Guy Rom

Question for engineering leaders (managers, directors, VP's, etc): I'm curious about the current landscape of developer productivity analysis + management tools - things like LinearB and Jellyfish. Which tool, if any, are you using? Any opinions/pros/cons on the tool you're using (or the entire domain overall)?

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~40% of Frec’s customers are engineers working in tech, many of whom expect frequent and large capital gains. They also prefer to self-manage their money, which makes Frec an ideal platform. Meet Evan: an engineering leader who upgraded from investing in ETFs to direct indexing. Direct indexing appealed to Evan because it offers comparable returns to his ETFs while saving him money on advisory and ETF fees. “ETFs are true and tested, and giving folks a different way of investing in the market while saving more money is really appealing.” He’s used many other robo-advisors and other fintech tools, but “Frec seems to maximize tax loss harvesting opportunities better than any other product that I’ve used.” He also likes Frec's transparent fee structure.  “I feel like with a lot of other companies, that’s muddled in with the cost of investments,” he told us, “and you don’t really know how much you’re paying or how much you’re not saving as a result. I think Frec does a really good job of laying all of that out and giving you a true understanding of the cost of these investment products.” Read more about his Frec journey here ⬇

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This old post from Ben Horowitz highlights a common struggle among entrepreneurs – expecting the team to perform seamlessly without investing in training. People are not plug-and-play; they bring diverse backgrounds and perspectives. You gotta spend time training and educating on your business, the way you want to talk to customers, and the right experience you want for them. Training is a powerful tool and needs to be done regularly! https://lnkd.in/ekv8c6WD #Entrepreneurship #Training #BusinessSuccess

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��Anybody up for some ramen? I am excited to share that I am back in the garage, building again (it’s actually a house in the Berkeley Hills). We are taking the wraps off of Supercog AI, a new startup focused on solving Application Integration using LLM powered agents. My co-founder in this new venture is a great friend of mine (and a former co-founder partner), Alex Osborne. Alex and I have worked around the application integration space for a long time, and we are unrealistically excited about applying the GenAI stack to this problem. Not many people relish the task to get some bits to move from system A to system B. But it’s a critical job to be done, and that’s led to a lot of brittle scripts, a myriad of inflexible “no code” tools, and a lot of hand crafted SQL. But the power of the Large Language Model, trained on a huge corpus of information, offers a remarkable tool to solve this problem. The LLM you use today already knows the APIs of hundreds of popular systems. It knows the SQL dialects of every major database. It understands the semantics and data schemas of many popular SaaS systems. It understands much of the specific domain in which your business operates. I like to call the AI revolution “the last platform shift”. That may turn out to be hyperbole, but I definitely believe we are in the very early stages of seeing what this new stack can enable. I know we are hardly the first folks to claim that “amazing stuff is coming!”. But this is why Alex and I have decided to focus on a real and hard problem. If we can prove that LLMs can power a new way to solve this problem, it will be the first successful *new* approach in 15 years.. We will have much more to share about this new platform soon. In the meantime, if you’re interested in getting a peek - or even better if you have application or data integration tasks that you would like some help with - please reach out because we want to help. #genai #startups #backinthegarage

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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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AI is innovating a variety of industries across the US and Agriculture is no exception. 🐄 My new friend, Catie McVey, has created a new "Agtech" startup that uses patented 3D Modeling and Machine Learning algorithms to evaluate the health of cows by looking at specific characteristics such as hoof morphology and facial characteristics. Working with her to architect how to get source data from "The Stockyards" to "The Cloud" has been a lot of fun. I am constantly discovering new ways AI can make an impact in industries from legal, to healthcare and now agriculture! Read more about Catie's journey on RIoT - Internet of Things' blog #AI #software #agtech

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I can't wait for the release of our podcast episode next week! We talked about effective collaboration between product managers and engineering managers. I also summarized my tips to EMs in this blog post: https://lnkd.in/dfx5k43H I hope you find it helpful

