An effective way for announcing new features is to use the user/problem/answer tweet thread format. It makes it clear what the thing is and who should care. It also shows that you are thinking deeply about the right solution. Another benefit to this format is that it helps you clarify the value. What’s worthy of going in the tweet thread? Maybe instead of writing the press release first we should be writing the tweet thread first. Examples:
Cost basis tends to get the most attention when it comes to pricing. I remember business classes in college spent endless hours talking about cost plus pricing, margins, and so on. However, perceived value—the difference between the price and what people think it’s worth—gets overlooked. If the perceived value is high relative to the price, it’s a no-brainer to buy. The set of features and the price establishes the perceived value. What you get for the price and how you describe it to prospective customers does much more to increase perceived value than lowering the price. Another way to increase perceived value is with add-ons that are priced independently (e.g. phone support $x/month) helps assign a value relative to the bundled price. Read Three Ideas on Pricing. See also:
Workers moving from tech hubs to red states for remote work could be inhibited by conservative legislation like anti-abortion laws. Tech companies in particular tend to be in liberal states and have more progressive leanings. It seems likely that the states and cities that will benefit the most from remote work might be in blue states.
Managers are essential to scaling a successful organization but have a large blast radius if things go wrong. The best organizations don’t suffer fools. The center of gravity (culture and decision making) is with individual contributors. This works because ICs are better evaluators of a manager than other managers or leaders, making it more obvious when it’s not working out.
I remember when I first started working at Stripe I felt like the dumbest person in the room. I was amazed at how smart everyone seemed and the writing…gosh, the writing! If I wanted to be like that too, something needed to change. At first I thought I needed to improve my critical thinking. Looking for a solution, I poured over mental models and frameworks. It didn’t really help though. I can hang my thoughts off of a neat model but can still get away with sloppy thinking—just packaged in a smarter looking format. Turns out, what I’m really trying to do is ‘think better thoughts’. (As an aside, it’s wild that humans can even have this kind of metacognition!) I don’t want to be smarter, I want to be more creative, reason about problems clearly, and draw upon useful knowledge. Better thinking is a skill I can take steps to develop, being smart is merely a judgment (and a lousy one at that). How do you think better thoughts? One of my favorite Paul Graham-isms has to do with finding startup ideas. The best way to find amazing startup ideas is to become the kind of person who has amazing ideas. As annoying as it sounds, the only surefire way to have better thoughts is to be the kind of person who has better thoughts. Afterall, identity is a powerful motivator and improving thinking is a collection of habits and behaviors. To me, that’s reading better books and writing things down. Read better books (I’m going to focus on non-fiction books here due to their practicality in thinking better thoughts, but of course there fiction books which apply.) It’s not like I read one book and suddenly think better, but reading increases the cardinality of thoughts I can have. Reading helps me think “wider” and combine more ideas—an important element of creativity and discovery. Thinking wider leads to compounding benefits as more ideas become available like an ever expanding pallet. Reading books about thinking was surprisingly helpful. The Clock of the Long Now helped me think about long term thinking and deep time. The Beginning of Infinity helped me explore epistemology and how to not fool myself. The Minto Pyramid Principle helped me think about writing and how to explain things to others effectively. Reading books opens up new pathways follow your curiosity. Those new pathways lead to other books to read and more ideas to think about. For example, The Beginning of Infinity led to thinking about consciousness which led to reading I Am a Strange Loop and physics. Not just any book will do. I feel that “better books” are ones that are relevant to your interests but slightly off the beaten path. A simple heuristic is to look for canonical books in the field if inquiry that gets mentioned often by people working in the field but are seldom actually read. Write things down There are many benefits to writing and it gets even better when I write about what I’m reading. I take notes to clarify my understanding of the ideas I find interesting. I think about what I’ve read more if I’ve written anything about it. It sharpens the ability to express ideas to others. This last point proves to be another important part of thinking better thoughts—writing grows knowledge and enables others to add to it. Human knowledge is meme replication so ideas need to be effectively replicated. This is critical for making progress as a group whether you are working on a team or building a company. Now that I’ve written this down, the through-line here is that cultivating curiosity is a useful strategy for thinking better thoughts. Reading books and writing naturally leads to more curiosity. The difference between “go read these books about philosophy, it’s good for you” and “why does Godel’s incompleteness theorem keep coming up in these other books, what did he find” are huge. One feels like homework, the other feels like discovery.
Enterprise Value (EV) to Next Twelve Month (NTM) revenue multiples in public markets for SaaS businesses rose sharply from 2019 to 2021 up to as high as 24x. Now, those multiples are falling below pre-pandemic levels to 10x. This has major implications for retail investors, VCs, and running a startup during a recession. For example, startup fundraising rounds will come down (potentially for a long time). Growth is less valuable than revenue. Monetizing late stage valuations probably won’t work right now. Read What Does the Post Crash VC Market Look Like? from Mark Suster.
