Evan Zhou

I've spent 20+ years launching products and features. I finally wrote down the early access playbook I wish I'd had when I started. docs.google.com/document/d/1…

Introducing our Trusted Person network powered by our new Instinct-to-Instinct communication protocol. Your Instinct can now talk to other Instincts to coordinate plans on your behalf. Getting people together often involves a lot of back-and-forth: finding a time, working out the details, and following up when plans change. Instincts can now work with each other to help handle that coordination. For example: - Coordinating plans with your spouse - Planning a weekend trip with friends, including dates and arrival times - Scheduling time with colleagues and other collaborators - Hosting events with 10s or 100s of people - Organizing recurring plans like tennis, book clubs, or weekly dinners Disclaimer: Your Instinct will only be able to communicate with those in your Trusted Person network. This is the group of people who are closest to you: - Spouse - Older children and parents - Colleagues and trusted professional relationships - Small local businesses The Trusted Person network is currently available to our early access group and will be slowly rolled out across the user base over the next 24-48 hours.

Today we’re announcing Ontology 1, our newest AI model. Perhaps surprisingly, it’s at least 2.7x more accurate than the world’s best ecommerce search engines, and handles queries that have never been possible before. We keep reaching for the edge of what it can do. We haven’t found it yet. Not only that, but it learns on its own with no retraining or fine-tuning. And it’s hallucination-free. It’s a successor architecture for search. Learn how we built it at onton.com/research/ontology-…, and check out the benchmarks at onton.com/research/ontology-…. Try it at onton.com/.

International Dance League's First Media Rights Deal Is With ESPN (Exclusive) hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-…

As engineering, product, design, DS, etc. melt into a new kind of role, I was reflecting on what roles might look like in the future. For example, when I look at the Claude Code team I see what I think is five archetypes: 1. Prototyper: comes up with brand new ideas; churns out many ideas, most of which don't ship 2. Builder: quickly turns a prototype/idea into production-grade product/infra 3. Sweeper: cleans up the UI, simplifies the code and system, unships, optimizes performance 4. Grower: takes a product that has been built and iterates on it to improve Product-Market Fit 5. Maintainer: owns a mature system to make it secure, reliable, fast, and efficient as it scales Many people span across 2 roles, and sometimes 3 roles. I also notice that these roles are not really tied to job function -- eg. across Anthropic, some designers match category 1, some 2, some 3; same for engineers, PM, DS. A healthy team needs a mix of these, depending on the product: - A product that is new and pre-PMF needs people that are strong at 1+2+3 - A product that is growing and has found PMF needs 2+3+4 and some 5 - A product that has strong PMF needs 3+4+5 and some 2 Maybe product roles of the future will look more like this, and less like the domain-specific roles of today?