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Founder, Leet Resumes, we write your professional resume for free (tips appreciated!) www.leetresumes.com
Founder, Ladders, www.theladders.com
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Also check the blog for lots of my advice for free.
if you’re not getting interviews in two years, i’m happy to help advise on best practices.
“ Since my last quarterly update, companies across nearly every sector have experienced significant transformation—whether it’s a more aggressive focus on profitability or a shift in product strategy due to the acceleration of generative AI (GenAI). Thematically, however, one thing has remained the same: companies are committed to driving productivity and efficiency throughout their organizations. At Stack Overflow, we continue to help our customers and community deliver both.”
The unclear and muddy writing reveals that their thinking is likewise unclear.
Generalities instead of specifics. Vague platitudes. This is poor writing.
StackExchange is facing an existential threat and there is nothing in this letter that names it, identifies steps they’ll take to address, or how they will thrive in the new future.
It is not unexpected, but a confirmation of what we all might fear.
Playing rough in the sandbox hurts all their products. See what’s happened to Bing since they won’t let you use it in Safari or Chrome.
FTCI SRT RBT ZEPP VIAO FEIM EMKR FKWL AAOI
The challenge is that you’ve invested $250M to produce a business that sounds like it’s worth $100+M today (if $30M in debt is going to wipe out half your equity).
As much as the ride has been thrilling and you’ve worked your tail off, from a performance perspective, investors look at the $250M in and $100ish M in current value and say “meh, not that great an entrepreneur, turns every buck I give them into fifty cents.”
The reason your COO and Board are skeptical of your plan is that your actual business that you have has proven to be low margin, which means you produce relatively low value over your cost of goods for your customers. So a fantastical plan where in the future you’ll provide LOTS of value to your customers seems speculative at best, foolhardy at worst.
From a personal perspective, your value as an entrepreneur / founder, will never again go up at your current company, only down. There is no scenario in which five years from now people are more impressed with what you’ve built than they are today.
Your personal best outcome, IMHO, is to sell as much as you can and take the personal exit. Hand the keys over to the COO for them to do the grinding turnaround over next five years. Take six months to recharge and come back into the market with something new. You’ll be able to raise at a higher valuation for a new business, and actually get paid a higher comp.
I will forever hear “Businessmen they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth None of them along the line, know what any of it is worth”
differently now.
btw, the Waze founder’s (similar) goodbye post is also worth reading.
Right question is ‘how do I get my contributions to be well understood.’
For that, you need to emphasize numbers. Every project, every task, every epic you ship has, at its heart, the goal to improve some metric in your business.
Do you understand what those metrics are? Do you understand why they are important to the business?
If the answer is “no”, then you’re doing things out of order. You can’t possibly hope to get others to understand your work if you yourself don’t understand it.
When you can say “I helped reduced latency by 237 ms”, that’s a good metric. Even better if you are curious enough to then connect it to the outcome - “which led to 17% longer sessions by users.”
When you master the numbers, then self-promotion becomes a by product of your work. E.g., at the team meeting “I understand our goal is to increase flip flops by 10%, is that right? Well, I think we can do it because when I was on that project with Team B last year we increased flib flabs by 12%.”
Summary: don’t self-promote, instead understand and communicate your impact on metrics.
This good, courageous person should be honored.
I suppose this valuation cut is also in-line with what public companies have gone through since April as week (i.e., here’s Meta’s 60% drop: https://elite.finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=META&p=d)
Really an astounding re-framing of biology, and one of the best books of science literature I’ve read in my life.
Very insightful post. And as much as a reader might think it highlights dysfunction at Google, the continued growth and success of Waze within Google argues otherwise.
Buffalo is East of Miami
Cheyenne is South of Cleveland
DC is North of San Francisco
Atlanta is West of Detroit
Remarkably, that worked!
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WaPo might claim - “we’re not pretending to be CNN, we are accurately stating that we provide breaking news about CNN.” And with CNN often in the news these days, there is some validity to this position.
In general, you can’t even use ‘Coke’ in your ad if you’re Pepsi, as in ‘Tastes better than Coke - buy Pepsi.’
Is it OK if we like it more because it was born out of love?: ‘Wordle is a love story’ https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/03/technology/wordle-word-ga...
And in the space of a month went from ‘introduced in NY Times’ to ‘bought by NY Times’?
‘The New York Times Buys Wordle’ https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/31/business/media/new-york-t...
In many ways, I think this is the perfected ideal of what engineer-creators hope for.
The intense focus on making something that feels magical for one - even better that that one is magical to you.
Sharing the creation with a few friends and having them experience the magic too.
And having the world recognize, and then pay $ millions, for your creation done in the name of love.
No years lost in the lab, no fighting with corporate suits to keep ads out, no long marches of ‘growth’ tactics that feel icky.
It is the Romantic Ideal of Engineering.
Does any other story come close?
I wrote “How to write a great technical resume” here: https://www.leetresumes.com/blog/how-to-write-a-great-techni...
14% with incomplete information also sounds right.
And I also concur with you on the screening being pretty basic, not ES level of sophistication at all.