One of the most profound findings from Godel’s incompleteness theorem is that meaning can be mapped onto a system that was specifically designed to prevent it. Principia Mathematica, the system Godel was poking at, was designed—amongst other reasons—to solve the paradoxes of set theory and logic with a constrained set of rules. Godel abstracted over the symbolic logic (converting proofs into numbers) to show a self-referencing statement could not only be represented in PM but was also undecidable. This proof shows that new meaning can be mapped onto existing things through analogy and abstractions are real. From I Am a Strange Loop.
When selling B2B software, self-serve and product-led growth is appealing business model (no sales people, account managers, etc.). However, it’s much more common that you would still need a sales team and account managers for enterprise customers. They expect to be able to talk to someone about their challenges and guide them through implementation. See also:
Remote work has not yet made the jump to universality. We’re still in the phase of “specialized work objects” which are a combination technology to perform the work, jobs that can be performed remotely, and businesses that can operate anywhere. What needs to be true to achieve remote work universality? Technology to perform the work
We already have this with networked computers and the internet. Access is widely available (though not ubiquitous) and software allows millions of people to do their job. Jobs that can be performed remotely
Some jobs are not possible to be done remotely, though I would argue this is more of an extension of the technology problem. Over time more jobs will be possible to be done remotely through automation, robotics, or applied AI. Businesses that operate anywhere
There are myriad rules and regulations that are different in every location. Compliance has no universal object that enables them to operate anywhere (though that’s what we are working on at Mosey).
To run a one-off ECS task from the Example:aws CLI in Fargate you need to specify the subnet, set assignPublicIp to enabled (otherwise it will fail to pull the container image), and optionally include overrides to run the command you want.aws ecs run-task\
--cluster foo\
--task-definition bar\
--count 1\
--launch-type FARGATE\
--network-configuration '{"awsvpcConfiguration": {"subnets": ["subnet-123456"], "assignPublicIp": "ENABLED"}}'\
--overrides '{"containerOverrides": [{"name" : "MyTask", "command" : ["python", "example.py", "arg1_here"]}]}'
Building tools to help users that are not experts in the thing they are using the tool to do presents unique design challenges. You can’t assume prior knowledge. You must provide a sense of progress towards mastery even though the subject matter might be unfamiliar. You need to simplify without being overly reductive. You need to identify the unknown-unknowns without being overwhelming. A tool that enables non-experts to become experts is incredibly valuable especially when the expertise is difficult or expensive to acquire on one’s own. See also:
Some of the biggest criticism of the remote work movement is that people aren’t actually doing work. There are several flavors of this: working in your pajamas, not doing real work, or, the most sinister, that the company culture will suffer. This fails closer inspection immediately. All of these are a euphamisms for “I can’t see you working so work isn’t happening”. Unfortunately, this is a common fallacy, particularly for managers that need a sense of control. This position reveals a major failure of management—lack of trust. Tell me you micro manage your employees without telling me you micro manage your employees. All working arrangements require trust regardless of whether it is in-person or not. Remote work exacerbates this problem and forces managers to confront their parochial errors about how work actually happens and how to measure progress. Remote teams need to be more deliberate about everything, not the least of which because managers can’t rely on surveillance.
There has always been strong demand for remote work and it wasn’t until the global COVID-19 pandemic that the supply side (employers) briefly caught up. There is still not enough supply. Flexible work and work from home options are among the top reasons for changing jobs. Back to the office efforts have stalled. Commercial real estate value is crashing. Remote jobs rose to nearly 15 percent of all high-paying job listings. What is the actual ceiling? According to the US Bureau of Statistics, 45% of jobs can be done remotely today. That doesn’t account for jobs being created or changes to the composition of jobs over time (e.g. more information workers, less coal miners). Realistically though, it’s the employers resisting change from a traditional office-based environment to a remote-enabled workplace.
Like the Mitch Hedburg joke, “when escalators break they become stairs—sorry for the convenience” reminds us about the importance of designing systems that fail gracefully. Escalators can still be used even when their function no longer works unlike elevators where you get stuck until it’s fixed. What are some other examples of systems that still work? See also:
The realest thing to anyone is themselves. The further from the self the less real things feel. For example, we know about the stars and distant galaxies but the fly buzzing our ear is more important and “real” as to steal our attention. While we have the power to imagine great things and empathize, direct experience is more important because it involves the “I”. Our wants, needs, and desires exceed the realness of all else. This phenomenon sums up one my biggest frustrations with the COVID-19 global pandemic and, what I’m fairly sure will become another health crisis, Long COVID: we fail to take collective action against something we know is real but we don’t always directly see. From I Am a Strange Loop See also:
A Household Pulse Survey (HPS) found that more than 14% of US adults have or had Long COVID. Across all age groups, the 40-49 year old had the highest percentage at 18.8%. This could indicate a staggeringly large number of people will have lasting health issues due to COVID-19 and was a key contributer to the labor shortages in 2022.
When we talk about perception we should be careful not to confuse it with reception and awareness (or souledness). A thing that receives stimuli is like a video camera, merely measuring photons with a sensor. A thing that has awareness can be as simple as a toilet being “aware” of the water level. Neither perceives the world around it because neither has symbols that activate to translate that stimuli into understanding. From I Am a Strange Loop.
