At an early stage startup (less than 10 people), it’s a big advantage to do everyone’s job first. That doesn’t mean you don’t scale or hire other people, but doing their job first gives the most understanding about what the job actually entails and the knowledge of how it works.

Being a founder, this can feel daunting. What do I know about customer success? I’ve never had to answer support tickets, how do I do that? And so on.

This is the source of the advantage because everything fits into your head. You can make fast decisions. You can learn who would be successful when hiring someone to do this job in the future. You can understand more fully how your business works, what the problems are, and what to do about it.

You will never have this pace of knowledge growth again.

See also:

• Being obsessed with what you are building certainly helps too
• The most effective people care a lot

This is a reflection on using org-roam as a founder in the early stages of starting a company. It’s mostly a draft that I may or may not come back to.

What I’m trying to do generally is have better quality thoughts. I want to answer questions and reason about the clearly.

I’ve found that writing is thinking and drawing from a wide pool leads to creativity.

Taking notes and linking them together (the vast majority of the utility from these tools for thought are just these two things) provides heterarchies that are, in practice, very useful. It helps me digest vast amounts of disparate information. It helps me find several through lines that can change over time. I can separate out the situation from “what’s going on here?”. It’s just enough distance to help me think less narrowly.

Is it practical? It’s a lot of work and it’s easy to dismiss the effort as impractical or a distraction. Turns out, I really do reference these notes and look at them often.

I don’t have “conversations” with my notes, but I often consult them and reference them. The most common reason is when I’m recalling some information or idea with someone else that comes up in a conversation. I realize I’ve had this thought (or something like it) before and go to my public notes, search, and share.

The single best hack for looking at notes again was adding a “random note” button to my published notes. When I’m bored, I click around and let myself wander previous ideas and thoughts. It also keeps the quality up—I’m more likely to go back and fix/update something I wrote if I see it again.

I don’t write more essays or blog posts. My interests are wide but focus is narrow. While I admire pundits with wide ranging essays such as Noahpinion, Matt Clancy, Bryce, and Slate Star Codex, my focus—the majority of the day (and night)—is on building a business. The way I take notes and what I do with them is heavily influenced by this focus and motivation.

I use my notes to write internal memos and product briefs. Mostly when thinking about strategy, the market, and sharing past insights about product, engineering, and sales.

I also use my notes to give advice and answer questions from others. If someone asks me about raising a seed round as a solo-founder or finding the first 10 users I’ve written many notes to draw from.

What else?

Tools for thought are single-player but at least this single-player is better prepared with more clear thoughts to share.

Better thoughts lead to better leadership. When I’ve clarified my thinking it tends to be very solid. Conviction and confidence (or maybe just a well considered approach) are important for others who are taking a risk by working with you. Nobody want to sit through a meeting where a leader is thinking out loud and confusing everyone.

The venerable .com TLD and a single word domain are a multiplier that improves nearly every interaction with your business. Establishing trust when someone sends a link (avoiding “this looks like spam”). Communicating your domain name to someone over the phone (try saying ‘dot S O’ to someone who can barely hear you on a land line). Interoperating with old legacy systems (some forms just don’t accept all TLDs). Signaling status to potential customers and employees (“they have the dot com they must be doing well”). Finally, it’s easier to remember off hand since you only need to recall the name not the name plus the TLD.

These micro interactions with your business add up over time. The easier to find you and establish trust, the better your business will be.

Is it worth millions of dollars for a domain name? I’m still doubtful. Paired with the right branding, maybe. Just keep in mind we’ve had Google for decades now and nobody searches by typing in `{name of thing I want}.com` into their browser anymore (yes, people actually used to do this).

See also:

• Most compounding interest benefits occur at the end, a good domain name might not compound the value of your business, but it certainly improves it
• Don’t combine domain name hacks

There have been 115 tech companies with layoffs since April 2022 and a steep increase in May.

Source Layoff.fyi.

See also:

• Running a startup during a recession
• How long will a recession last?

During the early part of the pandemic (July 2020 to July 2021), the population of SF fell 6.3%—the biggest population decrease in the US. Given the number of tech workers in SF, this could represent a significant redistribution of tech talent to other geographic areas.

From the SF Chronicle.

See also:

• Permanent moves from SF increased 23% but then fell to pre-pandemic levels

Sequoia Capital is the latest big name VC to warn founders about uncertainty in venture capital due to inflation and geopolitical turmoil. Slides here.

The cost of capital has gone up, valuations in public markets have gone down and are paying less for growth, the impact of these shocks will have second order and third order effects (like housing prices up 60+%).

In the short term, profitability is favored to growth in a downturn. While the Nasdaq is down, Morgan Stanley’s unprofitable tech index is down 64%. In the mid to long term, durable growth is best—improving margins and growth.

