Career

Things you underappreciate if you join a project that has passed the zero-to-one stage: Leverage Distribution Marketing

TL;DR: Everything I’ve worked on in the last decade comes back to one thing: incentives. I didn’t plan it that way. I just keep ending up there. The Thread Charlie Munger said it best: “Show me the incentive, and I will show you the outcome.” I’ve quoted this for years. But recently, I realized it’s not just a quote I like. It’s the lens through which I see everything. ...

Throughout my career, I’ve had consistent success getting jobs at other companies, both small and large. I bring unique ideas and perspectives to the table. I can build and lead small teams. I can communicate clearly and effectively, endure pain, adapt, and I have the hard skills to learn and execute. I also have well-known weaknesses (impatience, aversion to meetings, self-criticism), but that’s not what this post is about. This post is about my weakest muscles: finding PMF, getting my first real customer, and taking a product from zero to one. ...

In 2014, Alan Kay was a guest lecturer in my programming languages class at the University of Toronto. I thought it was cool, but I definitely did not appreciate it as much as I should have. To this day, one of his infamous quotes still resonates with me: “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” A Pattern I Can’t Ignore With the new year, I’ve been reflecting on my career up until this point. ...

I took a ferry from Seattle to Victoria, and all I could think about on the way back was: Which company should I buy (not build) to generate free cash flow? If you’re a seasoned software engineer in the age of AI who lives to build, you’re probably thinking how ridiculous this sounds. Well, Andrew Wilkinson planted a tiny seed in my mind, and it has started germinating. Strap in. This post is about making plans without expectations, how that mindset extends into everything else in life, and if you’re a Swiftie, I’ve got something special at the end for you as well. ...

Onboarding engineers is hard. You need to set up your development environment, build context, navigate the codebase, navigate the organization, understand the system, the product — and the list goes on. I used to believe that the best way to onboard an engineer on day one is to make sure they: Get their development environment set up Make a pull request to the codebase Merge and deploy to production You get an immediate hit of dopamine and experience the end-to-end flow of shipping a feature or fixing a bug. ...