suhail

What I’ve done:

Hooktheory is more modern: https://www.hooktheory.com/books

Learn an instrument & go through the level 1-5 theory books. Be sure to play the notes while you work through the book.

Make songs & apply what you’ve learned.

Microsoft probably won’t notice for now but just be careful: the licensing for Windows 10 requires a very specific kind of license that’s fairly pricey per user. You can’t just use a normal end-user / student one. As a result, the economics are really tough.

This idea was actually the first idea for Mighty before I pivoted a few months ago.

macOS can only be run on Apple hardware btw. That also makes the cost structure for this kind of business complex.

Good luck!

This is also one of my favorite and most helpful posts I’ve found working with X so far: http://jichu4n.com/posts/how-x-window-managers-work-and-how-...

Buggy. They broke clear recently. Copying and pasting is strangely difficult. It’s not as good. Settings through a json file is fairly confusing & esoteric at times.

quickjs.c is 47,842 lines of non-generated code. :mindblown:

It’s all capped at a max payment and not terribly expensive.

VP9 and its new versions will take over but it will be a while until it’s implemented in hw fully.

My favorite bug is having it plugged in to an external monitor, unplugging it to take it home, and then the computer still thinking it’s plugged into the monitor so it stays on & the battery runs out. After, you have this really hot dead laptop.

Apparently the fix is to unplug it & put it in sleep.

Not really an accurate comparison. A better one would be if people left their bikes randomly all over the street & sidewalks at scale.

Step 1: Lay down the cold, hard facts (not your interpretation) in a tactful manner meant to assist in helping him vs. attacking him. Do not issue threats or ultimatums ("I will go to the board", "I'll quit if...", etc.), that will often make things much worse--hurtful to your employees/executive team. Give your co-founder some time to determine whether those facts are true or if it's just you (~2 weeks).

Step 2: If that doesn't breakthrough, then your next step is escalating with the board and letting them do a real investigation to the merit of your claims. Ultimately, they'll likely speak to someone on his team.

Step 3: If you can't do that, consider stepping down since the opportunity cost could be very high. It's much worse for the two co-founders to be at odds and potentially blow up the company at this stage. The company is learning to scale around 4 years in (usually) and if he's a first time CEO, he's probably going to be struggling.

* Try your best to remove the emotion. Consider therapy during this time as it's going to be a bumpy road especially if you've built up resentment over the last four years with each other and care a lot about your company that you started.

Email me (click on my profile) and I am happy to help you through this while keeping it confidential.

You need demand and user retention. Just the former is a false sense of success. Many startups flameout without the latter at high frequency. I've witnessed 100s.

(1) Have you considered looking at it through the lens of "Engineering" vs "Web development?" I think there's much more of a methodology involved if you do since the primary difference becomes how would you solve challenging problems through the use of computers, programming, and math than how do I master some domain specific technology in order to write JavaScript and CSS to make a dynamic website.

(2) It's an over-generalization to believe that the best developers are awkward and socially inept. Do you have enough data points? The best developers are actually great collaborators who care more about the problem they're solving and the value it provides to users. Often that makes them stronger communicators and peers because they're working a team of other skilled people (designers, product managers, customer facing teams) to find the best, most impactful solution. I'd rather hire a 10-20% less skilled developer who has great communication & collaboration skills. Have you considered working at an organization where you could work with a larger team in place?

(3) It's becoming easier to learn to write code than ever before but that doesn't mean that the value of those skills is reaching asymptotic levels. In fact, I believe the bar is increasing: machine learning/AI, scaling large distributed systems, re-thinking how we'd build software as hardware improves and becomes cheaper, etc. Finding great engineering talent is still extremely scarce. I won't really comment on how you feel about one's appearance (I don't know why that matters) and communication style (pick a culture you like).

So did you create many distorted tracks ahead of time or are you automatically adjusting the distortion down? If the latter I wish you talked about how you did that but maybe I missed that?

Automatically making music seeks a lot tougher.

Thanks for pointing out some areas where we can improve. We will work on making autotrack great over the year specifically for those things but we haven't seen any major problems with our large customers from performance to pricing. If we do, we are committed to changing things quickly.

It's not likely anyone is accepting 1/2 their market salary. Lots of companies are paying top dollar market only to be slightly less than Google.

Usually google helper is a martyr for "a plugin." Curious to figure out which plugin is having a hard time or maybe it's something else? We are happy to fix this with more info!

There's one missing point on this post that I believe is important. I don't blame them for not putting on there either though since it's a bit intangible:

YC really encourages commitment. Commitment to your idea and co-founders. That commitment inspires a lot of motivation to do a lot with little in a very small amount of time.

You go from a rag tag group working on weekends and evenings due to school or your day job to a competitive, hungry machine ready to usurp your market leader.

The effect of the peer pressure amongst your batch mates continuously making progress each week is substantial.

YMMV - it worked for us at Mixpanel.

