Board

Flexibility is overrated, sometimes it is better to use opinionated tools, frameworks, and languages

1/ Startups get funded when they’re expected to be valuable, and they’re valuable when they can generate a continuous stream of profits for its investors. 2/ With this view, the value of a startup comes mostly from its expected moat, i.e. how well can it defend its business from competitors once they take notice of… Read More

most important things are outlier-driven • draw lots of samples • filter for maybe-amazing, not probably-good • learn where your bar should be • expect to fail a lot

The title explains it all, you don't even have to read. There are no good, even passable web browsers. None. Not a single one even comes close. The weird thing is this: making a good browser should be easy! Among the existing web browsers, you could assemble all the parts necessary for a passable (if not perfect) browser. No one has ever bothered to do this, instead, people assembled 90% good stuff and 10% junk.

I believe we should look beyond libraries and frameworks and rediscover the value of patterns and principles, and I’d argue that it would lead us to have less breaking changes and add more longevity to the stuff we build.

Last week, food technology company Rebel Foods (previously Faasos) kicked off its $75MM fundraise with a $16MM first tranche.  Beginning to Roll The Faasos’ journey poetically started with a beverage (read alcohol). In 2003, Jaydeep Barman and his co-founder friend Kallol found themselves deep in a drunken conversation. While looking to name their company, they came up with “Fanatic… Read More »Inside Faasos’ Rise to The Cloud

Last week, Postman raised $150MM at a valuation of $2Bn and entered the coveted unicorn club. Joining the league of Indian SaaS unicorns like Freshworks and Druva, Postman has been the fastest to get here, taking just six years. Open the Bridge They say startups emerge from founders’ personal pain.  In 2009, Abhinav Asthana was… Read More »Will Postman Deliver Tech to Build Software’s Global Bridges?

> If you are to do important work then you must work on the right problem at the right time and in the right way. Without any one of the three, you may do good work but you will almost certainly miss real greatness. Richard Hamming No magic answer will guarantee that all three conditions are satisfied. But, by making a series of 95% confidence bets and gathering more data along the way, you can quickly find seemingly impossible futures. A first principle cannot be deduced from any other axiom

Virtual private clouds (VPCs) live at the molecular level of cloud architecture. Not quite atomic (core cloud services) or elemental (user-defined services), they define how which sets of services can talk to each other, They act as security boundaries and a networking layer for sets of services. But in the SaaS cloud era, VPCs take on even more importance. They are a deployment target for SaaS vendors – (see SaaS Isolation Patterns). These vendors "take ownership" of a VPC. Customers can ensu

AI is coming for source code generation. But for the boring stuff. I'm not talking about machine readable or intermediate code generated by compilers (although AI is coming for that as well), but human-readable source code generation. These models will provide the glue between layers to seal up leaky abstractions. And the leakiest abstractions are first. Take for example generic REST or gRPC API client/servers. It would be a pain to plumb through each request/response pair for each language w

There are three principles of pricing: it must be comparable, practical, and consistent.

The pathway to more widespread web3 adoption starts with familiar web2 onboarding user journeys before branching out further with with non-custodial wallets.

CockroachDB’s success is not guaranteed. It has to overcome significant hurdles to secure a profitable place among well-established database technologies owned by companies with very deep pockets.

The founders of Cockroach Labs wanted to ensure data written in one location would be viewable immediately anywhere on the planet. The use case was simple, but the work needed was herculean.

There is an art to engineering and sometimes engineering can transform art. For Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis, the two worlds collided when they created the open-source graphics program, GIMP.

Cockroach Labs has many things going for it. The company’s approach to distributed database technology is novel, and it has the potential to gain significant market share internationally.

Power laws rule everything around us. This is a core principal of what we have largely come to learn in a world dominated by this narrative, which has also helped proliferate the concept of Asymmetric Upside. Within traditional tech/Web2, due to the compounding nature of moats (most notably network effects) and duopolistic markets, it is […]

Clayton Christensen claims that Uber is not disruptive, and he’s exactly right. In fact, disruption theory often doesn’t make sense when it comes to understanding how companies succeed …

Not all products are disruptive: some are obsoletive. They are more expensive but remove the need for entire categories of products.

The a16z crypto partner is the Midas List’s new no. 1 for 2022, and the venture industry’s most visible, and often controversial, face in the wild west of tokens and NFTs.

We like easy-to-read code because we like easy-to-maintain code. This is why we like Go.

We like lists because they are an objectively good way to organize information. They allow readers to quickly and easily get what they want.

How operational necessity (and tax consequences) dictate the shape of money movement into charities.

You probably need to do fewer things right now. Prioritization, the other definition There’s two loose definitions of prioritization. Prioritization(1): Ordering a todo list. You make a giant list of things you could do, things you should do, things you’d like to do… and then you put a unique number...

A retrospective on usage-based pricing (Part 1)

The original version of the Web based on high-quality organic hypertext links is long gone. It has been largely replaced with captive silos of information targeted at keeping users within walled gardens to the maximum extent with links to external content being marginalized in order to keep the user engagement the highest. Social networks are […]

There are only two ways to make money in business: One is to bundle; the other is to unbundle. So the idea behind unbundling of Airbnb is simple: Pick a niche use case with passionate but unsatisfied guests and then build a business around it.