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Reason behind a startup’s success

If a startup becomes profitable, you can try to trace the chain of events that led to it. You might actually find reasons and believe them. It’s as if you’ve discovered some kind of truth and now you understand exactly what needs to be done and how. This is especially noticeable when your very first startup succeeds. You think it’s because your product is better than your competitors’. Or maybe it was your distribution, or the best developers, or your persistence. Or any of a million other reasons. You believe so strongly in the infallibility of your actions that you start to lose sight of the facts.

It’s much harder to admit that you have no idea why the startup became successful. Because investors and partners won’t appreciate that.

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I haven’t finished a single project 100%

Right now I have over 10K tasks written down across all my projects. If I completed one task every day, it would take me 30 years to complete all of them. But when I do a task, I get new ideas and write down a few more new tasks. My task list will never end. The number of tasks in it only grows every day.

Writing down a task doesn’t mean I have to do it. It just frees up mental space. When I write something down, I don’t spend time assigning priorities or deadlines. An idea comes up, I save it to a file right away, and I’m done thinking about it.

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What city do you live in?

Recruiters often ask this question when they want to check whether a candidate’s time zone matches the team’s working hours. Suppose it’s -5 in their city, while your team is at +3. That’s an eight-hour difference. But why does it matter what city they live in?

What if the candidate named a city but is planning to move away from it? Or they constantly travel and live in different time zones. And what if their life isn’t tied to a time zone at all?

The mistake is asking the candidate for their time zone instead of stating yours. It doesn’t matter what city they live in today or where they’ll live in a month. If you need them to work at specific times of day, just ask whether they’re willing to work those hours.

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I’m tired of talking to AI

I found GitHub repositories that were spreading malware. I asked AI what to do about it, but it gave me nothing useful. So I opened a discussion on GitHub. Someone replied. It was the exact same text the AI had given me. I called it out and the comment was deleted. Then another person replied. It was the same AI answer again.

I worked as a developer at a company. I asked the business owner a question about a business task. He sent me a ChatGPT screenshot with the answer. I replied that it had nothing to do with my question and everything there was wrong. A minute later he sent me another ChatGPT screenshot. He didn’t even read the AI’s answer. He just took a screenshot and forwarded it to me.

Recently someone messaged me on Reddit about my post. I replied. They wrote again, I replied again. After a few messages I realized I was talking to an AI agent.

I’m tired of talking to AI.
I want to talk to real people.
But even when I talk to people, they forward my questions to AI and send me the AI’s answer.

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Apostrophe and quotes

American style uses double typographic quotes “ ”, British style uses single typographic quotes ‘ ’, and technical documentation uses straight quotes " ". In American style, punctuation goes inside the quotation marks; in British style, placement follows meaning. But even in American blogs and technical books, punctuation is often placed by meaning rather than inside.

The apostrophe is either straight ' or typographic ’. For articles and posts, the typographic apostrophe is recommended. But if you look at popular news outlets or blogs from large tech companies, you’ll often find straight and typographic apostrophes and quotation marks mixed even within the same article. Some AI agents can’t use typographic symbols and replace them with straight ones.

Straight quotes are always easier to type than holding 3 keys for typographic ones. On top of that, with straight quotes the opening and closing mark is the same character, while typographic quotes use different ones. Smart auto-replacement to typographic symbols can be set up on a laptop, but most apps ignore that setting. If you write in different languages or for different styles, smart replacement will not help. You can set up a script to replace them before publishing articles, but if the article contains code examples, you can’t replace them there. You can also replace them manually before publishing, but when replying to comments you end up with straight ones again. Some fonts render the straight apostrophe beautifully, but you control the font only on your own site. Some websites automatically convert typed text into typographic marks, but if you paste text, they leave the straight ones in.

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Looking for a VMware or Proxmox Alternative? Let's Talk VMmanager

On May 28, join us for a live technical demo of VMmanager — our virtualization management platform built for hosting providers and infrastructure teams. We'll walk through cluster setup with Ceph, VxLAN networking, white-label customization, and automation patterns that cut routine ops by 30-40%. If you're evaluating alternatives to VMware or Proxmox, or just curious about how we approached these challenges, join us.

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Who should tune in:

• Hosting providers considering alternatives to VMware or Proxmox

• CEOs & technical directors looking to reduce operational costs

• DevOps leads tired of maintaining custom automation scripts

• System architects planning infrastructure expansion

The details: 

May 28 

📍 Europe (CEST, UTC+2): 4:00 PM 

📍 US East Coast (EDT, UTC-4): 10:00 AM (New York)

📍 US West Coast (PDT, UTC-7): 7:00 AM (Los Angeles) 

Can't attend? Register anyway —we'll send you the recording and materials.

👉 Register here

Doubts about what I’ve done

I have doubts not only while making a decision, but also after I’ve made it. I publish a post, and the next day I already want to change the wording. I put an unpromising project on hold, and a month later I want to continue working on it. I come up with a cool name for a product, register the domain, and claim the social media handles, but a week later I no longer like the name. I publish an essay, and a year later I want to delete it so no one can see it anymore.

No matter how many hours I spend thinking things through and making a decision, the doubts won’t go away. I just make decisions knowing that I may no longer agree with them in the future.

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Multilingualism in startups

When launching a startup, don’t make it multilingual until you have stable revenue and a team to support it. You can’t know whether the startup will become profitable, so early on, your time is better spent finding PMF and acquiring users. AI can write scripts to manage translation files and help with text translation, but the quality will still be poor. Users might as well use the browser’s built-in translator.

If you build the service in 10 languages right away, you’ll struggle to maintain it. Every interface change means updating translation files across all languages, even though most of your users will likely understand an English interface anyway. But if you’re building for a specific country, build it in that country’s language and don’t add English. Even two languages at the start are worse than one. With a single language, you can keep text directly in the code instead of splitting it into separate translation files.

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