Intentional Assimilation
The paper Does the “Melting Pot” Still Melt? Internet and Immigrants’ Integration aligns with feedback I’ve often shared with immigrants who come to the U.S. for college or early in...
Sparcity is Entropy to Innovation
Most companies in our portfolio are distributed to some degree, and I believe remote teams are here to stay. But founders should recognize the inherent challenges and take measures to...
Thoughts on AI (early 2024 edition)
This is the transcript of a video series I recorded to share some perspectives on AI for the layperson. I did everything from memory and in one pass, which means...
Word2Vec from Scratch
Word2Vec was a pivotal paper published a decade ago by researchers at Google. They showed that by attempting to predict a word from their neighbors (or the neighbors from the...
Personal Goals 2023
This document summarizes my goals for the year 2023. The goals themselves are not listed in any particular order, but they are grouped by category. I am doing this for...
Infinite Thought Leadership
Traditionally the Turing test will attempt to validate whether the machine is as smart as a person. However, consider what makes you think a piece of text was generated by...
On Over-Employment
I recently discovered an article on overemployment, a term referring to holding multiple full-time jobs secretly. While some, often low-income individuals, juggle multiple part-time roles out of necessity, overemployment typically...
Portfolio Simulator
This document is intended to help those interested in venture capital think about the asset class and potential for returns. Unless specified, all results are net to LPs, so carry...
On Dev Shops
Companies often turn to software development consulting shops for a helping hand to build or enhance their products. At first glance, this appears to be a rational decision, but hidden...
The Hard Work Dilemma
During a recent conversation with a colleague, we discussed the idea of work ethics and the impact they have on personal and professional development. This is a subject that has...
Tiny Slack GPT
I made a simple, single file script to run GPT in your slack organization. It can participate in conversations when mentioned, summarize long threads, and query a sqlite database containing...
To Manage, or be Managed
As someone who has had the opportunity to manage teams of 100 or more individuals, as well as being managed, I have gained some experience and knowledge that I hope...
Personal Goals 2022
This document summarizes my goals for the year 2022. The goals themselves are not listed in any particular order, but they are grouped by category. I am doing this for...
Startup Compensation
In the startup world, many conversations stall while discussing compensation. This is unsurprising, given that the upside is composed of cash, stock options, growth prospects, and possibly a bespoke role....
Future of Knowledge Work
Knowledge workers are broadly the professionals who use primarily their brain to do their job, as opposed to jobs that require physical exertion. Another way people refer to this distinction...
Growth
An acquisition that pays 10 times revenue is generally considered a success story (average multiples might be half that). If that’s so, then why are VCs willing to pay 20x...
Thoughts on Product Lifecycle
When we invest in a new company, I spend the first few weeks getting to know the team to understand their current challenges to help where I can. A common...
On Technical Debt
Code is like cars and buildings. It requires regular upkeep and recurrent care to perform well. But when it comes to software, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. While car maintenance...
Startup Survey
I reached out to a few acquaintances who have recently been involved in or are planning to found a startup. My objective was to gather some quick and dirty data...
Mindshare and high-performance teams
Some researchers claim that nonverbal communication accounts for the majority of the information transmitted during in-person interactions. Followers of this theory use supporting evidence invoking the complexity of our facial...
How I'm spending my sabbatical
After finishing college at UMass Amherst, I went straight into my first job. I packed my blue 2001 Honda Civic, and drove across the country, hoping to find my place...
Behavioral Trade-Offs
Over the years, I’ve distilled patterns that seem common among top performing engineers. These in particular are interesting because as a novice manager, I often leaned towards their respective anti-patterns,...
How to hire data-driven PMs/Designers
At FindTheBest (later Graphiq), we have spent a lot of time building a knowledge graph, refining our product development processes, and learning data science techniques to enable data-driven decision making....
Intuition vs Analytics in UX
Much like economics, UX is a very polarized field. On one hand, you have the traditional practitioners who believe good UX is solely the product of good intuition. These people...