Andrew Lau

It took 67 years to go from steam engine to factory. Then another 144 years to optimize and organize those processes into productive assembly lines. Implementing isolated pieces of technology is often pretty straightforward. Finding the most efficient way for humans to work alongside it usually takes a little longer. Slide courtesy of Konstantine Buhler at Sequoia Capital (video linked in comments)

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To be fair, sometimes it *is* the seed. Not all seeds are going to sprout, thrive, or survive to bear fruit. But you can't control the seed, you can only control the conditions. Sometimes seeds fail to thrive because they are in a poorly fitting environment, and sometimes the environment is just poor, and no one really thrives. Wow, you can ride that analogy all kinds of distance. A culture that is direct and kind can be a great asset to a business, but it does not guarantee success. If the culture does not serve the business and help ensure its survival, the culture is not achieving its most important job.

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Bonus essay from Dave's Quick Hits: If a superintelligent system watched us the way we watch a dog that once found rotisserie chicken in a specific spot, and now checks that spot every day, what would it actually see? I wrote a new essay, “The View from Above”, about that question. The core idea: a lot of human behavior is not random or mysterious from above. It is legible and steerable. We are often: 1️⃣ Checking the same “chicken spots” long after the reward is gone 2️⃣ Running on reward hijacks and mimetic desire we barely notice 3️⃣ Building institutions where internal incentives quietly beat the mission 4️⃣ Narrating our biases instead of actually escaping them From a smarter mind’s vantage point, they are predictable circuits. And once behavior is predictable at that level, it is easy to forecast and shape. The essay walks through: - The “chicken dog” analogy for human error that is coherent inside a limited model - A simple tier model of meta awareness and why it matters for who we trust near powerful systems - How current A/B tests, feeds, and recommender systems are already narrow proofs of concept for large scale steerability - Why any real hope lives in the scaffolding we build around our own bugs, not in raw willpower If you are thinking about AI, alignment, product design, or governance, I would love your pushback on this frame. 📄 Full essay here: https://lnkd.in/gr-Znuyu #artificialintelligence #aisafety #alignment #humannature #systemsthinking

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🌟 One of my biggest milestones this year was officially closing out our Technology Innovation Agency (TIA) seed-funded project. This close-out represented a full cycle of audited milestones, validated technical reports, and the delivery of a market-ready product. In a landscape where only a small percentage of funded technologies reach true commercialisation, this outcome is deeply meaningful to me and to our team. What this close-out reflects: ✔️ 100% milestone completion (technical & financial) ✔️ Independent audit verification of financials and deliverables ✔️ A validated, deployable technology ✔️ Institutional market validation, including LOIs and a term sheet from a non-bank finance institution (even though the SLA didn’t conclude, it remains strong commercial proof) Along the journey, we’ve also been supported by partners who helped strengthen this foundation, including Bowmans for legal drafting and negotiations, Wits University for access to market and key resources, and AWS (AWS for Startups) for the infrastructure, credits and tooling that enabled us to build and scale more efficiently. Their support has been instrumental. From Quickprop to PropSyte: Evolving Into a Data-as-a-Service Platform What began as a property management product has grown into something far more ambitious: A cloud-native, vendor-neutral DaaS platform built for real-time institutional insights. Our platform now delivers two layers of intelligence: 1️⃣ Financial & Portfolio Intelligence • Real-time analytics • Asset performance indicators • Portfolio health metrics • Investor-grade reporting 2️⃣ ESG Intelligence • Energy, water & utilities consumption • Carbon & sustainability metrics • Governance & compliance tracking • Social and operational impact indicator This positions PropSyte as an institutional data engine designed for banks, investors, DFIs, property funds, REITs and ESG-aligned organisations. Our technology is market-ready and built for scale. 🤝 Entering Our Commercialisation Phase As we move into this next chapter, I’m open to engaging with: • Institutional clients and users • Strategic partners • Investors aligned with our trajectory • Organisations seeking smarter portfolio and ESG intelligence If institutional data, analytics or sustainability intelligence is central to your work, let’s connect. #Innovation #Commercialisation #DataAsAService #PropertyTechnology #ESG #Fintech #SouthAfrica #Investors #AssetManagement #Entrepreneurship

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i don't think most people have priced in the fact that codegen is now trivial. the bottlenecks are shifting upstream -- why build, what to build -- and, importantly for us, downstream -- whether what's built holds up in the real world. no software will ever be perfect. bugs happen in production. new corner cases uncovered. reality wins. so the differentiator going forward is designing systems that expect failure, then learn from it. when something breaks, it should be detected, root-caused, and fixed -- fast. and the system should remember the issue so that it's more resilient in the future. anti-fragility will be the new baseline.

