The Observation Deck | The Observation Deck

I have a difficult confession to make — a shameful incident that I have never spoken of, even to those closest to me. Late one night in my first year at university and having found computer science to be my life’s calling, I was in the back of the large computer science lab, talking with some fellow underclassmen. We were snidely decrying the lack of technological understanding in the broader population, with the kind of arrogance and hubris that youth and precociousness can uniquely summon. Somewhere in this discussion, a terrible idea was hatched: what if we went next door to the general computer lab, and told the humanities students there that a computer virus was spreading through their machines? Would they believe it? To my everlasting regret, we acted on this ugly urge: we went next door to a packed lab of students working on term papers, and — with synthetic alarm in our voices — loudly announced that a virus had escaped the computer science lab, and that they all needed to eject their floppy disks to prevent its spread. What happened next was bedlam — the technological equivalent of shouting fire in a crowded theater. People panicked: they not only ejected floppies, but they powered machines off; yanked cables out of already-powered off machines; screamed; ran out of the room. We immediately realized that we had done something awful, but found that we couldn’t contain the wildfire that we had lit. We tried to explain that it was "a prank"; some (rightfully!) responded with indignant fury (what was wrong with us that we would do such a thing?!) while others simply didn’t believe us: once the fear had taken root, we couldn’t eradicate it. The aftermath is a blur — but it was bad. It was the week leading up to finals, and people who had powered their computers off had lost work. They were furious, and we were in a ton of trouble. The next morning, we found ourselves in the office of the facilities director (a famously imposing presence), who lectured us sternly as we stared at our feet. He made us each write letters of apology (easily done as my shame was earnest), telling us to give him two copies: one to be sent to those whom we had wronged, the other to be kept in his drawer. He told us in no uncertain terms that if we ever found ourselves anything close to anything like this again, we would be finding another university to attend — and we assured him that we had learned our lesson. (When I graduated four years later, he made a point of handing the letter back to me — and I remain grateful for the gravity and empathy with which he handled the whole thing.) I could have (and perhaps would have?) taken this whole shameful incident to the grave, but I feel compelled to confess it now, because I have never seen fear sown so irresponsibly by putative technologists as I have now with respect to AI and the threat of human extinction (!). Amazingly, that is not hyperbole: this week, ex-Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon claimed — and then Anthropic Alignment Science lead Evan Hubinger agreed — that the probability that AI will "kill all humans" is ">10% in the next decade" (!!). That is, the claim is not merely that AI could kill thousands, millions, or even billions of humans (claims that themselves would be extraordinary!), but that there is a greater than ten percent chance that AI will kill all humans. That is, if you have a newborn, their claim is that there is a greater than ten percent chance that your child will somehow perish at the hands of AI before they enter middle school. These ghoulish claims strike brazenly at the hearth, and given the obvious importance of AI, it is unsurprising that they have leapt into the mainstream, with people asking the natural question: how would that happen? The answers always rely on hand-wavy extrapolation into the future; for example, Jacob Coxon cites "hacking critical infrastructure" and "extinction-level bioweapons" without further elaboration. But Coxon is not an expert on critical infrastructure, nor on bioweapons — nor, for that matter, on extinction. What 27-year-old Coxon is an expert on — if accidentally — is the contagion of fear. We cannot expect the public to understand the inner workings of all technology (that was the fallacy of my 18-year-old self!): technology is too broad, too deep, and too core to all of our lives to expect everyone to understand everything; we must — at some level — trust domain experts. When those domain experts sow fear, it is the fear that takes root, propagating much more readily than any evidence that may follow it. (As Jonathan Swift famously quipped over three centuries ago, "Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it".) In this regard, Coxon is more vector than index case: it is indisputable that the fears of extinction risk are widespread and Coxon himself likely has these fears because he has heard them from someone else. Unfortunately, as the fear takes hold, the sheer number of frightened experts becomes its own kind of evidence, with contrary voices drowned out by the din of an apparent consensus. With the full knowledge that the fear is becoming well established, I would nonetheless like to offer a rebuttal, if from my own (narrow) domain of expertise: building computers. As I reflected in my 2023 