Andrew Machado

I used to spend hours prepping for weekly game review meetings at Zynga. With Mark Pincus in the room, newly minted PMs like me showed up ready to anticipate every possible question. At first, it was exciting. The stakes were high, and the meetings felt meaningful. But over time, the meetings felt more like theater. We focused so much on crafting bulletproof slides that we left little space for actual discussion. Sometimes, real issues were buried beneath our fancy decks. Now at FunCraft, I never want our weekly user acquisition meetings to feel like performance. I tell my team: Don’t prep to impress me. Prep to learn something useful for you. Bring real questions and surface friction points. Use the meeting to get what you need to make better decisions. We’re still iterating. Making every recurring meeting valuable is hard. But the goal isn’t perfection - it’s relevance. We want our UA meetings to be a problem-solving forum, not a timesuck. I’m curious how other studio leaders approach weekly review sessions. What’s working for you?

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Document processing is having its iPhone moment. A post about Gemini 2.0 went viral on HN yesterday, and my comment explaining why legacy vendors will be obliterated hit #1 on the thread. It's clear that over time, OCR & document parsing are going to be swallowed up by these multimodal models. After all, the best representation of a document at the end of the day is an image. The problem shifts from "can we pull the text off the page?" → "how do we teach an LLM to extract the data we need, validate its performance, and deploy it with confidence into prod?" Getting > 95% accuracy in real world complex use cases requires state-of-the-art parsing powered by VLMs and OCR, but also: - orchestration of various document processing modes (parsing, classification, extraction, and splitting) - tooling that lets non-technical domain experts quickly iterate, review results, and improve accuracy - evaluation and benchmarking tools - fine-tuning pipelines that turn reviewed corrections —> custom models - and tons more that we're shipping at Extend Very excited to test Gemini 2.0 and roll it out to our users 🚀

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With this one simple phrase, my friend Jasper, the CEO at Artisan, built $2M+ in new ARR, and got a few death threats: "Stop hirring humans." At Artisan, they launched this provocative campaign in SF and it went viral. They’re going all-in on “the era of AI employees.” And when it comes to advertising, provocative works. The thing is, I know the Artisan team doesn’t hate humans. (In fact, they are hiring real people right now). AI will indeed replace many parts of the marketing funnel, but we strongly believe that: While AI scales, humans close. That’s how we’re looking at it at Popl. Humans + AI = the ideal state. We’re using AI to enhance human connection, not replace it. AI should solve the busy work, the spreadsheets, the data cleaning, the badge scanning, so that humans can focus on creating genuine connection. Because we believe the strongest connections happen in-person. And at Popl, we’re all-in on in-person GTM.

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❤️ I love when a product launch genuinely solves a problem we’ve all felt. In this case: sifting through overwhelming noise. If you’ve ever tried to find that one critical piece of information - and ended up digging through tabs, articles, and PDFs - this one’s for you. 🚀 We’ve just launched AI-generated Search on the POLITICO Pro Platform, and it’s so cool. Instead of keyword hunting, you can now ask questions like: “What is the Digital Markets Act?” (I'm sure you all know this one though) “What are the next potential parliamentary majorities in France?” In seconds, you’ll get a concise, sourced answer drawn exclusively from POLITICO’s trusted reporting. It’s designed to help policy professionals find what they need faster, and think smarter - no noise, no fluff. It’s not a chatbot. It won’t make things up. It’s just a better, faster way to access the insight that matters most. 💡 Explore how it works: https://pro.politico.eu/ And if you don’t have access, drop us a message. Kudos to the amazing team behind the project: Aditi Luykx Etienne Bauvir Gautier Morel Younn Olivier Laura Melita Nemos Thorpe Theodoros Kondakos Tamer Schiller Nicklas Kragbé Ebru Aydin Matilde Baggio

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What separates good CRO's from great ones? I unpacked some of my learning from interviewing close to 20 of the best in the world on the Topline Podcast with Asad and AJ this weekend. We got into: 👉 the qualities of exceptional CRO's 👉 what it means to be a stage appropriate leader 👉 strategic planning and probabilistic thinking 👉 the impacts of reasoning models like o1/o3 on startups 👉 the role of rev ops in best in class companies 👉 what we've changed our minds on in 2025 💊 👉 and much more Hot takes were flying 😅 Eager to hear your thoughts!

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Here's how I think about recruiting at Clay in three analogies: 1. Recruiting is like a solar system 🪐 ↳ Like orbiting planets, Clay and candidates are both in constant motion. Recruiting is about timing and fit: sometimes alignment happens right away, and other times it takes years of circling back. For certain candidates, it may take multiple touch points over time before Clay and a candidate’s orbit come close enough to align. ↳ At the beginning, you start with a blank canvas, you try to fill in the colors as best as you can with interviews, references, etc. Then compare that picture with the spec for your role. ↳ I'm not making value judgments if someone is "good" or "bad". I'm just trying to understand their story, peek into their soul — figure out who they are! — to determine if Clay's role is a good fit for them at this moment. For example, someone may not be a fit if they need more support than Clay can give them at this stage of growth. 2: Recruit like you're fishing 🎣 ↳ Know when to chase with energy & urgency. Know when to ease up and let them come to you. ↳ It's a dance where you always need to sell and evaluate the fit at the same time throughout. The best people make that tension feel natural! ↳ People want to feel wanted. Bring high energy and enthusiasm even if you're hiring for a great role. 3: Interview like this emoji → 👯‍♀️ ↳ Interviewing shouldn't be combative, even though sometimes it feels that way. Ideally you and the company are working together to get the right information to determine if there is a fit. ↳ You get information at every part of the process. For example, in an offer negotiation, you learn more about the candidate by how they act and engage if there's conflict. Candidates also learn how companies act too (e.g. Clay does not make exploding offers). I hope this is helpful! Curious what people think and if there are any questions, feedback or ideas!

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