I think, like most situations, that the public has very little information and context. For all you know, the situation is exceedingly complex for the board and Parker.

Sacks is smart. Parker is too and he wouldn't take it lying down but clearly wants to do the right thing: preserve the integrity of the company and its employees over himself. You can see that in his actions as he resigned from the board and is being really quiet -- that's tough as a founder.

I wouldn't overly judge the memo. The audience isn't you or me, it's the employees of Zenefits. It's their message to interpret and internalize. And they already know who their founder is and what he contributed to Zenefits.

Yes - email in my profile.

We aren't having trouble monetizing the business. Our revenue projections remain the same even though we let some staff go and we are doing fine on that end. Mixpanel isn't going anywhere if that's your concern. If anything, we are investing a lot more in engineering, product, and design to make our products a lot better for all you.

It's too early to say what we'd do in an outcome like that. I certainly wouldn't want to see everything we've built go to waste.

Hey everyone, I am one of the founders at Mixpanel. Layoffs were tough on us, we did over hire a bit, and wanted to make the company more lean. We are deeply sorry for those that are no longer part of Mixpanel - they were our friends and co-workers that we continue to miss.

I am happy to answer any questions that I can.

I'd like to expand my knowledge in machine learning/AI. I am not that great at math so this will push my boundaries a bit. I am on chapter 2 of this: http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/chap2.html

Ultimate goal is to be able to intuitively see valuable places where machine learning would actually be useful in solving problems people have in the world. I'd like to be able to debate ideas with people that know ML better than I do and not be completely ignorant. And then apply them to my startup or a future company.

Great advice.

I do think that you should try to think about how you might try to solve something before looking at what your competitors do. The reason being that it's easy to trap our minds into thinking that there are no other solutions unless they fit into a similar box of what's already working. Naïveté combined with thinking for yourself can often be a powerful reason why many startups succeed.

If your solution ends up looking similar, at least, it was likely derived from first principals vs the path of least resistance: blind copying.

I think this is a bit flawed: it assumes the products were great but simply lacked a distribution strategy. In many cases, it's more likely the products were just ok and still lacked a distribution strategy - causing a sale.

My bet is Marissa is trying to build more driven, savvy, smarter leadership by buying it and promising influence.

We tend to see it as there are many more people in the world who aren't developers that get some valuable data as opposed to guessing or using their gut. For developers, we still have a manual way to do this.

Yes, that's true - you have to install the SDK which takes some developer time (though minimal and nearly equivalent to copying and pasting a JS tag)

I can see why you'd say that but not in this case - we had it baking for a while on mobile. I am glad they found it valuable to build too.

I think you have to judge if you've been a top 10% team member in the past and are capable of being one in the future. If you're not, this is unlikely to happen to you. The reality is, most companies do this. And as a company gets larger, they get this down to a science. The calculus here is pretty simple because the company (whether you're a startup or Google) is very incentivized to retain it's top-tier talent who can go and work anywhere they want.

No company will promise you millions of dollars in long-term incentivized compensation (whether that's a stock option or a RSU) because it's highly dependent on the output of the individual and circumstance. I do think you can safely assume this is happening all around you (like I said: I meet many people who we cannot get) but they may not be publicizing it on forums like HackerNews (I am not sure many people find it kosher to boast that they made a lot of money as opposed to people who have been burned).

To be constructive though, I think prospective employees could ask the following set of questions to figure this out:

- Are there people in your company that are making above $X dollars a year in total compensation (options + salary)? I'd like to know what's possible if I worked hard and made a huge contribution.

- If I worked very hard and killed it, what kind of total compensation could I expect down the road? How is it split between long-term incentives like options and salary?

- What's an example of a project that someone did an amazing job on that changed the trajectory of the company? Was this rewarded? (Does the company have projects that they valued and has acknowledged that it made a difference?)

- How long has the most tenured Engineer in the company been at the company? What about the 2nd most tenured? 3rd? (This can tell you if the company has talent at the company they believe is top-tier and if they value them presumably because they are incentivized to stay)

I am sure there are other questions you could ask but these were just the ones at the top of my head that I feel would be pretty convincing.

The reality with your second point is that it is very hard to know for sure which engineer will be 10x better due to your interview process. Great people aren't just great technically, they also are great humans too (who can mentor, collaborate, be humble, and see the forest from the trees). Often you don't find out later until 3-6 months into a working relationship. I think you're placing a lot of weight on the initial offer because many smart companies will issue huge stock grants and salary bumps for their best employees to retain them. And I would argue that I know this to be the case because I chase a lot these continuously, long employed people each day that have incredible golden hand-cuffs.

At any stage company? Valuing options at $0 at a seed company is a lot more reasonable than at a company actually making money or is growing rapidly.

That's true, this can happen. At Mixpanel, we proactively true people up throughout the year, each year. It's not that hard of a pill to swallow when you weigh the decision of that person leaving vs paying them $10-20K more.