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Our 10 person startup gets acquired by Google, we rebuild our product the Google way, and begin to understand that amazing things are possible at Google, if you play the Google game. A follow up to What I learned at Venmo and What I learned at Socratic. As we started to raise Socratic’s Series B in…
I’m not a guru and I don’t aspire to be one. I certainly don’t have the deep intuition of someone like Rick Rubin. But I’ve been surprised by how often my work requires helping founders tune in to their intuitions instead of their verbal thoughts. “This feels right” or “This feels wrong” has way…
January 2016 Life is short, as everyone knows. When I was a kid I used to wonder about this. Is life actually short, or are we really complaining about its finiteness? Would we be just as likely to feel life was short if we lived 10 times as long? Since there didn't seem any way to answer this…
In 2005, I cofounded Y Combinator, the first "accelerator." Today there are hundreds of them all over the world, but in 2005 what we were doing was so unusual that most people in Silicon Valley regarded us as irrelevant. Y Combinator began the same way as most other startups: with a hypothesis about…
Home is often a reflection of our unique life lived. From inherited art to tchotchkes collected throughout the years, the objects we surround ourselves with take on meaning, adding layers of memories that echo our experiences. The authenticity and intention behind these details continuously inspire…
The 1993 film Dave has an interesting legacy. It did great at the box office, ended up a premium, and later basic cable staple, and everybody loved it. Ebert loved it, and so did Siskel. It’s a movie about a normal, everyday Joe having to take over the most powerful position in the world, and the…
Ernest Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance, became stuck in Antarctic ice. Before long it was crushed, ruined. Shackleton and his 27-man crew then spent 19 months – from January 1915 to August 1916 – rowing 800 miles to safety in tiny lifeboats, with nighttime temperatures hitting 10 degrees below…
Traveling through time in three dimensions 01 Intro Time is a curious thing. It’s a constantly flowing stream that can’t be paused, stopped, or repeated. We experience it, but we can’t control it. We can’t even touch or feel it. To get a better grasp of this weird, intangible resource that governs…
The history of coffee is a bit of a delicious mystery. We don’t have official documentation to confirm exactly who discovered coffee trees for the first time, or who invented coffee as the beverage we know today. However, we do have colorful legends we can use to piece together a rich tapestry of…
Can Duruk, the cofounder and CTO of the mapmaking startup Felt, is perhaps best known as the coauthor of The Margins, a funny and clear-eyed tech and business newsletter he writes with Ranjan Roy. Bef
01 Dec, 2020 I’ve been part of the internet startup scene for a while. There are so many different camps: the bootstrappers, the VC-backed tech-bros, the crypto “investors”, the people marketing their courses on marketing courses, the newsletter gurus, the micro-saas homeboys. The list goes on. Each…
Photo courtesy of Piccino Interviews San Francisco Piccino’s Margherita Sagan and Sheryl Rogat Reflect on Their Journey and the Community They’ve Built March 8, 2023 Piccino Dogpatch 4.7 · Italian · $$ Dogpatch Share is a quintessential neighborhood restaurant that’s been an anchor to the community…
February 25, 2023 The Bridge at Villeneuve-la-Garenne, 1872, Alfred Sisley I have a few links and thoughts I want to share, about both the internet and AI. The internet stuff follows immediately; AI is further down. Here is Rachel Binx, a brilliant artist and creative technologist, on the…
If Tim Ferriss’s 4-Hour Workweek kickstarted the “first wave” of the post-industrial reimagination of work in 2007, 2022 was the year that a newer, and weirder, second wave began. Unlike the first wave, which largely played out at the individual level, this one is happening at the societal level.…
Today’s Scatter Brain is brought to you by AngelList! AngelList offers startups one platform for cap table management and fundraising. Companies like StabilityAI, Harness Wealth, and Syndicate migrated from other cap table vendors in less than a week to remove the friction from their back office.…
In the centre of Gamla Stan, Stockholm’s old town, surprisingly close to the Royal Palace, between charming narrow cobbled streets, stands a beautiful 18th-century building echoing the vision of a cla
Though never afraid to show vulnerability before, Loyle Carner opens himself up more than ever on new album ‘hugo’, shedding the image of UK hip-hop’s perfect ‘nice guy’ to explore his reconnection with his estranged father and his Black heritage, and what it means to become a dad himself 25 October…
School has started up again here in Berkeley, and after attending Back to School Night just this past week, I’ve been reflecting on how much has changed the last few years. I’ve heard that these are the golden years of parenting — my kids are 6 and 9, well past the diapers and toddler tantrums, in…
Go to tennis r/tennis r/tennis Professional tennis discussion. Feel free to visit our sister sub for more information on technique, r/10s. Members Online • by IAMA College Tennis Coach, AMA I am the c
Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports is a landmark album in ambient and electronic music. Although it wasn’t the first ambient album, it was the first album to be explicitly labelled as ‘ambient music’. Music for Airports was released in 1979, though some sources cite 1978 due to its copyright…
