Matt Rickard
Board
Commoditized Trust
A bank sells many products, but the most important product it sells is trust. Trust that your money is safe. Trust that you can withdraw it when you want. We buy the household items from the same well-known brands because we trust that we're getting the advertised quality. When Airbnb launched its rebrand back in 2014, Brian Chesky wrote this (emphasis mine) We used to take belonging for granted. Cities used to be villages. Everyone knew each other, and everyone knew they had a place to call
Re-entering the Arena
Reflections on 2022, and towards a more ambitious year ahead.
Daniel Mangum (@hasheddan@types.pl) on Twitter
If you have a widely adopted project or product that someone claims they could build in a weekend, you should view that as a massive complement because you have either:1) Executed better than anyone else on a very simple problem.2) Made a very complex problem appear simple.— Daniel Mangum (@hasheddan@types.pl) (@hasheddan) January 9, 2023
Tanay Jaipuria on Twitter
Google P&L in the form of a Sankey diagram, which might be one of the best ways to visualize financial data pic.twitter.com/YfbFL3j4YJ— Tanay Jaipuria (@tanayj) January 5, 2023
A few themes for 2023 - by Tanay Jaipuria
The obligatory predictions piece
White Space
The social graph belongs to Meta. Microsoft has the best distribution among F500 companies and also owns GitHub and partners with OpenAI. Amazon boasts the world's largest cloud and the biggest online store. Google dominates the consumer web with search, email, productivity tools, and chat. Apple controls the mobile market. Despite the expansion of software markets, many are still trying to find a niche in the untapped space in between - the white space. White space presents an opportunity for
Sizing the Web3 B2B Software Market by @ttunguz
What's Next After NextJS
NextJS is the Ruby on Rails of modern development – fast, easy, and just enough framework to get a full web application up and running without getting in your way too much. The company behind the open-source project, Vercel, has successfully built a managed platform around the library that combines a CDN and edge functions to provide a fast, cheap, and scale-to-zero website that serves dynamic and static content. Vercel is open-core – the code for Next is open-sourced, but a good chunk of funct
RPA: The Human Interface
In one of the first posts on this blog, I talked about how APIs would always beat RPA (Robotic Process Automation). A brief summary of that argument: SaaS as a software model breaks RPA – updates can be sent without user intervention and non-consistent changes (A/B testing). As a tangential point, the shift to collaborative web-first software also takes users away from scriptability (e.g., lack of a Win32 API – see The Programable Web). But something that I missed was our propensity to build h
What's an MVP in 2022?
The Lean Startup came in 2011. It codified the Silicon Valley school of startup building – customer interviews followed by rapid iteration. But is that still the case in 2022? Figma didn't launch for two years after it was founded. Startups like The Browser Company (building a better web browser) are still in closed beta two years after launch. First-mover advantages might not matter as much, but first impressions do. Apple Maps suffered a botched launch – missing data, incorrect directions, a
9 Must-Read Books for Software Engineers in 2023
As a software engineer, staying up-to-date with the latest developments and best practices is essential for growth. One of my favorite (and what I feel is overlooked) methods for growth is reading books. We spend a large part of our day reading Stack Overflow and blog posts, but books have really helped me see things in a different light or understand something I do not come across on a daily basis.
Gorilla Toolkit Open Source Project Becomes Abandonware
The Gorilla Web Toolkit, a popular, open source Go toolkit for web-based applications, is being archived at the end of this year.
Staring into the abyss as a core life skill
thinking about scary things • examples from Wave • examples from elsewhere • finding a buddy • getting the timing right • a list of abyss questions
"Don't borrow trouble"
I remember clearly the first time I heard the phrase, "Don't borrow trouble." It was fall 2018, I had the flu, and I was all burrito'd up in a blanket, binge-watching a silly show for tweens called The Nine Lives of Chloe King. And off to the internet idiom dictionary
A better call to action than "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof
Don't borrow trouble from tomorrow.It means: Don't count your problem chicks before the problem chicken lays the problem egg which may or may not hatch — what am I, a problem chicken veterinarian?
Borrowing trouble is the curse of the newbie entrepreneur.
In the absence of real-world experience, action, and feedback, your idle mind is inclined to manufacture fantasy. And, if you're anxious, your fantasies will be anxiety-inducing: you'll conjure up problems that don't exist.
The antidote to borrowing trouble is to ground yourself in today.
Technological Windows - Commoncog
Technological Windows is the central concept of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs's career, and the shape of the game in consumer tech.
