meterplech

I think a critical component of making platform teams work is to allow internal competition between the platform team and the stream-aligned team using some other technology. In this way the platform team is a stream-aligned team whose customers are internal, and they have to win or lose within their market (internal teams). For example, a stream-aligned team can either use platform team CI/CD or github actions.

What I've seen is that platform teams work well in either small scale (because focus is clear to all) and large scale (because of this internal competitive dynamic) but are extremely hard to execute between the two.

Really helpful - thanks for the details!

This is really cool. Out of curiosity - how did you actually set this up for him to use? Was it on tablet or a computer or phone? Any suggestions for a dad of a 3.5 year old?

Also, is he reading / at what level? Trying to get a feel for when I can introduce it to him.

May be hard with unpredictable timing of a layoff, but I’d recommend folks look into Recurse Center: https://www.recurse.com/

After closing down my last startup I did it. It was a great balance of community providing some baseline structure to my days while being mostly unstructured allowing me to explore interests for fun.

And at the end they help a lot with getting a job. If you can pull it off financially/with timing, I highly recommend the experience.

I built a command line wordle solver that provides an updated best guess as the game progresses and you learn more. Right now it's just based on word frequency, but working to add more.

Also added a command line version of wordle in case you want to play more and practice and a simulator I'm using now to explore optimal strategy more.

https://github.com/jkatzur/wordle-solver

Oh I see. You allow this in-app.

Your signup flow, though, has a start time + end time and doesn't make it clear you can add these windows in. It made me pause during sign-up and I wonder if it would cause other folks to drop off. Maybe could be solved with copy somewhere even?

Similarly, as far as I can tell the signup flow does not let me add half hour increments (e.g 8:30am - 6:30pm). I also can't figure out how to add that even in-app.

Just went through sign-up flow. Heard of the product for years + interested in it.

One note - I have a bit of an idiosyncratic schedule. I work 9-6:30 and then stop for the evening (dinner with family, put kid to bed) and resume work ~9pm typically. I'd love the ability to block off that time slot (6:30-9) but keep space for working before and after.

Beyond with, excited to try it out.

Love this idea. Some quick thoughts:

1) Tool to tool choices: Many migrations involve making decisions that are judgement calls because of service inconsistency (e.g the security roles in the two systems aren't exactly the same so you have to evaluate tradeoffs in how to handle in the new one). I bet many of these 'decision points' could be a defined for particular migrations, allowing the destination service to present to their customer options with tradeoffs, and then automate the migration from there. Even more valuable than the data flowing would be being the central tool that knows about these 'choice-points' in specific migrations.

2) White labeling: a lot of B2B SaaS companies would love to offer migration services. I would have paid $ per migration for something like this if it worked.

3) Services work as needed: I still think many migrations custom work is needed. I would lean into this actually if I were you. We would have loved a trusted 3rd party that just wanted to do migrations. It was hard to get incentives aligned, though, with many systems integrators because they obviously wanted a direct relationship with the customer & hoped to sell them more stuff afterwards. If B2B companies trusted this was your specific focus you could be a better 'full service' partner across both what can be automated and what can't be.

100% true.

And a good reminder of how much exposure housing prices have to interest rates. To frame the same math another way:

If you bought a house for, say, $580k with a $500k mortgage... You paid $80k down payment + $20k closing costs and your monthly would be ~$2,073/month.

If interest rates go up to 6%, and the person buying your house also wants to pay the same ~2,073/month, they would only be able to afford a $344,649 mortgage. Assume the same $80k down payment and $20k closing costs... and they should be willing to pay $444,649 for your house ($135,351 less than you paid!).

Obviously with inflation the person may be willing to spend more than you spent! But there's a lot of risk for homeowners who need/want to sell if/when interest rates go up. That's why the 30 year fixed is such a fantastic bet if you are willing + able to hold and lock that fixed price... but housing is a pretty lousy investment if you need to sell.

There are many photos one could take without uploading or saving them in the cloud. The question is can I safely store things locally on my device without a multi-national corporation being able to set the policy of what's allowed there. The article cites examples of banned memes/images by the Chinese government.