The drop in the market is steep and recovery takes a long time.

Be quick to cut expenses to avoid a death spiral. “In 2008 all companies that cut were efficient and better.” It’s not about being the strongest, but being the most adaptable.

There’s an opportunity in a down turn. FAANG companies all have a hiring freeze. Your competitors may not adapt and end up in a death spiral.

A large-scale survey of 12,000 people found that remote work increases employee happiness by as much as 20%

Read Remote Work is Linked to Happiness: Study of 12,455 Respondents.

A burn multiple is the amount of cash burned compared to annual recurring revenue (ARR). For example, if a company burns $10MM to add $30MM ARR the burn multiple is 3.0x. Higher burn multiples are worse and imply the company will run out of money faster. This is a better measure of overall efficiency compared to LTV/CAC because it encompasses all costs (burn).

What’s a good burn multiple? (Source a16z)

See also:

• This is a useful measure to help run a startup during a recession since companies wit a high burn multiple will need to raise money but availability of capital declines (inflation causes downward pressure on startup valuations).
• David Sacks talks more what burn multiples correlate to in this essay
• Net magic number

Startups are a microcosm of the economy and we can observe that things are changing quickly towards a recession footing. The effects of inflation on valuations are readily apparent, but we also see that things were too good to be true and investors and late stage companies exploited it.

Everyone looks like a genius when things are going well, but as it turns out, that wasn’t very durable.

How should we think about running a startup during a recession?

• Salaries are the largest cost on a startup’s balance sheet and the first to be cut back with hiring freezes or layoffs
• Selling to other startups will have greater churn as companies run out of capital and are unable to raise money
• Efficiency is more valuable than pure growth (as evidenced by falling revenue multiples in public markets)

See also:

• Adapting to Endure - Sequoia Capital
• Zero interest rate policy (ZIRP)
• What founders should know about interest rates

As inflation rises there will be a tightening of money supply and higher interest rates to control it. This causes a repricing of assets and, in particular, high-growth tech stocks. The median public company software valuations dropped from 12x forward revenue to 5x or less—an almost 60% decline.

The decline of public company valuations creates downward pressure on startup valuations. A startup whose valuation was 100x forward revenue (ARR) should expect that to be brought down significantly closer to their comparable public company valuations with a slight premium for faster growth (more like 10-15x).

This has big implications for running a startup during a recession. Availability of capital will go down as VCs make fewer deals, more selectively, and with lower valuations. Many companies will run out of cash and fail to raise additional rounds of financing. YCombinator recommends founders cut expenses and plan for 24 months without additional fundraising.

We are probably in a recession already, but we can’t know for sure for another quarter or so. With inflation on the rise and interest-rate hikes making less money available, it will be some time before things grow again.

In a blog post, Fred Wilson estimates it will be another 18 months before we see any improvement. Key indicators will be a bottoming out of public stock valuations before rising again (e.g. 1980 recession took 3 years to see stocks rebound).

Elad Gil says, “The most likely scenario is 2023 will be a much tougher environment for startups than 2022” in Changing times (or, why is every layoff 10-15%?).

See also:

• The interest rate fallacy shows that actually more money will be available not less as interest rates go up, but the demand side could decline
• Running a startup during a recession a key factor will be the availability of venture capital that is impacted by a recession

St. Pierre’s Cathedral in Geneva is built on top of another church which is built on yet another church going back hundreds of years. At the center, at the lowest layer, is a grave that is believed to be an chieftain from the original settlers of the area. They built the original church around this grave and the city of Geneva grew around it.

Setting a cookie doesn’t always have the same behavior. If you set a cookie on a domain listed in the public suffix list using SameSite=strict, it will get blocked by CORS even if they request and the cookie are coming from the same domain.

This makes sense for certain domains that are primarily used to host the sites of multiple users like compute.amazonaws.com for AWS resources or githubpreview.dev which serves preview for GitHub Codespaces. You wouldn’t want a different user hosted on the same domain to be able to set cookies for your users' site because that would be a security issue.

A workaround is to use SameSite=none and the prerequisite Secure attribute to set the cookie, but this effectively allows cross site cookies which requires other security measures to lock down.

See also:

• This is another gotcha for GitHub Codespaces like how they don’t allow requests across ports from a preview
• SameSite is important to prevent cross site request forgery (CSRF) attacks

Using the built-in docker-compose configuration in GitHub Codespaces is limited. It’s better to run docker-compose inside the Codespace but this requires a docker-in-docker setup which is finicky.

Here’s how to use docker-compose from Codespaces so that everything is set up when the codespace is created.

