Podcast appearances and mentions of Paul Graham

Jim and Yonathan discuss some of the crazy things they've seen in the market recently and discuss strategies for entrepreneurs to not only survive turbulent times, but thrive. TOPICS DISCUSSED IN TODAY'S EPISODE Friday the 13th doom and gloom Bear Market, Inflation, Unpredictability Key Hires What to do with your cash Should you get a line of credit now Resources: Jim Huffman website Jim's Twitter GrowthHit The Growth Marketer's Playbook  Additional episodes you might enjoy: Startup Ideas by Paul Graham (#45) Nathan Barry: How to Bootstrap a Company to $30M in a Crowded Market (#41) How I Met My Biz Partner and Less Learned Hitting $2M ARR (#44) Ryan Hamilton on his Netflix special, touring with Jerry Seinfeld, & how to write a joke (#10) How We're Validating Startup Ideas (#51)

Jim is joined by Draft.dev Founder/CEO Karl Hughes and they dive deep into the nitty gritty of how to bootstrap a business in a niche market.TOPICS DISCUSSED IN TODAY'S EPISODE    The benefit of niche markets when you're bootstrapping    Deciding to go all in on the niche    Finding your product market fit    How do you use your money to grow    Accounting Hacks    The importance of referrals in niche market growth    Starting a launchpad business    Niche Business ideas    The mental challenge of writing your own playbook Resources:  draft.dev  Jim Huffman website  Jim's Twitter  GrowthHit  The Growth Marketer's Playbook  Additional episodes you might enjoy: Startup Ideas by Paul Graham (#45) Nathan Barry: How to Bootstrap a Company to $30M in a Crowded Market (#41) How I Met My Biz Partner and Less Learned Hitting $2M ARR (#44) Ryan Hamilton on his Netflix special, touring with Jerry Seinfeld, & how to write a joke (#10) How We're Validating Startup Ideas (#51)

Key Points: James explains how his trading background led him to founding Cognism (01:04) Cognism's first major pivot (02:25) My thoughts on early pivots with a quote from Eric Ries (03:39) James describes how Cognism's market size meant there was plenty of growth opportunity, despite competition (06:24) I explain the advantage of starting your business outside the hyper-competitive US market with a quote from Jean-René Boidron (07:18) James talks through why friendly, warm relationships with your early customers is key (08:53) My opinion on networking and why you should begin marketing efforts years before your product is available (09:57) I unpack why even mediocre companies can succeed if they have excellent product-market fit, with a quote from Wealthfront's Andy Rachleff (12:28) James discusses the importance of mentorship (13:28) My advice on seeking out mentors (14:21) Why Cognism did things in the early days that wouldn't scale, with a quote from Y Combinator's Paul Graham (16:26) My thoughts on building out your brand narrative once you've identified your competitive edge (18:55) James describes the moats Cognism is building for the future (23:57) Advice James would give to fellow SaaS founders (26:40) Wrap up (28:09) Mentioned:James Isilay LinkedInJames Isilay TwitterCognism LinkedInCognism WebsiteLean Startup by Eric RiesExpanding internationally into market openings with Kameleoon's Jean-René BoidronAndy Rachleff LinkedInPaul Graham TwitterMy Links:TwitterLinkedInWebsiteWynterSpeeroCXL

We've got a tricycle anniversary!

Jim is joined by Brian Sloan who has overseen meteoric success of an 8 figure company through developing a unique sex-toy. Brian shares tips and advice about how to grow and develop products in non-traditional markets.TOPICS DISCUSSED IN TODAY'S EPISODE   Getting into a unique product category   How to develop manufacturing for unique products   Scaling once product is developed: Non-traditional growth   How to harness power of the press   Becoming a part of the conversation   How to choose staff for unique industries  Resources: Autoblow Jim Huffman website Jim's Twitter GrowthHit The Growth Marketer's Playbook  Additional episodes you might enjoy: Startup Ideas by Paul Graham (#45) Nathan Barry: How to Bootstrap a Company to $30M in a Crowded Market (#41) How I Met My Biz Partner and Less Learned Hitting $2M ARR (#44) Ryan Hamilton on his Netflix special, touring with Jerry Seinfeld, & how to write a joke (#10) How We're Validating Startup Ideas (#51)  

Jim and Yonathan break down another Iconic piece of writing as they talk about David Sacks Substack article titled Your Startup is a Movement. They go over the main points and discuss what they agree and disagree with as well as contextualizing some of the ideas for new startup founders. TOPICS DISCUSSED IN TODAY'S EPISODE Marketing a Movement 13 Steps defined Favorite Quotes Attacking the status quo Punching Up not Down What makes this iconic Who should read this Resources: Your Startup is a Movement David Sacks Jim Huffman website Jim's Twitter GrowthHit The Growth Marketer's Playbook  Additional episodes you might enjoy: Startup Ideas by Paul Graham (#45) Nathan Barry: How to Bootstrap a Company to $30M in a Crowded Market (#41) How I Met My Biz Partner and Less Learned Hitting $2M ARR (#44) Ryan Hamilton on his Netflix special, touring with Jerry Seinfeld, & how to write a joke (#10) How We're Validating Startup Ideas (#51)  

Paul Graham

Jim is again joined by Yonathan as they continue their experiment of building in public. They update everyone on the progress of the agency, the productized service, and the D2C product as they move towards the insane goal of getting each business to 6 figures.TOPICS DISCUSSED IN TODAY'S EPISODE The importance of setting goals/benchmark Updates on Agency Updates on EOS Business Model for Productized Service Pricing models for tiers Validating strategies Throwing out the book in the first stage of development Goals for the $3M Challenge  Resources: Jim Huffman website Jim's Twitter GrowthHit The Growth Marketer's Playbook  Additional episodes you might enjoy: Startup Ideas by Paul Graham (#45) Nathan Barry: How to Bootstrap a Company to $30M in a Crowded Market (#41) How I Met My Biz Partner and Less Learned Hitting $2M ARR (#44) Ryan Hamilton on his Netflix special, touring with Jerry Seinfeld, & how to write a joke (#10) How We're Validating Startup Ideas (#51)  

Jim is joined by business coach Corey Wright. Jim and Corey dive deep into the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) and get specific about how to implement this system in your business and what impacts can result from properly implementing EOS.TOPICS DISCUSSED IN TODAY'S EPISODE   What is a business coach   What is EOS   Where and when is EOS right for implementation   How does it impact a business   How do values factor into EOS   What are the risks  Resources: Corey Wright Jim Huffman website Jim's Twitter GrowthHit The Growth Marketer's Playbook  Additional episodes you might enjoy: Startup Ideas by Paul Graham (#45) Nathan Barry: How to Bootstrap a Company to $30M in a Crowded Market (#41) How I Met My Biz Partner and Less Learned Hitting $2M ARR (#44) Ryan Hamilton on his Netflix special, touring with Jerry Seinfeld, & how to write a joke (#10) How We're Validating Startup Ideas (#51)  

Paul Graham

Paul Graham

This week, Jim is joined by Jordan Summers, the director of Growth at Growthhit. Jordan gets into the nitty gritty details of growth marketing strategies for D2C and other businesses.  TOPICS DISCUSSED IN TODAY'S EPISODE   How to attract employees with a lot of options   Finding the “sweet spot” of experience and growth    The importance of visual assets in D2C businesses  Hacks for getting visual assets without breaking the bank  How to position Hero products  How to test marketing approaches strategically  The importance of focusing on channels that work Resources:  Jim Huffman website  Jim's Twitter  GrowthHit  The Growth Marketer's Playbook  Additional episodes you might enjoy: Startup Ideas by Paul Graham (#45) Nathan Barry: How to Bootstrap a Company to $30M in a Crowded Market (#41) How I Met My Biz Partner and Less Learned Hitting $2M ARR (#44) Ryan Hamilton on his Netflix special, touring with Jerry Seinfeld, & how to write a joke (#10) How We're Validating Startup Ideas (#51)  

In this episode Paul and I talk about what drives people to present a perfect version of themselves on social media. I mean, it was there long before Facebook, LinkedIn and the like but it's a lot more visible now.

硅谷创业之父Paul Graham：你以为你想清楚了？写下来才知道

Jim is joined by Bash Jones, Co-founder of Homeplan to discuss how you can translate acquired life-skills into a successful scalable tech company. Bash shares his amazing story of enduring homelessness while hustling his way to success in both the Music and Tech industries.TOPICS DISCUSSED IN TODAY'S EPISODE Pivoting from a simple idea to full blown startup Translating life skills into a tech business The power of being prepared for a meeting How to take off the blinders to find the big scalable ideas Using free tools to bring in new customers The power of story in copy Resources: Homeplan Jim Huffman website Jim's Twitter GrowthHit The Growth Marketer's Playbook Additional episodes you might enjoy: Startup Ideas by Paul Graham (#45) Nathan Barry: How to Bootstrap a Company to $30M in a Crowded Market (#41) How I Met My Biz Partner and Less Learned Hitting $2M ARR (#44) Ryan Hamilton on his Netflix special, touring with Jerry Seinfeld, & how to write a joke (#10) How We're Validating Startup Ideas (#51)  

Paul Graham keeps things simple. Yours Truly does not. Do you keep things simple?