There is also the risk of algorithm mistakes. Without the trust + safety team or any cloud verification, does this just get immediately forward to the FBI?

What is the process to be made non-guilty if the Apple algorithm thinks you have something illegal and you don't if there is no human in the loop involved before it's forwarded to authorities?

At least if you upload to a service someone on the trust + safety team can verify the algo worked properly. I would be very nervous building this kind of system of the risk of false positives! Maybe even so nervous to introduce many more false negatives - which is in itself terrible in the case of something like CSAM.

My current job has a lot more video calls than prior. It took some getting used to. I find the biggest challenge to be the urge to do some low-quality work simultaneously. What's helped me on that is:

- Use a good monitor or TV. Ideally not the main one you use to work. - Move, physically, from my desk to a place I take the calls in. Enter 'meeting mode' not 'desk mode' - Close all other applications. Full screen video. - Turn off other monitors - Take notes via notebook

I bet building a room would help, but these things worked for me in an apartment where that wasn't an option. Still takes energy to focus on it though.

As a new parent I think about this a lot in terms of how to educate my son.

I find it especially relevant as my first job was starting my own SAT tutoring company. Anecdotally I found it interesting that immigrant parents & most of the wealthiest US-born parents shared a recognition that this was a game. They were direct and explicit to their kids that this was a system that they must participate in, so they might as well win at it.

I think that is the key: make sure your kids can recognize when something is a bs system they need to hack (like selling enterprise software) and when something is actually about craft and the best will win (like building great products that end-users want to use).

Agreed. Valuation is based on sum of future profits - so essentially how profitable the business can be AND how big it can be. If

1) Ratio of fixed to marginal costs is high you have economies of scale, and will get much more profitable as you grow (software vs consulting)

2) You can capture revenue quickly because it's operationally simple to add customers (e.g don't need to hire with each dollar of revenue) you are more likely to reach that profitable scale faster.

If your company uses tech to achieve (1) and (2) then they should have high valuations. If you happen to use cool tech but don't have economies of scale or easy operational growth than how you brand the company shouldn't really matter.

Google Cloud Composer, built on top of Airflow (mentioned by a number of people here) has a great Getting Started Guide to check out: https://cloud.google.com/composer/docs/quickstart

You can dive right in to Airflow here: https://airflow.apache.org/tutorial.html

One interesting thing to think about is how reliant Facebook is on startups. If there is a wider reduction in VC investment, Facebook may be dramatically affected (like Yahoo in early 2000s).

I am not the founder of my company, but I ask the same thing of new hires (it's probably easier to give ideas to the non-founder). One thing that has worked well for me has been to say "One of my favorite things to hear from a new hire is what we could be doing better. You have the perspective of someone who has been elsewhere and have fresh eyes, and don't just accept things that aren't working. One example of something that isn't working is X. Another is Y. Besides those, can you think of other ways we can make the company better?"

That way you start by being self-critical, which makes people feel more open to complaining.

Btw, remember if you ask this... you have to follow through to _fix_ some of these problems or you can lose trust. Only ask if you really do want to hear feedback and action on some of them.

Obviously this vision is compelling. I'm confused by the decision of their prototype car to not have manual control overrides (e.g steering wheel or something similar). Air travel has been revolutionized with autopilot, but there are clear overrides for safety in case systems crash. I don't think we need to be wed to the pedal + wheel paradigm - but having a manual override option seems critical to safety.

As an intern project years ago I had to all the BLS data into a database for analysis. Any time I ran into an issue I would call them directly. Little known fact that every BLS data set has a source.txt file with a phone number to call. You might think of government agencies as massive bureaucracy, but I was amazed at how helpful and knowledgeable everyone I spoke to was (and that the calls were answered at all). They would answer my immediate question and often explained the logic that went into the data structure.

Making survey data structured is quite challenging and I gained a lot of respect for the work they do.

Anyway, if you go down this rabbit hole, maybe make it an IRL rabbit hole and giving them a call may help get to your answers quickly.

