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blader

1,686 karma · joined March 27, 2007

runway.com (a16z)

previously: @sandboxvr (a16z), vp growth @postmates, @heyday (sold to @postmates), head of product at zynga, serious business (sold to zynga), ycombinator s08 (dropped out).

angel investor: clubhouse, amplitude, italic, pipe, +100

http://facebook.com/founder http://twitter.com/blader http://linkedin.com/in/siqic

submissionscomments
blader··on Ask HN: A friend has brain cancer: any bio hacks that worked?
1. Tumor Treating Fields (electricity, not magnets): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37953242/

2. CEGAT Vaccine: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-51315-8

3. Supplementation: keto diet, curcumin, sauna, and some Chinese traditional medicines all have good academic data that improves overall and progression free survival

Source: I am a rare disease dad and did a lot of research and put together a private research team as well.

blader··on Flowers for Algernon (1965) [pdf]
Ted Chiang wrote a short story inspired by Flowers for Algernon ("Understand") that explores what might happen if a guy just never stopped getting smarter: https://web.archive.org/web/20140527121332/http://www.infini...

I love Flowers for Algernon, but Understand is my favorite short story of all time.

blader··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2022)
Runway | Remote in USA and Canada | https://www.runway.com Runway replaces the operating model that almost every growing business has in spreadsheet form and transforms it into a visual model of how every part of your business is connected. This gives everyone from the CEO to the individual contributor a shared understanding of how the business works, where you’re going, and why. With this new context, your team can engage in higher-level conversations about what’s right for the company. Together, you can easily explore which levers to pull and find out, in real-time, if doing so will help you meet your goals.

Runway does all of this in a way that makes you want to dig into the data — not run away from it — through a fundamental rethinking of the core primitives of the spreadsheet. Because when you have the information you need, your team can ask better questions and make the best decisions possible.

We’ve put together an exceptional team of ex-Striåpe, Coinbase, Facebook, and Twitter engineers, many of whom are experienced founders. We are backed by folks like a16z and Garry Tan from Initialized, Dylan Field from Figma, Akshay Kothari from Notion, Naval Ravikant and Elad Gil. If you’d like to learn more about our team, our culture, and what’s it like to work at Runway, please check out our Working at Runway profile along with our Values here: https://runwayhq.notion.site/Working-at-Runway-c7a9a7c8ef914... Our open roles in Engineering, Product, and Design as well as Go-To-Market are listed on the bottom of the page: https://runwayhq.notion.site/Working-at-Runway-c7a9a7c8ef914... Stack: Typescript, React, Go, GraphQL, Postgres, GCP/Kube, Figma.

Direct opening links:

[1] Product Manager: https://runwayhq.notion.site/Product-Manager-c2fa45bcaaf6439...

[2] Product-first Frontend Engineer: https://runwayhq.notion.site/Product-first-Frontend-Engineer...

[3] Product Designer: https://runwayhq.notion.site/Product-Designer-baa24543701f47...

blader··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2022)
Runway | Remote in USA and Canada | https://www.runway.com Runway replaces the operating model that almost every growing business has in spreadsheet form and transforms it into a visual model of how every part of your business is connected. This gives everyone from the CEO to the individual contributor a shared understanding of how the business works, where you’re going, and why. With this new context, your team can engage in higher-level conversations about what’s right for the company. Together, you can easily explore which levers to pull and find out, in real-time, if doing so will help you meet your goals.

Runway does all of this in a way that makes you want to dig into the data — not run away from it — through a fundamental rethinking of the core primitives of the spreadsheet. Because when you have the information you need, your team can ask better questions and make the best decisions possible.

We’ve put together an exceptional team of ex-Stripe, Coinbase, Facebook, and Twitter engineers, many of whom are experienced founders. We are backed by folks like a16z and Garry Tan from Initialized, Dylan Field from Figma, Akshay Kothari from Notion, Naval Ravikant and Elad Gil. If you’d like to learn more about our team, our culture, and what’s it like to work at Runway, please check out our Working at Runway profile along with our Values here: https://runwayhq.notion.site/Working-at-Runway-c7a9a7c8ef914...

Our open roles in Engineering, Product, and Design are listed on the bottom of the page: https://runwayhq.notion.site/Working-at-Runway-c7a9a7c8ef914... Stack: Typescript, React, Go, GraphQL, Postgres, GCP/Kube, Figma.

Direct opening links:

[1] Product Manager: https://runwayhq.notion.site/Product-Manager-c2fa45bcaaf6439...

[2] Product-first Frontend Engineer: https://runwayhq.notion.site/Product-first-Frontend-Engineer...

[3] Product Designer: https://runwayhq.notion.site/Product-Designer-baa24543701f47...

blader··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2022)
Runway | Remote in USA and Canada | https://www.runway.com Runway replaces the operating model that almost every growing business has in spreadsheet form and transforms it into a visual model of how every part of your business is connected. This gives everyone from the CEO to the individual contributor a shared understanding of how the business works, where you’re going, and why. With this new context, your team can engage in higher-level conversations about what’s right for the company. Together, you can easily explore which levers to pull and find out, in real-time, if doing so will help you meet your goals.