Jim is joined by Jordan Allen & Nick McLain of Doorsey, an app that is re-imagining the home buying process. Nick and Jordan share tips on how to enter an established space with a brand new idea and talk about what it takes to succeed.TOPICS DISCUSSED IN TODAY'S EPISODE·      Pain points for first time home buyers·      How to launch a new approach in an established industry·      Idea validation tips·      How to create a V1·      When to fundraise·      Get investors to follow your journey·      Components of a good partnership·      Upcoming trends Resources: · Doorsey· Jim Huffman website· Jim's Twitter· GrowthHit· The Growth Marketer's Playbook Additional episodes you might enjoy: Startup Ideas by Paul Graham (#45) Nathan Barry: How to Bootstrap a Company to $30M in a Crowded Market (#41) How I Met My Biz Partner and Less Learned Hitting $2M ARR (#44) Ryan Hamilton on his Netflix special, touring with Jerry Seinfeld, & how to write a joke (#10) How We're Validating Startup Ideas (#51)  

Paul Graham

This week Jim goes on the Tropical MBA podcast to chat with host Dan Andrews about the pros and cons of running a successful agency, and how Jim has recently been encouraging and enabling his team to create new products via the internal ‘startup studio incubator'.TOPICS DISCUSSED IN TODAY'S EPISODE Trials and tribulations of agency life Tips for startup incubators Resources: Tropical MBA Jim Huffman website Jim's Twitter GrowthHit The Growth Marketer's Playbook Additional episodes you might enjoy: Startup Ideas by Paul Graham (#45) Nathan Barry: How to Bootstrap a Company to $30M in a Crowded Market (#41) How I Met My Biz Partner and Less Learned Hitting $2M ARR (#44) Ryan Hamilton on his Netflix special, touring with Jerry Seinfeld, & how to write a joke (#10) How We're Validating Startup Ideas (#51)

In this episode of Ready to Retail, we are joined by joined by Australia Posts Group Chief Executive Officer and managing director, Paul Graham. We had the opportunity to talk with Paul surrounding about his experience with Australia Post after his first 6 months in the job, his favourite sport, which, as it turns out, is all sports! We also chat about Paul's advocacy for mental health and the programs associated with this, alongside some insight into the appointment of Australia Posts Chief Mental Health Officer and how this will be able to help the broader Australia Post community. Paul also shared with us what's on the horizon for where Australia Post will be in the next 5 years and what his focus points would be.Want to see news and updates from Paul? You can find these HEREOr feel like sending an email or leaving a video message for Paul? Contact the team by sending to: askpaul@auspost.com.auPlease be reminded that as a team member of Australia Post, if you need to speak to someone, you can access our Employee Assistance Program or as a Licensee, you can access our Workplace Assistance Program. (EAP/WAP). To contact the free and confidential counselling service, please call EAP/WAP on 1300 our eap (1300 687 327).As always, we would love to hear from you. If you have any comments, questions, suggestions or queries, please feel free to contact our team by emailing them on: retailacademy@auspost.com.au

TOPICS DISCUSSED IN TODAY'S EPISODE·      Updated on the $3m challenge·      Naming Conventions·      Frameworks for VC opportunities·       Tips for entering the VC space Resources: MetaProp VC  Jim Huffman website Jim's Twitter GrowthHit The Growth Marketer's Playbook  Additional episodes you might enjoy: Startup Ideas by Paul Graham (#45) Nathan Barry: How to Bootstrap a Company to $30M in a Crowded Market (#41) How I Met My Biz Partner and Less Learned Hitting $2M ARR (#44) Ryan Hamilton on his Netflix special, touring with Jerry Seinfeld, & how to write a joke (#10) How We're Validating Startup Ideas (#51)

Text Hawk to 66866 for Mindful Monday Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com  Twitter/IG: @RyanHawk12  https://twitter.com/RyanHawk12 Polina Pompliano is studying the world's most interesting people & companies. She is the Founder & Author of The Profile. Polina is a former writer at  Fortune. Some of the people she's written a profile on are: Martha Stewart, Keanu Reeves, and The Rock. I am a paid subscriber and love her work. Notes: Sustained excellence comes from being obsessively curious about what you do… And knowing that failure is part of the process. It's how you choose to respond that matters. Examples: Taylor Swift, Kim Kardashian, Martha Stewart. The advice she received from David Perell (also a previous podcast guest). He said, “Everything you put into the world is a vehicle for serendipity.” Polina wrote a profile on The Rock. She had no idea he would share it four times on all platforms. Create your own personal board of advisors. Listen to criticism, but only from people who want you to win. Only from people who care about you doing well. Not from trolls online. "Consistency is the best way to earn trust. – Name a relationship in your life where you trust someone who is inconsistent. You can't. That's because we don't trust people — whether it's in work, business, or relationships — who constantly break their promises. Since I started The Profile three years ago, I have never missed a single week." Criticism: "I once heard Kat Cole say that one of the biggest lessons she has learned after years of business experience is to put your ego aside and improve from criticism. She said, “Anytime you're criticized, assume first that it's correct.” The act of simply considering that a fraction of the criticism may be accurate will keep you learning, unlearning, fixing, and ultimately, gaining respect." How to Find Ideas: "It's about being obsessed with the details. A great idea typically masquerades as a question in a friend's text message, a quote in a documentary, a line in a book, or an observation on a walk." Creativity: "I can't get new ideas staring at a blank page. Creativity, for me, requires motion. When you go on a walk, you can turn your world into an idea-generating sensorium, and ideas will spring up from the most unlikely sources. There is one thing that's absolutely certain about creativity: It's an active process, not a passive one. The best ideas come when you become curious, aware, interested." Daniel Ek – Makers schedule versus a Managers schedule. This is from Paul Graham. I wrote it about it in my first book, Welcome to Management. Marriage: "In 2013, I asked my great-grandmother what she had learned from 53 years of marriage. She said, “When you're young and beautiful like we were, falling in love is easy. But you have to fall in love with someone's soul — because you will get old, but the soul will never change.”" "I don't like to gamble, but if there is one thing I'm willing to bet on, it's myself.” - Beyonce How to attract more luck into your life? – Written by George Mack (published by Polina) Avoid Boring People Have a luck razor Have a Poker mindset Polina desires to help you "improve your content diet." Instead of binging TV shows and scrolling through random social media, read The Profile. How to be more creative: Take a walk Allow room for serendipity Look at the footnotes of books What Polina learned from James Clear: When he doesn't read enough, he doesn't have the ideas to write about. Reading helps generate ideas. Have a stack of books everywhere in your house and office. Why leaders should write? It creates clarity of thought. "I can tell that you're thinking is sloppy if your writing is sloppy." Every single word of a post matters. It's about being precise. Precision is so important when it comes to writing. You have to clearly think it through to create precision with thought and writing. Storytelling - Get rid of the generic, fluffy writing. People enjoy profiles because it takes you inside the mind of a person. Life/Career advice: Don't tie your identity to something that can be taken away from you.

JIm is joined once again by Brian Lockard the Co-founder of Bala shoes. Brian and Jim talk about fundraising strategies, how to research a products for a successful launch, and check in on Bala which had 7 figures in sales in its first 12 days.TOPICS DISCUSSED IN TODAY'S EPISODE·      Launching with $1m sales without any ad spend·      The value of product insight and understanding your customers·      The challenge with Kickstarter campaigns·      How to manage growth so it doesn't become a liability·      The problem with the “technology” approach in consumer goods·      Pitch Tips·      Fundraising Approaches Resources: Bala Shoes Brian Lockard: Making $1.5M in 7 Days Launching His Shoe Brand (#26)  Jim Huffman website Jim's Twitter GrowthHit The Growth Marketer's Playbook  Additional episodes you might enjoy: Startup Ideas by Paul Graham (#45) Nathan Barry: How to Bootstrap a Company to $30M in a Crowded Market (#41) How I Met My Biz Partner and Less Learned Hitting $2M ARR (#44) Ryan Hamilton on his Netflix special, touring with Jerry Seinfeld, & how to write a joke (#10) How We're Validating Startup Ideas (#51)

Paul Graham

World-renowned photographer Paul Graham joins host Frances Butt to talk about the ways he works, empathically documenting moments of the world and people's lives as they present themselves, as well as the impact of the pandemic on his work and on life in general.You can find writings on and by Paul here:https://www.paulgrahamarchive.comAnd his Museum of Modern Art archive here:https://www.moma.org/artists/2286---Recorded January 2022Music: Frances

My guest today is Garry Tan, founder and managing partner of early-stage venture firm, Initialized Capital. Before starting Initialized, Garry was a partner at Y Combinator, employee number 10 at Palantir, and co-founder of YC backed blog platform Posterous. Our discussion covers what's missing in the investment world, how to best systematize venture investments, and what he learned from Paul Graham. Please enjoy my conversation with Garry Tan.   For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.   -----   This episode is brought to you by Tegus. Tegus is the new digital hub for market intelligence. The Tegus platform empowers Investors and Corporate Development teams to invest smarter by pairing best-in-class technology with the highest quality user-generated content and data. Find out why a majority of the top firms are using Tegus on a daily basis. Head to tegus.co/patrick for your free trial.   -----   This episode is brought to you by Lemon.io. The team at Lemon.io has built a network of Eastern European developers ready to pair with fast-growing startups. We have faced challenges hiring engineering talent for various projects - and Lemon.io offered developers for one-off projects, developers for full start to finish product development, or developers that could be add-ons to the existing team. Check out lemon.io/patrick to learn more.   -----   Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.    Past guests include Tobi Lutke, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, John Collison, Kat Cole, Marc Andreessen, Matthew Ball, Bill Gurley, Anu Hariharan, Ben Thompson, and many more.   Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here.   Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus   Show Notes [00:02:45] - [First question] - Why he's interested by software and the global brain [00:06:23] - How the shift from global to local manifests in his investing and company activities [00:11:42] - Ways to increase throughput that would benefit everybody in the investing world  [00:17:13] - What software he would build if there were no limitations and what happens at the systems level of securing deals at Initialize  [00:23:33] - Why there is no objective application process for early-stage capital and how much human judgment we can remove from approving funding [00:26:49] - Shared characteristics amongst new inventions he finds favorable  [00:31:49] - Whether he's able to evaluate an idea without a prototype [00:33:33] - Why travel planning software was the worst idea of 2012 and what he sees as the bad idea of today [00:36:06] - The most common reasons for failure in these types of businesses [00:39:07] - Is big enabling technology shifts what manifests in successful outcomes? [00:40:37] - The role of media and how it intersects with investing [00:44:29] - What he attributes to the success of his firm and thriving in chaos [00:48:11] - Would he press a button that would have made his childhood easy, and whether he's met founders who haven't come across adversity in their lives  [00:50:00] - His thoughts on the world today via the lens of his portfolio [00:53:12] - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for him   

