Our newest value
Harmonic has long had an internal refrain of “stay above the line” to guide decisions around building products or processes. Today, we’re formalizing it as our fourth core value.
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Staying above the line |
| Below the line are familiar, deterministic solutions that work, but decay as AI evolves. Above the line are solutions with specific properties that lead them to compound as AI evolves. We fight the familiar and operate above the line. |
What is the line?
The line separates work fueled by AI progress from work eroded by it.
Below the line are bounded UIs and manual workflows. Safe approaches that reliably get the job done.
Above the line are context machines that at their core employ agents to complete work. Solutions designed to: understand intent → gather and absorb all relevant context possible → orchestrate and delegate work to agents → deliver outcomes.
Above the line systems naturally absorb AI advancements; below the line systems ossify, and eventually become useless relative to their above-the-line counterparts.
Leave Granola on in the background and you’ll end up with searchable, sharable summaries from every meeting. They’ve built incredible hooks to soak in all meeting context, and with no incremental user effort they deliver better summaries and more useful artifacts at the rate of general AI progress: Above the line. Assign scribes and stay up to date on the best collaborative manual note taking processes. We love Google, but: Below the line.
Shopify began demanding proof AI can’t do the job before provisioning non-AI resources: Above the line. Samsung imposed a blanket internal GenAI ban in reaction to one employee’s misuse: Below the line.
The Browser Company mothballed its beloved Arc browser to build an AI-native browsing experience unencumbered: Dia. Risky, with some staging and communication misses, but: Above the line.
The below-the-line siren song
You: “we all know AI is powerful and cool, and should be used. Why are you writing this?”
Humans and organizations are energy-optimizing machines. We travel through the reinforced paths of least resistance. We tend to exploit strategies that we know work rather than explore fundamentally new ones.
Decades of deep ruts (proven playbooks) draw us to below-the-line solutions that we know work now and have predictable ROI.
We have to rewire ourselves to forge paths that are massively more productive.
This is why we’re formalizing this core value: to embed and reinforce into our cultural DNA the knowledge that the path that takes you above the line is always the better one.
Join the movement
We’re bringing together founders, investors, and operators that are carving above the line paths so we can learn from each other and accelerate.
- Aug 21: Join investors from top NYC VC funds + engineers from fast-growing startups at an exclusive happy hour in Manhattan
- Sep 24: We’re speaking with LangChain’s Harrison Chase on practical ambient agent applications and Above the Line thinking
- …and much more to come
We'll also be sharing learnings from our own product, engineering, and design endeavors; as well as talking to fast-growing startups about how they're staying above the line. To stay in the loop, sign up below:
