(Illustration: The corner at AWS Summit Taipei 2026 that belongs to the community, where we explore and move forward together. Image source: thanks to our hosts Amy and Eric for the photo.)

Every time I come back to the community, I love that atmosphere: a bunch of people sitting on the floor in a circle, talking about the topics we are all curious about, rolling up our sleeves and solving problems together. I felt bad that so many of you had to stand at the back for so long, and I hope this short session brought you a little bit of inspiration, or a little bit of something useful. Every era has its own buzzwords and buzzvibe, and every era has its own anxiety and hesitation. What I hope to bring is a relaxed, comfortably humble way of decomposing, integrating, and connecting things until they click. Maybe not a moment of enlightenment, but if it helps a few like-minded people take one small step forward, I am more than content.

Thank you as well to AWS Summit Taipei 2026 for the invitation. As a fan who has been decomposing along with AWS since 2008, thank you for staying focused and sticking to doing the right things together. And finally, thank you to my community friends Amy and Eric for looking after everything, front and back, and for hosting (and to Tubo for harvesting and delivering the bananas :p

If you are interested in exploring Ontology together, and in integrating and landing it into the workflow of your own or of your organization, feel free to leave a comment first. We are currently talking with a few friendly organizations about the ideas we could explore together next. If possible, please remember to leave your email so that we can follow up with you. And if what you are after is mentorship for product managers and product people, feel free to turn right and take a look at the mentoring and advisory services of StableProgress.

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(Illustration: Back in college I was also genuinely puzzled about why humans always had to adapt to information systems, instead of having software adapt to our workflows. Sure, there were plenty of constraints twenty-odd years ago, but what I really couldn’t stomach was the “this is just how it is” attitude — accepting that nothing could change and giving up the chance to change anything — so I kept running headfirst into every rule and frame. As I grew up I got slightly better at sidestepping obstacles (which is how I ended up not joining a multinational), but I at least learned to keep pushing without internal injury. Maybe I’m also following a kind of rigid rule, just one of my own making. Shot on a 2016 business trip, having the post-lunch Italian espresso with the locals. They said this was how they drink their iced coffee, so I said I’d give it a try. Image source: Ernest.)

✳️ Redefining Continual Learning at OpenAI

When everyone is focused on the latest AI applications and tools, some of the deeper exploration about learning and the underlying nature of intelligence is actually worth spending more time on. These explorations might help us understand humanity itself a bit better, and they might also open up all kinds of possibilities for coexistence between humans and AI. Just like one of the core values of AIESEC, the student organization Ernest participated in back in college: Living Diversity — working and living in cross-cultural, cross-background environments and learning together from different viewpoints. Maybe there will be a world peace day after all (?

This episode of Unsupervised Learning features OpenAI’s chief scientist Jakub Pachocki, discussing continual learning, RL (reinforcement learning), chain-of-thought monitoring, compute allocation, and interface evolution. The interview also refreshes OpenAI’s timeline: the research-intern-level system target is set for September 2026, the fully automated AI researcher target for March 2028, and Codex has already taken over the majority of actual coding work inside OpenAI. Four observations below worth writing down.

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(📷 Caption 👉 This resonates with the “manual before automate” principle we’ve been practicing alongside customers for years. The useful foundational magic is often that unassuming broom tucked away on the balcony, yet it reliably clears everything to shine. No need to keep chasing legendary remedies like plucking a lion’s mane. Humble knowledge inventories and process inventories alone can paint the world in vivid colors. Taken at Namiki. Cherry blossoms are in full bloom right now, but I’m afraid I’ll forget my preference for ginkgo. Image source: Ernest.)

✳️ Decomposing Ramp’s Hiring Philosophy: Why Spiky, Malformed, and Strong-Yes Beats Zero-Defect

This post is a follow-on to Breaking Down Keith Rabois on Barrels, Ugly Babies, and AI-Era Teams. Keith recommended listening to Ramp CEO Eric Glyman, which led me to this 2024 talk on real-world hiring — specifically on how to grow a team of Super ICs (Super Individual Contributors), a path most companies give up on. For context: Ramp has been growing at an absurd pace.