On this episode, Jim is joined by Blake Emal. Blake tells us how he was able to go from dropping out of college to becoming a CMO in the matter of a few years. He deep dives deep on skillsets and strategies you need to grow an audience and how to leverage that to succeed in growth marketing.TOPICS DISCUSSED IN TODAY'S EPISODE·      The value of working for an agency·      Trying to prepare for jobs that don't exist yet·      “T” shaped skillsets·      The importance of changing your title often·      Formatting copy for the internet·      Strategy for content creation: Tips and Tricks and core principals·      The value of transparency and open sourceResources: Blake Emal Twitter Jim Huffman website Jim's Twitter GrowthHit The Growth Marketer's Playbook Additional episodes you might enjoy: Startup Ideas by Paul Graham (#45) Nathan Barry: How to Bootstrap a Company to $30M in a Crowded Market (#41) How I Met My Biz Partner and Less Learned Hitting $2M ARR (#44) Ryan Hamilton on his Netflix special, touring with Jerry Seinfeld, & how to write a joke (#10) How We're Validating Startup Ideas (#51)

Paul Graham

What I learned from rereading Sam Walton: Made In America by Sam Walton.Subscribe to listen to the rest of this episode and gain access to 242 full length episodes.WHAT OTHER PEOPLE ARE SAYING:“Without a doubt, the highest value-to-cost ratio I've taken advantage of in the last year is the Founders podcast premium feed. Tap into eons of knowledge and experiences, condensed into digestible portions. Highly, highly recommend. “Uniquely outstanding. No fluff and all substance. David does an outstanding job summarizing these biographies and hones in on the elements that make his subjects so unique among entrepreneurs. I particularly enjoy that he focuses on both the founder's positive and negative characteristics as a way of highlighting things to mimic and avoid.”“I just paid for my first premium podcast subscription for Founders podcast. Learning from those who came before us is one of the highest value ways to invest time. David does his homework and exponentially improves my efficiency by focusing on the most valuable lessons.”“I haven't found a better return on my time and money than your podcast for inspiration and time-tested wisdom to help me on my journey.“I've now listened to every episode. From this knowledge I've doubled my business to $500k a year. Love your passion and recommend your podcast to everyone.”“Founders is the only podcast I pay for and it's worth 100x the cost.”“I have listened to many podcasts on entrepreneurship (HIBT, Masters of Scale, etc.) and find Founders to be consistently more helpful than any other entrepreneurship podcast. David is a craftsperson, he carefully reads biographies of founders, distills the most important anecdotes and themes from their life, and draws commonalities across lives. David's focus is rightfully not on teaching you a formula to succeed but on constantly pushing you to think different.”“I highly highly recommend this podcast. Holy cow. I've been binge listening to these and you start to see patterns across all these incredible humans.”Listening to your podcast has changed my life and that is not a statement I make often.“After one episode I quickly joined the Misfit feed. Love the insight and thoughts shared along the way. David loves what he does and it shines through on the podcast. Definitely my go-to podcast now.”“It is worth every penny. I cannot put into words how fantastic this podcast is. Just stop reading this and get the full access.”“Personally it's one of my top 3 favorite podcasts. If you're into business and startups and technology, this is for you. David covers good books and I've come to really appreciate his perspective. Can't say enough good things.”“I quickly subscribed and it's honestly been the best money I've spent all year. It has inspired me to read biographies. Highly recommend.”“This is the most inspirational and best business podcast out there. David has inspired me to focus on biographies rather than general business books. I'm addicted.”“Anyone interested in business must find the time to listen to each any every Founders podcast. A high return on investment will be a virtual certainty. Subscribe and start listening as soon as possible.”“David saves you hundreds of hours by summarizing bios of legendary business founders and providing valuable insight on what makes an individual successful. He has introduced me to many founders I would have never known existed.”“The podcasts offer spectacular lessons on life, human nature and business achievement. David's enthusiasm and personal thoughts bring me joy. My journey has been enhanced by his efforts.”"Founders is the best self investment that I've made in years."Sign up to listen to the rest of this episode and get access to every full episode. You will learn the key insights from biographies on Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, John D. Rockefeller, Coco Chanel, Andrew Carnegie, Enzo Ferrari, Estee Lauder, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Phil Knight, Joseph Pulitzer, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Alexander Graham Bell, Bill Gates, P.T. Barnum, Edwin Land, Henry Ford, Walter Chrysler, Thomas Edison, David Ogilvy, Ben Franklin, Howard Hughes, George Lucas, Levi Strauss, Walt Disney and so many more. You will learn from the founders of Nike, Patagonia, Apple, Microsoft, Hershey, General Motors, Ford, Standard Oil, Polaroid, Home Depot, MGM, Intel, Federal Express, Wal Mart, JP Morgan, Chrysler, Cadillac, Oracle, Hyundai, Seagram, Berkshire Hathaway, Teledyne, Adidas, Les Schwab, Renaissance Technologies, IKEA, Sony, Ferrari, and so many more. Sign up to listen to the rest of this episode and get access to every full episode. 

Jim is joined by founder and incredibly skilled chef Joel Gamoran. Jim and Joel talk about finding a new path and making your own opportunities in business and tips and tricks for developing an on-screen presence. TOPICS DISCUSSED IN TODAY'S EPISODE·      Food as a way-of-life·      Creating your own opportunities ·      The importance of getting reps·      Tips to make the most of your 15 minutes of fame·      How chance encounters can be life-changing ·      What do good support systems look like·      Cooking secrets     Resources:· Homemade· Jim Huffman website· Jim's Twitter· GrowthHit· The Growth Marketer's Playbook Additional episodes you might enjoy: Startup Ideas by Paul Graham (#45) Nathan Barry: How to Bootstrap a Company to $30M in a Crowded Market (#41) How I Met My Biz Partner and Less Learned Hitting $2M ARR (#44) Ryan Hamilton on his Netflix special, touring with Jerry Seinfeld, & how to write a joke (#10) How We're Validating Startup Ideas (#51)

Paul Graham

TOPICS DISCUSSED IN TODAY'S EPISODE·      $3M Challenge Update·      Product development surprises·      How to grow without resources·      New AI ideas in the design space·      Consulting and agency tips·      What content should you focus on·      How do you approach different types of clients·      Value vs. Volume·      How to price services Resources:· Consulting Success· Jim Huffman website· Jim's Twitter· GrowthHit· The Growth Marketer's PlaybookAdditional episodes you might enjoy: Startup Ideas by Paul Graham (#45) Nathan Barry: How to Bootstrap a Company to $30M in a Crowded Market (#41) How I Met My Biz Partner and Less Learned Hitting $2M ARR (#44) Ryan Hamilton on his Netflix special, touring with Jerry Seinfeld, & how to write a joke (#10) How We're Validating Startup Ideas (#51)

Paul Graham

Having a herd mentality is ALWAYS fashionable. But beware of the sheep in a lone wolf's clothing! Why is it that the groupthinkers somehow also believe they are really counter-cultural and rebellious? Why do so many who parrot the ruling-class's propaganda also use hashtags like #RESIST? This episode is brought to you by by Libsyn, where you can begin your own great podcasting adventures. Sign up with promo code "DanielD" and get two months of free podcast hosting! Find out more at https://signup.libsyn.com/?promo_code=DANIELD Also check out the very funny satire of the super-woke wackos, Super #SJW Man: A Cancel-Culture Superhero. Imagine Don Quixote reincarnated as a champagne socialist living in gentrified Brooklyn. This hilarious story is on sale for 75% off in the USA through Friday the 18th: https://amzn.to/3LB8TMz (Amazon affiliate link kicks a small portion of the purchase price back to me at no additional cost to you). Here is a link to Paul Graham's excellent collection of essays: http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html And for even more ridiculousness, visit www.CrazyComedyHumor.com!

Why should programmers treat programming like a craft? In this episode, Max Brunsfeld, co-founder of Zed, a collaborative code editor written in Rust, joins Beyang Liu, co-founder and CTO of Sourcegraph, to share the apprenticeship-like pair-programming experience that taught him to appreciate programming, explain how he learned the fundamentals of parsing on the weekends and tell the story of presenting an application he couldn't explain to Paul Graham at Y Combinator. Along the way, Max describes how the Zed team passes off in-progress branches to teammates in other countries and keeps development moving across time zones.Show notes & transcript: https://about.sourcegraph.com/podcast/max-brunsfeld/Sourcegraph: https://about.sourcegraph.com

Jim and Yonathan debut a new segment where they break down iconic think-pieces written over the years. On this first edition they give their thoughts and takeaways from Sam Altman's iconic 2019 blog post "How to be Successful." TOPICS DISCUSSED IN TODAY'S EPISODE·      Compounding yourself·      The importance of original thinking·      Don't be afraid to fail: You only need to score once to win·      Getting rich by owning things·      Why you might not always need to be a “force of nature”Resources:· Sam Altman Blog Post· Jim Huffman website· Jim's Twitter· GrowthHit· The Growth Marketer's Playbook Additional episodes you might enjoy: Startup Ideas by Paul Graham (#45) Nathan Barry: How to Bootstrap a Company to $30M in a Crowded Market (#41) How I Met My Biz Partner and Less Learned Hitting $2M ARR (#44) Ryan Hamilton on his Netflix special, touring with Jerry Seinfeld, & how to write a joke (#10) How We're Validating Startup Ideas (#51)

Paul Graham

Jim is joined by Craig Swanson, who has started more than 10 companies that continue to operate to this day. From co-founding CreativeLive to selling an e-product business for 8 figures, Craig has been incredibly successful in the e-product space and gives tips on how to increase growth in the digital marketplace and shares success (and failure) stories from his own life.TOPICS DISCUSSED IN TODAY'S EPISODE     Criteria for building an e-product business     How to make failure a business strategy     Separating family finances to afford business risk     What to do when business strategy doesn't align with personal work     Learning from the customers and user generated content     When can you raise prices and still entice new customers     Half-baked ideas for a growth agency   Resources:  Craig Swanson Website Jim Huffman website Jim's Twitter GrowthHit The Growth Marketer's Playbook  Additional episodes you might enjoy: Startup Ideas by Paul Graham (#45) Nathan Barry: How to Bootstrap a Company to $30M in a Crowded Market (#41) How I Met My Biz Partner and Less Learned Hitting $2M ARR (#44) Ryan Hamilton on his Netflix special, touring with Jerry Seinfeld, & how to write a joke (#10) How We're Validating Startup Ideas (#51)

Paul Graham is a programmer, writer, investor, and co-founder of the influential startup accelerator and seed capital firm Y Combinator. In 1995, he and Robert Morris started Viaweb, the first software as a service company. Viaweb was acquired by Yahoo in 1998, where it became Yahoo Store.Y Combinator is an American technology startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch more than 3,000 companies, including Stripe, Airbnb, Cruise, PagerDuty, DoorDash, Coinbase, Instacart, Dropbox, Twitch, Flightfox, and Reddit.Paul is the author of On Lisp, ANSI Common Lisp, and Hackers & Painters. He has an AB from Cornell and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Harvard. 