Monktoberfest talk, Intelligence is not Enough, acts of engineering are not acts of intelligence alone. They require not only the human aspects of our character, they also require our action in (and reasoning about) the physical world. Those who are resolute in their fear like to gloss over these bits ("robots will do this!"), but to do so is to ignore the physical reality that robots cannot do this today — and do not seem to be doing so on a time horizon consistent with these extinction fears. More generally, to the degree that digital systems have agency in the physical world, it is agency that we — we humans with arms and legs and brains and parents and children — permit: AI executes on physical systems that have been engineered with human accountability and control. Intelligence does not exempt a system from the realities of the physical world! To those who — like Coxon — are gripped with unwavering fear, this will be of little solace. But to those who are hearing these fears for the first time: know that your incredulity is warranted. We should heed the wisdom of the late Carl Sagan that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence: the claims from Coxon and his ilk are the most extraordinary a technologist can make, and we must demand evidence commensurate with the claims. That said, we should not expect the public to understand LLMs, critical infrastructure, bioweapons, extinction biology, etc. — that burden must lie with those making the claim. The lesson that I learned (shamefully) decades ago is that domain experts, by way of their expertise, implicitly hold the public’s trust — and we must not abuse it. It is incumbent upon us to be circumspect in our claims — and maximally so when raising the alarm. So to those in that late-night lab over three decades ago, I’m sorry: you had nothing to fear then — and (at least with respect to extinction risk!) you have nothing to fear now.

On a Sunday night not too long ago, something extraordinary happened in West Oakland: the Oakland Ballers — an independent baseball team not even two years old — won the Pioneer League championship, bringing a baseball championship to Oakland for the first time since 1989. The atmosphere was electric, but to an outsider, the roar of the packed house might have seemed perplexing: why such fervor for…​ an independent league baseball game?! The beauty of baseball is the narrative beyond the diamond, and that Sunday night in Oakland stands as an exemplar. Speaking personally, to understand not just why I was there with my wife and our teenage daughter, but the emotion behind our full-throated chants, you need to go back in time, to a little more than a decade ago. It was 2014. After a promising season, the Oakland A’s had just had an early exit from the playoffs, having lost a gutting extra innings single-game wildcard in Kansas City. Our boys — then aged seven and ten — had had their hearts broken, in a way that a sports team uniquely can for kids of a certain age. The boys were weeping; we consoled them as parents of grieving sports fans do — not by saying that "it’s just a game" (an obvious lie!), but by saying what parents have said for generations: wait until next year. "Someday," I recall telling them as they went to bed, "perhaps decades from now, the A’s will be in the World Series in Oakland — and we will be there to watch it together." Tears dried, the boys went to sleep; there was, after all, always next year. Fast forward a decade, to 2023, and I was being proven a liar — not by disappointment on the field, but by treachery off it: the owner of the Oakland A’s — titanic failson John Fisher — had won approval to move the team from Oakland; after years of threats, the A’s were actually leaving. As Brodie cried, so did we all. This emotion may seem confusing: is this grieving over…​ one less entertainment option? Well, no, it’s about more than the team or even the game — it’s about who we have watched those games with. It’s not just our fellow fans; it’s our friends — our families. In our house, it was our nuclear family: we had become A’s fans in 2012 when our oldest caught the baseball bug at seven (aside: he still has it). For other A’s fans, it was multi-generational; listen to Roberto Santiago describe it when he was interviewed at the Reverse Boycott at the Coliseum: > My dad didn’t know what to do with me, so he brought me here and we used to > walk across that BART bridge to games, and it was like magic. I watched > Dwayne Murphy and Ricky Henderson out there running the outfield, stealing > bases, hats flying off, it was beautiful. And that’s what made me fall in love > with baseball. > > And then I had a little brother who is 13 years younger than > me, and I didn’t know what to do with him. So what did I do? I brought him here. > I brought him to baseball games, I brought him to Opening Day. His birthday is > in April, and we would come to Opening Day every year. And when I went away > to college, I would send him tickets to Opening Day every year. And he > would call me for the national anthem, and he would call me for the > seventh-inning stretch, and he would call me for Jason Giambi’s first > at bat as a Yankee, so I could hear the boos. > > And then when I had kids, > I knew what to do with them. And so what did I do? I brought them > here. My kids are so at