We get better at what we practice.
Although I would never claim to be a perfect blogger, this kind of writing comes easily to me: I've been writing blog posts since 1998, and can track almost every career progression to something I wrote online. I love sharing my thoughts in this ...
February 27, 2021
Brass tacks: I have three roles at my company that I need to fill immediately. In each case, you'll be working with me directly.
The first is a Senior Product Manager. I'm looking for someone who is comfortable leading sprints, writing stories, and working in an interdisciplinary way across teams, but ...
February 24, 2021
I'm terrified for the future and not sure where to begin.
I have a young, teenage cousin who has apparently been having panic attacks; not because of school or generalized anxiety, but because he has a real sense that the world will have disintegrated in his lifetime. The signs of climate ...
February 24, 2021
One. So here's the deal: I didn't get to do a birthday post this year because it was the day after the attempted coup, and it just didn't feel right at the time. We're still in the aftermath - it's been a little bit over a month, and the impeachment ...
February 20, 2021
Remember before web browsers had tabs?
A lesser-known browser called SimulBrowse was the first one to do it, although Opera subsequently popularized the idea: you could keep a whole set of websites open at once, so you could keep them up in parallel and multitask from one to the other. Before ...
February 17, 2021
As you drive down any highway in the San Francisco Bay Area, you can see them under overpasses and bridges: small conglomerates of tents, surrounded by increasingly-complex infrastructure for electricity and water. Not so much shantytowns as distributed shanty-hamlets: communities of people huddling together and conserving resources as best they ...
February 12, 2021
I'm selling my frozen heart.
Or at least a representation of it. Five representations, to be specific. Five copies of my frozen heart illustration were released as non-fungible tokens, available to be purchased on OpenSea. All you need is a wallet like Metamask and a few ETH.
Credit to my friends at ...
February 9, 2021
A company is little more than a community of people pulling together in an organized way to achieve the same mission and vision. Like many communities, there are leaders who adjudicate and set direction, and there are norms to follow. Underlying it all, there is the culture of the community: ...
February 5, 2021
I've spent over half my career at the intersection of technology and media. I believe journalism is the bedrock of a well-functioning democracy. Given the choice between tech companies and news organizations, I'll support the latter every time. I'm well-documented as being an advocate for antitrust reform and an opponent ...
February 4, 2021
This morning I was asked why I like startups, as opposed to co-operatives or any other kind of organization that builds software or technology. It's a fair question: I'm hardly a free market capitalist (in that I care very much about providing a social safety net and have no interest ...
February 4, 2021
Don't lie to your customers.
Don't lie to your team.
Spinning is lying.
Intentional omissions are lying.
If you find that you must lie or spin to sell your product, go back and build a product that actually matches your talk.
If you lie, people will find out.
All business is relationship-based.
Trust is core to every ...
February 2, 2021
A few weeks ago, I went to the doctor with an ear infection. It turns out it was probably to do with my AirPods Pro, which fit just a little bit too snugly into my ear canal. (After some Googling, I've learned that this is actually a surprisingly common reaction. ...
February 2, 2021
I'm starting to see a bunch of startups that offer to speed you up by completing your work using GPT-3. It's a hell of a promise: start writing something and the robot will finish it off for you. All you've got to do is sand off the edges.
Imagine if the ...
February 2, 2021
This is my monthly roundup of the tech and media I consumed and found interesting. Here's my list for January, 2021: a month that included an armed coup attempt, my 42nd birthday, and the start of a new Presidency.
Books
The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, by Eric ...
February 1, 2021
I learned my uncle, my father's older brother, died the other day: my cousin reached out to me and asked if I'd heard the news. I hadn't. He'd passed away on my birthday, and I had no idea.
A fair amount has been written about the grief of being a third ...
February 1, 2021