In .devcontainer/devcontainer.json:

{
    "name": "My Space",
    // The dockerfile will be at te root of the project
    "build": {"dockerfile": "../Dockerfile"},
    // Your code path from the .devcontainer directory
    "workspaceFolder": "../app",
    // List of ports that you want to preview
    "forwardPorts": [1234, 5678],
    // Script to run to bootstrap the app when the space is created
    "postCreateCommand": ". ../path_to_setup_script.sh",
    // Automatically start the app in subsequent sessions
    "postStartCommand": "cd app && docker-compose start",
    // Privileged flag is needed to run docker-in-docker, the volume
    // is needed or docker build will fail
    "runArgs": ["--volume=/var/lib/docker", "--privileged"],
    "postCreateCommand": ". /app/scripts/codespaces.sh"
}

In DockerFile at the root of the project:

FROM alpine:3.15.4

RUN apk update
RUN apk add --no-cache git
RUN apk add --no-cache docker-engine
RUN apk add --no-cache docker-cli
RUN apk add --no-cache docker-compose

ADD ./app /app

EXPOSE 8000
EXPOSE 35729
EXPOSE 3000
EXPOSE 1313

In your setup script:

# Assumes docker-compose.yaml is at the root /app root
cd app
# This setup script depends on running some code in other containers
dockerd &
# Ugh yes there's no nice way to wait until dockerd is ready
sleep 5
# Do whatever setup you need
docker-compose up -d
docker-compose exec {some command to run migrations etc}
# If you need to use docker for this setup script you must stop all containers
# otherwise, any servers running in docker will not have their ports
# forwarded properly by codespaces.
docker-compose stop

See also:

• Another annoying quirk is that Codespaces doesn’t allow requests across ports from a preview
• You will also need to workaround cookies because githubpreview.dev is on the public suffix list

At time of writing, a CORS error will occur if the web application served in a GitHub preview URL attempts to make a fetch request to a different port. Specifically, it the preflight OPTION request receive a 302 HTTP status code and fail with Redirect is not allowed for a preflight request.

Forwarding ports in a Codespace will generate a different URL for each port. For example, opening port 8000 will have a preview URL of {codespace name}-{port}.githubpreview.dev. That means, if you have your frontend and backend servers on different ports, it won’t work.

The workaround is to change the port from private (the default) to public. Annoyingly, there is no way to configure that a port be made public in the devcontainer.json so it needs to be set each time a codespace is created. The other way around is to add a reverse proxy to put both frontend and backend server on the same port, but that may not match what is in your production setup.

See also:

• GitHub Codespaces is too cumbersome and expensive to replace local development

The fact that humans exist with the capacity to observe and theorize about the universe is the explanation for the universe being the way that it is. The physics that creates the preconditions for intelligent life means that intelligent life could only ever observe this kind of universe. If other universes don’t support intelligent life, they will have different physics from our universe and, potentially, our physics is universal to intelligent life.

From The Beginning of Infinity and A Brief History of Time.

See also:

• It’s a neat little theory but could be easy to vary to fit all kinds of new observations and could easily be a parochial error

Growth marketing is simple to get started. Sell the product directly to 10 paying customers. Review the sales process with those customers and identify an ideal customer profile and their “aha” moment—preferring customers with low friction and grow organically. Experiment with automated ways to acquire the next 100 customers from that profile. Once you’ve built a playbook that works repeatedly, move on to the next cohort.

When you sell the product directly you’re getting immediate feedback on what’s working and you can iterate on the messaging (and product) much faster. If they’re not buying then something isn’t working. If you can sell 10 times you start to get clarity on the right people to talk to and their “aha” moment that crystallizes the value of what you are selling.

Choosing a single ideal customer profile focuses your efforts in finding the next 100 customers. If your profile encompasses too many use cases and kinds of buyers, it will make it harder to find repeatable ways to find them.

Experimenting with different ways to identify potential customers that match the ideal customer profile and reach them is important for error correction. Using automation is a key constraint otherwise you won’t be able to reach enough people to make the next 100 sales (not everyone you talk to will be interested or respond at all).

If you find a repeatable playbook then great, keep running it while you work on the next customer profile and repeat the cycle.

Based on my conversation with Jesus Requena, VP of Growth at Figma.

See also:

• Product-led growth is another way to do this but isn’t a fit for every kind of product
• You should be able to get from Seed to Series A on your network alone and get your first 10 customers

One of the issues with the big bang theory and observations of the cosmos is that there ought to be more stuff. The presence of dark matter must be there because we can measure its effects via gravitational waves. A possible explanation for why dark matter exists at all is that there is an anti-universe—the same as “our” universe but with neutrinos spinning the opposite way and time going backwards. If that’s true, it would be expanding in the opposite direction as the big bang.

See also:

• Absolute time does not exist and in an anti-universe relativity probably also exists
• The symmetry of a universe/anti-universe sounds similar to black hole / white hole theories and our universe existing inside of a black hole

A sentence that, upon closer inspection, has no real meaning.