home here, they come in here and they take > off their jackets and they drop them in a corner and they run off because > they feel like they’re at home. That’s what baseball in Oakland is. This > is generations. To rip a team out of a city, then, is to sour some of our dearest memories, ones that cannot be recreated; it is to come into a home and desecrate the family photo album. And the scar is permanent: look at the Sonics or the North Stars or the Expos or the Nordiques — to say nothing of the generation-defining trauma of the Colts or the Dodgers. For each of these — the most recent of which was nearly two decades ago — you won’t have to look long to find people who got passed it, but never, in fact, got over it. And this is where I was when 2024 rolled around: passed it, maybe, but absolutely not over it. And then, in March, a surprise. From the arsonous ashes of Oakland baseball emerged an unexpected green shoot: a new independent league team, the Oakland Ballers. In the video announcing the team, the words of Mistah F.A.B. echoed: "Anytime something ends, something else begins." I was elated at the prospect of the Ballers — and then doubly so when team co-founders Paul Freedman and Bryan Carmel joined us on Oxide and Friends. Somehow, in the span of just a few frenetic weeks in the spring of 2024, they turned historic Raimondi Park into a proper ballpark. The home opener in 2024 was sold out and while (per grand tradition of Oakland baseball!) the home team lost, the game was a blast. As the 2024 season went on, the games felt like a neighborhood block party — you always saw people you knew. And the team knew their town: when they unveiled their new mascot, Scrappy the Possum, it was a pitch-perfect Gritty-esque reflection of the Oakland zeitgeist. The team made the playoffs that year, winning a game at home but losing in the semi-finals. I was at the game with the kids — and as my then-17-year-old said, "it’s great to have postseason baseball back in Oakland." And it was! Then, the 2025 season — this season. Early in the season, there was a discernible shift. Something to know about the Pioneer League is that it’s professional, but it’s deliberately a development league: players can’t have more than three years of professional experience. And with the MLB draft having been drastically cut (from 40 rounds to 20), MLB-affiliated development leagues like the Pioneer League are increasingly where young players go to try to chase their dream of making it to the bigs. The Ballers were making a name for themselves among college players from the region — and the complexion of the roster was changing, with increasingly familiar names. These were kids who had grown up in Berkeley and Martinez and Hayward and Stockton — who had gone to JUCO at Chabot and Ohlone, to college at East Bay and Davis and Cal and St. Mary’s. These were…​ NorCal kids. Our kids. And they were good. Like, really good. The structure of the postseaon in the Pioneer League is that the season is divided into two halves, with the top two teams of each half making the playoffs. This makes it exciting for the players and the fans: no matter how rocky a start a team has, they could still make the postseason with a strong second-half showing. But the Ballers had different plans: they won both the first half and the second half, becoming the winningest team in Pioneer League history. All of this winning meant that the Ballers secured their postseason fate remarkably early in the season, which presented us at Oxide with a wild opportunity: as we were planning our annual internal meetup (which we call OxCon), we were realizing that the last night of the meetup was going to fall on the first postseason game at home. We felt we had to take the Oxide team to see the Ballers, and it’s a credit to our idiosyncratic team at Oxide that they embraced the idiosyncratic one at Raimondi. My colleague iliana — a Mariners fan! — felt that we should explain baseball to our fellow nerds, and the final session of OxCon was the two of us explaining what people were about to see. (Or tried to, anyway — baseball defies quick explanation!) We piled into busses and headed over to Raimondi, with kids and partners who were local meeting us at the game. We knew that we had kept our Oxide colleagues (very) busy over the week of OxCon, and told them that they should buy Ballers gear on Oxide’s nickel for anyone back home who might appreciate it. The game was awesome: the Ballers won — and Oxide employees went home loaded with swag for their families. For the Ballers, their season continued. The three-game series went to the win-or-go-home third game, and after a gripping 1-0 victory, the Ballers advanced to the championship against the Idaho Falls Chukars. The five game set had a familiar format: two games away followed by three at home. The Ballers lost their first two games in Idaho Falls — badly. With the championship and the season on the line, the team returned to Oakland, where they needed to win three straight, starting on Friday night. My daughter was stoked: "Can you imagine the atmosphere on Sunday?" she excitedly asked. I pointed out that the team was going to be lucky to get the chance to play Saturday, let alone Sunday. But my daughter’s optimisim proved to be prophetic. The team won decisively on Friday night — and again on