Board

Economic models and the perfect role

Talented and ambitious employees are quietly rising up against one of the final vestiges of employer-dominated eras: employment contracts

Welcome to Catching the Biggest Fish. I have 10+ years experience in software engineering at a variety of companies from “Big N" to startups. I write a biweekly blog post discussing various topics about working as a software engineer, running a company, and ideas on tech. It’s completely free to subscribe, so please do so if you find this content interesting.

Establishing a career path for Developer Relations is one more step forward in creating a mature industry. It makes a bold statement that we know our value, we’re here to stay, and here’s our plan on how to move forward in our careers! I recently rolled out a Career Path with my team at Camunda, and

Developer Relations (DevRel) is an interdisciplinary role that sits in a border space between product, engineering, and marketing. The daily work looks very different from company to company, and because DevRel is often rolled into other organizations like product or marketing, it may not have its own separate career path – a document that describes […]

Indian startups have seen ~ 10,000 layoffs in 2022. The Ken looks at which jobs are safe and which ones are not

How can you tell the companies who are earnestly trying to improve apart from the ones who sound all polished and healthy from the outside, whilst rotting on the inside? This seems to be on a lot o…

This is a book summary of Linchpin by Seth Godin. Check out this Linchpin summary to learn about its key ideas and lessons.

Plus! Cash as Cosmetics; Two Inflations; AI; Offline-to-Online; Starlink; Diff Jobs ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌Open in browserThe Diffhow social platforms try to control the rate of fame and attention inflationlook at how YouTube's business model has evolved over timethe many levels at which a company can be a search business

Spurred by cheap loans and investors desperate to boost returns, buyout firms roam every corner of the corporate world.

Don’t build the startup ship of Theseus.

Plus! Mobility; More Housing, Just in Time; Wargamification; Worker Shortages; Taiwan; Diff Jobs ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌Open in browserWelcome to the weekly free edition of The Diff.

What free cash flow has to do with growth, and why Chinese businessmen in the South East Asian diaspora obsessed over it.

Revenue recognition for software companies sounds boring but is actually fascinating and frequently hilarious.

Why aligning incentives with your customers is key to capturing the value you create.

After nearly two decades leading the file-sharing company, its co-founder and CEO talks about how his understanding of value in enterprise software has evolved.

A lot of pitch decks I review have a slide that really shouldn't be there: the exit strategy slide. As an early-stage startup, it's downright nonsensical, and it shouldn't be part of your deck at all.

Imagine there are two ice cream vendors at the beach. They sell exactly the same flavors at exactly the same price. Beachgoers are indifferent, so they walk to whatever vendor is closer. Where should each ice cream vendor park their stall to maximize the number of customers? One solution might be for each vendor to serve half of the beach, situating themselves 1/4 from the end (so that nobody has to walk more than 1/4 a mile). ----A----|----B---- This might be the "socially optimal" solution

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

The second part of a three part piece on incentives. It turns out that if you've grokked the primary incentives of an industry, you can do one other thing: identify aberrations, and use that as a guide to dig further.

I quit Facebook back in 2011 for a lot of reasons, but perhaps the most crucial was to rebel against its core mission: Connecting the world. I was over-connected with the world, acquaintances and friends from the past, and I wanted out. Zuckerberg has repeatedly doubled down on the toxic idea that we should only have one self, one pers...