David Chang

After a year of work my book Building A Startup - A Primer For The Individual Contributor is finally available! https://lnkd.in/erThxvpP If you’re working in or around startups as an IC or technical leader this book is for you. It’s based on 20 years of startup work and will help set you up for success to do more with less, move faster and more correct, and spend more time building features and product people love and less time banging your head at roadblocks and bottlenecks.

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Alistair Gray gave a great talk at Write The Docs Portland, going into detail about our investment in Internal Docs at Stripe. He breaks down our thoughts about issues of fragmentation, discoverability, and document quality - and how we’ve tried to build great tools to improve the state of internal docs at Stripe across all of these axes. In Q&A, he touches on an important theme which is essentially “how do we convince engineers to use the tooling we build.” The answer really boils down to “ruthlessly build what engineers want” while maintaining our core primitives (eg, ownership, doc quality) that we know are vital to the health of Stripe’s knowledge base all-up. Let me know if y’all have any questions - happy to expand more on these themes! https://lnkd.in/em4QRFmH

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Exciting to see Adaptive tackling the slow payments issue in construction with innovative financial management tools! 🏗️ It's clear their platform addresses crucial inefficiencies in the payment chain, benefiting small- and medium-sized businesses in the industry. The team has closed their $19 million Series A round—looking forward to seeing how they expand and enhance financial workflows for even more construction companies. 💡 A great example of tech-driven solutions making a big impact where it's needed most! 🚀 #ConstructionTech #FinancialInnovation #SMBs https://lnkd.in/eBJq3Q93

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At Speakeasy we love working with devex leaders like Michael Heap to continuously raise the bar for what is "best in class" 🔥 We've been super lucky to work with him on what makes a great developer experience for iac and terraform. Come hear him and Thomas Rooney talk through how you can leverage OpenAPI and your API supply chain to build a provider and unlock the Terraform ecosystem. Link to the livestream in the comments 👇 #terraform #codegeneration #openapi

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Polls can be a cheat code for earned media, and a great way to build authority. But there are levels to this. Here's how one of the best I've seen - Capital One - does it. (And what I'd do differently to increase earned coverage). Led by Shena Ashley, PhD, Capital One's Insights Center is a masterclass in leveraging polls to create unique insights that would do incredibly well via earned syndication. Here’s what they do great: ✅ Content that sticks: Crucial issues > fleeting trends. Focusing on topics like financial stability, mobility, and entrepreneurship, it's easier to rationalize investment on topics with a longer shelf life. Their insights + stories can drive coverage for months to come. ✅ Visual storytelling: Data doesn’t have to be dry, and Capital One presents original insights through clear and eye-pleasing visuals that are easy to understand. Publishers like charts, they love colorful charts, and they LOVE colorful charts that are easy to understand. Check, check, check. ✅ Strong methodologies and extensive polling numbers: Capital One frequently involves 7k+ participants in their studies - they are not half a**ing it. Well explained methodologies are table stakes to get your polls covered, and Capital One does a great job outlining their data collection process, sample size, and research methodologies.   ✅ Easy to steal: Each report has multiple easy to take stories/soundbites, and are also written as full pieces of content, which can be taken as whole. Finally --- if I could change one thing... Add a byline. Brand publishing NEEDS a byline - no news outlet wants to cover a story that can't be credited back to a human. All in all, polls can be incredibly valuable for driving earned syndication - check out Capital One's Insights Center in comments for killer examples.

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Some takeaways for a Jeff Hinton interview with timeless insights. My POV as an app builder is that models are now being improved for better UX (faster response/multi-modal) and reasoning capability and cost continues to improve. The technology headroom remains strong, and the integration of LLM into all software experience will continue and expansion of the reach (invasion) of software + intelligence will also continue. - Next word prediction is not merely parroting of training data. To do next word prediction well, LLM needs and already exhibits strong reasoning behavior. This would continue to scale / improve with more data / training. - LLM is a compression of human knowledge. The compression mechanism is identifying similar concepts across domains and reduces duplications among them. This can also be a source of "creativity" as LLM "sees" correlations of seemingly unrelated ideas through this compression. LLM can be more creative as it sees similiarity / correlations across all domains beyond (human) convetional wisdom. - LLM can exceed the quality of its training data. Jeff gave an example of an experiment where a model trained on 50% intentionally incorrectly labeled data, can still perform at 90+% accuracy after training. - Multi-modal models can improve the overall world understanding and lead to better overall reasoning. It does not even need to generate multi-modal output. - Not ML specific, but an interesting life insights. Bad intuition comes from believing (or wanting to believe) everything you are told. It diminishes the ability to make a clear choice that would lead to differentiated success (or failure).

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As a long-time Line 6 Helix user, I found this interview with its architect Eric Klein really interesting. Much good talk about user experience and usability. "If somebody tells you there's a problem with what you're offering them, they're almost always right. But if someone tries to give you a solution to that problem, they're almost always wrong." Chimes strongly with my experiences over the years. Address needs. Solve problems. Taking feature requests from users is how products can die.

