Yoshio Goto

The Summit

How'd he get here?

I build products and the teams that run them. I co-founded Ultraspeaking in 2021. Before that, I spent four years as a software engineer.

This island is a map of what I make, what I practice and where my curiosity goes. The climber on the stair is me.

The Town Crier

What's new?

Everything new on the island, newest first: posts, videos, books, and short notes from X and LinkedIn. Coming soon.

The Phone Box

How do I reach him?

Write to me at hello@gotoyosh.io. I read everything.

The Tower

Where has he worked?

One floor per chapter, oldest at the bottom.

1. 2021 to now: Ultraspeaking. Co-founder. Head of Product and Engineering, then COO. I helped redesign delivery around peer practice, and I took AI Coach from roadmap to release with our engineers and a co-founder.
2. 2018 to 2020: Dirt Protocol, then Pulley (YC W20). Software engineer
3. 2017 to 2018: Tidbit. Founding engineer
4. 2016 to 2017: Radius. Software engineer
5. 2015: Genie, Hong Kong. Co-founder

The Workshop

What does he make?

YoshiOS: a personal AI operating system. It reads my email, messages, notes, and training and health data, and tells me what to do next.

Also on the bench: Westward Trail, an Oregon Trail-style game for keeping habits with friends, and this island.

The Press Room

What does he write?

ROUGH DRAFT, on Substack: "The machine you're making is making you back. STAY HUMAN."

More pieces are on the press.

The Radio Tower

Where can I watch or hear him?

CoRecursive, "From Everest to Startups", October 2, 2024.

The Track

Does he show up every day?

Each runner is a habit I keep every day. The first on the board is Anki: 2,223 of 2,237 days since July 2020, as of September 10.

The Proving Grounds

What is he good at?

Five skills, each with its proof. Pick one, and a line of light runs to each building where the work happened.

• Product: AI Coach, from roadmap to release, at Ultraspeaking; YoshiOS, my personal AI operating system; Westward Trail, a game for keeping habits with friends.
• Design: This island: the world, the art direction and the site.
• Engineering: Software engineer at Pulley (YC W20); Founding engineer at Tidbit; Software engineer at Radius; YoshiOS and this island, built end to end.
• AI: YoshiOS reads my email, notes and data, and tells me what to do next; AI Coach at Ultraspeaking, from roadmap to release.
• Operating: COO at Ultraspeaking; Redesigned delivery around peer practice; Co-founded Genie in Hong Kong.

The Guild Hall

What is he like to work with?

Kind words from people I have worked with go here, one banner each.

Basecamp

What are his adventures?

In 2014 I trained for two years for an Everest expedition. The avalanche that year ended it.

The Library

What is he reading?

A bookshelf of what I read, with the best ones marked. The shelf is still being filled.

• Gates of Fire, Steven Pressfield: Thermopylae, told by a survivor: courage as something you train.
• Musashi, Eiji Yoshikawa: A wild young swordsman becomes a master, one discipline at a time.
• Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl: A psychiatrist in the camps, on why meaning keeps people going.
• Meditations, Marcus Aurelius: An emperor's private notes to himself on how to live.
• The Art of Doing Science and Engineering, Richard Hamming: A Bell Labs legend on how to do great work, not just good work.
• Ultralearning, Scott Young: How to learn hard things fast, with projects you design yourself.
• Peak, Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool: Deliberate practice: experts are made, not born.
• Make It Stick, Brown, Roediger and McDaniel: Learning lasts when it's effortful: test yourself, space it out, mix it up.
• A Theory of Fun for Game Design, Raph Koster: Fun is the brain learning patterns. Half the pages are cartoons.
• Game Thinking, Amy Jo Kim: What makes hit games work, guiding people toward mastery, as a product process.
• Designing Virtual Worlds, Richard Bartle: Online worlds are places, where people go to find out who they are.
• The Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman: Why doors confuse people, and how good design explains itself.
• The Advantage, Patrick Lencioni: Organizational health lets a smart company use its intelligence without politics or confusion.
• The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman and Kaley Klemp: Notice when you are defending, shift into curiosity, and lead from there.
• The Score Takes Care of Itself, Bill Walsh: Teach a precise standard of performance, and the results follow.
• The Effective Executive, Peter Drucker: Effectiveness can be learned: manage your time, your contribution and your decisions.
• High Output Management, Andy Grove: Intel's CEO on management as leverage: a manager's output is the team's output.
• Get Scalable, Ryan Deiss: How a founder-led company grows by replacing the founder as its hidden operating system.
• The High-Velocity Edge, Steven Spear: Design work to reveal problems, solve them where they happen, and spread what you learn.
• The Algorithm, Jon McNeill: Tesla's operating method: question, delete, simplify, speed up, automate.
• The Dream Machine, M. Mitchell Waldrop: How Licklider's vision and ARPA's funding built personal computing.
• Thinking in Systems, Donella Meadows: Stocks, flows and feedback loops: how systems behave.
• The Goal, Eliyahu Goldratt: A novel about a failing factory and the bottleneck that runs it.
• How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand: What happens to buildings after they are built, in photos over decades.
• Systemantics, John Gall: A funny, serious book on how systems fail, and why working ones start simple.
• The Crux, Richard Rumelt: Strategy starts by finding the most important part of the challenge you can solve.
• Poor Charlie's Almanack, Charlie Munger: Munger's case for a latticework of mental models from many fields.
• Thinking in Bets, Annie Duke: A poker champion on deciding well when you cannot know the outcome.
• Never Split the Difference, Chris Voss: An FBI hostage negotiator on tactical empathy.

The Quest Board

What is he doing now?

What I am building, reading and practicing this season, and the questions I am chewing on. Coming soon.

The Bandstand

What is he listening to?

What I am playing on Spotify right now, or the last track I played.