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I recently came across this thought-provoking article on feature teams vs. empowered teams, and it got me reflecting on our own journey at Meero. As we've been launching and scaling multiple products simultaneously after our pivot (AutoRetouch ProperShot CarCutter), it's been quite the adventure. And I have to admit, some of the scenarios described in the article felt pretty relatable. 😅 In our mission to disrupt various industries and stay ahead of the curve, we've definitely relied on our feature teams to deliver those critical capabilities. Our product managers have worked tirelessly to make it happen, and their hard work has been instrumental in getting us to where we are today. However, as a CEO, I've also come to realize that I don't have all the answers when it comes to product strategy. I'm not some all-knowing, visionary founder with a crystal ball 🔮 That's why I believe it's so important to empower our product & tech teams and trust in their expertise. What really struck me was how much our approach at Meero aligns with Marty Cagan's philosophy of empowered product teams. When we made the decision to pivot our business model, we knew that empowering our product & tech teams would be key to our success. Since then, we've been working hard to create an environment where our teams are laser-focused on understanding and solving customer problems, prioritizing outcomes over outputs, and having the autonomy to make the right decisions. Is it a smooth transition? Not at all. It requires a significant shift in mindset and a lot of trust. But I'm convinced it's the right direction for Meero as we navigate this pivotal stage in our growth story. By empowering our tech teams, we can leverage their diverse perspectives, deep customer insights and creative problem-solving skills to build truly remarkable products. I believe that the most successful companies strike a balance between a clear, overarching vision and the autonomy for product teams to innovate and experiment. It's not about having all the answers upfront, but rather about setting a strong direction and then empowering our talented teams to find the best path forward. Embracing the empowered product team model isn't easy, because it means letting go of control (never easy for a CEO 😂). But I'm excited to see where this journey takes us. One thing I know for sure: we have the right people on board to make it happen. 🌟 Maxence Bernard François Pallier Clément Boutignon Ludovic Dupuy Christof Opresnik Alexis Boyer Fanny Kauffer Jérémy Foucault Estelle Lichnowski #meero #featureteams #ai #empoweredteams

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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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In just over three weeks, we're going to host our first SW2con.com. We started this conference because we were bone-certain that AI was going to change the nature, process and ecosystem of software development and deployment forever. We're just at the very beginning of that change, and we expect the next 3-5 years to contain bursts of innovation, setbacks, disappointments, successes, open source standards evolving, and all that you would see in a new ecosystem. We're also sure that there will come a spate of conferences. There are already several in the Bay Area. We're also sure that having a conference that is purposefully a) intimate; b) not in the Bay Area; and c) focused in its curation provides a value in that simply can't be duplicated. It is with all of that in mind that our excitement builds for the first SW2con.com. And we hope that you'll join us. The agenda: https://lnkd.in/gj9fNwbD

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Last week, I sat down with ⚡Arnon Shimoni, a product leader, focused on monetization at Storytel to talk about what he's learned about the modern monetization stack, building billing systems in house, and the benefits of managing entitlements via a separate service. I loved this conversation, and we’ll release the entire interview soon on youtube. In the meantime, here's a great clip where Arnon discusses personal experiences with hard-coded pricing & packaging. Highlights: 1. Why it's so hard to build internal monetization services --> you just can't predict how monetization will change as you interact with the market. 🔮 2. Why he's argued for the separation of billing & entitlements --> There's an education piece that's missing. Everyone knows about feature flags, no one knows about entitlements. This problem creeps up on companies, and then they look for solutions, and by then it really hurts because everything has been hardcoded.🔒 3. The one exception & when none of this matters → when you have a very simple product that you don't intend to mature and whose pricing & packaging you don't intend to change. 😉 Through years of experience operating within the systems that govern feature access, pricing & packaging, quoting, and billing, Arnon has become an expert in SaaS monetization infrastructure. He's been an engineer and product leader by day, having held product roles at Pleo & SQream, prior to Storytel. He's also a generous writer, sharing much of his knowledge on his blog, which I've linked to in the comments. #pricing #packaging #b2bsaas #monetization

