Permanence is a snare
Five fragments for the week of November 10, 2025
Hello from a big day: we just announced Gamma’s Series B at a $2.1B valuation, led by Sarah Wang at a16z. I’ve had the most fun of my career here, and you could, too: we just added reams of roles to our careers page!
From a grateful place, here are five fragments that stuck with me last week…
the first slack emoji wields absurd power. most people will just click whatever’s already there (easier in slack ui) if it’s within ~0.8 cosine similarity of what they feel. when the Nth person arrives they think N-1 people genuinely feel that way. but really it was just you
– Nick Cammarata on X, November 6, 2025. This claim is true on a literal level (I see the pattern in action every day at Gamma), but it also feels like a metaphor for something.
This show includes the second iteration of her candelabras, vessels that house two light sources: the ephemeral burning candles, releasing energy, and the consistent glow of the gas captured within the glass. For this project, Pataky employs borosilicate glass, a material with commercial and scientific applications such as Pyrex and beakers. The thermal properties of borosilicate glass allows her to experiment with varied textures, shapes, scales and complexities with the tubes, resulting in glass that undulates and coils, resembling tentacles and tunnels. These forms possess a slightly corporeal and unsettling quality, holding an ethereal glow that flickers and vibrates with energy.
– Press release for A Common Burn, Meryl Pataky’s solo exhibition at pt. 2 gallery, September 2023. Flickering and vibrating; sounds about right.
In 0-1 the conditions for the product’s success are always at the cusp of being discovered, but never previously known - so I steadfastly believe that the only thing that brings clarity in an enviro[n]ment like this is shipping. Clarity creates conviction, and in turn, creates great momentum - and momentum is everything.
Therefore, in optimizing for momentum, you can think of product innovation as either a dictatorship or a democracy, but not anything in between.
You can have a singular vision, owned by one person and embraced by everyone else, that you execute against, and everyone is expected to march to this singular drumbeat. In this world there is one leader -> everyone else is a doer.
Or you can assemble a group of people that have a proven track record of “applied curiosity” - people who ship ideas as quickly as they can dream them up. In this world there are no execs and everybody just ships their ideologies, unfettered.
– Raiza Martin on X, November 6, 2025. Raiza led the team that shipped the original NotebookLM at Google and now has her own startup, Huxe. I love the idea of “applied curiosity” here.
For it is by means of our own victories, if we are not regenerated, that the work of Nemesis is wrought: doom breaks from the shell of our very virtue. Peace then is a snare; war is a snare; change is a snare; permanence is a snare.
– Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, 1949. Victory as doom is one that’ll stick with me. (Brought to you by me realizing this week that Campbell and I share a birthday, and that he died the year I was born.) Also interesting how the 1949 prose registers as downright biblical. The opposite of LLM-ese.
Movies are great though. Even if you set aside the pure artistic enjoyment (you shouldn’t). Movies are stories, and stories are powerful, primal, moving, motivating. They are prompts to you to consider dilemmas and scenarios, to build your world model and compass. My rec is to go to the golden age of story telling and movie making that imo ramped up in the 80s, was roaring in 90s, peaked early 00s, and declined since. One sourcing example: pick a random year there, look up Oscar winners, pick and watch. Enjoy and attend guilt free.
– Andrej Karpathy on X, November 10, 2025. Letter to a Young CS Student.
Until next time,
Diana
https://dianaberlin.com