halfway

You can interpret "new version with more features" as Product. Basically, he's saying that Product trumps Marcom.

It seems that hackability of tests, along with their purpose can be generalized. Tests, like big company politics, are signalling mechanisms. The totality of all tests, culminating in a degree from an institution of a certain prestige, is a signal of potential to contribute.

Companies and other big institutions need very strong assurance that supplicants will indeed "work out" by comporting themselves to the culture and making valuable contributions to their goals. And the reason such absurdly strong signals of assurance are needed is the ridiculous level of friction inherent in admission to and ejection from these institutions and their hierarchy of stations.

So, to get into Big Company X, you need a prestigious degree, and to advance once you're there, you must identify and play their internal signalling games. Such is the attachment to signalling, that you'd often do much better to lead the holiday decoration committee than to create actual value by solving some important problem.

The relative lack of friction in open source is why, given the ability and inclination, even a dog can contribute at a high level.

But is cold emailing worth it? Most investors claim that they (and most others) never respond to cold emails. It's been said that reaching an investor through their network is a kind of mandatory IQ test.

The way workers and events are exposed looks pretty slick, and I think abstracting away infrastructure and dev environments is the future for teams who care about speed to market. One nagging question is, how do you plan to make money? Will you have a free/freemium self-service offering? Any plans to target enterprise? I think some assurance of financial viability would ease the minds of otherwise reluctant adopters. Full disclosure, I'm a solo developer working in the IaaS space.

A directive seemingly at odds with the spirit of social media.

Perhaps missing something obvious, but what's the advantage of having time zones over everyone using UTC/GMT?

Aside from enthusiasm for the mission, or the chance to strike it rich, there is another important consideration: self-actualization. That is, how much do you need it?

In a way, self-actualization is like having your own personal mission. If things like impact, influence, autonomy, innovation, speed, and big challenges are important to you, than you'll probably be miserable at a well-established company, regardless of the compensation, WLB, T-shirts, pep rallies, etc.

How dangerous is the hypergrowth mandate for startup that has product-market fit and a solid GTM?

The best "API language" is the one constructed to work with the app's data model. SQL constructs are relational - fine for rails, django, or salesforce apps which map screen to table (or table join).

Wouldn't work for facebook, google knowledge graph, or the larger enterprise app vendors today. Theirs is typed graph.