(Watching this, I kept nodding in recognition. More quotable lines will surface in a few days, and I’ll probably put the transcript highlights on the blog. These past few weeks of reading alongside everyone, discussing alongside everyone, have been a joy. I hope everyone gets something out of it like I do. Even if only a single passage lands in the right situation and does its job, that's already the original intent of magic design. Believing in that is what keeps me writing.)

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(Illustration 👉 Taken at 2025 AWS re:Invent just before Matt’s CEO keynote. Grateful to 2008 Ernest, still grinding through his busy days as a TSMC PIE engineer, who stayed curious enough to start poking at EC2 and S3. Just like installing Claude today — maybe ten years from now I’ll feel the same gratitude. Image source: Ernest.)

✳️ Decomposing Nigel Morris’s 2x2 Board Framework: Four Moves From Capital One to QED

Every time I sit alongside founder friends heading into a board meeting or shareholder meeting, I feel the tangle the founder is in: the market, cash in the bank and runway, and every stakeholder in the room. Today’s piece is a follow-up to Breaking Down Keith Rabois on Barrels, Ugly Babies, and AI-Era Teams. Keith recommended listening to Ramp CEO Eric’s talk, and then Eric pointed me back to the centuries-old founding story of Capital One. (My sense of time has been a bit scrambled lately, so let’s just go with that.)

Nigel Morris (Capital One co-founder, QED Investors co-founder, AUM over $4B, 200+ investments across 17 years at QED) sat down with Miguel Armaza and distilled the entire decision-making framework he has accumulated — both as an operator at Capital One and as an “operator masquerading as an investor” at QED — into four moves worth trying. The core point: board day shouldn’t be spent on “explaining,” it should be spent on “deciding.”

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(Illustration: As an amateur photographer, I’m always drawn to light and shadow, like reflections. The reflections you only catch after the rain, or the light, or the dark matter we think we can’t see or touch, but maybe it’s been there all along. Taken during an evening walk before a business dinner in 2016, at the Royal Palace of Madrid. Image source: Ernest.)

[How Ramp Took Customers from American Express: Building Dark Matter Moats for Enterprise Software in the AI Era by Shifting from Selling Money to Selling Time]

A few days ago while putting together Breaking Down Keith Rabois on Barrels, Ugly Babies, and AI-Era Teams, Keith recommended checking out a talk by Ramp CEO Eric. Plus, he led Ramp’s seed round in May 2019 and locked in the Series A with a term sheet as early as September, so I wanted to see how the founder Keith bet on so early actually thinks. I dug up this February 2026 episode with Eric Glyman on the Stripe channel and excerpted three short sections to get a feel for it.

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(📷 Illustration: Back at the Bluetooth SIG working group annual meeting at Hotel InterContinental Madrid, the kickoff day featured a bomb-defusal mini-game so cross-team folks could warm up. Unsurprisingly the youngest person ended up as the laptop operator (defuser), having to follow the discussion of senior Bluetooth veterans from major chip vendors while flipping through the manual. I think we finished without coming last. I may not have business acumen, but at least I have finger acumen and bug-hunting acumen?! That interaction also broke the ice with the seniors and gave the rest of the spec discussions a much better tempo. It is one of those rhythms of always throwing yourself into pressure and trying to keep smiling. Image source: Ernest.)

✳️ Across Ancient Times and the AI Era: Keith Rabois on How Three Uncomfortable Things Buy You a Truly Tough Team

In this episode of Lenny’s Podcast, Lenny asks Keith Rabois (Managing Director at Khosla Ventures and a member of the PayPal Mafia) one question: what do all those companies he invested in early on, the ones that grew into Stripe, Airbnb, YouTube, DoorDash, Ramp, and Palantir, have in common?

Keith’s answer: operating tempo.

That kind of tempo isn’t just about going fast. It’s about being able to diagnose a problem, ship a solution, and measure the impact all between one board meeting and the next.

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(Illustration: A mentor once told me, “the data is always in there — but ‘in there’ doesn’t mean findable, and findable doesn’t mean correct.” That’s why “dreaming” fits the sandbox so well: there’s a boundary, depth can vary, and you share some memory with the waking world. Sometimes you wake up dazed, sometimes you wake up knowingly smiling from the inside. Image source: Ernest.)

