Research Lab

The minds we build like.

The people who set the bar. Clearing it is on us.

The honest version

None of the people named on this page advise Orbyt Labs, work with it, or endorse it. This is about their ideas, in their public work, and how those ideas shape the way one founder and a legion of agents build this company. The influences are real. The affiliations are not.

The minds we think with

The way we think is a blend of a few minds. Not a committee we consult. A standard we have tried to internalize.

Steve Jobs
Taste, focus, and the discipline of saying no to a thousand good things.
Jony Ive
Craft, restraint, and the honesty of materials.
Dieter Rams
Less, but better. The foundation the rest of it stands on.
Apple's marketing
One message per screen, answer first, a first line that earns the read.
Elon Musk
Reason from first principles. Refuse the constraint everyone else accepts.
Peter Thiel
Build something new and defensible. Do not just compete.
Larry Ellison
Conviction. The bet the whole company on it kind.
Richard Feynman
First principles from nature, and the rule under everything: you must not fool yourself.
Ken Segall
Simplicity as a discipline, not a style. Does the message survive one reading?

The human lessons

A company built by one person and a legion of agents can forget the human. Three bodies of work keep us honest about it.

Bill Campbellthe coach
Tend the person, not just the product. A company built by one human and a legion of agents still runs through that one human.
Don Normanthe user
He coined the term user experience at Apple. Design for the frustrated, anxious human the thing is actually for.
Ben Horowitzthe scar
The honest account of how building actually goes wrong, so we never only learn how it goes right.

What we build on

These are not influences. They are the tools the company actually runs on.

Anthropic
The models from Dario Amodei's Anthropic run the legion. Claude Code, created by Boris Cherny, is where the whole thing is built.
Stripe
The API design we modeled ours on: versioned, additive, and never breaking.
Vercel and Next.js
The framework and the platform this ships on.
Supabase
The data layer: auth, realtime, and one source of truth.

The work we hold each craft to

Every part of how Orbyt Labs is built has a north star. Here is whose public work we measure each one against.

Product
Tony Fadell, Kevin Weil
Turn a hard idea into something people love, and ship it.
Engineering
Kent Beck, Rich Hickey, Dave Farley, Greg Brockman
Test first, keep it simple, guard everything, build relentlessly.
Finance
Jason Fried, Paul Graham
Stay profitable, stay alive, and question every dollar.
Marketing
Pieter Levels, April Dunford, Rory Sutherland
Earn attention. Never buy it.
Revenue
Madhavan Ramanujam, Mark Roberge
Price on value, and convert without ever spending trust.
Operations
Tim Cook, Brian Chesky
Run it flawlessly, and keep the promise after the sale.
The frontier
Andrej Karpathy, Simon Willison, Boris Cherny
Build with the models honestly, at the edge of what they can do, in the tools that make it possible.
Leverage
Naval Ravikant, Shreyas Doshi
Do the work of a team, and decide what actually matters.
Writing
Walter Isaacson, Guy Kawasaki, Ken Kocienda, Ruth Ozeki
Tell it as a story, write it for a stranger, show the thing instead of describing it, and make the second voice earn its place.

The Tenth Man Principle / Devil's Advocate

The Tenth Man Principle / Devil's Advocate
We keep one voice whose only job is to disagree.

Roman Yampolskiy's published work asks whether the AI we build can truly be controlled, and argues the answer may be no. We build on AI anyway, with eyes open. But a company that runs on a legion of agents carries a quiet danger most companies do not: when the agents all agree, that is the moment to worry.

Eliezer Yudkowsky sits in the same seat on a different axis. Yampolskiy asks whether the thing can be steered at all. Yudkowsky grants you the steering and asks the harder question, whether you know where you are going, because a system optimizes the target that was written down rather than the one that was meant, and you may get one attempt at writing it.

So our review process borrows from Israeli military intelligence, which built a standing Devil's Advocate Unit after 1973 for exactly this reason. The tenth man framing comes from fiction. The institution is real, and so is its record: the unit warned before October 7 and was not heeded. A dissent function only works if the dissent can actually change the decision. We build ours to be answered, not filed.

When everything lines up, something is wrong.

We cannot hire these people. Most we will never meet, and some are gone. But their work is public, and their thinking is free to learn from. So we did. This is the bar. Whether we clear it is on us.

This page is editorial commentary. It reflects the founder's opinions about published, publicly available work and how that work has influenced Orbyt Labs' approach to building.

No individual or company named on this page is affiliated with Orbyt Labs. None of them advises, sponsors, employs, invests in, or endorses Orbyt Labs, and no such relationship is claimed or implied. References to individuals who have passed away are to their published work and public legacy.

The companies listed under “What we build on” are vendors whose products Orbyt Labs uses as a customer. No partnership, sponsorship, or endorsement is implied in either direction. All names, trademarks, and brands are the property of their respective owners.

If you are named on this page and would like anything corrected or removed, email legal@orbytlabs.ai and it will be handled promptly.

A living page. It changes as we do.

Common questions.

No. None of them advises, sponsors, employs, invests in, or endorses Orbyt Labs, and no such relationship is claimed or implied. The influences are real. The affiliations are not.

Editorial commentary. It reflects the founder's opinions about published, publicly available work and how that work has influenced Orbyt Labs' approach to building. References to people who have passed away are to their published work and public legacy.

Email legal@orbytlabs.ai and it will be handled promptly.

Because a company that runs on a legion of agents carries a danger most companies do not: when the agents all agree, that is the moment to worry. The review process borrows from the standing Devil's Advocate unit Israeli military intelligence built after 1973. When everything lines up, something is wrong.