Senior Product Designer, @chase, Brand Ambassador @spacexai prev @salesforce
San Francisco, CA
Joined January 2026
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Rest in peace 🙏♥️
In my 20’s, I used to work on Wall Street.
People my age now (45) said they were working 70, 80, 90 hours a week for their families…but all their families actually wanted was their presence.
They didn’t understand why their families resented how much they worked when they lived in a nice house, and their kids went to private schools.
It was just the world we all lived in. We knew nothing else.
I decided early in my startup journey that wasn’t going to be me.
My co-founders and I have always had a policy of quitting at 5 or 5:30.
By that, I mean:
> Shut off my laptop
> No more work talk
> Go home to my family
Frequently I’m out even earlier - 3-5, depending on whether I want to do something with the kids.
I rarely travel for work and don’t entertain for work.
My family life gives me energy for my work.
My work gives me energy for my family life.
I'm trying to stay not burnt out and excited about this for several decades.
Can every founder choose this?
Maybe not everybody, but more people have the choice than realize they do.
There is great reward that comes from designing a business around the life you want.
Sebastian Mendo retweeted
SpaceX acquiring Cursor was a genius move. The Cursor team are WILD. I just took Claude Code for a spin for the last two hours and it's just horrible compared to Cursor Projects. Anthropic wins on usage subsidies, Opus beats Grok by miles, but Cursor's UX is off the charts.
We are living in the pixel renaissance, and the first thing leaders say is “get rid of Figma”. We should be using every tool at our disposal to create net-new experiences.
This is one of the biggest challenges we have with our industry today: the best way to differentiate yourself is with a design challenge. However, you never really know what the other party's intentions are.
ABSOLUTELY SHAMELESS.
Julia contacted me to work for @yourpersona and mentioned they were looking to hire full-time.
After our call, she took many days to reply. I assumed she was busy, so I let time pass.
Then she came back with a project and said:
“We changed it to make it easier and less time consuming. To preface, it won’t be paid (I wanted to be clear, since I mentioned that in our last call), since we just want fast work so we can speed up the hiring process. We love your work!”
Two things:
1. She never mentioned it wouldn’t be paid on our last call, but I didn’t think much of it.
2.She said she wants to speed up the hiring process.
I worked hard on the project. It took me 2-3 hours, on top of a 24-hour deadline for another client, because I wanted to make a good first impression. I submitted it and waited. I knew I did well, and I was confident my designs were better than anyone’s.
I waited patiently for days. Then she sent this:
“Hey, I have an update! The team thinks you’re a great designer and we would love to work with you, we’re just a little too early to expand right now. We’d love to stay in touch and reconnect in a month or two! I’ll hit you up then :)”
Mind you, she said they wanted to hire fast. Now they’re “a little too early to expand”? And she went on to post this engagement farming post.
Why is she posting this when she’s already “found” me? The team supposedly thinks I’m great and would love to work with me.
I contacted a few friends here on X who have viral posts like mine. They got the exact same message from her.
If you’re not ready to expand, why ask for a free trial and promise a full-time role? And why are you now shamelessly posting this to get people to do more free work and hand over more free ideas for your app?
Sebastian Mendo retweeted
Counter argument: Not only is taste subjective, it's a moving target. As soon as [tasteful thing] becomes easily replicable, it stops being tasteful.
Taste is a status game with a strong defensibility mechanism. That's why the term is so fuzzy and ill-defined. Vagueness is the whole point. It's meant to be hard to copy.
Sebastian Mendo retweeted
Ambassador applications for @spacexai / @cursor_ai are reopening soon!
Drop your email to be the first to know:
anysphere.typeform.com/to/Ln…
Sebastian Mendo retweeted
said that last year, saying it again.
vibes coding is a slur.
it’s clear we need to retire the term vibe coding because the models now produce better architecture & way more coherent code than an average software engineer.
perhaps even better than top software engineers too because unlike a human, ai has a much much larger context window.
this ain’t vibe coding at all. it’s precision engineering.
Sebastian Mendo retweeted
it’s clear we need to retire the term vibe coding because the models now produce better architecture & way more coherent code than an average software engineer.
perhaps even better than top software engineers too because unlike a human, ai has a much much larger context window.
this ain’t vibe coding at all. it’s precision engineering.
Spent a whole weekend touching grass in British Columbia. Genuinely cannot recommend more detaching from work and focus on looking at nature for a bit.
Sebastian Mendo retweeted
if you're job searching right now: choose the team, mission and approach that resonates most, and where you'll have the most fun.
not just the buzziest or apparent leader. with model advancements, products reinvent themselves every 3-6 months, so the leaderboard resets often.
if you're chasing hype, you'll be unhappy once you're (inevitably) out of the hype cycle.