Having to think about everything all the time would be impractical so people rely on other people to think certain thoughts for them. This happens all the time without us noticing or caring most of the time. For example, reading what an expert has to say about something is more efficient than deriving your own opinion from source materials. The problem with that is people can be wrong, misinformation can mislead you, disinformation is purposely trying to mislead you, and experts are just people too. You have to be mindful when you are outsourcing your thinking otherwise you won’t be thinking clearly when it matters most. See also:
Writing is the much-discussed secret to building great remote teams. How do you write for a remote team? There are three things to do to make writing the core of a remote team. Write project briefs. Take meeting notes. Broadcast widely. Write project briefs Project briefs are the foundation of great remote teams. They drastically improve the clarity of ideas and work. They make it easy for the team to share feedback. They are an artifact for future coordination. Project briefs need to have an opinion. It’s not a scientific paper, it should be convincing. Project briefs should be about solving a problem. Problems are a conflict between ideas—if there is no conflict there is no problem. How do you write a good brief? SCQA is by far the best format I’ve seen for structuring a project brief (The Minto Pyramid Principle is also great for business writing generally). Situation, complication, questions, and answer. Don’t start by asking what the problem is, ask what the situation is. So much error happens between the facts of what’s going on and the interpretation of them—SCQA avoids this pitfall by putting space between them. Writing briefs has a natural advantage over other forms of communication. When you write, your misunderstandings become obvious. It’s a natural forcing function for improving clarity. Reviewing briefs structured in this way becomes much easier. Is the situation indisputable? Was the interpretation of the complication reasonable? Is the key question answered fully? I’ve read a lot of bad documents. It usually comes down to not answering the key question fully or the answer being disguised as the problem. Once you have project briefs, there is an anchor point for coordination. You can link supplementary docs to it. You can share it with new teammates. You can reference it over and over to keep the team focused (“what are we trying to do again?"). Take meeting notes Any meeting with three or more participants and any meeting that others could be interested in should have notes. Those notes should be shared broadly. Everyone can’t attend every meeting and remote teams that make it easy to absorb context asynchronously is a big advantage. As an artifact, meeting notes are surprisingly useful. Referencing it just once to remember that one thing a user said that one time is worth the price of entry. In meetings, it’s easy for everyone to think they agreed and were on the same page. Writing meeting notes reveals when that’s not actually the case. Putting it down in writing has an air of finality that’s useful to take advantage of. It’s too easy to let things pass in conversation otherwise. Broadcast widely As we’ve seen, the value of writing for remote teams is clarity and coordination, but there’s another important way writing helps—building trust. Writing should be shared internally as broadly as possible. Transparency improves trust (there are no secret conversations where the decisions are being made). Ambient awareness leads to serendipity. That doesn’t mean everyone should read everything, but they should be able to. Filtering content is a much easier problem to solve than building a culture of writing. People can choose what they tune into and how to best use it in their work. A remote team that is in the practice of constantly sharing briefs, meeting notes, and other artifacts will find that trust is built into the system. There’s clarity, transparency, and accountability.
One of the observations that supports the Big Bang theory is the redshift of galaxies. If the universe were static then the light that we observe would not be so redshifted (the wavelength of light gets stretched out making it more red). However, that doesn’t mean that galaxies are moving away from us, just that there is comic expansion puts greater distance between things. From The Latest Webb Observations Don’t Disprove The Big Bang, But They Are Interesting. See also:
When we see an object that has a feedback loop we ascribe it a more human goal-oriented desire. For example, the plant that curves towards the window “wants” to get more sunlight. Even a simple feedback loop (where the plant points to the window as it grows) raises this innate perception of an object with desires. From I Am a Strange Loop. See also:
A working paper from Stanford Digital Economy Lab studying the differences between attempts at measuring the number of US workers that work remotely found that half of US workers work remotely at least some days per week. The differences between various surveys (Gallup, CPS, The Atlantic) can be explained by exclusions of those who are self-employed (more likely to work remote), questionnaire design and the intensity of remote work, industry, and whether or not the survey was measuring COVID-19 effects. The CPS in particular undercounts relative to other surveys because it focuses solely on remote work due to COVID-19 and not those who worked remotely prior to the pandemic or permanently work remotely now.
The rules for when a company must provide federally mandated medical leave to employees may change due to remote work. So far though, proximity to an office is still an important criteria. In Texas, a court ruled that an employer was not liable for FMLA because the employee was working remotely, reporting to an Ohio office, and was not within 75 miles of the office because they worked from home in Texas. So far the states are interpreting rules that weren’t written with remote work in mind. How Does the FMLA Apply to a Remote Workforce? See also:
It’s an easy excuse to tell yourself you can’t do something because you’re tired. If only you were well rested, you could do something great. The reality is, doing anything demanding where you need to peak performance means you will be tired often. But so is everyone else. What you do even when you are tired can give you a meaningful advantage over those that pack it in. I overheard this listening to Hard Knocks and I always feel a bit more energized seeing how professional football get ready for the highest level of competition.