✳️ The Dream Sandbox and the Merge Button

Since last summer, everyone’s been talking about AI Agents (not really! Most people are actually arguing about discussing the AK LLM Wiki! That’s another topic — let me brew it into one of my rare essays. Thanks for all the love; people have been quietly reaching out this week to commiserate together.)

Most teams hit the same wall. The prototype demo looks great, the happy-path scenarios all run, but no one dares push the agent into production. AI Agents can schedule shifts, adjust calendars, answer questions, even place TTS phone calls — but what happens when one edits data it shouldn’t touch, or peeks at fields it shouldn’t see? At DevCon 5, Palantir showed a demo of a medical scheduling system: a nurse uses voice to ask the agent to schedule a surgery, an administrator reviews, and the system auto-dials patients with the update. The whole thing was built by Palantir’s team in less than one weekend.

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(Illustration: Taken at The Venetian, where I get up early every year-end to enjoy a sunrise breakfast. Chef Thomas Keller built two restaurant brands: The French Laundry, the embodiment of perfection, and Bouchon, the same obsession over detail but made approachable for everyday life. ElevenLabs has a similar structure. Research with real power shouldn’t be locked away in papers or experimental data; it belongs in products, where users walk past it every day. The deepest craft eventually walks toward the everyday. Image source: Ernest.)

✳️ Tech Can Be Chased Alone, But the Org Structure With Its Culture Is Hard to Copy

Research-driven companies often hit the same problem: the technology works, but the product won’t move. Or the reverse, the market need is crystal clear, but the research can’t keep up with the rhythm. ElevenLabs started in 2021 as a weekend experiment by two Poles, Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dabkowski, focused on AI voice synthesis, with applications spanning audiobooks, dubbing, voice agents, and games, where the synthesized voices can almost fool a human. In just a few years, they’ve reached an 11 billion USD valuation with a team of over 300 people. They aren’t just better at the technology. The way their organization runs, fused with their culture, becomes the moat. Tech alone can be chased, but the org structure together with the culture cannot easily be copied. From a16z’s interview with CEO Mati Staniszewski, three lines of thought are worth observing in detail. (Of course, every family has its own difficult scripture; lines of thought have to match constraints and context. Don’t copy them straight into your own situation after reading.)

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(Illustration: In the process of exploring the world and becoming yourself (being), ensure freedom, ensure the underlying safety net mechanisms, ensure common interface interoperability, while tuning parameters (metacognition) and running into the wind with open arms. That said, running still requires eating, and eating can never be let go. Taken in 2016 in Madrid, allegedly at the world’s oldest restaurant. Made sure to bring the magic card, made sure the communication interface was interoperable, left the rest to the kitchen, and comfortably walked out five minutes before the restaurant closed at eleven. Photo by Ernest.)

MMDP = Multimodal Data Plane

At Palantir DevCon 5, Data Plane Group co-lead Ted introduced MMDP. I was curious enough to practice breaking it down.

• First, the feature list is long, and I wanted to compare it against my own product roadmap.
• Second, their design trade-offs reflect a core question: when enterprise data is scattered everywhere, should you move the data or move the compute? (No right or wrong answer here, but I wanted to compare the reasoning and parameters.)

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(Illustration: Some people buy multiple pieces of the same clothing style. I tend to buy multiples of the same toys (or brands), paired with a deep-seated quirk of not wanting to be like everyone else, like this niche notebook Field Notes that I’ve been using for over a decade. I was originally drawn to its woodgrain cover, which has since been discontinued, but thankfully my hoarding habit means I have some stocked up. The advantages of using the same style through deliberate design decisions are many, perhaps including the transformation into excess returns for our clients a decade later (wishful thinking). Photo taken in 2016 at a friend’s home in Boston. Image source: Ernest.)

✳️ The Design Decision of AUM Fees

Charging a percentage of AUM (Assets Under Management). Almost every wealth management firm uses this model, and most clients take it for granted. But a16z Perennial CIO Michel Del Buono said on the Sorcery Podcast that this isn’t just a pricing decision, it’s a design decision that influences everything else. Let’s practice decomposing it:

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