What Pieter Levels thinks about management
Dutch bootstrapper who builds and runs his internet startups alone — Nomads.com, Remote OK, Hoodmaps, Photo AI and Interior AI — and has written about it at levels.io since 2013. Posts as @levelsio.
Everything they publish, on ppll ↗
Pieter Levels did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
3 dated positions, 2024 to 2026, in their own words. Our reading of what Pieter Levels has said — not written or endorsed by them.
The line under a date shows how recently it was said: empty within a month, full after three years.
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Their wordsIf you enjoy calls, you're probably a manager not a maker https://t.co/CmUTfFxVgZ https://t.co/ZslI1JXbZW
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Their wordsMany times the calls were for those people to hit quotas in their schedule for their boss
- 2 years earlier
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Their wordsThey could have shipped ChatGPT for example, I heard, in 2019. And they never shipped it because they were so stuck in bureaucracy. But they had everything. They had the data, they had the tech, they had the engineers and they didn’t do it.
↗Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #440youtube.com 2nd of 30 in this recording
The line under a date fills as the words age, a quarter at a time: past a month, six months, a year, and three years. Empty means said within the last month; full, more than three years ago. It says when, not whether it still holds — a change of mind is marked on the claim itself.
Dashed means we only know the words existed by that date; they may be older.