Pejman John's personal site and digital gardenpejmanjohn https://pejmanjohn.com/ Mon, 16 Jun 2025 16:24:53 +0000 Mon, 16 Jun 2025 16:24:53 +0000 Jekyll v4.4.1 A couple of months back I discovered the Japanese TV series, Sunshine Sento Sake. I had read a small blurb about it recently in some philosophy book I was leafing through, and decided to give it a try. It’s streaming for free on Amazon Prime now. At first I wasn’t sure what I was watching. The show is deliberately slow and formulaic. In each episode, the main character, Takayuki, a salary man, struggles in his sales job. He spends his time cold-calling businesses across different Tokyo neighborhoods, and each time stumbles upon a Sento – a traditional Japanese bath house. The bulk of the episode is comprised of him skipping work for a mid-day indulgence to the Sento and then enjoying a meal and a cold beer afterwards, before he inevitably gets pulled back into the orbit of corporate life. In a way the show acts like a travel guide... Mon, 03 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://pejmanjohn.com/sunshine-sento-sake-the-senses https://pejmanjohn.com/sunshine-sento-sake-the-senses Over the last 10 years I’ve noticed a shift in tech. Well at the very least in myself, but as we are so much a reflection of our environment I can’t help but believe this shift is more than just a personal one. Namely, I feel we have shifted the central locus of our tech culture from one that venerates design to one that celebrates insight. Another way to put this is that we have tempered our obsession with objects and experience (the physical world) to make room for our insatiable hunger for thought and wisdom (the intellectual world). Specifically, I am comparing today to approximately the years of 2007-2010. This was the heyday of the iPhone and mobile apps. Steve Jobs was unquestionably the cultural leader of our industry. Through him and Apple’s success we learned the power that comes from a singular focus on aesthetics and user experience.... Thu, 21 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://pejmanjohn.com/our-tech-zeitgeist-the-shift-from-design-to-insight https://pejmanjohn.com/our-tech-zeitgeist-the-shift-from-design-to-insight Last night I watched a fantastic philosophy documentary called “Being in the World” by Tao Ruspoli (and inspired by Hubert Dreyfus). I’ve been on a learning kick lately. Our environment is highly structured to effortlessly push us entertainment (breaking news, gossip, pop culture) but we have to put in our own work to make learning just as seamlessly accessible. With that in mind, I recently created a playlist on YouTube of documentaries and lectures. Also, I discovered the Libby app which allows you to freely check out ebooks and audiobooks where ever you are (using your library card). Finally, I re-discovered Kanopy which lets you use your library card to freely stream top notch cinema and documentaries. This includes much of the Criterion Collection and I was also personally thrilled to see a huge selection of Iranian Cinema (which I highly recommend checking out if you enjoy serious film). But... Sat, 23 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://pejmanjohn.com/being-in-the-world-documentary https://pejmanjohn.com/being-in-the-world-documentary I’m wondering how often this happens to you: You pick up a book and start reading it only to find it uninteresting and so abandon it. Years later you pick up the same book and are blown away by it. Maybe you’ve had the same thing happen with music or movies. Also, there’s the opposite experience, where you re-experience something you formerly loved after much time, only to find it to now be shallow or flawed. While I think these experiences are relatively common they are nonetheless jarring. We often conceptualize insight as something out there in the external world to be extracted like some sort of gem in the mountainside. In other words, an object’s measure of insightfulness is purely an inherent attribute of the thing itself. Driven by this conceptualization we invest great amounts of energy in searching out and consuming content. We think that the road to... Sun, 24 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://pejmanjohn.com/musing-on-being-in-the-world https://pejmanjohn.com/musing-on-being-in-the-world My goal in this post is to connect two things that for most of us are viewed as very different: social networks and work. Today, these things are superficially linked in our minds. For an individual, a social network like Twitter or Instagram is seen mostly as that distracting thing you can’t help checking while at work. In this way, work and social networks are competing for your attention, but the competition goes much deeper than this. I think it’s useful to view social networks and work as being on a continuum of human organization. And even more, this continuum is increasingly collapsing. The future of work will look more like social networks, and the future of social networks will look more like work. First let’s start by examining what I mean by human organization. I would characterize it as the coordination of people and resources towards a productive pursuit.... Mon, 25 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://pejmanjohn.com/connecting-social-networks-and-work https://pejmanjohn.com/connecting-social-networks-and-work If you’re into product development and haven’t watched Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview before, I highly recommend it. It’s currently on Netflix. One part that especially jumped out for me was this 90 second clip on content beating process. I suggest you give it a watch before continuing reading. Watching Steve Jobs you realize how contrarian his thinking was versus much of the conventional views in product development today. Today entrepreneurs