The theory of relativity shows that time is not a constant, but a relative measurement to the observer. For example, it’s long been established that clocks running further away from the Earth’s gravity run slightly slower than those on the surface when they are compared.

See also:

• I read about this in A Brief History of Time (although I already know GPS clocks have to adjust for this)
• Time is relative but it can also break the law of conservation of energy: time crystals break time-translation symmetry

According to the Q1 2022 survey by Ladders, 24% of all job posting in the US and Canada are now for permanent remote positions—an increase from 18% in Q4 2021 or roughly 3MM jobs.

This is mostly led by fields in technology but similar trends are happening everywhere. For example, software development job postings went from 2.9% remote in Q1 2020 to 33.44% in Q1 2022.

See also:

• The share of remote workers fell from 35% to 11% of those who were working remotely due to COVID-19
• A 10x increase in remote hiring creates challenges for the back office
• Nearly 15 percent of all high-paying job listings are remote showing that these trends are impacting the top jobs in the country

Using license-finder by GitLab makes it easy to list all open source licenses from dependencies of your codebase. What’s nice is that it uses a docker image so it’s easy to run in any environment with no setup.

In the directory to scan, run:

docker run \
–volume “$PWD”:/code \
–env=LM_REPORT_VERSION=“2.1” \
–env=CI_PROJECT_DIR=/code \
registry.gitlab.com/gitlab-org/security-products/analyzers/license-finder:latest

Employment and tax compliance is not static. Requirements change because of new laws, hiring in a new state, employees relocating, or when government agencies tell you they’ve changed—UI rate changes, notifications and enforcements. Companies change too as headcount grows, revenue increases in more places, and what they are registered in each jurisdiction.

Since compliance is constantly changing, businesses need to answer “what do I need to do to be compliant?” continuously. Compliance is really a workflow, one that never stops over the course of doing business.

See also:

• People intuitively know that they need to be compliant, but a challenge with compliance products is selling non-compliance
• Building compliance products is like reading Kafka but you get to fix it

I bought the Sinn u50 automatic watch in February 2022 and have worn it every day since.

What I was looking for was simple—a way to tell the time and date that doesn’t constantly send me notifications or need to be charged. I want to admire the analog engineering of an automatic mechanical watch. I want it to look good for the kind of lifestyle I have—casual, functional, understated, and maybe ready for adventure.

The Sinn u50 ticks the boxes and appeals to me in a way that no other watch has yet. It looks really good and I enjoy looking at it every day.

It’s so totally overbuilt in a way that I can appreciate. It’s a time fortress sitting on your wrist that is reassuring. The Sinn u50 makes you feel a little bit invincible.

Three-month review

After three months, what do I think of the Sinn u50? I still get excited to wear it and it’s held up as advertised—not a single scratch so far. Now that I’ve adjusted the bracelet, it’s very comfortable and I forget that it’s on my wrist. I even wear it overnight so I can check the time when I wake up in the middle of the night.

I see much more clearly how brutalist the design is. It’s so dull (bead-blasted matte finish) and the steel is a darker gray that somehow makes it even less conspicuous. I can see the need for having a dressier watch especially after going to a fancy event and deciding not to wear Sinn u50.

Six-month review

The Sinn u50 has been on my wrist continuously for about 6 months now. Still no wear, no scratches, and it looks brand new.

At this point, I’ve purchased a few straps to try out from Nick Mankey Designs. This is a nice change of pace from the metal bracelet and extremely comfortable. I’ll probably keep playing around with new straps to keep things interesting.

I did a little bit of traveling with it. I went to New York City, explored the Oberland of Switzerland, and went to Hawaii. The Sinn u50 felt out of place only a handful of times at a fancy dinner or wedding. In Hawaii, it was great to not worry about it in the water and heat.

The design still feels great to me. Very unique but understated. Doesn’t work in every situation but most. I am starting to eye the Explorer I after trying it on in Switzerland so we’ll see if that starts to change my opinions.

Twelve-month review

Now that I’ve had the Sinn u50 for a year and I’ve worn it almost every day since getting it. Everything I wrote earlier is still true—I love the design, there are still no visible signs of wear, and I’ve taken it with me just about everywhere.

So what’s different? In September, I received the Cartier Tank Must as a gift. The two watches complement each other perfectly. The Cartier Tank is the exact opposite of the Sinn u50—elegant, classic design, white dial, square case, and compact. The pairing addresses one of the few issues I have with the Sinn u50, it doesn’t fit well in situations that require a dress watch.

My taste in watches has not changed much, despite visiting the Phillipe Patek Museum in Geneva, Switzerland. After a year on the wrist, I still think the Sinn u50 is going to be a classic it it’s own right—unapologetic in its modern design and rooted in utility.