Yesterday was my last day at Curious, where I’ve been employed as an iOS and Ruby engineer since September of 2014. Before that, I contracted with them to create the very first native iOS app they put to market, in October of 2013. To say that I’ve met great people there, learned a ton, and been impacted in a positive way is an understatement. The perceptive reader might question why I decided to leave....
Power Law Distribution - A Glimpse into a VC Fund Perhaps the most enlightening lecture about startups I ever attended was class 7 in Peter Thiel’s CS183. In it, Thiel outlined the basics of what a VC firm does, with a particular emphasis on what the graphs must look like in order for a VC firm to come out ahead in any given fund. These words in particular have stuck in my mind for years since I heard him utter them:...
“They just fired me” The words caught in her throat and reverberated oddly into my brain. I could feel the moment starting to warp into some sort of shakespearian ‘lesson’ I was supposed to latch onto and spit out at my junior employees years into the future; and yet I simply stared staunchly back into that statements twisted face in denial. Standing before me was one of my best friends who I had recruited a year earlier to be a linchpin in a company I helped co-found....
To me a highly effective leader is someone who leads from the back. Like a good user interface an effective leader frames the problem, points their employees in the right direction, and then gets out of the way. If a leader has surrounded themselves with the right people (aka people smarter than themselves), getting out of the way allows your organization to fully unleash their collective creativity on a problem and grow closer together as a unit....
Way back in 2009 I took my first Human Computer Interaction course at Stanford from my future advisor, Scott Klemmer, that sparked my curiosity with early stage products. Recently I decided to relive some memories and logged on to his 2012 coursera course where I was reminded of an incredible story that really embodies the value of low fidelity prototypes and not being afraid of putting your work out there at it’s earliest stages....