are pushed to “get out of the building” and talk to your customers. Steve Jobs famously said “people don’t know what they want until you show it to them” – and generally ignored things like customer research and validation. So who’s right? Both I claim, but I think Jobs has the more fundamental truth that real breakthroughs come from deep thought and sweating the details. This truth is especially profound these days as so many entrepreneurs and companies have... Sat, 02 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://pejmanjohn.com/content-beats-process-making-leaps-in-product https://pejmanjohn.com/content-beats-process-making-leaps-in-product Remember good old encyclopedias? Back in my (childhood) days, if you wanted to look up a fact like the capital of a country or the biography of Abraham Lincoln you’d flip through the pages of Encyclopedia Brittanica. It was a slow, manual process and for most of us required a trip to the library. Given how slow this process was, schools emphasized route memorization of facts. Nowadays, of course, we have Google and Wikipedia so we can look up anything we’re curious about pretty much instantaneously. As such, we’re increasingly rethinking how important it is know certain facts. Do I really need to know the exact year Lincoln was assassinated or do I just need to know how to quickly look it up? This shift from studying/memorization to just-in-time information has also played out in the world of navigation. Gone are the days of carefully mapping out your route before... Tue, 05 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://pejmanjohn.com/just-in-time-education https://pejmanjohn.com/just-in-time-education One way to think about organizations is that they are decision-making machines. An organization’s mission constrains the things they make decisions about, and an organization’s culture dictates how they go about making these decisions. I believe there are a limited number of styles we bring to decision-making. Each organization can be thought of as a certain blend of these decision-making styles. Here are the four styles I think pervade tech. Perhaps there are more but a blend of these four does a decent job of capturing decision-making culture. Fists: “The most experienced person makes the call” Numbers: “Let’s decide objectively.” Words: “The best argument wins.” Demos: “The best experience wins.” For example, following the popular characterizations of the big companies it seems that Apple is Demos & Fists. Google is Numbers. Microsoft is Fists. Amazon is Words & Numbers. Companies almost always have a bit of each of these styles,... Thu, 07 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://pejmanjohn.com/decision-making-styles-fists-numbers-words-and-demos https://pejmanjohn.com/decision-making-styles-fists-numbers-words-and-demos Putting down into writing “what it is we want” is a difficult exercise. Life generally does not require such precision. How we live, succeed, and fail is, to a large degree, dictated by the random collisions of people and circumstance. We do not know who or what will influence us next. Often we fill in the narrative as we go. We take what life has dealt us, or what we have half-consciously taken on and we build the best story around it that we can. Human beings excel at this skill. We can convince others, and more importantly ourselves, that each step we take is the right one and fits into some master plan. Given our mastery of such a skill, it may seem unnecessary to plot the dots in advance; to etch out in rigid form where we seek to go. A person can get away with a lot... Wed, 29 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://pejmanjohn.com/purpose-partnership https://pejmanjohn.com/purpose-partnership “Less is more” is a popular insight to the point of being trite. We reference it when designing products. We use slightly different language when invoking it for group decisions (“too many cooks in the kitchen”) or personal obligations (“priorities”). We as individuals and groups do best when working within constraints. Sometimes the constraint feels like pressure (only having so much financial runway), sometimes its just an intellectual tendency of restricting the field of possibilities (dichotomies when combinatorics are possible). Ultimately while I’m a believer in the notion “less is more”, I can’t help but wish we could achieve “more is more”. It’s feels like a deficiency that we can’t make that work, particularly at the group level. While I believe a smaller group can better cooperate & make smarter decisions, shouldn’t one of the major programs of the future be about inventing ways to scale group size without sacrificing... Fri, 14 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://pejmanjohn.com/making-more-is-more-true https://pejmanjohn.com/making-more-is-more-true Last week I attended the 2025 AI Engineer World’s Fair in San Francisco with a bunch of other founders from Seattle Foundations. There were over 20 tracks on specific topics, and I went particularly deep on Evals, learning firsthand how companies like Google, Notion, Zapier, and Vercel build and deploy evals for their AI features. While there were meaningful unique details in each talk, there was also surprising consistency on the general framework which I’m representing with this flywheel below: Beyond Vibes So what does AI feature development look like without evals? It’s really just going off vibes. You are ad-hoc in the inputs you put into it as well as how you judge the output. If you’re building a chat bot, you might riff on a few messages and get a feel for the responses from your AI bot, and after some back and forth deem it shippable. But... Fri, 13 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://pejmanjohn.com/ai-eval-flywheel https://pejmanjohn.com/ai-eval-flywheel