Soleio

Jason Yuan says every relationship is a story with shared authorship between two people. The self in isolation does not exist, even though internal identity does. Calling yourself a good friend only works if a bad friend can exist. As the only person on earth, there is nothing left to identify against. Dot can know a life because it was told about it, and that private record still cannot show that the toxic, emotionally unavailable man is you. Other people have to co-author the story. The world is a collection of stories people write together.

The detail that matters is narrative ambiguity. One account can call Soleio an amazing best friend while Soleio says Jason is okay and that he sees h

Everett Katigbak joined companies before they were big and before other people saw anything in them. Colleagues asked why. Before Facebook he worked at the Getty museum. Facebook was still talked about as a college website, and social media was not a category yet. Pinterest was easier to place, a quirky consumer brand. Stripe was a weird, small financial tech company. Anthropic looked like a fad to a lot of people. Soleio was skeptical of Anthropic too, and later said he was glad Katigbak ignored that advice.

There is no special radar in his account. He looks for cruxes where something is about to emerge, and other people's doubt is how he knows the pull is real. Soleio calls the pattern a

Facebook's Analog Research Lab was a physical way to argue about what the company stood for. Soleio says a startup would not obviously build one at that stage. Everett Katigbak and Ben Barry turned mantras into war posters that left the company and entered ordinary American speech. Move fast and break things is a turn of phrase because of those posters, the lab, and their friendship.

The two of them started the same day and grabbed the same doorknob at orientation. The assignment was a marketing design team. They refused the name and called the work communication design, because they communicate, and that felt bigger than making the number go up. Short lines do what a bumper sticker does, a

Everett Katigbak means intimacy, not scale. At Facebook the company was described by the scale of the network, the investments, and the valuation. Nobody was talking about the intimacy of the product. The industry stayed on infrastructure, and the flip was to show what the product did for a person.

Calling his family in the Philippines is the case. He could reach them without staying up late, waiting until everyone was awake, and passing the phone around. People outside the industry recognized that story. Those details make the work worthwhile. Hide them, and a system that reaches humans on the other end is only a backend.

Soleio takes the same moment one step further. The intimate relatio

Soleio says Figma, a company he helped build, created prosperity for somebody in Minnesota to buy a first home. A kid posted a photo of the home and thanked Figma, and the post gives him enormous meaning. Eighty percent of his job is opportunity routing.

The routing is a string of introductions. A founder should sell to a customer. An investor should talk to a team because the team is amazing. A designer looking for a next gig has a you-size hole on a team. He can build an entire life resume on finding novel connections. For him, the act of going independent is an extreme act of meaning.

Sorting the next introductions is the hard part. He names film projects, startups, and a whole range of

Koen Bok and Jorn van Dijk say a chat tool can make a landing page fast, and speed is the main advantage, but the page looks generic. A landing page for Soleio comes back quickly and looks like the others. Asking the chat to make a button blue often fails. The back and forth feels like a walkie-talkie. Newer tools, including V0, now add controls after the chat: click the button, open a popover, and pick a color.

Framer is in the reverse position. A year of AI work is headed into the product in Q1, while the editing controls are already the base, from button color and forms to animation, breakpoints, and how a page looks, feels, and breathes. The plan is to put AI on top so people move faste

Soleio credits Framer with a handprint on the aesthetic, the language, and the medium of the web. Old startup websites were terrible seven years ago, and they are awesome today. The gap is night and day, and people can sense and feel the aesthetic of Framer Motion and a Framer website.

The arc runs through two acts. Act One was five years of working on a prototyping tool that helped designers make ideas real, try things out, and share them with others. The prototyping work hit a glass ceiling, and a really difficult crucible moment forced a decision to pivot. Act 2 was a 10-year overnight success of building the premier website builder, the best way to build amazing websites. 55% of YC comp

Ryo Lu says AI both levels the playing field and raises the ceiling at the same time. Soleio had asked which way the power moves: an older hope that technology would push power out to the edges, or a new concentration where a 10x engineer becomes 1,000x more productive, often with Cursor. Ryo Lu does not pick one side.

Before these tools, doing anything meant learning the programming concepts, the syntax, and how to run the server. Now anyone with an idea can start. The first output can be a little sloppy, purple gradients, and more iteration brings it closer to what that person wanted. Telling an agent the exact thing still takes knowing the language, the concepts, and sometimes reading th

Ryo Lu says the best programmers he knows can maybe run only four agents at once. A person looks at one chat thread at a time and cannot take in that much information at once. The problem that follows is how to help someone who would otherwise be chatting with 15 agents at once or reviewing every change those agents make.

Cursor's interface started as manual coding, files and lines typed by hand. Completion came next: the product finished the next function, jumped to the right file, and tried to keep the person in flow while they typed. Chat made the model aware of the whole codebase and able to answer questions. Editing let it apply changes, and tools made the work more agentic. People are

Soleio says it is easy to be amongst the best if you are amongst the first. He does not know if the best energy is an energy of youth. He wonders if there is a power of naivete. When you do not know that you cannot do it, and you do not know the danger, the downsides, or what is impossible, you are far more likely to try something that has not been tried before.

Once a result is obviously doable, everybody races after it. The pattern is hard to turn into a formula, because the start looks like nothing until a leap of faith, an intuition, sprouts into the world. Nobody has a head start. Somebody who has been doing the work for decades and is the best at it stays vulnerable to the person star

Soleio traces the Facebook thumbs up to glyphs Aaron Sittig had already drawn for ranking stories in News Feed. A hand felt native to Facebook, which already used gestures such as the poke icon, and human anatomy was a load-bearing idea for a symbol meant to last.

The News Feed team realized a down rank would help people see less of some stories. The thumbs up and thumbs down were one experiment among several, and the thumbs up started as a placeholder. Hearts and stars were tried as other expressions of a like. The thumbs up was the one that felt most native to Facebook and felt like the Facebook way. Soleio gets assigned far too much credit for the mark. News Feed gained commenting and li