I believe you can use the concept of technological windows opening, and eventually closing. And what I mean by that is, enough technology — usually from fairly diverse places — comes together and makes something that’s a quantum leap forward possible. And it doesn’t come out of nowhere. If you poke around the labs, and if you hang around the Media Lab in MIT and other places, you can get a feel for some of those things.
And a window opens up. And it usually takes around — in my experience anyway — around five years to create a commercial product that takes advantage of that technical window opening up.
It takes around five years, or some number of years like that to realise that window opening, and then it seems to take another five years to really exploit it in the marketplace
Akamai Buys Linode, Akamai’s Strategy, Cloudflare and Disruption
Akamai’s acquisition of Linode makes lots of sense, even if Linode’s customers won’t be happy. The real winner, though, is Cloudflare.
Cloudflare, meanwhile, benefited from coming along a decade later and built a completely different kind of network: instead of specialized hardware the company used commodity hardware (which was also much more powerful) and created all of the functionality of a CDN (and DDoS protection service, its biggest product and the one that gets the company invited into ISPs around the world) in software. The concept is known as software-defined networking, but if anything that term undersells what Cloudflare is doing: the addition of the Workers compute platform in particular suggests something closer to software-defined everything.
They are always motivated to go up-market, and almost never motivated to defend the new or low-end markets that the disruptors find attractive. We call this phenomenon asymmetric motivation. It is the core of the innovator’s dilemma, and the beginning of the innovator’s solution.
How Companies Think About Layoffs
Plus! Moderation; Understanding TikTok; Reputational Bank Runs; Coal; Disney; Diff Jobs
That friction also means that a healthy job market for workers is a nerve-wracking one for employers: wages are rising, and companies have to make hiring decisions in light of 1) the probability that many offers will get topped, and 2) the probability that some of their existing team will depart.
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Pitch Deck Teardown: Encore's $3M seed deck
For this week's Pitch Deck Teardown, we take a look at the $3 million seed round raised by developer tool startup Encore.
Report: Netlify Business Breakdown & Founding Story
Docker as a DevTool Platform
Docker Extensions is a new beta feature in Docker Desktop. It allows you to run third-party tools in Docker Desktop, complete with a simple React-based GUI. For example, you might run the Tailscale extension, which sets up a Tailscale node inside Docker for your tailnet. Or you might run one of the many GUI dashboards from the Marketplace. Of course, there's nothing new about Docker Extensions in terms of functionality – nothing is stopping you from passing through an API token to a Docker cont
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Making sense of MVP (Minimum Viable Product) - and why I prefer Earliest Testable/Usable/Lovable - Crisp's Blog
(French translation, Spanish translation, Japanese translation) A couple of years ago I drew this picture and started using it in various presentations about agile and lean development: Since then the…
Silicon Valley's other entrepreneurs: Sex workers
The Bay Area's growing adult services industry caters to the region's well-paid techies.
Workspaces
Explore the workspaces of creative individuals, sent directly to your inbox every Saturday and Sunday.
Consoles and Competition
Reviewing the history of video games explains why Sony is dominant today, and why Microsoft is actually introducing competition, not limiting it.
The Better CustomerStartups or Big Enterprise?
Step inside the Group Partner Lounge to hear Y Combinator Group Partners Harj Taggar, Michael Seibel and Brad Flora discuss the pros and cons of startups selling software to other startups. Or is there a better approach out there?
Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
Work at a startup: https://www.workatastartup.com/
Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) -
00:00 - Intro
01:20 - When selling to startups doesn't work?
03:53 - Startups might not have the problem
05:03 - Startups are not an easy customer than enterprise
05:55 - Early stage companies churn
09:35 - Sales
12:01 - The benefits of charging startups
14:22 - Bottoms up sales strategy
15:18 - Big takeaway
#startups #sales #tech #software
Why The Impact Effort Prioritization Matrix Doesn't Work
The Impact/Effort prioritization matrix is a classic product managment tool. However it can easily lead you to pick the wrong ideas
An Ideal CI/CD System
A good CI/CD system means developer productivity. What an ideal CI/CD system looks like today. Serverless – A CI/CD system should be serverless. There's no reason to be managing Jenkins or individual nodes. Managing CI/CD machines makes it really easy to introduce configuration and environment drift, which causes hard to trace down bugs. Container-native is usually a good choice, especially if you often deploy software inside containers, but anything that provides a real ephemeral environment i