13,002 karma · joined October 8, 2008
I've done so much startup stuff I'm equally bad at all of it.
I currently work coaching Founders globally from a base in Singapore: https://coaching.figuringshitout.com/
I formerly was a 3x Founder and have worked in Engineering, Design, Product & Growth.
I also have a background in Computer Vision (designed a single camera 3D tracking algorithm), Augmented Reality (Designed a AR prototype for FEMA to manage disaster response workers), Tabletop/Touch Computing (Studied how people's collaborative behaviors change when put under time pressure), HCI (Studied it for 4 years), Interaction Design (ditto) and am well read in Psychology (esp. Social Psych), Economics, & other random trivia.
I also cook... a lot.
There was one other time Google was hacked by a major government that also spurred massive internal security posture changes! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_effect#Tech_industry
A car should be a software platform on wheels, software first, experience first, features plug and play into a modular platform. Cars should be based around common hardware platforms, from which large amounts of investment can be poured into long term, and on top of which sit different packagings to appeal to different consumers. Cars should be rapidly iterated upon and data from each model should rapidly feed back into the next model, turnaround time and agility should be prized to more quickly hone in on product/market fit.
What made Christensen's disruption thesis so revolutionary is he outlined how, even if the incumbent has full knowledge of every move the disruptor has made and is about to make, this can often not be sufficient to prevent getting disrupted because it's the incumbent's own advantages that are played against them.
eg: Microsoft couldn't fight against Google because Google's interests were in the internet getting more powerful and there were a lot of very powerful people inside of Windows who were happy to sabotage any Microsoft attempt to make the internet more powerful because it disrupted the Windows monopoly.
But another lesson I think is instructive to learn from all of this is that cut-throat competition is terrible for Capitalists but amazing for Capitalism. America, over the years, has more and more pushed the thumb on the side of Capitalists and China has clearly been observing this trend and realized how it hollows out a country and is now extremely wary.
The government has signalled a clear priority shift over the last 5 years (Jack Ma's dethronement was the first high profile move people noticed) of ensuring as many markets as they can are full of vibrant, ruthless competition as a way to build up national champions and run the disruption playbook in industry after industry.
I find what's often unacknowledged is just how much interest in technical matters is driven by a trauma response. A lot of us were unpopular as children or were ostracized for being weird and attaining mastery over an "objective" arena allowed us to feel better about our place in the world.
Asking people like that to "just be charismatic" is asking them to depart from a safe space and enter into an arena they've previously associated with a lot of unpleasant emotions. People will act out in ways that feel are perfectly "rational" for them but are coming from places they're unable to explain because they're driven by more primal urges.
For the advice to stick, you have to address the root cause which is the emotional, not the informational need. Otherwise, you're going to see the same well meaning advice go around in circles with only a minority of the field being motivated to act on it.
We look at a doorman and might naively think their function is to open doors so if we can replace their function, we can replace the person. Then we build an automation, fire the doorman and subsequently discover the doorman was responsible for a multitude of social tasks, like taking in the mail, co-ordinating services, providing small tasks for the residents etc. and that physically opening and closing doors was actually the least important part of their job.
Similarly, we think the purpose of code review must obviously be for reviewing code until we look deeper and understand the sociological purposes of code review.
Technologists have a bad habit of entering into a field they don't know, observing but not talking to any of the people they're trying to automate and assuming only the most legible parts of anyone's job are important to grok. It's important to understand that the value any job or function brings can often be totally opaque to an outsider and it requires actually talking to people and understanding total value chains to fully understand where technology can be used to improve things.
The retention rate for these classes are abysmal, which is why you have people propose they should be taught, despite they themselves actually sitting through these classes, simply because any memory of these classes have been erased from their memory.
Similarly, the benefits of Sweden banning Signal would most likely accrue to WhatsApp, not any indigenous software company.
[1] https://restofworld.org/2022/tiktok-sized-hole-in-india/
This is such a fallacy of "If it is evil, it must be competent". Did you actually look at the software? In no universe can you confidently infer that it's a "really great implementation", it's childish at best. You're just assuming it so you can make the rest of your argument.
Later on, they did the same promo but Modernist Cuisine was prominently listed as a book the promo didn’t apply to.
Anyway, that, my friends, is the story of how I made $313 impulse purchase.
Of course, the odds are not static and some people genuinely do have a better RAROC by being a founder but most people overestimate their founder abilities vs the odds and feel like they're not fairly compensated at 1%, which is fine, most people shouldn't be founding engineers either.
But there's a reason it's equilibrated around the 1% mark because early equity compensation is about risk, not effort.
Most of the time, the accent of the person speaking is irrelevant to the topic at hand but at the same time, denying that it exists is an act of obfuscation. We should all be able to recognize the politics that come embedded with our positions and talk about how those inflections affect how they color the topic.
The big feature 2 years ago was car starting to sprout LIDAR bumps but now that feature has become de rigueur enough that car brands need to figure out something new to stand out, hence the big push to advertise their active suspension.