Runway does all of this in a way that makes you want to dig into the data — not run away from it — through a fundamental rethinking of the core primitives of the spreadsheet. Because when you have the information you need, your team can ask better questions and make the best decisions possible.

We’ve put together an exceptional team of ex-Stripe, Coinbase, Facebook, and Twitter engineers, many of whom are experienced founders. We are backed by folks like a16z and Garry Tan from Initialized, Dylan Field from Figma, Akshay Kothari from Notion, Naval Ravikant and Elad Gil. If you’d like to learn more about our team, our culture, and what’s it like to work at Runway, please check out our Working at Runway profile along with our Values here: https://runwayhq.notion.site/Working-at-Runway-c7a9a7c8ef914...

Our open roles in Engineering, Product, and Design as well as Go-To-Market are listed on the bottom of the page: https://runwayhq.notion.site/Working-at-Runway-c7a9a7c8ef914... Stack: Typescript, React, Go, GraphQL, Postgres, GCP/Kube, Figma.

Direct opening links:

[1] Product Manager: https://runwayhq.notion.site/Product-Manager-c2fa45bcaaf6439...

[2] Product-first Frontend Engineer: https://runwayhq.notion.site/Product-first-Frontend-Engineer...

[3] Product Designer: https://runwayhq.notion.site/Product-Designer-baa24543701f47...

[4] Customer Obsessed Operator (Sales, Customer Success): https://runwayhq.notion.site/Customer-Obsessed-Operator-Sale...

blader··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2021)
Hi! I just tried in Incognito and it appears to be up.
blader··on Amplitude (YC W12) IPO S1
It’s so crazy to see this. I still remember meeting Spenser and Curtis for the first time when they were just like half a dozen people. Even then it was clear this solved a huge pain. Surreal to see. Congratulations Spenser, Curtis, and Jeff!
blader··on Launch HN: Pry (YC W21) – Finance for Founders
Hi! I'm a cofounder at Runway.

I've been poking around with Pry for Runway, and I think their approach is super compelling. There's a lot of overlap between our approaches, and some meaningful philosophical differences in product strategy.

Overall, the problem space is enormous and I'm super impressed by how much Andy has built with a small team.

Out of all of other products in the space that are publicly available, I consider Pry to be the most impressive one I've seen. And I strongly agree that we need more people in this space innovating on finance, so more options is a good thing.

blader··on 10M events a month, free
Have you looked at Amplitude? Because those reasons are exactly why I became a customer (and later an investor)

If you ever get to that point, you can use raw Redshift access to do whatever queries you want. I used to use Zynga's pretty state of the art analytics infrastructure, and Amplitude dashboard was the only thing that covered most of my edge cases. For the rest you can always go raw SQL.

blader··on Is Uber Making Taxi Service Better?
Right, that's the point of the article the OP posted that I'm responding to.
blader··on Is Uber Making Taxi Service Better?
I had to take a taxi from San Francisco Airport recently. It was the first time I've been in a taxi in close to 4 years, and it was amazing. On the outside, it's the same looking taxi with the same Yellow Cab company.

On the inside, I've never seen anything like it. Interior was spotless and smelled nice. The driver was exceedingly polite, like a black car driver. They happily took credit cards using a NFC reader. Before that ride I was actively avoiding taxis, and now I'd take one in a heartbeat.

If you haven't taken a taxi in a few years, I think you'll find it really different from what you've remembered, at least in the Bay Area.

blader··on Lessons I learned from the failure of my first startup, Dinnr
I agree with you that there are a lot of "startup lessons" out there, and that most of them sound super basic and obvious.

I've learned the hard way that it's exactly the lessons that are "obvious" are the ones that I should be paying attention to. If a lesson was both obvious and easy to implement, you probably wouldn't hear the lesson repeated so many times over so many different people.

So whenever I read yet another startup lesson that seems obvious and is frequently repeated, that's a signal for me that that lesson is actually very difficult to implement on the ground, in the moment.

blader··on Carousel – Gallery from Dropbox for photos and videos
We're working on it! We'll support both - I think we solve different problems though.
blader··on Mobile Analytics Platform Amplitude (YC W12) Takes On Flurry and Mixpanel
Super happy customer here. Not many analytics companies give you raw SQL access to your data - it's pretty clutch if ever you need to get insights that you can't get from a service's web dashboard (which is basically all the time if you're doing any serious analysis).
blader··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2014)
San Francisco - Heyday - http://hey.co

We are building a lifelog for people to remember and share the story of their lives, automatically, beautifully, and privately. Two months ago, we launched here on Hacker News [ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6858373 ]. Here's what some of you guys said:

- "Wow. I rarely download this stuff. But the fact that it claims to be automatic piqued my interest. After downloading it I can say that my first impression is shocked. Shocked that I really liked it."