What practical tips would you offer for how to live a happy life? If we want to be happier, I think the first place to start is looking at the available options and then working out which to pursue. The way I see it, there are only three avenues to take. We can change how we think, how we spend our…
Say you want to learn about sleep. You see two articles: “Theory and practice of effective sleep” “Seven insights about sleep” Are you drawn to the second? I am. Of course, I hate myself for this because I’ve internalized the idea that lists are cheap and low-class. But I’m still drawn to them.…
How I designed my perfect day by fixating on what I hate Andrew Wilkinson 3 min read· Jul 6, 2017 -- . Last year, my business partner Chris and I sat down to think about what we wanted to achieve at Tiny. We thought up all sorts of lofty goals, but when we really got down to it our true goal was…
Hello internet citizen 👋 My name is Joel Denning – this post exists as a way for me to share common information with people who contact me related to my work on single-spa and other open source projec
...or, what happens when an app company runs buses... Smartbus Citymapper is an app company building a popular transport app for cities. For years we've helped city dwellers to get around by showing them the best public transport options available. In May 2017 we decided to run buses ourselves to…
I gave a guest lecture in an undergraduate software engineering class (CSCE431) at Texas A&M University a few days ago. Now I’ve turned this lecture into a blog post here, and hopefully some people on the Internet will find this useful. If you arrived from a Google search, here are some contexts:…
Patience is a virtue The chemistry of cold-brew coffee is so hot right now Ten hours to make a cup of coffee? Now that's commitment. Jennifer Ouellette – Apr 9, 2020 6:30 am | 172 Cold-brew coffee is so hot right now. Credit: Allrecipes.com Cold-brew coffee is so hot right now. Credit:…
The Unix shell is pure wizardry. With the right incantation of shell spells, you can organise files, process text, compute data, and feed the output of any program to the input of any other. We might even say, paraphrasing Clarke’s Third Law: Any sufficiently clever shell one-liner is…
The most rewarding phases of my life have stemmed from this simple mantra. Ximena Vengoechea 6 min read· Oct 23, 2013 -- I have a confession to make. I have never had a five-year plan. I’ve read GTD and the Action Method. I know all about the importance of setting goals and formulating an actionable…
Monocle is a full text search engine indexed on my personal data, like my blog posts and essays, nearly a decade of journal entries, notes, contacts, Tweets, and hopefully more in the future, like emails and web browsing history. It lets me query this entire dataset to look for anything I’ve seen or…
A peculiar challenge of management is trying to invest in someone’s career development when they themselves are uncertain about their goals. As a manager, you may have more experience and more access to opportunities within the company, but that represents a small slice of someone’s career…
Tony Stubblebine 2 min read· Nov 27, 2020 -- This experiment comes out of my Heavy Mental group (linked, but not a sales pitch). That’s where I test out ideas around applying mindfulness to productivity. An idea I’ve been refining for the last couple years is to go all in on the checklist manifesto.…
Last week I covered some frequently asked questions about lifestyle businesses. Now it's time to talk about what makes a great one. Guidelines, not principles First, let me caveat this by saying that you will find lots of successful businesses that violate these principles. Indeed, I just met with a…
I love lifestyle businesses. I've started a couple (one failed, one sold), before founding a larger business. Lifestyle businesses are intriguing to people, they sound too good to be true but the reality is they are imminently doable. Since I get quite a lot of questions regarding lifestyle…
Applied Capitalism For Fun And Profit I'm a capitalist. A friend of mine is a devoted Marxist. I think we mutually agree that, considering any particular employee, it is in that employee's personal interest to stop selling hours of labor and start renting access to his accumulated capital as soon as…
Update: since I wrote this article, Panelbear has been acquired and I've simplified my stack. In particular, instead of Kubernetes I now use Kamal to deploy my apps. You can read more about it here. This is a long-form post breaking down the setup I use to run a SaaS. From load balancing to cron job…
The biggest tragedy for any founder isn't failure. It's becoming trapped inside a business that you don't actually like. If you could build any type of business you want, why would you build one that makes you miserable? Ideally you wouldn't, but it happens surprisingly often. I've interviewed 500…
It's been said that ideas don't matter, and that only execution does. I wholeheartedly disagree. You need both to succeed, but you can only get so good at execution. A great idea gives you much more leverage. Below is my framework for coming up with great business ideas. The Basics Most people…
encoding="utf-8"? By Julien Blervaque and Yannick Castaing, Ubisoft Film and Television- Paris Between January 2020 and March 2021 we were quite busy at Ubisoft Animation Studio (in-house studio of Ubisoft Film & Television) working on a 70min long special episode of our TV series Rabbids Invasion.…
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