Saturday night. And the atmosphere was indeed singular on the sold-out Sunday night. The Ballers got a good start with an early 3-run homerun — and then blew the game open with another 3-run jack to deep center in the 8th. Going into the top of the 9th inning, the Ballers were up by 8 runs. Any baseball fan will tell you that one bad inning can sink a game, that there is no lead large enough to assure a victory. Still, this felt pretty good. The boys are away at college now, but they were with us in spirit, and my 18-year-old was listening from college in Washington. With two outs, he texted me: "Film this last out." I filmed it: a swinging strikeout as the stadium erupted. Oakland Fire, which would often position a fire engine in the outfield and sit atop it to watch the game, turned on their lights in celebration. The team stormed out of the dugout and mobbed their pitcher. And then, magic: that fire engine in deep center pointed a stream of water skyward and onto the outfield. The players instinctively ran to the water, like kids running through a sprinkler. They slid in the outfield, making snow angels on the wet ground. It was everything great about sports, in a single joyous moment. These players know the significance of it all: they — like Oakland — have something to prove. The Pioneer League is a development league, so while we see some returning players next year, many will also move on. Some will move to other independent leagues, chasing their major league dream. Others will presumably hang it up, just as everyone hangs it up eventually. But for all of them, wherever their careers may take them, they will forever remember that electric Sunday night in West Oakland, when they proved what is possible when we refuse to give up on ourselves. At long last, there’s a parade in Oakland.

Note: This was co-authored with Steve Tuck, and originally appeared on the Oxide blog. We are heartbroken to relay that Charles Beeler, a friend and early investor in Oxide, passed away in September after a battle with cancer. We lost Charles far too soon; he had a tremendous influence on the careers of us both. Our relationship with Charles dates back nearly two decades, to his involvement with the ACM Queue board where he met Bryan. It was unprecedented to have a venture capitalist serve in this capacity with ACM, and Charles brought an entirely different perspective on the practitioner content. A computer science pioneer who also served on the board took Bryan aside at one point: "Charles is one of the good ones, you know." When Bryan joined Joyent a few years later, Charles also got to know Steve well. Seeing the promise in both node.js and cloud computing, Charles became an investor in the company. When companies hit challenging times, some investors will hide — but Charles was the kind of investor to figure out how to fix what was broken. When Joyent needed a change in executive leadership, it was Charles who not only had the tough conversations, but led the search for the leader the company needed, ultimately positioning the company for success. Aside from his investment in Joyent, Charles was an outspoken proponent of node.js, becoming an organizer of the Node Summit conference. In 2017, he asked Bryan to deliver the conference’s keynote, but by then, the relationship between Joyent and node.js had become…​ complicated, and Bryan felt that it probably wouldn’t be a good idea. Any rational person would have dropped it, but Charles persisted, with characteristic zeal: if the Joyent relationship with node.js had become strained, so much more the reason to speak candidly about it! Charles prevailed, and the resulting talk, Platform as Reflection of Values, became one of Bryan’s most personally meaningful talks. Charles’s persistence was emblematic: he worked behind the scenes to encourage people to do their best work, always with an enthusiasm for the innovators and the creators. As we were contemplating Oxide, we told Charles what we wanted to do long before we had a company. Charles laughed with delight: "I hoped that you two would do something big, and I am just so happy for you that you’re doing something so ambitious!" As we raised seed capital, we knew that we were likely a poor fit for Charles and his fund. But we also knew that we deeply appreciated his wisdom and enthusiasm; we couldn’t resist pitching him on Oxide. Charles approached the investment in Oxide as he did with so many other aspects: with curiosity, diligence, empathy, and candor. He was direct with us that despite his enthusiasm for us personally, Oxide would be a challenging investment for his firm. But he also worked with us to address specific objections, and ultimately he won over his partnership. We were thrilled when he not only invested, but pulled together a syndicate of like-minded technologists and entrepreneurs to join him. Ever since, he has been a huge Oxide fan. Befitting his enthusiasm, one of his final posts expressed his enthusiasm and pride in what the Oxide team has built. Charles, thank you. You told us you were proud of us — and it meant the world. We are gutted to no longer have you with us; your influence lives on not just in Oxide, but also in the many people that you have inspired. You were the best of venture capital. Closer to the heart, you were a terrific friend to us both; thank you.