Nio's new ET9 is showing off their car doing tricks like bouncing a soccer ball (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3Ezjmz63U8), driving with a stack of glasses on it's hood (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEr_sNp7XLM) and syncing the suspension to a movie (https://www.tiktok.com/@autogefuehl/video/745225999151335350...). Yangwang is showing it leap the car in the air. At the end of the day though, the more Hertz and more acceleration your active suspension system has, the smoother it can dampen movement inside the cabin and Chinese consumers are already getting very picky about how well specced the active suspension systems are.
In another 2 years time, Nio/Yuanyang style active suspension will have trickled out into enough midrange cars that it's no longer an exciting feature and Chinese car brands will figure out the latest new thing to compete. Meanwhile, American car brands will be barely half way through their model cycle refresh and just starting to think about incrementally adding a single feature or two and maybe adding a new curve to the body somewhere.
I'm the author of the original piece which was originally penned to warn Quora that their social software design seemed purposely designed to drive evaporative cooling. With the benefit of 15 years of hindsight, Quora has thoroughly evaporatively cooled to an extent beyond even my imagining.
At the beginning of ride sharing, people believed there was absolutely no geographical moat and all riders were just one cheaper ride from switching so better capitalized incumbents could just win a new area by showering the city with discounts. It took Uber billions of dollars to figure out the moats were actually nigh insurmountable as a challenger brand in many countries.
Honestly, with AI, I just instinctively reach for ChatGPT and haven't even bothered trying with any of the others because the results I get from OAI are "good enough". If enough other people are like me, OAI gets order of magnitudes more query volume than the other general purpose LLMs and they can use that data to tweak their algorithms better than anyone else.
Also, current LLMs, the long term user experience is pretty similar to the first time user experience but that seems set to change in the next few generations. I want my LLM over time to understand the style I prefer to be communicated in, learn what media I'm consuming so it knows which references I understand vs those I don't, etc. Getting a brand new LLM familiar enough to me to feel like a long established LLM might be an arduous enough task that people rarely switch.
> Susquehanna, a global trading firm, first invested in ByteDance in 2012 and now owns roughly 15 percent of the company, a person familiar with the investment said. The Chinese arm of Sequoia Capital, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, invested in ByteDance in 2014 when it was valued at $500 million. Sequoia’s U.S.-based growth fund later followed suit.
> General Atlantic, a private equity firm, invested in ByteDance in 2017 at a $20 billion valuation. Bill Ford, General Atlantic’s chief executive, has a seat on ByteDance’s board of directors. The company’s other notable U.S. investors include the private equity firms KKR and the Carlyle Group, as well as the hedge fund Coatue Management.
The problem now is people use "agile" to mean anything from the 2001 agile manifesto meaning of the term to the 2024 F500 meaning and that's too long a span of time so the word has lost all communicative value. You can either engage in a fool's errand trying to drag the word back to the original meaning or accepting reality and letting people have it and come up with some new term like "katana development" or some bullshit that means essentially the same thing.
The "Observability" crew are good at this, I feel like every 10 years, there's a new coat of paint on essentially the same basic SRE concepts. Like how we went from Oriental to Asian American to AAPI, the mental burden of keeping up with these language changes serves as a basic shibboleth to who is paying attention enough to developments in the field.
<doing a poor job> --- <doing a average job> --- <doing a good job>
Whereas the more accurate mental model is:
<doing nothing> --------------------------------------- <doing a thing> -- <doing the best thing>
The former mental model is intellectually satisfying because you get to infinitely yak shave over every little tradeoff and doing nothing isn't even on your mental radar.
The latter is deeply humblingly mundane and doesn't get to center us as masters of the universe which is why we all initially resist it. Even for the people who become great at it, they become great against their inclinations, and still have to fight the urge at every step.
This doesn't just apply to tech, look at it in politics. How much time do we spend in politics debating policy? Which of our different political philosophies lead to different tradeoffs that are a deep expression of our values? How much time in politics do we spend debating state capacity? A state that can do none of the things, it's irrelevant which of the things we want the state to do. A state that can do more things, almost always just the sheer option of things they can do means they can find a better policy.
And yet policy arguments are just so fun while state capacity arguments are incredibly wonky and depressing.
But I've drawn that same diagram on 100 different whiteboards in front of 100 different juniors and said the same words of "before we figure out how to do the best thing, let's just see if we can even do a thing first" and it seems to have gotten through to an appreciable number of them enough that it feels like a high converting meme.
To be clear, the pathway to management noticing is not you going around the building loudly blaring that you did a thing, it's that churn went down, or ARPU went up or CAC went down or uptime went up or something management cares about.
But the essential thing to also understand is that this doesn't just happen for free. Figure out what metric your ship is meant to affect, put monitoring in place and proactively notify those above you about how your ship impacted that metric. If you don't do this last step, you didn't ship.
There's no way to engineer it such that you don't get to live in this reality. Be it tech companies, marketplaces, politics, revolutionary movements; once you reach a critical mass of people, all meaningful change looks like this.