Adam Liska
Blog Research Notes

Blog

  • Aug 26, 2026

    Customer-Level Gross Margin Is a Product Signal

    One slightly uncomfortable data point from inside Airspeed: most of our customers have healthy gross margins, but a small number currently cost us more to serve than they pay us.

  • Aug 25, 2026

    Your Time as a Founder Is Worth $1,000 an Hour

    In the early days of Airspeed, one of our advisors, Pablo Mendes, introduced me to Georg Bauser. Georg had built Accoleo, sold it to Airbnb, and then helped build Airbnb’s international expansion.

  • Aug 24, 2026

    A Forecast Spreadsheet Tells You What the Team Believes

    Your forecast spreadsheet says what the team believes. Buyer evidence tells you whether it holds up.

  • Aug 17, 2026

    The Vision Is the Invariant. The Strategic Narrative Should Move.

    Building a company right now, when everything seems to move at the speed of light, has had me thinking about the difference between a company’s long-term vision and its strategic narrative.

  • Aug 10, 2026

    The Interface Has Leverage. So Does Product Pull.

    It took me a while to get into Acquired, but Devang talks about it so much that I eventually caved in.

  • Aug 3, 2026

    Your Company's Workflows Aren't Exhaust

    An AI data company emailed us this morning about licensing Airspeed’s codebase to train next-generation AI models. The potential payout was more than $200,000, depending on volume and complexity.

  • Jul 30, 2026

    A Good Cold Email Is a Compression Problem

    You have to appreciate a good cold email.

  • Jul 10, 2026

    Why AI Coding Works, and GTM AI Doesn't Yet

    One reason AI coding works so well is that code has a built-in feedback loop.

  • Jun 25, 2026

    What Happens When a Software Engineer Designs a Company?

    Google describes site reliability engineering as what happens when you ask a software engineer to design an operations team.

  • Apr 25, 2026

    The Person With the Context Can Now Do the Work

    I have started contributing to our codebase again. Actual pull requests, not just feedback on specs or small copy changes.

  • Feb 23, 2026

    Everyone Owns Customer Success Until Nobody Does

    At the beginning of 2025, I wrote that every person at Glyphic contributed to customer success.

  • Jan 28, 2026

    Agents Are the New Compilers

    “Agents are the new compilers.”

  • Jan 18, 2026

    From Decision Support to Autonomous Execution

    A little over two years ago, I sat down with Aarish Shah to discuss Devang’s and my vision for Glyphic.

  • May 19, 2025

    Must-Have Features Are Often Fossilized Workarounds

    Startups often get dismissed for what they do not have yet.

  • May 4, 2025

    Love, Not Adoption, Is the Real Product Moat

    We recently ran the Ellis Test at Glyphic: how would users feel if they could no longer use the product?

  • May 15, 2016

    Multi-arm bandits and the conflict between exploration and exploitation

    We have recently started a reading group on reinforcement learning with a group of colleagues, following the draft of the second edition of Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction by Sutton and Barto. The PDF version of the book is available on the book website; we are using the draft from October 2015 (currently the latest one).

  • Feb 4, 2016

    How to download Human Connectome Project data from Amazon Web Services

    All public releases of data produced by the Human Connectome Project (HCP) are available online through the ConnectomeDB. Nevertheless, I’ve had trouble running the Aspera Connect browser plugin – that’s required to download data from the database – on my Ubuntu machine (it crashes whenever I want to initiate a download).

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