Paul Graham’s Founder Mode is an important piece, and you should read it if for no other reason that “founder mode” will surely enter the lexicon (and as Graham grimly predicts: “as soon as the concept of founder mode becomes established, people will start misusing it”). When building a company, founders are engaged in several different acts at once: raising capital; building a product; connecting that product to a market; building an organization to do all of these. Founders make lots of mistakes in all of these activities, and Graham’s essay highlights a particular kind of mistake in which founders are overly deferential to expertise or convention. Pejoratively referring to this as “Management Mode”, Graham frames this in the Silicon Valley dramaturgical dyad of Steve Jobs and John Scully. While that’s a little too reductive (anyone seeking to understand Jobs needs to read Randall Stross’s superlative Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing, highlighting Jobs’s many post-Scully failures at NeXT), Graham has identified a real issue here, albeit without much specificity. For a treatment of the same themes but with much more supporting detail, one should read the (decade-old) piece from Tim O’Reilly, How I failed. (Speaking personally, O’Reilly’s piece had a profound influence on me, as it encouraged me to stand my ground on an issue on which I had my own beliefs but was being told to defer to convention.) But as terrific as it is, O’Reilly’s piece also doesn’t answer the question that Graham poses: how do founders prevent their companies from losing their way? Graham says that founder mode is a complete mystery (“There are as far as I know no books specifically about founder mode”), and while there is a danger in being too pat or prescriptive, there does seem to be a clear component for keeping companies true to themselves: the written word. That is, a writing- (and reading-!) intensive company culture does, in fact, allow for scaling the kind of responsibility that Graham thinks of as founder mode. At Oxide, our writing-intensive culture has been absolutely essential: our RFD process is the backbone of Oxide, and has given us the structure to formalize, share, and refine our thinking. First among this formalized thinking – and captured in our first real RFD – is RFD 2 Mission, Principles, and Values. Immediately behind that (and frankly, the most important process for any company) is RFD 3 Oxide Hiring Process. These first three RFDs – on the process itself, on what we value, and on how we hire – were written in the earliest days of the company, and they have proven essential to scale the company: they are the foundation upon which we attract people who share our values. While the shared values have proven necessary, they haven’t been sufficient to eliminate the kind of quandaries that Graham and O’Reilly describe. For example, there have been some who have told us that we can’t possibly hire non-engineering roles using our hiring process – or told us that our approach to compensation can’t possibly work. To the degree that we have had a need for Graham’s founder mode, it has been in those moments: to stay true to the course we have set for the company. But because we have written down so much, there is less occasion for this than one might think. And when it does occur – when there is a need for further elucidation or clarification – the artifact is not infrequently a new RFD that formalizes our newly extended thinking. (RFD 68 is an early public and concrete example of this; RFD 508 is a much more recent one that garnered some attention.) Most importantly, because we have used our values as a clear lens for hiring, we are able to assure that everyone at Oxide is able to have the same disposition with respect to responsibility – and this (coupled with the transparency that the written word allows) permits us to trust one another. As I elucidated in Things I Learned The Hard Way, the most important quality in a leader is to bind a team with mutual trust: with it, all things are possible – and without it, even easy things can be debilitatingly difficult. Graham mentions trust, but he doesn’t give it its due. Too often, founders focus on the immediacy of a current challenge without realizing that they are, in fact, undermining trust with their approach. Bluntly, founders are at grave risk of misinterpreting Graham’s “Founders Mode” to be a license to micromanage their teams, descending into the kind of manic seagull management that inhibits a team rather than empowering it. Founders seeking to internalize Graham’s advice should recast it by asking themselves how they can foster mutual trust – and how they can build the systems that allow trust to be strengthened even as the team expands. For us at Oxide, writing is the foundation upon which we build that trust. Others may land on different mechanisms, but the goal of founders should be the same: build the trust that allows a team to kick a Jobsian dent in the universe!