The entrepreneurs reading this may recognize a common failure pattern here: we got to a really great demo fast, and then hit a cliff that we couldn't surmount. Rather than taking the L and re-evaluating, I slammed my head into the cliff hoping I could break through via force of will, but the tech just wasn't there, and the product wasn't either.

Eventually I started taking a wider view of what success really means: the magical product-market-fit. Getting PMF is darn hard, so what I ask when I start working on a project is, what % feels easy? Do I get to MVP quickly? Do people love the MVP? Do users stick? Do they start ripping updates out of my hands? Do they ignore the warts? And then do they continue to stick for months or even years? Each of these milestones is a chunk of percentage points that tally up to 100%. If I've got a good project then most of that 100% is going to feel "easy." The higher the percentage that feels easy, the better the odds that the project will succeed.

How is it possible that a reasonable description of something in Verilog turns into something completely wrong in hardware? You can think of hardware as some state, with pure functions connecting the state elements. This makes it natural to think about modeling hardware in a functional programming language. Another natural way to think about it would be with OO. Classes describe how the hardware works. Instances of the class are actual hardware that will get put onto the chip. Yet another natural way to describe things would be declaratively, where you write down constraints the hardware must obey, and the synthesis tool outputs something that meets those constraints. Verilog does none of these things. To write Verilog that will produce correct hardware, you have to first picture the hardware you want to produce. Then, you have to figure out how to describe that in this weird C-like simulation language. That will then get synthesized into something like what you were imaging in the first step

Verilog is so inexpressive that many companies use an ad hoc tool to embed a scripting language in Verilog or generate Verilog from a scripting language.

Big tech CEOs and VCs really love performing for each other. We know they hang out in group chats like high schoolers, preening and sending each other texts, each trying to make sure they're all wearing the latest fashions, whether it's a gold chain or a MAGA hat or just repeating a phrase that they heard from another founder. A key way of showing that they're part of this cohort is to make sure they're having a tantrum and acting out against their workers fairly regularly.