Hoy no hay invitado, o mejor dicho, hoy vosotras y vosotros sois mis invitados a la mesa de Calle Oscura, la que hay bajo la bombilla de la carátula del podcast. Y es que que siguiendo vuestras sugerencias me he dejado liar y excepcionalmente en este episodio soy yo quien contesta a vuestras preguntas. Soy un tanto reacio a hablar de mi trabajo y de mis procesos porque prefiero escuchar y aprender de los demás, pero a juzgar por el número de preguntas recibidas a vosotros sí os interesa saber qué pienso, así que voy a olvidarme durante un rato de mis prejuicios y a tratar de transmitiros mis reflexiones en todo aquello que me habéis trasladado. Ojalá os sirva para algo y no os aburráis de escucharme solo a mí durante un buen rato. Hoy, en Calle Oscura, vosotras y vosotros preguntáis y yo contesto. En este episodio hablamos de - Lo que nuestras fotos pueden enseñarnos de nosotros mismos. - La dificultad de fotografiar en tu ciudad (y cómo abordarla). - El miedo a la repetición. - Crisis creativas y cómo enfrentarnos a ellas. - La foto de calle como la búsqueda solo de imágenes impactantes. - Que la fotografía nos salva de unas cosas y nos quita otras. - Fotos sueltas y proyectos. - Los retos de la formación y la comunicación. - La montaña rusa de trabajar en lo que te gusta. - Esperar a que sea el momento… Y de algunas (bastantes) cosas más que me habéis trasladado. Quién os acompaña Permitidme que, como si fuese un invitado más, os haga un pequeño resumen de mi vida hasta hoy, sobre todo para dar un poco de contexto a mis respuestas. Nací en 1976 en A Gudiña, un pequeño pueblo arrinconado en extremo sureste de Galicia. Bueno, en realidad me llevaron a nacer desde allí a Ourense, la capital de la provincia, pero siempre me he sentido más de aquel lugar y de Tameirón, el pueblo de mis abuelos maternos, que vivían al final de Calle Oscura. Estudié Físicas y en 2011, mientras trabajaba en una fábrica de paneles solares, arranco un blog que entonces se llama Rubixephoto para retomar y dar continuidad a mi amor por la imagen. En 2013 comienzo a dar talleres y descubro, contra todo pronóstico, que me encanta enseñar. Eso provoca que un año después, cuando me despiden de mi puesto, decida apostarlo todo a vivir de lo que de verdad me apasiona: compartir lo que voy aprendiendo de Fotografía. Una cosa lleva a la otra y en 2019 arranco mi gran proyecto, El Club de Fotografía Callejera (https://jotabarros.com/club-fotografia-callejera/). A esto le siguen un libro, Fotografía de Calle, publicado en 2020 y este podcast, lanzado a finales del mismo año. Referencias y enlaces Autores - Bernard Plossu. - Duane Michaels. - Garry Winogrand (y el curso que le hemos dedicado en El Club: https://jotabarros.com/curso/monografico-garry-winogrand/). - Paul Graham. Trabajos - Surbanalisme, de Plossu. (https://amzn.to/3ocvNj0) Gracias por tu escucha Si te ha gustado este capítulo de Calle Oscura deja tu valoración positiva en Ivoox, Apple Podcast y Spotify, donde también puedes encontrar el podcast. No olvides suscribirte a través de cualquiera de esas plataformas para no perderte ningún episodio. Por favor, comparte este contenido entre tus redes para que llegue a más gente, puede suponer una gran diferencia. Y ahí abajo tienes los comentarios, para seguir conversando sobre los temas abordados. Muchas gracias por estar ahí, al otro lado. Muy pronto, más episodios de Calle Oscura. Mientras tanto… Nos vemos en las calles! Jota.

