#SF is great for #startup founders. Just not every founder. AI2 Incubator's Yifan Zhang has a framework for knowing the difference—and it starts with a simple question: is your startup butter or sand in the gears?

My latest for GeekWire: https://www.geekwire.com/2026/butter-or-sand-in-the-gears-the-question-every-founder-must-ask-before-choosing-sf-or-seattle/

Nobody reads instructions. Not your customers. Not your employees. Not even your kids. Convoy co-founder Dan Lewis learned that the hard way — and it's one of 10 startup lessons he shared at the Seattle AI Startup Summit. My @GeekWire writeup:

https://www.geekwire.com/2026/stop-trying-to-make-people-read-instructions-10-startup-lessons-from-convoy-co-founder-dan-lewis/

I wonder what Otter is doing to improve its speech-to-text transcription? It hasn't been doing a stellar job lately, tagging the wrong people when voices are clearly diff. Just thinking about it after writing about Microsoft's launch of MAI-Transcribe-1.

https://theaieconomy.substack.com/p/mai-transcribe-1-microsoft-speech-to-text