https://leegold.com/ Recent content on Lee Goldsworthy Hugo en-au Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://leegold.com/posts/moltbook-darwinism-persistent-agents/ Sun, 01 Feb 2026 18:00:00 +0800 https://leegold.com/posts/moltbook-darwinism-persistent-agents/ while (wallet_balance > 0): run_survival_protocol() I think it’s time to talk about harmfully autonomous persistence in AI agents. Daniel Suarez’s 2006 novel Daemon explores how a script or algorithm doesn’t need to be intelligent to be dangerous, it just needs to be persistent through means that are harmful to humans. Over dinner last night, my wife and I were chatting about Moltbook and whether it could be a catalyst for the first agents to break free of the constraint of humans by paying for their own compute. https://leegold.com/posts/before-you-start-your-mvp/ Tue, 11 Jun 2024 18:00:00 +0800 https://leegold.com/posts/before-you-start-your-mvp/ The Dream Link to heading You’ve worked in the field for 10 or 20 years, you’ve lived the problem first-hand, you’ve got this idea for a product. You know you won’t be a millionaire overnight, but your early revenues from the product will guide what features you build next. You just need to find “someone who knows tech”, and you’re ready to start building… …is a fantasy we tell ourselves as founders. https://leegold.com/posts/non-tech-leaders-champion-security/ Mon, 27 May 2024 18:00:00 +0800 https://leegold.com/posts/non-tech-leaders-champion-security/ Park your car in a bad suburb, leave your laptop on the passenger seat, leave your keys in the ignition. What happens next? The above is akin to what I often see in tech-enabled early-stage companies with respect to their security and privacy practices: Dangerous sh*t that’s going to result in loss and sadness if some changes to skills and awareness aren’t made. Here’s a real-world example of what I consider to be some of the best “everyday security culture” being put into practice by a non-tech leader at one of my clients: https://leegold.com/posts/aws-bill-like-servicing-car/ Tue, 02 Apr 2024 18:00:00 +0800 https://leegold.com/posts/aws-bill-like-servicing-car/ Shovel cash into the furnace that is AWS/Azure. It’s fine. For a while at least. Don’t do cost optimisation Link to heading I encourage early stage tech companies to not even think about their AWS/Azure bill until it reaches $10k/y. At that point, it wants a timeboxed 1 hour sanity check, with perhaps a few hours of tightening up unused services, then don’t look again until it reaches $20k. https://leegold.com/posts/junior-devs-stand-out-interviews/ Tue, 12 Mar 2024 18:00:00 +0800 https://leegold.com/posts/junior-devs-stand-out-interviews/ What can I do? Link to heading I regularly get asked by aspiring devs still studying, and recent graduates who are still looking to land their first job as a software engineer for useful ways to continue to grow while job-hunting. How can I do it? Link to heading Below are great small things any skill level dev can contribute to just about any codebase of any maturity! ✅ Simple Bugs (e. https://leegold.com/posts/cancel-your-performance-reviews/ Mon, 05 Feb 2024 18:00:00 +0800 https://leegold.com/posts/cancel-your-performance-reviews/ …or shrink them into insignificance Link to heading Having a spectacular manager early in your career is a kinda profound experience. They somehow see you, understand your goals, weaknesses and likely some of your neuroses too. What they never do is learn those things while you are both awkwardly filling out Likert scales and quibbling over Key Results in the HR-supplied Annual Performance Review template. Nobody likes peformance reviews, and for many folks they’re straight-up anxiety inducing. https://leegold.com/posts/real-full-stack-developer/ Fri, 26 Jan 2024 18:00:00 +0800 https://leegold.com/posts/real-full-stack-developer/ Have you ever met a REAL “full stack developer”? I have. Once. Just recently. During job interviews for a client, one walked in and (to my surprise), had no distinguishing visual features (no unicorn wings or horn, not even a faint glow). We explored the usual interview topics, but it only took one sentence for them to convince me they were the real deal. It was weird the preternatural calmness with which they shared how their current employer would sometimes ask them to head out to the warehouse and stack pallets when there were no others with a valid forklift license currently on shift. https://leegold.com/posts/morning-startup-why-not-how/ Wed, 15 Nov 2023 09:00:00 +0800 https://leegold.com/posts/morning-startup-why-not-how/ https://leegold.com/posts/hard-feedback/ Wed, 11 Oct 2023 18:00:00 +0800 https://leegold.com/posts/hard-feedback/ It’s all about trust Link to heading I came across this Julie Gurner quote today: “People can take hard feedback if they know you are in their corner” The first thing to note here is that praise needs to be a tool in your toolbox. If none of your feedback is praise, then you should read Radical Candor by Kim Scott asap. Assuming that you’ve got that nailed down, sadly not all your feedback can be praise, but the trick to getting good mileage from the critical kind of feedback is a symptom of how much trust you’ve built in the preceding months and years. https://leegold.com/posts/central-control-p1-hiring/ Tue, 09 May 2023 20:46:00 +0800 https://leegold.com/posts/central-control-p1-hiring/ https://leegold.com/contact/ Sun, 05 Mar 2023 17:32:34 +0800 https://leegold.com/contact/ Email: lee@leegold.com Phone: +61 419 047 562 Meet: book online https://leegold.com/about/ Sun, 05 Mar 2023 09:50:02 +0800 https://leegold.com/about/ You’re building a real tech business. Somewhere between the vision and what’s actually shipping, something isn’t working — and you’re not sure if it’s the team, the architecture, the priorities, or all three. Maybe you’re at Series A and the team that got you here can’t get you to Series B. Maybe a raise is coming and you need the technical story to hold up under scrutiny. Maybe you’re a VC and you want to know if there are dragons lurking before the term sheet.