Chris updates us on his new window manager of choice, Moom, and tells us what's good with it. He's also giving yet another task manager a go: OmniFocus. (Sorry Things.) Steph talks about defining test classes in RSpec and readdresses flaky tests to improve CI build time. Chris is worried about productivity. He's still not coding as much as he'd like to be. Steph lends an ear, and together, they discuss potential ways Chris could gain back a little bit of coding time at work. This episode is brought to you by ScoutAPM (https://scoutapm.com/bikeshed). Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy. Moom (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/moom/id419330170?mt=12) OmniFocus (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/omnifocus-3/id1346190318) Is It Worth the Time? (https://xkcd.com/1205/) Knapsack Pro (https://knapsackpro.com/) Shopify Monolith (https://shopify.engineering/shopify-monolith) Sacrificial Test Classes (https://blog.bitwrangler.com/2016/11/10/sacrificial-test-classes.html) rspecq (https://github.com/skroutz/rspecq) Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of The Bike Shed! Transcript: STEPH: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Steph Viccari. CHRIS: And I'm Chris Toomey. STEPH: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. So hey, Chris, what's new in your world? CHRIS: What's new in my world? Well, hey, Steph. Oh, I have an update on a thing that I think I talked about a while back or at least asked on Twitter. But I've been looking for a window manager for forever. And in that way that I sort of overcorrected a while back, I think where I'm no longer allowed to do anything related to productivity or dev tools. I was just forbidden because it was a time sink. I'm slowly trying to correct back and be like, you know what? I regularly think about how it would be nice to have a better window manager. So previously, I had used Divvy, D-I-V-V-Y, which is fine. It did an okay job, but it just didn't have quite the level of control that I wanted, or maybe I didn't investigate it enough. But it felt like it was lacking. So I did a little bit of research. A bunch of people recommended different things. There was Spectacle; there was Rectangle. There was a whole bunch of other things that I'm forgetting now because I have settled on Moom, M-O-O-M. Those are fun words. STEPH: I feel like you keep bringing interesting words [laughs] because last time, it was Things where you're tracking all the things. And now we have Moom to track the space. All right. CHRIS: If this is my legacy as a podcaster, then I feel like I will have done well just, you know, weird sounds mostly that's what he's going for. But yes, I've been using Moom now for…[laughs] God, it's just ridiculous to say, but here we are. STEPH: [laughs] CHRIS: I've been using it. I've been enjoying it. In particular, the thing that I liked about it...a bunch of the other ones that I looked at were like, oh, we've got all these different configurations. And you can move things any which way, and you can have any number of hotkeys. And I was like, wait, wait, wait, say more right now. You want to take over my global namespace of hotkeys and just clutter it with 19 different things? You know that that is a limited space that I'm working with here. And so Moom, somewhat uniquely, at least in the ones that I experienced, was what I would describe as a modal window manager. So much like Vim is modal where you start out in normal mode, and you're moving around and you kind of bounce and search and all of that, and then you enter insert mode. And in insert mode, keys do different things. And then in command mode...it's got all these different modes. And so there are lots of different namespaces for hotkeys. It's one of the things that makes Vim so powerful. Moom is similar in that there's one global activation hotkey. And then, within that, I can have a whole namespace of hotkeys. So like M will put something in the middle of my screen now. F will put something full-screen. And I don't need to remember weird multikey combinations for that. There's just the one to get started, and then I've configured it such that the tab will bounce to a secondary display and sort of rotate through them. M and F and Q and P I've got it physically laid out on the keyboard. So it looks like my screen. Q being on the left side will push something to the left side, P to the right side. And I'm very happy with that. I don't need a lot out of this tool. I don't need very complex management or scripting or any of that, which are very nice features that exist in the other ones. But that combination, the one hotkey to rule them all, and then the sub hotkeys within it, and the ability to mostly move between the screens and then put stuff where I want it is great. I'm very happy. STEPH: I think I've figured it out. So Moom, I think it's a combination of move and zoom, and that's how they got Moom. CHRIS: You're probably right. STEPH: That does sound really nice. I'm a Spectacle fan. And I have enjoyed it and just stuck with it because I haven't felt a need to change from it. And it's really nice where I use my arrow keys for which direction I want to go. So that has been easy for me to recall. But that sounds really nice, all the things that you're describing with Moom. CHRIS: Does spectacle have the like, is it some Command Option Control and then left or right or up or down? Or is it you type something, and then you type left, right, up, down? STEPH: I have to actually touch my keyboard to answer that question because I have the muscle memory, which is an interesting thing that my muscles knows it, but my brain has to really think about it. So I think it's like the Option Command, and then yeah, then use the arrow keys. CHRIS: Gotcha. That's roughly what I had when I was using Divvy previously, but I found just enough of a limitation there. And so Moom has been great as another tool. But I think Spectacle has a lot more features in terms of scripting and other fancier stuff that you can do, which is both super intriguing and, again, sort of the thing that I'm not allowed to do. [laughs] So I went with, like, this tool seems fine and has the one feature that I really want. That said, you brought up Things, which is the to-do list app that I've been looking at. I've been using it for a week now. It's great. I'm enjoying having a more structured way to say, like, here's what I'm doing today. Here's what I'm doing tomorrow. It's been wonderful. But I'm already looking at OmniFocus as a better version. STEPH: [laughs] CHRIS: Because I think there's some stuff that I don't love, and yes, I can hear my own voice in the back of my head that's like, always chasing that next thing. But I haven't actually made the effort to switch over or even tried. I've used OmniFocus in the past. But anyway, I'll let you know if I do make additional moves there. STEPH: Yeah, I'm enjoying this journey. Keep me up to date on it. I've heard of OmniFocus, but I know nothing about it. But I feel like I've heard good things. So I like this journey you're going on where you just keep switching and trying new things. That's fun for me [laughs], and there's chasing productivity. So I'm into it; I'm here for it. CHRIS: If I just invest enough hours to save a handful of minutes down the road, then I will have...oh no, wait, that's not how this goes. There's, of course, an xkcd about this which we can include in the show notes. But I'm trying to be very intentional with it. I waited for many years before I allowed myself to reinvestigate the world of to-do lists. And I'm hopefully going to keep it to just a couple of weeks of nonsense and then back to a few years of stable. That's the dream. But yeah, that's some of the smaller things that are up in my world. I have another topic that I want to chat about. But I'd love to hear what's new in your world? STEPH: Yeah, I have some interesting bits that I can talk about with the project that I'm working on. But more concretely, I have something that's been on my mind that I don't think that I've talked about here on the show, but I think would be fun to talk about because I just happened to run into it this week while working on some code. And it's the idea of defining test classes in RSpec so as you are testing part of your code, but then you want to create just like a fake class, something that you can use as a substitute for real application code. And so it's a really nice way that then you can have this replica behavior, but then maybe it's just one particular method or some behavior that you need to use in the class but then doesn't actually go to the real code. That's wonderful. That's great. One thing that I've learned is that with RSpec is when you are introducing a test class, so let's say if you have your RSpec describe and then either a string or it's the name of a class, and then you have a block so do, and then within that block is where you write your test. If you create a temporary class, say, like I have my class test class, and then I have some behavior, that gets defined in the global namespace. It's not scoped to that particular RSpec example. And the reason for that it's not specific to RSpec. RSpec is not the one that's doing this; it's actually Ruby behavior. So for Ruby, when you're defining within a block like that, if you're defining a constant, if you're defining another class inside of a block, it's going to use the outer namespace as its namespace. So if you had a top-level class that you were defining, but if you define a class as a block, and then inside of that block you define a constant, that constant is then defined in the object namespace instead of within that particular class that you have written. And so that's why RSpec has this behavior. Because someone brought up a really great question about this on RSpec::Core asking about it, and they're like, yeah, that's actually how Ruby works. And so we're not going to change RSpec's behavior since that is how Ruby has decided to handle this. And the part where this becomes important is when you define a test class within an RSpec example. While it may be unlikely that someone is going to use that exact same name for their test class that they're going to create in their RSpec example, if they were to use that same name, then you're going to have a collision between the two. One of them's going to win, and you're probably going to end up with some really weird test failures because it's going to get confusing as to which class is being used, and they may not match up with each other. So one way around this, and this is going to be one of the rare times that I suggest this, but let. Let is scoped to an RSpec example. And so you could define a class inside of a let, and then that will scope it to the example. There are probably some other approaches as well, but that's the one that I'm most familiar with to ensure that when you define that class or constant, it's not getting defined in the global namespace and ensuring that none of the other tests have access to it. CHRIS: Well, this is certainly interesting. I'm pretty sure I've been operating under the opposite assumption for the entirety of my career. This is good to know. I feel like I probably have had tests that failed because of this. And then I learned this truth, and then I subsequently forgot it. I don't know if you know this, but if you define a method within just a helper method that you extract in RSpec, are those also on the global namespace? I don't define classes in RSpec blocks that often. It's pretty rare. Like if I have a controller concern sort of thing that I want to test, I might say random controller and inject the thing there or some other abstracted piece. That is the only case I can think of where I have a fake model or a fake controller or something like that for test purposes. But it doesn't come up that often. I do extract a heck ton of local helper methods. And I'm wondering now, are those all in the shared global namespace? STEPH: I'm pretty sure they're not. And I'm getting on the edges of my knowledge here, but I think it has to do with the fact of when you're defining a constant. So if you're defining a class versus an actual constant, that will get into the global namespace because it's using the outer scoping. But in my experience, I'm pretty sure that's not true for the method just because I remember one time I did some funky stuff with RSpec. And I remember seeing that I couldn't access those methods from another example. CHRIS: I like the honesty. And you're like, to be clear, I was doing something weird, but I learned that day. Okay, that's good because at least that part maps to my understanding. So methods may be safe, but classes get shared. Very interesting. STEPH: And it's something that I rarely think about or had worried about just because if I'm defining a fake test class, I often will put it somewhere that's intended to be more global. So I'll stuff it somewhere in like spec support. So then other people can see, hey, I've already mimicked this behavior. So if you need to use the same thing, just go ahead and use this. It's not often that I am adding that class directly to the RSpec example group. So I think I've been fortunate where I haven't actually run into that conflict for that reason. But this came up while giving an RSpec course. And while we were just in a very small, tiny codebase and replicating some examples, someone in the class was like, "Hey, by the way, do you know that that's in the global namespace?" And I was like, "No, friend. Tell me more." So thanks to that person, they're the ones that actually enlightened me about how it's going into that namespace and how it can actually pollute your testing namespace. There's a really good article that's written by Ken Mayer. And we'll be sure to include a link in the show notes that talks about it and also provides the let example as a way to work around this. And also links to the GitHub discussion on RSpec::Core, where they talk about this behavior and why things are the way that they are. Circling back to some of the more general project-y things that I alluded to earlier, I've shared a bit about the project that I'm working on. But just to recap it, it is focused on helping a very large team that has a large number of tests, around 85,000. And they are looking to address flaky tests that they have and overall really improve their CI build time. So right now, it takes about 30 minutes for the build to take place. But they also have flaky tests, and then that slows things down. And so, the re-verify rate has been painful for them. There's been some really great work that has improved that, particularly there is a, I think we've talked about this before, but where they're re-verifying certain flaky tests, which isn't great because they're still flaky tests, but at least they're not preventing people from moving forward and shipping code. But some of the bigger stuff that is just on my mind is when you have a very large team and a very large application, by large team, I'm talking about 100 developers, and they are all contributing to this codebase. And there are around 85,000 tests, and that has grown substantially in the last 12 months. And so, if you think about the trajectory of the addition of those tests, it is just going to continue to grow. So there's a concern there of even if we address flaky tests and we improve things, there's an architecture concern of how do we really reduce the CI build time? And so there's that aspect, and then there's also the aspect of then well, how do we still work to improve the tests and the codebase as well as we go across all of these disparate teams? And right now, there is a bit of a culture where engineers don't feel empowered where they can necessarily address all of the flaky tests or things that they run into. And so there is a bit of a mindset of I'm stuck on this, or this test failed, or it's flaky, or I don't understand it. So I'm just going mute it, or I'm going to hand it off to someone else to work on it. So there are three big areas that are on my mind. The first one is architecture. You can throw architecture at it. There's also the code quality that's a concern. And then how do you improve the code quality in a way that you're improving it fast enough that then you've got 100 other developers that are also contributing to it at the same time? And then individual IC empowerment where then