As an employee, startup stock options are hard. I'm feeling pretty confident by now, but only because I've seen my friends get burned and been burned myself. What's so hard? 1. At one company, my option contract was to be signed "at a future date", not together with my employment contract. In
I'm both a millennial and a startup founder and both of these groups are often considered flaky perhaps, unable to commit. They seem like they're, flip-flopping between startup ideas or between jobs, between relationships. And I think all of this comes from different expectations to commitment. So I want to explore commitment. Some of the
How do you end up with an outlier success? I guess the common advice would be to "leave your comfort zone". That's hard to do. In the comfort zone, everything makes sense. Things work. Clients are using the product. You might even be growing slightly. It would be stupid to mess with something that works, right?
My nervous system is in a civil war over my actions. The dopamine-seeking side keeps winning. Dopamine itself is crucial: it's a neurotransmitter driving you to achieve external goals. The bad part is being driven to the easiest, least meaningful ones. I try not to feed the enemy. Soft-blocking addictive websites and subsections like recommendations helps.
There's an abrupt life transition almost everyone goes through: school to job. You might go from middle school to manual labour, or PhD to teacher. But regardless of details, a more gradual shift would be better. Most entry-level jobs could be apprenticeships that mix education and work. Why mix them? Trying to do a job well gives
Startups have high variance: the top few % reap most of the rewards. The same is true for artists of all kind, and to a lesser extent, software engineers: some Waymo engineers earn 100x the salary of the lowest-paid programmers. Risk is usually taken to be bad. But it might not be if you can influence the outcome. If you
Who needs an office these days? It’s a needless expense. I currently work alone, and when I meet others I do it via video call or on a walk outside. Plus, private offices are expensive. A desk in a co-working space is 150€ — and not an improvement over my working-from-home situation — and private room rents tend
I ran my first design sprint last week. According [https://www.gv.com/sprint/] to the creators: > The sprint is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers. The starting point of a sprint could be a problem like “website visitors don’t understand our product.” Monday is spent mapping
I recently reflected on my productivity and discovered, to my horror, that I’m doing pretty badly! I used to be very organized and do lots of creative, important work consistently every day for months on end. Somehow, I had lost that in the past 3-5 years. Doing what comes naturally is a lousy method for doing open-ended,
Every classification task is linearly separable in the right feature space. This statement is a clue to building ML solutions that scale to many different use cases. Here’s a visual explanation. Say you have data points in a given two-dimensional vector space. If you can use a straight line to separate the two classes, the dataset (and prediction