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I’ve come to believe that early experiences carry disproportionate weight - far more than we often acknowledge. For designers and builders, “minimum viable” may suffice for validating core functionality, but it rarely earns trust or sparks genuine delight. While velocity matters, I’ve always struggled with the notion that early versions should be merely viable, especially in a world where attention is scarce and emotional resonance is everything. This extends beyond product. Do you show up as the minimum viable version of yourself in your work, your relationships, your craft? I would encourage you to challenge the conventional MVP framework. Replace it with the Minimum Awesome Product. This doesn’t mean it’s fully-featured or pixel perfect. But it should be worthy of attention. Memorable, even evocative in the way it triggered emotion. The kind of product that prompts someone to say, “I didn’t know I needed this, but now I can’t live without it.” You can refine mechanics over time, but the emotional experience of a first interaction is singular and unrecoverable. Don’t settle for viability. Build something worth remembering… and make it awesome! ❤️‍🔥

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Here’s why Claude’s recent progress has unlocked the next leap forward for Canvas Medical. Claude’s tools, combined with our Deep Unified Architecture and SDK, are enabling new use cases for automation while simultaneously making us exponentially faster in shipping customer specific enhancements. It's a double win. Said another way, Canvas is an EMR built to provide context and tools for automation. And now we can enable AI driven development for any user or customer, whether technical or non technical, to build their own custom workflows in Canvas. Just in the past couple of days our team has shipped: For Brigade Health - a customized panel management dashboard for high-risk patients For Vida Health - ability to parse unstructured lab results from a fax into the chart as structured clinical data For Radial - improvements to the provider onboarding experience to accelerate the rapid scaling of their medical group operations For Doctronic - in-workflow evals for clinicians to submit structured feedback on the performance of their AI-driven note generation The best part? All of this work was done without software engineers 🤯 We used the Canvas Plugin Assistant, powered by Claude Code and the Canvas SDK. We’re living in the future. Here’s a graphic from Anthropic’s presentation yesterday with a couple of annotations to explain. Sometimes a picture is worth a few hundred words.

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Verdantix just dropped their analysis of software for carbon management -- the "green quadrant." We're honored they found Watershed to be a leader, with the strongest capabilities and momentum in the industry. They know this space better than anyone, and the report is chock-full of insights on driving real ROI, the role of AI, and more. Link to the full report in the comments.

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U.S. energy demand is surging — don’t get left behind. New gas projects and large industrial loads are reshaping power markets at breakneck speed. In this high-stakes landscape, timely and accurate data is essential. Halcyon’s Data Products, powered by a regularly updated authoritative data catalog of 4.5+ million documents from all 50 public utility commissions, ensure you always have the latest energy market intelligence. Download this guide to see how AI can help power sector stakeholders find new growth opportunities first.

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NEW: NY’s OCM has decided to transition to Metrc for their seed-to-sale tracking system. This comes after the partnership between Metrc and BioTrack, BioTrack of course was the tech company initially given the seed-to-sale contract in New York. Things to keep in mind as per https://lnkd.in/g_gunAbG: • Licensees who were sending data via the BioTrack NY STS API can now stop. • All licensees are still required to maintain an electronic, real-time inventory tracking system. • Metrc UIDs will cost $0.10, and any BioTrack tags previously purchased will be credited. • Third-party integrators will not be charged to transition from BioTrack’s API to Metrc’s API. • Labs will send testing data to Metrc under the new system. • Until Metrc goes live, transfers must use paper manifests, and licensees should keep historical data in their own systems. • OCM and Metrc will provide updates on API access, sandbox testing, training, and tags in the coming months. • Operators are advised to continue to submit inventory/sales reports to the Office via the portal. • They are aiming to help operators go live with Metrc in early 2026 Distru is a validated third party software integrator with BioTrack in NY, and we are committed to working with Metrc as OCM figures out what next steps are in the coming months. #NYCannabis #Metrc #SeedToSale #Compliance #CannabisTech #Distru

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