people feel like, hey, I ran into a slow test or a flaky test, and I feel like I can triage this, and I can make changes. For the architecture piece, we're still in the infancy stages of how to approach this and the strategy that we're using. But one of the ideas that has come up is how do we reduce tentpoles? And the tentpole is like when you're running your test and, let's say that it's parallelized, all of the various tests. But there is one process that takes like 20 minutes, and then the other process is completed in 5 minutes as a drastic example. And overall, you could have reduced your time if you had managed to split that 120-minute process across all the other workers who are then available for that work. So there are some tentpoles that are taking place. And that could be one first step in reducing the CI build time. There are also discussions around how to scale horizontally. Right now, we don't think that's something we can do with the service that we're using to run the test. But it's something that maybe we need to manually look into is then how do we build a queue of all these tests and not where we just split test by a file, which is typically how the Parallelize gem does it. But you could actually split up tests within a file. So if you had a particularly large file, that doesn't necessarily matter. But then building a queue of all these tests so then as each test finishes, a worker can just grab that next test. And then also you can easily scale up and scale down workers. As I'm saying that, that feels big, that's a lot to invest in. But that as an idea is how can we essentially then scale the architecture? So even as we continue to invest in the tests, in the system, and they continue to grow, our architecture can keep up with it. CHRIS: That last bit there is super interesting to me. It's something that I've looked into and haven't pursued yet. We're currently running on CircleCI with our test suite. And I don't even know that we pushed on parallelization because we're early enough on that. And we turned off bcrypt recently, which super-duper helps with the speed up. But overall, the test suite time is fine, is where I would put it. It had crept up, though, to a place where it was starting to be painful, is how I would describe it. And I think it's very easy for that to just continue growing and suddenly, it's 20 and 25 minutes. And then, depending on your merge strategy and all of that, it can be all the more complicated, and this gets in the way of deploys. And so, I think it is a super important thing to keep an eye on. I know Charity Majors pushes really hard for 15 minutes from merge to deploy to production. And so if your CI suite takes 25 minutes, then already you're stuck. As an aside, I just once more want to say out into the ether, CircleCI or any other CI platform, if you would allow me to say yes, we've already tested this Git hash, this Git SHA, or the working tree, ideally, because that's also deterministic, I would love that feature. I would love to not have to rebuild the same code when it gets merged into main, just saying once more out into the world. Also, GitHub, if you want to put me on the merge queue beta, I would love that if anybody out there is listening. [laughs] STEPH: I like how this has become a special requests hotline for all the things [laughs] that you're hoping to get a part of or features you'd like to see added. CHRIS: Hello, internet. I have some requests. STEPH: [laughs] CHRIS: I would love to see those things, but in the world where those don't exist. The particular thing that you're talking sort of a test queue, is something that I've seen. So Knapsack is a...what's the word? It's a tool; it's a service. It's a combination of things. But it does that essentially where it starts up a local build agent. And then it basically says like, all right, give me all of the tests that you need to run, and then I will feed them back to each of the individual agents that there's one agent running per parallelized process. And so say you've got five of them. The first one says, "Hey, give me a test," and runs it. And the second one says, "Give me a test," and et cetera. And so, the queue manager on the other side is in charge of that orchestration. And it means that they basically all finish in identical time, with one being an outlier, whichever one happens to be the longest. But it's only going to be however long your longest test is is basically that outlier versus what you're describing of like, well, if we split it by file, we can end up with more naive things where there's a bunch of feature specs on one of them, and it skews by two minutes. We obviously don't want that. So Knapsack, in particular, is a tool that I've looked at, but generally, I'm very interested in that as a solution to how do we maximally take advantage of parallelization there? STEPH: Interesting. I have not heard of Knapsack. There is one that sounds similar. It's called RSpec Queue. And it does some really interesting work where it will split the individual test, so it won't do it by file. It will also look at historical data to then try to be intelligent about how it's going to split it and find the longer running test. And I believe it uses Redis to then keep track of the test set up in run and things that still need to be run. That is a gem that the team is looking into using as well. I don't know how that works if that can integrate with the current platform as we're using TeamCity to run tests. I don't know if that's something that can integrate with TeamCity, if it's a replacement. I don't have all of the knowledge about RSpec Queue yet. But it seems to do a number of the things that we're interested in. So even if we can't use the gem, then maybe it's something that we can still imitate. CHRIS: The other thing that I'm surprised we haven't said yet is this is one of the places where people would often reach for microservices. I feel like we have to have the microservice conversation at this moment. Microservices can actually be a great solution to organizational problems. As a team scales, it does become really hard to manage a large group of developers. And so microservices introduces a very fixed boundary that then draws nice lines that you can have around things. And so, the individual build time for a portion of your application can be much more manageable by virtue of that. But it has this huge cost of technical complexity and overhead and et cetera, et cetera, all of the reasons that we may not want to go that route. And so interestingly, I was just looking at Shopify's Deconstructing the Monolith blog post, which I think at this point, they've skewed a little bit more into the microservices. Shopify is huge, one of the largest Rails apps out there. And so looking at them and being like, oh, what are they doing? It's an interesting sort of plot a course and to see how long they waited before they even started thinking about the much deeper things and even exploring microservices. But in this blog post, they talk about a different approach where they stuck with sort of a monolith. But then they started to introduce Rails engines and clear encapsulation within the large codebase such that then you can actually start to say, well, we don't need to run all the tests every time because if we're making a change within this section of the application, then we just need to run those tests. I've also heard of organizations having some logic that can determine based on the code change; we know the associated test files that we should run. I'm scared of that is how I would describe it. I want to trust my test suite. I want to be able to deploy on a Friday and say if tests are green, it's going out to production. That's great. And I worry about that sort of thing. That's hard to get right. That feels like caching, right? And that's one of those things that we historically get wrong a lot. But nonetheless, that is an approach that large organizations I've heard having good success with. So some way to determine what's the affected code and what tests do we need to rerun and et cetera. And that can really drastically reduce down the scope of each CI build. But those are some larger things that I have not had to reach for on any of the applications I've worked with. I've taken different approaches, different ways to reduce the time or otherwise Parallelizer et cetera. But it's interesting for when you get to a certain scale. STEPH: Yeah, it's funny that you bring up that idea because that came up in conversation with some of the other developers as well, was the idea of, like, what if we could just not run all the tests? You changed one file, and you don't need to run everything. And I immediately was like, that sounds very cool and super hard to be able to get right. And a lot of this code is extremely coupled, which then moves to the code quality area. So I suspect a lot of the test times could be improved by creating smaller objects because right now, a lot of the tests will load the entire world because they have to. They have to test everything. And so that is creating a ton of data, and then taking a long time to run versus if we were able to split out that code into smaller objects and test in unit tests, then that would also help speed up. But that's also hard to do. Where do you look first? We do have some great data, thanks to RSpec. RSpec is letting us know how long each test file takes to run, and then we are capturing that data. So I can go look at which files and say, oh, this file takes 10 minutes to run. Let's look at that file first versus some of the other ones that are performing better. But that is a battle that will take a long time to win. And it's something that takes consistency and then also encouraging others to join that battle. So while it's very important, it doesn't address the concern of tests growing rapidly and then being able to support that. Something that you said in a previous episode also was on my mind in talking about building processes in a way that encouraged people that they can make small, quick changes. And I think that's really important. So if we can build out the architecture to help scale this so then the tests were running in say 15 minutes, then if someone saw a test and they wanted to make a small refactor, they saw a factory.create, and they're like, oh, that could be a FactoryBot.build_stubbed instead and issue that into a pull request or change request and get that merged. I don't know if people feel as comfortable doing that right now because it takes them 30 minutes or longer to run the test. But that idea of how do we get a structure in place where people can make tiny, little improvements and do that as a whole, as a team, to then work on the code quality concerns? CHRIS: That last little bit is so interesting where you're saying, like, oh, we have a FactoryBot.create, FactoryBot.Build, but it has the overhead of having to go through the 30-minute test suite. But coming back to the thing we were talking about before, what if we didn't have to run all the tests? Although I find it very hard to tell, given a code change in actual production code, what tests do I need to run? When I'm just changing a test, I'm pretty sure I know which test I need to run in order to determine if that test still runs correctly. So that feels is there an optimization that can happen there? Which is I've only made test changes; therefore only run the changed tests. And then that's an encouragement to say, like; this is a part of our codebase that we are trying to improve on. Let's optimize the iteration speed there. You'd have to figure out how to write that. And so it's probably much like my productivity adventures, maybe not a good investment. Although given that this is such an organizational concern, maybe that is the thing that's worth spending an afternoon on and seeing if it could happen. Because if you can speed that process up, get more [inaudible 23:46] and more iteration in fixing the tests, that feels like it could be a win. STEPH: I think that's a really good idea. I think we could certainly tell that if a file's changed, that it's only a test file that has changed. And then I've heard very good things from the other developers that TeamCity has a wonderful API to work with. And so there's a way that we could then tell TeamCity to say, hey,...or it may not even be a TeamCity command. It may just be somewhere in the universe we have to say, "Hey, RSpec, only run this test," or "TeamCity, we're only going to feed you this one RSpec test to run, so user agent but only run this particular test." So I really like that idea. I think that's really intriguing. And I'll bring it up with the team because that would be a huge win, especially as Joël and I are really focused more on tests. That would just improve our lives. So selfishly, I'm excited about that idea because we are touching less of the application code and more focused on improving the test at this point. CHRIS: I mean, if right now you're getting, say, 5 or 10 pull requests through a day which frankly feels like a high bar on this, if suddenly that's 10 to 20, that's material right there. STEPH: Yeah, I don't know how large of an impact it would have for the rest of the team because I don't know how often they're only making changes to a test file, but it still feels like a nice optimization to have. Cool. Well, thanks. I appreciate that idea. CHRIS: My pleasure. Mid-roll Ad And now a quick break to hear from today's sponsor, Scout APM. Scout APM is leading-edge application performance monitoring that's designed to help Rails developers quickly find and fix performance issues without having to deal with the headache or overhead of enterprise platform feature bloat. With a developer-centric UI and tracing logic that ties bottlenecks to source code, you can quickly pinpoint and resolve those performance abnormalities like N+1 queries, slow database queries, memory bloat, and much more. Scout's real-time alerting and weekly digest emails let you rest easy knowing Scout's on watch and resolving performance issues before your customers ever see them. Scout has also launched its new error monitoring feature add-on for Python applications. Now you can connect your error reporting and application monitoring data on one platform. See for yourself why developers call Scout their best friend and try our error monitoring and APM free for 14 days; no credit card needed. And as an added-on bonus for Bike Shed listeners, Scout will donate $5 to the open-source project of your choice when you deploy. Learn more at scoutapm.com/bikeshed. That's scoutapm.com/bikeshed. CHRIS: What else is going on in my world? I continue to not code a ton which is interesting and probably makes sense for right now. But to share a small anecdote from this week, we had retro, and I ended up attending retro ever so slightly late. I was doing a hiring interview, which is super exciting. Again, for anyone that's out there, we are hiring at Sagewell Financial. And I would love to chat with you if that sounds interesting. But so I was having a wonderful hiring conversation that ran a little bit long. So I was a little bit late to retro, and I arrived, say like eight minutes in, and someone was expressing a concern. And the concern was, I very sincerely know this to be true, but they were saying in the most positive way. But they were like, "It'd be great if Chris could code more," and not in the judgmental like, Chris, why are you not getting as much done? Not in that way at all, very much in the it would be great if Chris had more time, if there wasn't as much pulling my attention in different directions. But then it kind of went into this interesting direction. So we then go back through and address the concerns and talk as a group about how we resolve them. But this one was like, my name was in the concern, again, in a very positive way, in a very supportive way. And we had a wonderful conversation, and there were really great ideas that were passed around. But man, did I feel weird having my name in a retro item. [laughs] STEPH: So one thing I've learned is that you do a really good job when you are giving presentations and being in the spotlight. But I don't think you actually love it. You love sharing content and things that you have learned. But I could see how being a focal point, especially if there's a concern or something that could have a negative connotation, that would feel