Robert Westbury
@rbrrw
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uber driver yesterday told me his energy hack after a decade of truck driving. 3 scoops instant coffee, mix w/ few drops of water, heat it up, add chocolate and salt, eat the goo. "the most sustained energy you'll ever have". all i thought was "this is stupid". anyway it works.
ask thirty smart people for advice, ignore them, listen to the Uber driver that tells you the folk wisdom.
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If a tsunami hits the mission district of san francisco i will accept my fate.
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mfs put "working on something new" in their bio then be working on an app to say gm to your friends. im mfs
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there is literally no reason to ever, publicly or privately, hate on someone young and ambitious. total downside for everyone. at best shows a ton of insecurity and discontent for the world.
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10p JFK-SFO is a great flight - spotted within 30m: . - 8 ChatGPT tabs.- 13 code editors.- Guy in front of me with a slide deck covered in “H100” and “PyTorch”. 🫡.
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hilarious take from today's NYT article on school choice & microschools. can't make this up
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🏋️♂️ Quick weekend side project: An app that helps you manage progressive overload in the gym - felt great to work on mobile again!
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someone should start a company that figures out how to legally define an “ai employee” so we can start putting llm costs in r&d vs cogs.
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we're pulling back the curtain on legislation we passed earlier this year that makes launching a florida school 10x simpler and free from incumbent roadblocks. just the start. 🇺🇸🇺🇸.
We'll do whatever it takes to fix K-12 education — including changing state laws. There are now 50,000+ new locations where microschools can open across Florida. If we’re going to fix our K-12 education system, we need to launch 1,000’s of new schools. Let's get to work.
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We're looking for an engineer to join us at @Primer. Come join as the third engineer building the OS for America's next education system — covering everything: student experience powering the day-to-day, family tooling tracking real-time educational outcomes, tools to turn
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hate to be negative but after spending 3 years building actual education (schools) i can confirm literally every piece of rhetoric you see on twitter about education is larp. same statements, same charts, 24/7. build schools or bust.
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true, but also, imagine waking up every day to work on something that isn't the 'hardest possible difficulty level'.
been there done that. this shit is brutally hard. if you want to build a generational company, edtech is the hardest possible difficulty level. kudos to this team for realizing this early and pulling the plug. it takes lots of guts
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incredibly easy to tweet all day about how bad the education system is. incredibly hard to talk about what you’re doing to fix it.
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This smash or pass ai project would never happen if people just focused on building one thing well. deep thought on what you're doing and living with it for months is incredibly underrated for this & actual learning. very basic morals also help lol.
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🤩 Can’t wait to finally share what I’ve been working on in my free time for the past couple months!. 👇 Grab it today at
Introducing Subso — a new app that helps you navigate the vast content landscape by joining all creators' socials into one. 🔭. Available now on iOS, Android and web 👉
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a belief i've held for years: the 99th percentile of virtual instruction can be far, far better than the same level of instruction in-person. we're finally building it for every kid at Primer. 🫡
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Come launch a Primer with us!.
Something new: the Primer Fellowship. If you've dreamed of launching a microschool, we built this for you. We're opening up the Primer platform — our software, ops engine, academic program, etc. — and giving it to you. Let's launch some schools.
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Always a good feeling when the first kid enrolls in a new state
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the solution is to completely ditch labels like "high achieving" or "struggling." these distinctions aren't real. you are where you are, and education should meet you there. simple as that.
It is, in fact, possible for an education system to support both struggling students and high-achieving students. Just 0.0002 percent of the federal education budget is allocated to supporting gifted and talented programs. Apparently some people believe that's still too much.
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a good litmus test for if your startup will survive the marginal cost of software going to 0. does a hurricane make your cpu metrics look like this
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Saturday evenings are for digging through GBs of buried state education reports so convoluted they make excel crash. 🫡. Illinois, in 2022:. - 941 schools have less than 5% of students proficient in Math. - 658 schools have less than 5% of students proficient in ELA. - 53 schools
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always awesome to see glimpses into the future we’re building. in case you missed it on Miami news this morning, a great segment that aired about Primer:
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working theory: the first Great Filter for edtech startups is getting exceptional educators and exceptional product leaders working well together. different walks of life, often near-opposite working & communication styles, etc. as always - lots of empathy and intentionality :).
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1. You sent your kid to a private school.2. Your test results look like this. ?
Arizona’s experience should be a wake up call. Ripping off taxpayer money from public schools and giving it to private schools for tuition vouchers is a disaster. NC legislators should stop unaccountable voucher expansion. - RC.
