bthdonohue
👋 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 situations when people ascribe causal power to something other than culture, I’m immediately suspicious. The…
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 lonely and hard. I believed the same when I worked in construction. At the time, any questions about…
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 has been “we are doing a lot better than I expected.” Productivity is up in some places, down in some…
To effect social change, companies need to talk about money — how they make it and how it might reinforce racial disparities. Chad Dickerson 10 min read· Jun 29, 2020 -- Press enter or click to view image in full size Photo: Matt Crossick — PA Images/Getty Images Suddenly, American business has…
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 Gmail, I wrote documents on Docs, I listened to Pandora, I viewed photos on TheFacebook. Why did I need…
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 than nothing, it is not good enough. The board diversity problem is a symptom of a much broader…
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 York Stock Exchange. A cluster of the company's executives stood near Prince, ready to shout out a…
The move is almost certain to face a court challenge and signals the latest salvo by President Trump to crack down on online platforms. President Trump and his supporters have long accused social media companies like Twitter of silencing conservative voices. Published May 28, 2020Updated June 2,…
For all the high-minded talk among techies, their new favorite app is an invite-only (so far) social network for mingling with one another. A screenshot of Clubhouse, a social media app where venture capitalists are gathering.Credit...via Varadh Jain Published May 19, 2020Updated Oct. 29, 2021 See…
Sometimes no user interface is the best user interface Max Braun 5 min read· Feb 10, 2020 -- Press enter or click to view image in full size Paper on Thanksgiving Day, 2019. Content: © 2019 The New York Times Company There’s something special about the layout of a print-edition newspaper. A news…
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 Internet’s gatekeepers. Microsoft emerged victorious with its Internet Explorer. During the 2008 financial…
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
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 challenge is to use what Geoffrey Moore calls the bowling pin strategy: find a niche where the chicken-and-egg…
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 that’s OK. I’m talking about Amazon Simple Queue Service, which nobody ever calls by its full name.…
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 “bad one” — asked too many questions. Questions like “Why are we building this now?” “Are we sure…
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…
Note: This story has not been updated for several years. [This post is adapted from an item from the November Six Colors members-only newsletter. Become a subscriber today to support the site and get access to our monthly newsletter, a members-only podcast, and more.] When I was a kid, I loved,…
There’s a sort of breathless industry-specific fact in software that goes around every so often. Revenue, and the underlying source of revenue, in the consumer web, whether impressions or sales, tracks remarkably closely to lower latency. This is from avoiding bounces, making conversion better, etc.…
If there is one debate that is the endlessly circling “Star Wars versus Star Trek” of product development, it is what I refer to as “The Tradeoff Between Quality and Time” (TTBQT). Here’s how it typically goes: Alice: The way we’ve built X is pretty janky/slow/hacky. I have a better solution. Bob:…
When it comes to the so-called “consumerization of the enterprise,” a workplace tool that looks an awful lot like Pinterest seems like it would be the trend’s final form. Brooklyn-based Air is buildin
awaldstein Dec 1, 2019 Truer words were never said.Spent a big chunk of my career as the fixer, hired gun brought in to public companies to turn them around brand and distribution wise, startups to figure go to market out.The largest wins with some crazy hold-on-for-dear-lilfe exceptions are always…
If you took a minute to think back and pick your favorite conference talk, I have no idea what it was about, but I bet the talk was designed to tell a story. Likewise, I bet your favorite book, even if it’s non-fiction, is lanced through by a crisp, continuous narrative. If you wanted to explain…
This is a draft guide for staffeng.com Most career ladders define a single, uniform set of expectations for Staff Engineers. These career ladders attempt to identify the commonalities across many folks performing similar roles in their organization, but in the end these ladders are a tool that apply…
hing to do with the coronavirus: what this change really means is the biggest missing piece in the Anti-Amazon Alliance is now all-in.
Swiffer and Shelf Space
Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it. Many of us would like to pin the…
On March 30, 2020, we enabled folks to opt into a beta dark mode on Stack Overflow. Let’s talk about the work that went into it. Dark mode opt-in banner I’m Aaron Shekey, Stack Overflow’s principal product designer on design systems. I help design all the interface components that get assembled into…
I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it's a…
A greater portion of the world’s work, organizing, and care-giving is moving onto digital platforms and tools that facilitate connection and productivity: video conferencing, messaging apps, healthcare and educational platforms, and more. It’s important to be aware of the ways these tools may impact…
To stop coronavirus we will need to radically change almost everything we do: how we work, exercise, socialize, shop, manage our health, educate our kids, take care of family members. We all want things to go back to normal quickly. But what most of us have probably not yet realized—yet will soon—is…
Lauren Smiley 13 min read· Mar 25, 2015 -- Press enter or click to view image in full size In the new world of on-demand everything, you’re either pampered, isolated royalty — or you’re a 21st century servant. By Lauren Smiley Angel the concierge stands behind a lobby desk at a luxe apartment…
Are you chained to the green dot? Turn it off and break free. As a general rule, nobody at Basecamp really knows where anyone else is at any given moment. Are they working? Dunno. Are they taking a break? Dunno. Are they at lunch? Dunno. Are they picking up their kid from school? Dunno. Don’t care.…
The Shift We’ve always hoped that our digital tools would create connections, not conflict. We have a chance to make it happen. Credit...Rebekka Dunlap Published March 17, 2020Updated April 2, 2020 See more of our coverage in your search results.Encuentra más de nuestra cobertura en los resultados…
When meeting notes startup Hugo decided to instate a maximum of four hours of meetings per week, they noticed something interesting. By forgoing meetings, and sharing company information through notes, Slack and video instead, the team found it was better informed about company projects and goals…
“Technical debt” is a metaphor for all software design choices that turn out to be suboptimal, no longer valid, or just plain wrong. These choices incur a cost on future development, and the shortcuts taken today will later slow you down until you “pay back” the debt by fixing the problems. And it’s…
Explore the things you love. Log into Facebook
Over the years, Apple has built up a portfolio of services and add-ons that you pay for. Starting with AppleCare extended warranties and iCloud data subscriptions, they expanded to Apple Music a few years ago, only to dramatically ramp up their offerings last year with TV+, News+, Arcade, and Card.…
Last June, more than two years after his father-in-law assigned him the task of bringing peace to the Middle East, Jared Kushner held a big kickoff conference in Bahrain to unveil the economic portion of his plan—and it did not go well. For starters, Palestinian leadership boycotted the entire…
No articles.