squeamish. It would make me feel squeamish. CHRIS: I hadn't thought about it in that way. But as you say it, also, this conversation is a meta version of that. Like, let's talk about me talking about me. I don't want to be the center of attention. But I love technology or process. I love talking about the work. That's great. And so I'm happy to do that. I'm happy to stand in front of a room and talk about it. But yeah, when it's about me, that's weird. And so now I'm going to move...well, no, I'm not going to move on [laughs] because this is the topic right now. But so there's a bunch of things that we have been trying to introduce. And I think this is a useful part of the conversation more broadly and less about me. So one of the things that I think I mentioned in a previous episode was the introduction of point-dev, which is each week, we rotate through a person. And that person is in charge of triaging the errors, making sure that nothing is stuck in Sidekiq, responding to any support requests, et cetera, et cetera. But they're meant to be the frontline such that everyone else can be heads down and really focus on the work. And what was interesting of the three developers that are working on the project, I am point-dev this week. So I was like, yes, that's awesome this week because I'm the person on the frontline. That has not helped me, but in the future, it will. And then one of the other developers mentioned that they feel like it's really useful but also feel like it's been noisy. And we realized the previous week was their week on point-dev. But the other developer was like, "Yeah, it's been great. I haven't had to think about anything." And so they have been off of that rotation for two weeks now. They'll be taking it over next week. But it is doing exactly its job of providing that attention coverage so that they can keep their focus on the code, and that's really wonderful. So I'll be honest, when we started talking about it, there was a tiny voice in my head that was like, is this a failure mode? Should we be dealing with the noise rather than having a process to address it in the moment? Should we be dealing with the root cause rather than the symptoms? And I still think that's a good point of view. But we found so much value from this. And as I've mentioned it, many people are like, oh yeah, we have that. It's great. I've heard enough positive things. So I've backed away from that. But there was a voice in my head that was like, are we failing right now? But yeah, so point-dev has been really wonderful. And next week, I will have to...well, frankly, the next two weeks, I'm off of point-dev appointments, so I'm very excited about that. I've been doing some of the product management or sort of the tech side of the product management and helping to triage cards and make sure that there's very clear work lined up for the engineering team when they're ready to do that. I'm trying to back away from that just a little bit. And one of the things that we did there was introduced an inbox column in our Trello board. You know how I love a good inbox. You know how I love to get to inbox zero. But that is a good way for me, for anyone now in the organization, which I don't want everyone to have to learn our processes, but just saying, "This is the place that you put requests, and we will deal with them. I assure you of that." It has been great because that means I don't need to be quite as responsive in Slack. I can just gently redirect people, "Hey, if you don't mind, please put this in Slack in the inbox column, and that'll be great." That thing, though, that gentle pushback in Slack is one of the things that I've struggled with. And this was one of the more personal aspects of the conversation that happened in retro was me being, like, if we're being honest, I tried to do that. But it's not my favorite thing to do in the world. Whenever someone asks me something, I want to be helpful. I don't want to seem rude or brisk or like I'm too busy for you, et cetera, et cetera. So I will often respond to the question or do the thing that they're asking and then say, "In the future, if you could go to this other place." And ideally, I'm slowly moving forward and being like, "No, no, no, please go to the other place. We've talked about this a few times." But it is an interesting example of one of the specific aspects of my personality coming through in this. But that introduction of an inbox has been great. Love me a good inbox, as I said. And then, more generally, we just tried to talk through what are the things that I'm doing? Do I need to own all of those uniquely? And some of them the answer we decided was yes but some of them we decided no. And we started to sort of distribute the work there or some of the meetings or different aspects of it. And so overall, it was a really great conversation but also very weird for me. STEPH: Yeah, because then you wonder, am I not doing the right thing? Am I not spending my time the right way? But then hopefully, that meeting helped reinforce that yes, you are spending your time the right way and that you're doing a lot of productive things. There are just too many productive things for you to do, and so you have to prioritize those aggressively. I like all the things that you just highlighted. There's one in particular, the last one that you mentioned about finding things that you can hand off to others. And I love that for a couple of reasons. It came up in a recent conversation that I was having with some other thoughtbot developers around when someone's on a project, typically someone just falls into being the point person. They just happen to be the person that the client talks to and ask questions and goes through the most. And that's something that is okay. But we want to make sure that that's not a bad thing, that everybody is treated equally, that everybody is given equal opportunities and room to grow. And so, in my mind, whenever someone is that point person, or you have fallen into that role, it is your job to then pull other people up. So if you have been given the responsibility of running a particular meeting each week, then go ahead and do it once or twice, so you can demo it and show it to someone else as to how you do this. But then tag somebody else and say, "Hey, I'm going to let you or ask you to run this next time." So then that person can experience it. They can demo their style, and then it continues on to have more people. So I really like that you are highlighting it's not just beneficial for you to then distribute those tasks, but it's empowering for everybody else on the team as well. I'm curious, so what was the final outcome? It sounds like there are some really good things in place, and you're transitioning, handing some things off. But I can't imagine that things have gotten...all of your priorities are still there. So do you think you'll actually code more, or what's the outcome for next week? CHRIS: Short term, maybe probably not, if we're being honest, but trending in that direction. So one of the things that's going on right now is hiring. That is just an activity that takes a lot of time. And I care a lot about doing that well, both for the organization and then for individuals on the other side. I want to be respectful of their time and communicate in reasonable timelines and not leave people without an answer or follow up or those sorts of things. It probably makes sense for that to sit with me as the starting contact. And then from there, folks that are continuing on in our hiring process they're going to talk to many other members of the team, and that won't just be me. But there are a lot of first conversations that I'm having. And so right now, my schedule has a bunch of that, which is fine and good. And that will hopefully, at some point, we'll hire some great people. And then we'll be on the other side of that. And that piece of the work that I have right now goes away. Some of the other outcomes that we named there were a couple of action items. And so I think those will help, but they're sort of we got to work towards that. One is transitioning a meeting, but it's a biweekly meeting. And I'm not going to just not attend the next one. So it'll be me and one of the other developers attending to transition ownership of that meeting moving forward. And then from there, so like, two weeks from now, I will not have that consideration on my calendar. And that's like one 30-minute block that I get back or, depending on how you think about it, one block that that 30-minute broke up. I do want to touch back just on something that you're saying there. I think you're being very kind to me in saying like, no, but you've got so many things, and so it's hard to do that. I think that's true, but that's kind of the work overall, and my version of that is one thing. But everyone sort of has, as a team, we have a version of like, how are we being most productive? Are we making sure we're doing the most important things? And so it was interesting in the moment, but I think it was a very good conversation. And I want to make sure that both we as a team and then me as an individual, wherever that happens to be the case, are open to these sort of constructive things. Like, frankly, to do the work to figure out how to get work off my plate that hasn't felt like the most important thing. It felt like close to the most important thing, but then there were all the other things that I had to do. So I wasn't doing the work to figure out how to not do the work. It is a complicated sentence that I just said. But this was a case where retro, I think, very usefully highlighted that this was a good thing for us collectively to put effort into such that we can be more productive moving forward. It happened to be slightly more focused on me rather than the entirety of the team. But broadly, that kind of thinking is why I'm a huge fan of retro. I think it's a great place to take a step back think about how we're doing the work rather than just being in the work day-to-day. STEPH: So if I'm internalizing what you said correctly, let me know if not, but it sounds like you're in one of those places, and I've witnessed this with other people and myself where someone is overwhelmed. They have a lot to do, and they're very focused in that grind and in that moment of doing all the things that they have to do. And it's very hard to then say, "I'm in the weeds right now. And then I also have to figure out how to get out of the weeds." And that's a very different skill and mental space to be able to do that. Because often, when you're just in that mode, all you can focus on is a bit on survival at that time. And then it may take other people to notice to say, "Hey, you're in the weeds. We need to figure out a way to help you not live there and to find ways to distribute some of the work." Does that sound like a fair assessment? Because I think I say all that because I've just seen people in that position. And then they think back, like, oh, I should have offloaded stuff earlier. And it's like, yeah, true, totally. And it often takes a retro or someone else coming to you and saying, "Hey, I've noticed...I looked at your calendar today; how can I help?" [laughs] CHRIS: I think that's probably the right calibration. And mostly, my emphasis was just I want to make sure that broadly, any team that I'm on has the space for this sort of conversation. And that thing that you're saying exactly that phrasing of like, "Hey, I saw your calendar. How are you doing? How's that going, though? Are you feeling okay? [laughs] You can't sleep and whatnot." That can be a really useful thing to have and to have organizational norms about what are our expectations of how many meetings someone should have in a week. And where do we start to think about different things? You did use the phrase overwhelmed. I want to say that I'm like 101% whelmed. So I'm just ever so slightly overwhelmed, but it is like I'm in the weeds. I need to figure out how to clear some of the weeds so that then I can get out of it. And it was a great conversation that came from that. STEPH: That's awesome. I'm glad you got a good team that, frankly, felt comfortable bringing it up, and then that you could lean on them for ways to talk about how you could code some more and talk about priorities and where you want to focus your time. CHRIS: It will be an interesting thing. As the team grows, I don't expect this to get easier. We talked about this a number of weeks back. And I think for a while; hopefully, we clear a little bit of dust here, and then I get back to being a little bit more on the code, and that's going to happen for a while. But as I think about the longer sort of the future of the company, this is something I'm going to have to revisit a handful of times. And it's a really interesting question that I'm still struggling with internally. And where do I want to be versus what will be needed and whatnot? So it'll be interesting to see how it evolves. But for now, I think I can gain back a little bit of coding time, a little bit of maker time versus manager time, as Paul Graham's essay goes. And yeah, I think that'll be good. STEPH: Yeah, I like how you're already looking forward to the fact that it will probably fluctuate because, yeah, right now, you are sort of paying a tax. You are building up to then where you can have more people on the team. And then that may give you back some of your time where then you can code because you can outsource some of the work to them. But then, as the team grows, so are other responsibilities. And traditionally, being in a CTO role and most CTOs I know will code here and there because they want to, and they enjoy it, but it is not their full-time job. So I think you're really wise to have already noticed that and start thinking about how that's going to trend in the future. And it sounds like you might need to figure out how to throw some architecture at it. So then you can scale horizontally, and then you can just have more time to do all the things. Yeah, that's right. [laughs] CHRIS: You're suggesting microservices, right? That's how my job becomes easy? STEPH: Yeah. Well, I'm thinking more like RSpec Queue, but we'll have RSpec Chris or some version of that. CHRIS: Chris Queue. STEPH: Chris Queue. [laughs] CHRIS: And then I just paralyze my human, and then it'll be great. STEPH: Yeah, that's always worked out well in the movies. Whenever somebody clones themselves, that goes super well. CHRIS: Multiplicity is a fantastic piece of cinema, and I stand by that. STEPH: I haven't seen it, but I feel like it doesn't end well for the main character. CHRIS: I feel like every time I mention a movie, you haven't seen it. I feel like we need to do a movie marathon at some point just to catch up so that we've got shared analogies. But yeah, it's a fun movie. It's fine. It turns out fine in the end. But there are some humorous adventures that happen in the middle. Cloning maybe [laughs] isn't the most direct option to solve productivity problems. STEPH: [laughs] Yeah, I think I've got Labyrinth, Hackers, and Multiplicity now on the watch list. And I appreciate the fact that you know that I'm not likely to watch them, although out of the three, Hackers will probably happen. CHRIS: All right, what if I were to get a bunch of Pop-Tarts, non-frosted? STEPH: Ooh. CHRIS: Does that change -- STEPH: Wait, are you going to send them to me? Because if you just have them, that's no good. [laughter] CHRIS: Eat Pop-Tarts on a video call and be like, "Look at this movie. It's great." [laughter] STEPH: All right, bribery definitely works for me. [laughs] CHRIS: Okay, so got it, noted. And based on the nature of the conversation that we have devolved into here, I think we've probably reached a good point. What do you think? Should we wrap up? STEPH: Let's wrap up. CHRIS: The show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. STEPH: This show is produced and edited by Mandy Moore. CHRIS: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review on iTunes, as it really helps other folks find the show. STEPH: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us at @_bikeshed or reach me on Twitter @SViccari. CHRIS: And I'm @christoomey. STEPH: Or you can reach us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. CHRIS: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. All: Byeeeeeeeeeee!!!!! Announcer: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.