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Subso has been one of the most influential experiences in my life, and today we’re sunsetting it. I think the last paragraph here perfectly describes how I feel right now:
We have made the hard decision to sunset Subso. Read our statement below:.
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The ambitious energy kids have on Primer is unmatched.
Only a few days into “Earth and Beyond,” our latest Science Fair theme, and we’re already seeing kids building solar panels, cryogenic fuel pumps, earth movement sensors, and… beyond. Here are some of our new scientists’ answers to why they decided to join the club.🧵
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sitting in an airport, listening to the live ATC Ground control, watching planes take off and hacking away on code is one of the purest forms of joy.
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an average afternoon of Pursuits at Primer:. - building 3d printers.- designing clothes.- doing self-directed chemistry.- making music.- learning new languages. meanwhile most kids are on their 8th hour of busywork
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Doing a Murph in SF tonight for Memorial Day - 6pm at the gym on Marina Green. Join me! Honoring Lt. Michael P. Murphy. All skill levels welcome.
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Duolingo:. - Exactly the type of co to crash post-2021.- Aggressively paused S&M, pulled back R&D soon after.- Correctly Adjusted EBITDA Margin went from (22)% in late 2021 to a positive Q4.- Stock up 14% from its 2021 high.- 8% (!) of revenue comes from an online English test
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Alpha in tracking down high pitched voice Minecraft Java tutorials from ~8-10 years ago and finding out where those kids are now.
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Growth hack: . Get so good at Tetris you get on your airline’s global leaderboard, then set your name as the URL of your product 😎
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once you start seeing fragmented industries with unit economics that can be driven down by a near-OOM (+ an improved experience) through economies of scale it's hard to stop. Housing -> @coverbuild.Education -> @Primer. so many sectors sitting duck. build!.
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Probably enough for 3 or 4 electron apps?.
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Maybe the real superconductor was the friends we made along the way.
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"There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen".
Trump says he would sign SCHOOL CHOICE, says it's "one of the most important things we're going to be doing"
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This paper (and others like it) are usually p-hacked to hell, but obviously directionally correct. Incredibly excited to make every Primer have high-quality air, natural night, healthy food etc. Perks of owning the full stack :).
putting a cheap air filter in a classroom leads to roughly the same increase in student test outcomes as the best charter schools in the country ($18k/y)
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Yeah IPOing is great, but have you ever tried a Philz Mint Mojito?.
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Fun @subsoapp story:. Our pubsub node (primary ingest service, handling ~4.5m pieces of content per day at peak) had a memory leak for years. I never added an autorestart cron since I didn't want to forget about it. So I manually restarted it twice a day for 600+ days:
If you don't have a single cron job or auto restart script your app is dependent on, you shipped too late.
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❤️.
Imagine getting stuck on a Scratch programming project as a third grader and @roberttwestbury comes to your desk to help you debug. @Primer Magic.
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Periodic reminder that if there's a law you dislike you can just change it.
We'll do whatever it takes to fix K-12 education — including changing state laws. There are now 50,000+ new locations where microschools can open across Florida. If we’re going to fix our K-12 education system, we need to launch 1,000’s of new schools. Let's get to work.
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sf symphony was world class. best way to spend a friday night. funny how classical music sounds so good irl but so mid digitally
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Just in-case anyone was wondering what the future of cloud looks like:.
It takes 11 seconds to deploy persistent Redis on @joinhop, with private networking to your project (vpc)
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this isn’t your grandpa’s florida. it’s primer’s florida. and you’re in charge.
I'm looking for a Florida GM for Primer. You'll run the state:.- Own an 8-figure P&L. - Drive expansion into new cities. - Be the face of Primer across FL. Must be a relentless operator + thrive doing what everyone will tell you is impossible. r@primer.com or DM.
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We’re hiring someone to run the real estate function at Primer!. You’ll own the entire real estate process for each new microschool: from the earliest conversations about new market expansion to delivering a fully-approved space ready for students on the first day of school.
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you're not "in the arena" you made a site for losers to vote on 170 ai generated women.
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you do not have to add ‘net’ every time. things can just be ‘new’.
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Latest addition to the office:. (also - forgot how fun pulley problems are)
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@agazdecki @AshokNellikar @PaulYacoubian @ctjlewis @anothercohen I’m 15 and I’m cringing at how childish this entire thread is.
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The ideal candidate is a full-stack, staff-level generalist with early startup experience based out of the SF Bay Area. We are doing a lot, and you will too. Expect to own entire parts of our product, be pivotal on going 0-1 on our engineering org and take on a 2^10 things that.
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