Ivan Vanderbyl

I’d argue it has never been valid, but also could be driven more by imposter syndrome than stealing of ideas.

Almost no one who is "famous" for writing online was an expert first.

They became an expert (or at least seen as one), from writing.

So, you don't have to wait.

You do have to write.

✈️Travelled the least distance in 10 years
🏔️Spent more time outdoors
☠️ Only 2 near-death experiences, 2x change on 2023.

2024 review:
🤝Found an incredible business partner and:
💻Started my 6th company: alcova.ai
🏃‍♂️Ran my first marathon: Queenstown Marathon
🔋Recovered from a long-term toxic relationship
👫Moved in with my incredibly supportive and constantly optimistic girlfriend
☃️Started a new life in Queenstown, NZ

I’m not a .NET dev, but for all other languages I use Sentry. They seem to have good .NET support

I do the opposite: block: extension://

Generative AI and data governance  |  Generative AI on Vertex AI  |  Google Cloud

If you’re building AI products that deal with customer data or anything that is sensitive/bound by Privacy regulations, it’s the only LLM with a stated commitment to not use your prompts for training cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/ge...

We’ve been using Gemini for the past 2 months and the pace of innovation is astonishing. It is truly the underdog that outperforms GPT 4o in every way that matters. I’m honestly surprised that more companies aren’t using it 🤔

Your ability to make an impact at a product is inversely proportional to how many people work on the problem.

Small cross functional teams with strong mission get the best work done.

Having mostly worked in startups my whole career, something that blows my mind is that at big companies like Google and Apple, PMs are responsible for individual buttons or interactions within a single app 🤯

Versus at a startup where you have purview over the entire platform, or most of it.

Fillout | Forms that do it all Create powerful forms, surveys and quizzes your audience will answer. Store responses directly where you need them.

What are your thoughts on www.fillout.com

I have a copy of that somewhere, definitely helped my early career

I was curious if you had started building a form product. I cut my teeth on forms early in my career, still seems to be a lot of opportunity.

I’m building alcova.ai

What are you building?

Bluesky reminds me of using twitter in 2008-09, with better ergonomics, less noise.

This seems like a crowded space, what’s your insight?

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The Apple Watch definitely has a better UX and nicer hardware, but it’s designed for the majority of the population, not the 2% of people who actually run more than 5 kms or want to measure training performance.

Apple Watch Ultra

- Constantly asks if I'm still working out when doing a long hike up a mountain.

Apple Watch Ultra is a watch for people who want to look like they do hard things. Feels like it was built and tested in a lab on a treadmill.

It's the Park Run of watches.

- Workouts longer than 60 minutes go into low power mode making basic stats unavailable. I typically run 10-20kms every Saturday morning, so 1 to 2 hours.
- Track back is limited to 5kms. I tried it on a 19km hike and it was useless.

Apple Watch Ultra: I've used this for 2 years and started to get frustrated when doing any sort of training that exceeded what they probably only tested in a lab in Cupertino.

Examples:

- Training readiness and sleep insights are native, not an external app

Forerunner cons:
- Notifications, can't really control what appears from my phone on the watch
- No Apple Pay — there is Garmin pay but I haven't set it up
- No music controls while working out. Not really an issue.

1 month ago I swapped my Apple Watch Ultra for a Garmin Forerunner while training for a marathon, here's how they compare:

Forerunner:
- 3 weeks battery life with continuous health monitoring!
- Highly customisable for any type of training
- Feels like it was built and tested it in real conditions