I m back with a "from the trenches" update on PawseKeys. We ve been working on bringing that intentional pause to more than just your desktop, and I finally have some movement to share.
Every top athlete has one (Lebron James, Novak Djokovic, Serena Williams). And it turns out, so do most of the biggest names in tech.
Steve Jobs mentored Mark Zuckerberg in the early days of Facebook. Eric Schmidt mentored Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google and later credited that relationship as one of the key reasons Google scaled the way it did. Bill Campbell, known as "the Coach of Silicon Valley," mentored Jobs, Schmidt, Jeff Bezos, and dozens of other founders throughout his career.
Big update. The optimizer can now prioritize high-traffic rooms over hallways and closets. Shoutout to @yotam_dahan who suggested density-aware placement.
Room type assignment - Right-click any room to tag it with a type from 46 presets across 6 building categories (commercial, residential, education, healthcare, hospitality, industrial). Each type carries a device density sourced from Cisco, IBC, and industry planning guides. Densities are fully adjustable per room. Custom type lets you name rooms whatever you want.
Over the past few months, we ve been talking to a lot of you using Velo. Real conversations, and people trying it out, sending clips, pointing things out. And almost everyone said some version of the same thing: It sounds like me but something feels missing. At first, we thought it was about accuracy. Maybe the voice wasn t close enough. But the more we listened, the clearer it became - that wasn t the issue. The issue was how it felt. The tone stays a bit too samey. The emphasis doesn t always land where you expect it to. And the little natural shifts that make your voice yours just aren t fully there yet. It sounds right, but it doesn t feel alive. So we went back and started reworking how we think about voice cloning at Velo. Not just matching how you sound, but capturing how you express. The way your voice changes when you re explaining something, when you re just talking casually, or when you actually care about what you re saying. That s what we re building now. The next version of Velo is focused on higher fidelity voice cloning. More nuance. Better pacing. More natural expression. Something that doesn t feel like a generated voice reading your script, but closer to you actually speaking. We re still building it, but it s coming together fast. We re planning to ship this soon. If you ve used Velo before, we d love to know - what do you think about Velo's voice cloning or other workflows? What would make it feel right? We re listening.
We re trying something new on Thursday: Alpha Day.
The idea is simple. If this is the first time you re launching your product anywhere, you can tag it alpha and get a boost to your points (and land on a special leaderboard).
Update: The Deel Leaderboard will no longer be going ahead today for the Paris event.
We re teaming up with The Pitch by @Deel, a global startup competition where up to 100 winners will receive $50k in funding and up to 10 winners will receive $1M+.
Let me start from the creator s perspective: I personally don t have a product (apart from hiring people for creative work or offering personal consultations).
But as a creator, I constantly share content, insights, and information, value that helps me build trust (for free). Based on that perceived expertise, people eventually decide to work with me (a paid service).
