Almost every weekday for six years, Christie Smythe took the F train from Park Slope downtown to her desk at Brooklyn’s federal court, in a pressroom hidden on the far side of a snack bar. Smythe, who
follow us Newsletter sign up Doing Old Things Better Vs. Doing Brand New Things Chris Dixon mental models & frameworks tech trends 10.18.20 New technologies enable activities that fall into one of two
Dec 12 2020 Short story: Google Chrome installs an updater called Keystone on your computer, which is bizarrely correlated to massive unexplained CPU usage in WindowServer (a system process), and made
When people get married, they are often quite sure that they will have a small, quiet wedding. None of these massive, extravagant parties with hundreds of people for us! We’ll just invite close family
Before we start: I'm hosting the first-ever The Pragmatic Summit on 11 February, 2026, in San Francisco. 400 top engineers and leaders as we answer the question: How is AI reshaping software engineering, dev workflows, and the modern engineering stack? Register here. Having worked for a decade as an…
(5 minutes read) My oldest son Noah turned 7 three months ago. If he could trade his family for a 2 hour session of playing minecraft, he would do it in a heartbeat. The other love of his life is Supe
macOS Big Sur 11.0.1 RC2 Full Installer.app error = “An Error occurred installing macOS” When you attempt to install or upgrade on a T2 Mac, you will get the error “The bridgeOS update doesn’t satisfy
Several months ago a friend of mine reached out to me because he was consideringchanging from an individual contributor (IC) role to an engineering management (EM)role at work. Given the fact that I’v
Some time back, I was working on a project where it felt like the timebomb of technical debt was exploding in our faces. We couldn’t refactor the whoositz because of the whatsitz and when we asked abo
The one thing that’s drilled into your head as a business major and leader is, “here is how you succeed.” Accordingly, you are taught best practices – things you do to optimize success. As you would e
By and Joshua Brustein October 7, 2020 at 4:00 AM EDT Like many future Donald Trump voters, Jason Gelinas felt something shift inside him during the presidency of Barack Obama. Things were going OK fo
“ Software contracts are better than first-lien debt. You realize a company will not pay the interest payment on their first lien until after they pay their software maintenance or subscription fee. W
September 2020 Mozilla is in an absolute state: high overheads, falling usage of Firefox, questionable sources of revenue and now making big cuts to engineering as their income falls. Mozilla's top ex
Since the pandemic started, in what has been one of the most tumultuous business environments on record, something really special happened for a number of Notation portfolio companies – they became pr
This twitter thread seemed to strike a chord with people, rather astonishingly so. I am transcribing parts of it for the sake of longevity and findability. I keep talking to engineers who are antsy to get to senior and beyond, frustrated that it is taking so long. And I've encountered one very, very…
Like many people, I have most of my best ideas in the shower. This is sometimes annoying: I could use more than one shower’s worth of good ideas a day, but I’d rather not end up as a shrivelled yet in
At around 7 am on a quiet Wednesday in August 2017, Marcus Hutchins walked out the front door of the Airbnb mansion in Las Vegas where he had been partying for the past week and a half. A gangly, 6'4"
I always aim to purchase the largest grade fish, 7 to 10 pounds and up. Why? The flesh is nicer. Thicker, fattier, richer flakes of flesh. You’ll never see fish of this grade at your average grocery s
In the year 2020, Jenny Eastwood became addicted to bad news. The 26-year-old from Auckland, New Zealand, couldn’t stop checking the narratives of the deadly pandemic, police brutality, protests, cons
A summary of today’s changes to 3.1.3 Other Purchase Methods: Your app must use Apple’s in-app-purchase (IAP) system for all purchases made in the app. Unless they’re purchases for goods or services t
Welcome back. Have you thought about subscribing? It's free. seths.blog/subscribe Long work is what the lawyer who bills 14 hours a day filling in forms does. Hard work is what the insightful litigato
Microsoft is working with Walmart on its efforts to buy TikTok's U.S. business from China's ByteDance, Axios has learned from multiple sources close to the process. The state of play: The idea would b
👋 Hi! I’m Julie Zhuo. I help companies scale and build people-centric products informed by data. I’m the author of a popular management book. I used to lead design for the Facebook app. The Looking Glass is my once-a-month-ish musings on products, teams, and our journey as builders. Once upon a…
I often describe myself as a cultural determinist, more as a way to differentiate myself from people with other dominant worldviews, though I am not a strict adherent. It’s more that in many situation
Not a lot is written about being a female founder and CEO. I used to believe that my journey as a startup founder was the same as any other founder's experience, regardless of gender, in that it is lo
Most (all?) of our portfolio companies have been working remotely for over three months now. So have we at USV. The initial experience with remote work has been mostly positive. The typical comment ha
To effect social change, companies need to talk about money — how they make it and how it might reinforce racial disparities. Published in Marker · 10 min read · Jun 29, 2020 -- Photo: Matt Crossick —
Back when there were rumors of Google building an operating system, I thought “Lol.” Then I watched then-PM Sundar Pichai announce Chrome OS. My heart raced. It was perfect. I got my email through Gma
This is a topic of great importance and one that we in the tech/startup sector have not done a good job with. We wait until a company is ready to go public and then address it. While that is better th
On Friday, September 13, 2019, Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn, cofounders of the San Francisco internet security firm Cloudflare, stood on a slim marble balcony overlooking the floor of the New Yo
Trump Prepares Order to Limit Social Media Companies’ Protections The move is almost certain to face a court challenge and signals the latest salvo by President Trump to crack down on online platforms
The Hot New Thing in Clubby Silicon Valley? An App Called Clubhouse For all the high-minded talk among techies, their new favorite app is an invite-only (so far) social network for mingling with one a
Disruptions, downturns, and recessions make the weak weaker and the strong stronger. It was true centuries ago, and it is true today. The 2001 downturn turned telecom and cable giants into the Interne
Content creators are some of the most underappreciated and misunderstood people in the entertainment industry. Over the past few years, I’ve become obsessed with the world of content creators, the fut
2010-08-21 A huge challenge for user-generated websites is overcoming the chicken-and-egg problem: attracting users and contributors when you are starting with zero content. One way to approach this c
In my position I probably shouldn’t have a favorite AWS product, just like you shouldn’t have a favorite child. I do have a fave service but fortunately I’m not an (even partial) parent; so let’s hope
At a recent happy hour, I struck up a conversation with a product manager. I told him I was a product designer, and he asked “one of the good ones, or one of the bad ones?” A designer on his team — a
John Allspaw has a great tweet on problem discovery: I’ve always loved the tweet, but I only recently noticed the paper he cites in the thread. It’s called “ The Art of Problem Discovery: Adaptive Thinking for Innovation and Growth “, by Brian Mathews. In the prologue, the paper tells the origin…
Shouts & Murmurs September 16, 2019 Illustration by Luci Gutiérrez Hello, I am a woman on a blue-and-green sphere that has dollops and doinks of mountains all over it. Some of the mountains on my cosmic sphere splooge out thick liquid fire spurts that run downhill and cool and turn into vacation…
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