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Hey friends - have you used Kafka and can share pain points & feelings on usability? I have a friend working on a project to improve the dev-friendliness and would love to chat (just 15-30 mins) if you're open to it -- comment below :)

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Some context from the #Founder perspective. As liberal as Seattle is as a city with policy and politics, it's incredibly conservative from an investment standpoint. One of the reasons you may not hear big "home-run" type pitches or pitches with sizzle, is simply because investors in Seattle don't like those types of pitches and Founders have been ingrained to not present in that manner. They may say they do, but ask any Founder and they'll tell you how they have been told to size down their pitch or talk about MVPs, first customer, first revenue, etc. or how what matters more is what you can do first couple years rather than the home run. Those early metrics are important by the way, but different from the big home run. Do you know who is receptive to homerun pitches? Investors in the Bay, NYC, Miami, Hong Kong. Seattle is not great for early-stage Founders with many prioritizing raising outside the city. We will be raising capital in the fall and as of now, have no plans of reaching out to Seattle-based VCs. I should also add that our company has a blockchain component and sadly Seattle VCs have not embraced crypto or blockchain. Welcome to #Seattle, Kyle Lui! Hopefully, you can help change the narrative! GeekWire

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Today we're launching our newest candidate quality-of-life feature on Ropes - IDE themes. There's a universal dislike for the rigid IDEs that assessment co's force on candidates. These code editors are slow, clunky, and missing the styes/shortcuts that developers enjoy. Developers are unique, and we work in unique ways. Ropes offers two new options to let candidates keep their style: (1) First, many employers on Ropes allow candidates to work in their own IDEs entirely. We've developed a way to gather insights like you were in the room, while allowing developers to use their daily environments. (2) For cases that need a browser-based IDE - we're giving the ability for candidates to choose their style/editor setup before the assessment starts - so they're comfortable when it begins. --- My bet is that if we build a great experience for candidates, we'll be building a great platform for evaluators, too. I hope you'll follow along as we pursue that mission - and we need help! We're hiring founding engineers in NYC - if you're interested, I'd love to talk to you.

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Check out our second AI feature we've added to the platform below!

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While this is a hardware story, there are tons of parallels in #productengineering for #softwareengineering #product. A quick read too, Thanks to https://lnkd.in/gSBhy5aU

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I am thrilled to announce that Credit Karma (Intuit) has signed an agreement to acquire Zendrive technology and team. This marks a significant milestone in our decade-long journey, and I am incredibly grateful for what we have achieved together. Zendrive pioneered the use of smartphones as telematics devices, leveraging sensor data and employing machine learning and AI to enhance road safety and save lives. Our efforts led to the creation of a new business category—Insurance Qualified Leads (IQL)—bringing substantial value to the auto insurance ecosystem and significant savings for safe drivers. This technology, along with our deep relationship with Credit Karma through the Karma Drive program, ultimately led to this acquisition. This achievement would not have been possible without the remarkable team at Zendrive. Your hard work, resilience, and commitment have been instrumental in our success. I am deeply thankful for your contributions and humbled to have worked alongside such talented individuals. Manish Sachdev, Sumant Hanumante, Aditya Karnik, Jayanta Pal, Chandan Shanbhag, Adam Ward, Anenth Guru, Girish Kadli, Himanshu Chaudhary, Yogesh Maheshwari, Roopkamal Tyagi, Deepanshu Gupta, Rob MacKethan, Rob Hall, Mor Sidi, Sakshi Chandra, Chandrakanth Narreddy, girish bhat, Nikhil Mudaliar, Deepa S., Vishal Ravindra, Ankit Jain, Mohan Sadashiva, Pedro Kroeff, Gina Minick, Syed Ali Haris, Gerry Goldstein, Sean Fleming, Nitin Dileep Salodkar, Pankaj Chawla (Consultant Speaker Strategist) Rajan Vashisht, Prateek Gupta and many many more Special thanks to: - My parents, my soulmate Prerana and my kids. Without your unwavering support this journey would not have been possible.  - My co-founder and dear friend, Jonathan Matus, for his invaluable curiosity and grit. - Dennis Ellis, for his expert leadership over the past two years and during the acquisition process. - Our investors, Tom Hutton, Brian Yee, Darcy Frisch for believing in us. Here's to a bright future and the exciting opportunities ahead! 🌟🥂 #Acquisition #CreditKarma #Zendrive #Innovation #Telematics #AI #Startups #Entrepreneurship https://lnkd.in/gFddNQBS

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Interesting read from DC Palter. Thoughts? ===== "Every founder thinks they want as much cash as they can get, but if they haven’t found product-market fit (and by definition, a pre-revenue company hasn’t found PMF) they’re going to need to pivot at least three times before they get rolling. The more they spend now on what will turn out to be a dead end, the harder it will be to pivot. Attempting to fly before you can crawl is a recipe for crashing." An Open Letter to VCs: Please Get Out of Pre-Seed Investing https://lnkd.in/gzC7HtZ8

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Work at a natural pace. In Cal Newport's new book "Slow Productivity" he walks through 3 components to accomplishment without burnout. 1. Do fewer things 2. Work at a natural pace  3. Obsess over quality Working at a natural pace is an area I'm focused on as I transition to whatever is next in my career. Most of my career's natural pace was driven by anxiety, coffee, HIIT workouts and more caffeine - which I'm pretty sure isn't what he means. In my late 40's though, that just doesn't work anymore. Nor do I want it to. It's a tricky philosophy though because if you're in the startup world I don't know how you build something meaningful and work at a natural pace. I've never seen it happen. It appears this is a philosophy that needs to be applied to a specific time and place vs. everyone, everywhere. Anway, I don't have the answers, I'm just exploring different questions. What I do know is working at a natural place seems to be more appropriate for where I am today. 

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Strategic alignment across product and field is complex and not easy to get right, but it's a pleasure to work alongside Brett Crane, Trevor Jett (Childers), and Jarod Greene. It's wonderful to be in conversation with them, sharing what we have learned, in this webinar: https://lnkd.in/gc-qp7Hk

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