229 karma · joined May 28, 2012
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Yikes. Okay, I know I'm maybe being a bit unfair here, but I'm sorry to say that this is one of the weakest engineering blog posts I've ever read. This seems to be a massive "let's end the craziness and finally pay our tech debt" effort. Good for them, but not something that excites me about working at Facebook.
https://twitter.com/anant90/status/1171867648285540352
Incidentally, "a platform for sharing well-researched ideas" is #11 on this list :)
ArXiv link: https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.03079
Stripe benefits when every new indie hacker or entrepreneur planning to start their business uses their free resources to learn how to go about doing this. The goal of marketing is to be in the mind space of your potential buyer when they feel the need your product serves. If you use Stripe's free resources to learn about building an online business, you're more likely to pick them to accept payments over Braintree/Paypal, etc.
Also, the easier they make starting a business by providing these free resources, the more smart people will take the leap to launch their startups (or side-projects) thereby expanding their overall market.
Lastly, spending your content marketing resources on evergreen content like this has very high leverage — it's a one-time investment that pays off for a very long time, unlike a blog post about a current trend that goes stale quickly.
Goes without saying, but the more businesses Stripe gets using their core product, the better the core product itself gets by amortizing development costs over a larger user and transaction base.
In addition, the book is one content chapter, followed by a few success stories chapters written by founders themselves. These chapters are written in a very uninspired tone (almost as if they wanted to write something and get it done for JD, not because they wanted to share their story) and barely inspire you or bring in any new insights over the meatier content chapters.
This is not a criticism of the OKR system — arguably it's one of the best goal setting systems out there. But does it need a whole book to understand? I think not. It just seems to be a vastly missed opportunity to me. John Doerr is pretty much a legend in the valley, and maybe my expectations were sky high hoping for a book on the same level as High Output Management or Hard Things About Hard Things.
[1]: https://library.gv.com/how-google-sets-goals-okrs-a1f69b0b72...
Incidentally, I read Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston back in my college senior year in 2012 and, as she put it, was immediately hooked.
Thanks for writing that book, and for everything else you've done for the startup world.
The courses have hands-on assignments that make you work through real-world problems.
The post has a collection of some of my favorite observations and quotes.
Can't recommend the book enough!
I was laying down my observations on what's the default, and hence seemingly most common behavior for the given network. All snapchat accounts are private by default (yes, you can make stories public like on Instagram). All Instagram accounts are public by default (yes, you can make it private) The power of default has a significant role to play in how people think about and use a particular network. This is even more true for the people who are not very tech savvy, which is the majority.
Again, not arguing if Instagram is better than Snapchat, or vice versa. Instagram probably will win the majority of the market, and will have an order of magnitude, if not more, users, engagement and revenue. Will Snapchat become irrelevant and die? I'd say it's too early to make that call.
On this spectrum, the Snapchat experience is a lot more authentic and closer to real-life interactions than Instagram/Facebook, which are a lot worse multipliers of inauthenticity.
On the other hand, the tight knit and private nature of the Snapchat network is going to keep it more attractive to me. At least for me, the amount of time spent in an app is more correlated with the depth of my relationships with other nodes on that network, and not just with the size of my audience.
I’ve loved Snap as a company for a long time, and I like their pitch of using innovation as a moat: they have consistently innovated every year since their founding (Ephemerality, Stories, AR filters, Memories, Spectacles (although this has largely been a failure)), have a core set of users who really really love them, and are now playing to their strengths by positioning themselves well as the private space for you and your closest friends.