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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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We hosted our first ever Hangar DX dinner in SF this week! We kept the dinner intimate with 12 DX leaders from Slack, Notion, Figma, Reddit, Amplitude, LinkedIn, Yelp, Benchling, Babylist and AMD. This gave everyone opportunity to have open unfiltered conversation about the DevEx space today, and form real connections. These were some of my most surprising findings: 🌟 None of the DevEx teams have a Product Manager - it is extremely hard to find a PM for DevEx who truly understands and aligns with developers' complex workflow needs 🌟 Even though everyone feels the pain of ownership, no one is using any off-the-shelf IDP today 🌟 Roadmap is primarily driven bottoms up - everyone uses some form of surveys and internal interviews to inform the roadmap 🌟 Influencing C-suite and explaining impact seems to be on top of mind Thank you Poya Osgouei for helping host the dinner, and Aviator for sponsoring :) #developerproductivity #developerexperience #devex

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Paradigm's Reth AlphaNet simplifies developing on cutting-edge features like EIP-3074, 7212, and 2537. Just some of the things I'm very excited about for each one of those standards: [EIP-3074: Better Account Abstraction] Custom smart contracts for every account are the wrong path for account abstraction due to complexity and trust issues. EIP-3074 maps better to how people use the Internet in 2024: wallet as identity, invoker as service provider (e.g., Google), and dApp as the product. It enables gas sponsorship and transaction batching, the two main features people care about in Account Abstraction. EIP-3074 will likely be adopted by every embedded wallet provider to avoid integrating EIP-4337 AA providers. [EIP-3074: Immutable Cold Wallet Manager] EIP-3074 enables cold wallets to use invokers as withdrawal managers, enforcing whitelisted addresses, amount limits, frequency, and timelocks. The invoker smart contract, controlled by the cold wallet, maintains security while allowing fund movements that satisfy the policy. [EIP-7212: Self-Custodial Passkey Wallets] EIP-7212 is crucial for integrating passkey wallets into Ethereum for wallets using Account Abstraction (EIP-4337 and EIP-3074). It introduces precompiled contracts for secp256r1, enabling efficient signing and reducing gas costs. EIP-7212 allows self-custodial passkey support, with wallets securely storing private keys and utilizing precompiles for efficient transactions. It's a significant step towards making passkey wallets first-class citizens on Ethereum, but secp256r1 should be the ultimate goal for native EOA schemes. [EIP-2537: Replacing ECDSA & EdDSA MPC] EIP-2537 introduces efficient BLS12-381 curve operations, enabling safer, more robust MPC compared to ECDSA for Account Abstraction wallets. BLS signatures natively support threshold signing and distributed key generation, reducing complexity and attack surface of MPC implementations. ECDSA and EdDSA were not designed with MPC in mind, often requiring complex workarounds that can introduce inefficiencies and vulnerabilities. The adoption of EIP-2537 and BLS signatures for EIP-3074 and 4337 wallets is a good step towards more robust and efficient MPC, but bls12-381 should be the ultimate goal for native EOA schemes.

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In the AI gold rush, I believe the trick isn't just to mine; it’s to sell shovels. I'm here to break down the AI landscape, highlighting why startups should focus on AI tooling or infrastructure rather than directly competing with giants. 🚀 Find out why leveraging AI for backend support or specialized processes could be your startup's winning strategy. 🔍 #AI #Startups #Innovation #Technology #Entrepreneurship #MachineLearning #DataScience #BusinessStrategy

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Sharing some nuggets of wisdom on open source, PLG, and infrastructure products, from my friend Ben Sabrin of Weaviate on our Brick by Brick podcast Garuda Ventures (link to full episode in the comments): 💡 On PLG and open source: "The biggest innovation in OSS and PLG is you're shrinking the 'prove it' phase of the sales cycle. You're letting people go figure out on their own that your product can solve their problems." ➡ On top-down vs. bottom-up in OSS/PLG: "Not every PLG product is meant to be complemented with a top-down motion. But if what you enable is strategic, you absolutely should be taking the bottoms-up user signal and you should be attacking those accounts top down." ✅ On the bar being higher when you are an infra company - we lived and heard this message every day from Todd McKinnon and Frederic Kerrest at Okta: "When you're an infrastructure company, a platform that other people build their business on top of, that comes with responsibility; if somehow you're product isn't working, that means their business isn't working. You need to have extreme empathy for customers." #garudaventures #brickbybrick

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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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