Mark Cuban is at it again. This time, he's providing affordable drugs. As someone who has been to the hospital more times than I'd like to count, this is an amazing product. Happy to see someone use their entrepreneurial skills to make medical care and resources more accessible for everyone.

I've already written about Jordan Singer and his products multiple times, but Automator's website launched this week and it's worth sharing.

Automator lets you take all the mundane and repetitive aspects of design and... automate them. Whether it's renaming layers or building out a full style guide, the things people are doing with Automator is mind blowing.

I'm going to be doing a lot more product work in the coming months.

In preparation, I've begun to familiarize myself with the tools and tricks of the trade. One of these tools is Fable. It's an amazing product that connects engineering, design, and product workflows and tools into a single intuitive interface.

I never thought I'd be writing about the mafia for this newsletter, but here we are. Ryan Breslow, the CEO of Bolt, a payments company focused on secure, one click checkout experiences wrote a extremely controversial Twitter thread on his experience with Stripe and Y Combinator as a fintech founder working on a competing product.

Ryan claims that:

- Investors would not back him and Bolt because of Stripe and YC's power
- Stripe & YC suppressed Bolt's product updates on HackerNews, a popular forum for technology workers
- Stripe invested in Fast Checkout in order to eat away at Bolt's market share

The thread is long, makes bold claims with little to back his hypothesis up, and according to the admins of HackerNews is factually inaccurate.

As an armchair startup investor and tech enthusiast, here's my two cents:

Regarding VC's ghosting Ryan. That's what VC's do. I've experienced it with multiple different companies I've worked on. Things can be going great, and all of the sudden the conversation can drop. Also, it's a really, really bad look to invest in two companies working on similar problems. If people backed Stripe or Fast, investing in Bolt wouldn't make sense. To boil all of this down to "Stripe and YC are conspiring against me" seems unlikely.

To his point about censorship on HackerNews, I'm not sure.

One of the heads of HackerNews was able to pull up time stamps and information that debunked Ryan's claims, but if I put on my tin foil hat... who's to say they didn't change this information after the fact? I doubt it, but something to consider.

Finally, to the point about Fast checkout, having competitor products is just what happens in business. Maybe Fast is the Pepsi to Bolt's Coke (or maybe it is the other way around). If you build something good, people will copy you to some extent. Fast was second to market, but there's been plenty of times where the first player is not the one who wins.

Whatever the case is, the vast majority of people online are siding with Stripe and Y Combinator. While I would love Ryan to be right, simply because it'd be interesting, it seems like he is making many bold claims with little to no evidence to back them up.

Huge used to work at Stink and is now a Design Director at R/GA. His work is fire. There's a bunch of great case studies on his site, but my personal favorite is the product and brand work for Weyay, Kuwait's first digital bank.

Last week I talked about offboarding from Square. This week I'll be discussing my decision to leave. Here's why I ended up leaving:

Steering an air craft carrier
Square has hundreds of designers. At times, it felt like I was trying to steer an aircraft carrier even though I wanted the speed and agility of a jet ski. A large company probably shouldn't be making such big, dramatic shifts, and I wanted an environment that allowed me to steer things a bit more.

Hasn't that already been designed?
Working at an established company provides stability and resources you don't get other places. However, at times it felt like I was redesigning things. To be clear, redesigning something that doesn't work is good.

It felt like my work was in some instances redundant and could be more efficiently done or absorbed by other teams.

Consequence-free risk
Taking risks is... well... risky? Thankfully I have a healthy family and strong support system, but that won't always be the case. I decided it's time for me to take on more risk rather than playing it safe at a big company (not that there is anything wrong with that).

Betting on the individual
Leave Square means betting on my own capability and skill rather than relying on the reputation of a large, respected company. This is intimidating, but I appreciate the challenge.

Going out to go up
As an IC at a medium-to-large sized tech company, there is a ceiling on how high you can go. I want to keep doing IC work, but in more or a player-coach capacity. Square isn't the place for this. In going out, I am working my way "up" in a manner that feels natural and makes sense for my current career goals.

If you want more in-depth writing on any of these points, you can read the full blog post here.

Dr. Andrew Huberman is an American neuroscientist with a podcast that explores human psychology, sleep, supplements, exercise, and much, much more. I recently listened to an episode on the science behind habits.

As someone who resolved to form new habits rather than trying to meet certain goals this year, I loved this episode. Andrew's work is backed by science. He explains the research and provides simple, actionable advice on how to take steps to form or break habits by behaving in a way that will regulate our dopamine response and therefore influence our behavior. It's a great listen.

Listen Here