“We didn't *want* to write a db, ffs. I've spent my whole career yelling at people "DO NOT WRITE A DATABASE!" But we needed a lot of tradeoffs that no one else was making:
- immutable, append-only column store
- schemalessness
- fast and close to right is better than "correct"”
Building the first iPhone's touchscreen keyboard was a make-it-or-break-it moment for the iPhone. Succeed, and the iPhone was possible. Fail, and the iPhone would've been shelved. This is its story.
It may be an employer’s market because of all the layoffs, but employees are increasingly choosing to walk away from job offers they think aren’t the right fit
Match Group, which owns Tinder, has filed an antitrust case against Apple with the competition regulator in India. But why? Read this edition online A paid 🔒 weekly emailer that explains fundamental shifts in business, technology and finance that happened over the last seven days in India.
There are few things more dangerous to startups than Big Deals. These are different from the deals that enterprise companies sign. They’re the deals upon which the entire life/death/success of the company rely. Founders lie to themselves by believing that catching a single Big Deal will automatically create a huge company. I’ve seen this belief kill a large number of startups. The possibility of a Big Deal helps founders avoid dealing with other, more pressing issues. When you convince yourself
How decentralization and Web3 will impact the enterprise
As Web3 becomes a major new industry in the startup technology sector, the question is increasingly asked, as it has been with each prior cycle of digital innovation: How it will involve business and IT?
In ecology, r/K selection theory relates to the tradeoff organisms make between quantity and quality of offspring. Some organisms choose K-selection, i.e., to have few offspring but offer them substantial parental investment (e.g., humans, whales, elephants). Others choose r-selection, having many offspring with low probabilities of reaching adulthood (dandelions, rodents, bacteria). By analogy, startups exhibit similar trade-offs. Some markets are nascent and rapidly changing. Others are crowd
Webhooks are the ultimate escape hatch to systems integration. Event publishing that doesn't require you to know much about who is listening on the other end. It's trivial to create a publisher or consumer (bring your own HTTP server/client). On the surface, Webhooks seem antithetical to the rise of the cloud native – it's easier than ever to set up servers that long-poll, managed pub/sub infrastructure, or simple event queues. But the opposite might be happening. * Zero-trust architectures
Not the implementation. At my first job, I spent a lot of time digging into the fintech stack. I had become convinced that reverse engineering mobile banking APIs was the technically superior option to screen-scraping. I even took my unsolicited opinion to Hacker News, running into one of the Plaid founders (Plaid, like Yodlee before it, originally used screen-scraping). Plaid turned out to be wildly successful. I learned that the value is in the API, not the implementation. Sometimes a dirty i