- "This is very well done. This could crush Facebook. Not in the short term but if you create a timeline that is more personally valuable to people they will be far more likely to use it and share it with friends and family. Your timeline is already far more interesting then my "Wall."

- "Why is it free? I would've paid for this."

- "I have been looking for this. I've been so desperate for this I've been contemplating creating it myself."

We're looking for mobile engineers (iOS - hard problems include making our sync engine fast/reliable, fast/intuitive search for memories, surfacing important memories in the background, UI performance, and doing it all without using a lot of battery), systems engineers (Python, Devops, Puppet/Chef - hard problems include delivering accurate geocoding for memories, reliable syncing, and building systems to monitor and scale all of it automatically), and data scientists (R/Matlab/SPSS, Python, SQL, statistics, machine learning - hard problems include using ML to improve accuracy of geocoding, building growth and retention models, all while guaranteeing user anonymity and privacy).

We will fly you out for interviews and relocate you to San Francisco if you aren't here already. A lot of our team work remotely from time to time, but we haven't found full time remote employees to work out well for us since we collaborate so closely together in real time.

Please email me directly at siqi at hey dot co (8 hour SLA for a response). I'm also happy to answer questions here.

Fun fact: 33% of our engineering team found us through Who’s Hiring threads here.

blader··on Show HN: I've launched my iPhone journal app I've worked on for almost 2 years.
This is so incredibly helpful. Thank you.

Nice find on the iOS transition. Search isn't is a good place, but eventually we want to do real search, so the current functionality can be considered a place holder. Unfortunate, but you have to launch some time. =)

Can you tell me more about what you mean when you say "Friend Requests? We shouldn't have any friend requests.

blader··on Show HN: I've launched my iPhone journal app I've worked on for almost 2 years.
You can swipe right on the title of any moment to delete it. =)

Passcode is coming, it's a pretty frequently requested feature.

blader··on Show HN: I've launched my iPhone journal app I've worked on for almost 2 years.
Yes! As soon as we make the product great on iPhone.
blader··on Show HN: I've launched my iPhone journal app I've worked on for almost 2 years.
We actually implemented the other way first, where we showed you the journal and then let you log in. The user experience ended up being more complicated then we liked in user testing.

We ask you to make an account so that we can back up your memories, in case you lose your phone, or want to see it on the web. You can turn this off in Settings, and Heyday will live completely on your device and nothing will go to our servers, and it will work fine. Sorry about that.

blader··on Show HN: I've launched my iPhone journal app I've worked on for almost 2 years.
Thanks, would love to hear more as you use it, there's lots to be improved!
blader··on Show HN: I've launched my iPhone journal app I've worked on for almost 2 years.
Thanks for trying it out and the feedback! When the stars align Heyday can be really magic.
blader··on Show HN: I've launched my iPhone journal app I've worked on for almost 2 years.
Thank you! We're working on exactly that - detecting nice faces and features in your photos to make them look better in your collages and slideshow.
blader··on Show HN: I've launched my iPhone journal app I've worked on for almost 2 years.
None at the moment, the numbers just don't make sense for our very small team right now. =(
blader··on Show HN: I've launched my iPhone journal app I've worked on for almost 2 years.
Yes! You should be getting a notification every so often to surface a nice memory or remind you to write. This is kind of annoying right now, but we're making it better!
blader··on Show HN: I've launched my iPhone journal app I've worked on for almost 2 years.
Thank you! We did it the naive way at first. We iterated to the current the sign up flow to maximize the opt in rate, so not quite brilliant design, just lots of iterating! =)
blader··on Show HN: I've launched my iPhone journal app I've worked on for almost 2 years.
Thanks! To be clear, I didn't mean to imply that it's a side project. We've been working on it as a team of 2-9 for the past 18 or so months.
blader··on Show HN: I've launched my iPhone journal app I've worked on for almost 2 years.
Thanks so much for the feedback! I'd love to learn about what we can do better for you!
blader··on Show HN: I've launched my iPhone journal app I've worked on for almost 2 years.
I'm a fan of both of those products. I think different people are going to like different things. Heyday isn't the best product for very introspective people to write about their lives (we actually don't even let you write a new text note right now!), so DayOne is probably going to be better for people like that.

For people who are lazy, travel a lot, and take a lot of photos, Heyday is the best product for those people. Of this I'm fairly sure.

blader··on Show HN: I've launched my iPhone journal app I've worked on for almost 2 years.
It may be relevant to note here that Manuel joined our team through a Hacker News Who's Hiring thread. =)
blader··on Show HN: I've launched my iPhone journal app I've worked on for almost 2 years.
That's cool. I use Memoir too, and it's a great app. I think you'll find that Heyday does things a little differently and is good for other use cases, like traveling or keeping a journal.
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