Curious as to why you say that. Do you mean in comparison to other cloud infrastructure providers or in comparison or rolling your own infrastructure?

I think the dirty not-so-secret of advertising is that for most content on the web the ads are awful, poorly targeted (or at best basic retargeted). Many content producers want to focus on building great content, so advertisers go for low CPMs and spray and pray. This is why the brands are so interested in Facebook and other platforms that seem to be able to deliver great content and are, increasingly, willing to pay the differential.

It's impressive to see StackOverflow putting this together in-house and I imagine it'll continue to be a competitive differentiator for companies that can pull it off going forward.

I don't know what you mean by bubbling. The overall essay produces a quite useful heuristic. Perhaps the specific example is inspired by recent experience... But it has power for me.

It's amazing to watch how many young people get caught up in various online outrage missions. Hours spent browsing Twitter or Reddit to dive incredibly deep into some current news outrage is bull shit wasted time.

Get back to work and try to build something (if that's what you want). Or be with your family (if that's what you want). Or do whatever. But this stuff (including my post right now) is addicting.

This leak is frustrating and sad. Many of us here applaud companies that work to be transparent with their employees and would appreciate working for a company that helped us understand metrics like this. It makes everyone feel like they are a larger part of the company's success and learn more about how to become founders themselves.

So, having an employee leak this out doesn't just hurt the culture at Uber (which it undoubtably will at least shake), but lessens the likelihood that any company that hopes to IPO or get bought will want to share their performance metrics with employees.

Well, the purchase is a onetime cost, and revenue is recurring. If they spend 2x what they are paying now they'd recoup the cost (in terms of revenue) in 5 years. Plus, that's not counting new customers for ExactTarget's services. If you are a heavy SFDC user and were previously deciding between Marketo, Hubspot, and ExactTarget, you may go with ExactTarget because you know it'll be fully supported by SFDC.

The story is that they paid it back via the private market, meaning that the financial community believes in the company enough that they no longer need public support.

Incidentally, they did issue corporate debt (a form of a loan, sure), but also issued more equity as well.

I think it's more likely to show that Facebook's growth has been faster than in 2006. People who just started using the site obviously have less friends in general than people who have been for awhile.

I think this is proves Apple is going to continue holding design and user experience above all else even with Steve Jobs no longer at the helm. In reality you operate under a very fixed amount of constraints, and easier upgradeability would make the laptop bulkier in a way that is against Apple's design principles. They made a tough design decision given engineering constraints - just like they did when they removed the disc drive from the Air. I bet consumers respond in turn.

I think these posts are something like productivity porn for life hackers or 4 hour work week people.

I definitely agree that 4 truly productive focused days of works beats 5 lackluster uncreative and unfocused days and I applaud creative work/life balance ideas. But, I think 5 truly productive focused days of works beats 4. As PG says, if you think of a startup as a chance to compress your whole working life to just a few years, you can probably attain that prolonged productivity at least for a few years. Yes, worry about burnout, give yourself time, etc... But one of the things startups do to beat big companies is outproduce them.

Obviously for lifestyle businesses and probably a variety of industries this may not apply. YMMV

While that's a good point and a great advantage of YC, did you only try one other investor?

I have met with four VCs/early stage investors in NYC just by responding to blog posts or e-mailing in to contact me posts. I have obviously e-mailed and attempted to contact much more than four, but if you want to meet people the best way to do it is connect with them in a non-generic way via their blog, office hours, whatever means they prefer.

It's obviously not incredibly easy, but every investor knows the importance of dealflow, and it's getting harder to pre-screen for early stage deals (except using YC), so if you are persistent enough I think you can definitely get in front of the right people.

I wasn't knocking you at all- sorry if it seemed that way! I was merely saying it's unfortunate that the discussion is going to focus too much on what made you think of this post (this particularly hot-button issue around women in tech), instead of the post itself, in which you included some really useful and practical advice for everyone. Proper apologies to win customer loyalty is a huge and important idea.