Jim is joined by ClickMinded co-founder Tommy Griffith and they dive into a subject that is often overlooked: personal finance strategies for founders. Both Jim and Tommy have lived and learned how difficult it can be to balance the different financial approaches you apply to business finances and personal finances and they share mistakes they've made and tips and tricks they've learned along the way.TOPICS DISCUSSED IN TODAY'S EPISODE·      How to approach personal finance as a business owner·      Betting on yourself vs. Betting on a stable market·      The benefits and downsides to a high-risk tolerance·      Is it better to own your own business or work around and get stock options·      Angel investing: funds or single businesses?Additional episodes you might enjoy: Startup Ideas by Paul Graham (#45) Nathan Barry: How to Bootstrap a Company to $30M in a Crowded Market (#41) How I Met My Biz Partner and Less Learned Hitting $2M ARR (#44) Ryan Hamilton on his Netflix special, touring with Jerry Seinfeld, & how to write a joke (#10) How We're Validating Startup Ideas (#51) Resources:· Clickminded· The Psychology of Money· I Will Teach You to Be Rich· Jim Huffman website· Jim's Twitter· GrowthHit· The Growth Marketer's Playbook 

Paul Graham

Join Sal's Syndicate: https://syndicate.angelinvestboston.com/en-us/the-surge-of-opportunities-in-angel-scale-biotech Artificial intelligence guru Gil Syswerda is back to talk about angel investing and to give practical advice to founders. We closed with entertaining stories from Gil's career. Highlights: AI Guru Gil Syswerda Is Back to with Tips for Angels & Founders Why Founders Should Value Their Time at $10 per Minute “...I stopped driving...I take an Uber or Lyft because it's not worth my time to be in a car... An Uber is way cheaper than $10 a minute.” Advice to Founders: Find a Co-Founder with Critical Skills You Lack Advice to Founders: “You need to be in the trenches, along with everybody else.” “One thing you make a must-read is an article by Paul Graham. It's called Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule.” “...The Hard Truth About Innovative Cultures, Gary Pisano just nails it, when he talks about how to create an innovative culture...” “...get an executive assistant as soon as you can.” “...you just cannot function at 100% if you don't get enough sleep.” Exercise Is Essential: Intense Outdoor Exercise at Sunrise; plus do Bouts Like Taking the Stairs “It's actually quite difficult for most people to make money as an angel investor.” “...I believe that Jeff Arnold probably does pretty well on his investments but he has pretty grounded knowledge in the biotech space and he has a methodology for evaluating companies.” How to Make Money in Biotech with Jeff Arnold Frank Ferguson Was a Spectacularly Successful Investor (Bose and Curriculum Associates) by Focusing on a Few Investments Intensely Practical Dreamer with Frank Ferguson Howard Stevenson Got Warren-Buffett-like Returns on His Angel Portfolio [Wealth & Families with Howard Stevenson] Sal Daher and His Biotech Screen for Angel Investing “These people [academic founders] have tremendous skills. If we can help them turn those skills in the direction of something useful, I think they can create a lot of value.” VistaPath Bio Using Off-the-Shelf Machine Vision to Create Value in Pathology Gil Syswerda Stories The HP Interview or Everything I Needed to Know I Learned in Third Grade Growing Fish at BBN Labs The Interview at Lawrence Livermore Research Laboratory Gödel, Escher, Bach & All That The AI Researcher and the Daughter of the Soviet Scientist Simulating Professor Paul Scott How to Have a Board without a Board Gil Syswerda's Perception of Where AI Is Today Gil Syswerda Highlights People Who Were Influential in His Success Topics: co-founders, angel investing strategies, management

Paul Graham

Ali Partovi is the CEO @ Neo, a mentorship community and communal VC fund that announced their new $150M fund last year on the back of early hits from Fund I including Vanta and Kalshi. As an angel, Ali has made personal investments in Dropbox, Uber, Airbnb, Facebook, Convoy and many more. Prior to investing, Ali founded 2 companies, the first; LinkExchange which he sold to Microsoft for $265M in 1998 and the second, iLike which was acquired by Microsoft in 2009. In Today's Episode with Ali Partovi You Will Learn: 1.) How Ali made his way into the world of startups with the founding of his first company? How Ali made his way into angel investing and then starting and raising Neo, as a fund? 2.) How To Kill a $125M By Being Too Honest: How did Ali lose this $125M with Jerry Yang and Yahoo? What led Ali to believe that Paul Graham was so special in 1995? What would Ali have done differently with the benefit of hindsight? How does Ali feel about investment misses today? What are his biggest misses? How has it impacted his mindset and approach to investing? 3.) The Meeting with Steve Jobs Did Not Go Well: Why did the meeting with Steve Jobs not go well? What was wrong with the way Ali phrased his final statement? What did this teach Ali about how founders should communicate the difference between hype and reality? What did this experience teach Ali about how founders should run both fundraising and M&A processes? How does Ali build trust with every touchpoint? 4.) U2, Airbnb and Google at Seed: How did Bono come to save the day for Ali for his startup in 2009? What did this teach Ali about how to frame risk and when to go all in vs hold back? How did Ali miss investing in the seed for Airbnb? How did he make up for it with a later investment? How did Ali come to miss investing in the Google seed round? Does FOMO haunt Ali today? Item's Mentioned In Today's Episode with Ali Partovi Ali's Favourite Book: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

IN THIS EPISODE, YOU'LL LEARN:10:39 - B2B SaaS tailwinds that have occurred from the pandemic.21:00 - The opportunity ahead for financial information migrating to the cloud.28:51 - Best metrics for tracking SaaS companies.33:11 - Logan's take on SOFI stock performance, since he was previously a VP there and is also an investor. 33:54 - Challenges ahead for the Fintech space, as there has been a lot of volatility as of late.46:11 - Logan's strategic advice for Fintech founders as they plan ahead for 2022.And a whole lot more!*Disclaimer: Slight timestamp discrepancies may occur due to podcast platform differences.BOOKS AND RESOURCES:Fin VC's Website.Logan Allin's LinkedIn.Logan Allin's Twitter.Brad Feld's Book, Venture Deals.Paul Graham's Blog. Trey Lockerbie's Twitter.Preston, Trey & Stig's tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool.New to the show? Check out our We Study Billionaires Starter Packs.See the all-new 2022 Lexus NX and discover everything it was designed to do for you. Welcome to the next level.Yieldstreet allows you to invest beyond the stock market with an evolving marketplace of alternative investments. Create your account today.Protect your online activity TODAY with ExpressVPN, the VPN rated #1 by CNET and Wired, and get an extra 3 months FREE on a one-year package.Push your team to do their best work with Monday.com Work OS. Start your free two-week trial today.Get access to some of the most sought-after real estate in the U.S. with Crowdstreet.Find Pros & Fair Pricing for Any Home Project for Free with Angi.Get in early on medical technology, breakthroughs in ag-tech and food production, solutions in the multi-billion dollar robotic industry, and so much more with a FREE OurCrowd account. Open yours today.Make it simple to hire and manage remote employees across all 50 states with Justworks.Be part of the solution by investing in companies that are actively engaged in integrating ESG practices with Desjardins.Stay on top of all your processes – directly inside Gmail with Streak. Get 20% off the Pro plan today.Learn more about how you can get started investing in some of the best cash flow markets today with Rent to Retirement.Canada's #1 employee benefits plan for small businesses! The Chambers Plan evolves with the way you work and live while keeping the rates stable. Opt for the simple, stable, and smart choice for your business.Reclaim your health and arm your immune system with convenient, daily nutrition. Athletic Greens is going to give you a FREE 1 year supply of immune-supporting Vitamin D AND 5 FREE travel packs with your first purchase.Donate to GiveWell's recommended charities and have your donation matched up to $1,000 before the end of August or as long as matching funds last if you've never donated before. Pick PODCAST and We Study Billionaires or enter code TIP at checkout.Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here.Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors.HELP US OUT!What do you love about our podcast? Here's our guide on how you can leave a rating and review for the show. We always enjoy reading your comments and feedback!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to The Quest Pod Season 2: Episode 37 with Eren Bali.Eren was the founding CEO of Udemy, an open online course provider which now offers 180K+ courses to 40M students. He is now the co-founder and CEO of Carbon Health, a vertically integrated, tech-enabled healthcare provider which started in 2015 and was most recently valued at $3.3B. Eren started the company after his mother fell ill and the traditional healthcare system took several months to reach the proper diagnosis and treatment. It began as a mobile app enabling patients to communicate directly with doctors, store medical records and facilitate telehealth appointments. It now has 90 physical clinics located in 14 states within the US.In this episode, Eren talks about the up and downs of founding Udemy and Carbon Health, the importance of perseverance and many other valuable learnings.Check out Eren's LinkedIn ► https://twitter.com/erenbaliFollow Eren on Twitter ► https://www.linkedin.com/in/erenbali/ 

The Measure of Intelligence is the Ability to Change - Albert Einstein A huge part of being able to change is understanding wide and ranging perspectives on topics you care about. Here are some of my favorite writers that challenge my ways of thinking and help me to change: Think Again - Adam Grant (book) Be Antiracist - Ibram X Kendi (podcast) Essays by Paul Graham (blog) Books by Malcolm Gladwell (books) Life Advice that Doesn't Suck - Mark Manson (blog) News and analysis - FiveThirtyEight - (Blog) How To Be the Luckiest Guy On The Planet In 4 Easy Steps - James Altucher - (Blog) Seth's Blog - Seth Godin (blog) Keeping it Awkward, Brave, & Kind - Brene Brown (Blog, Podcast) Every Monday and Wednesday, I publish a bite-sized episode on fulfillment, living by design, working hard, career growth, and mental models. These episodes are less than 10 minutes so you can fit them in your daily routine, and they come from some of the wisest, most accomplished people throughout history. Subscribe to the show today wherever you get your podcasts. For more Bite-Sized Philosophy content, subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts, follow me on Twitter or subscribe to my email list for a fun story delivered right to your inbox every single Friday! Text me! 323-609-5262 --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/joel-sigrist/support

Mensaje de Boro: Ángel de segunda clase.Escribe David Trueba en sus memorias de juventud: «Ganarse la vida es una expresión afortunadísima que por desgracia suele contener un valor meramente pecuniario, material. Ganarse la vida tendría que ser la aspiración mayor de una persona, pero ganársela en el sentido de honrarla, de estar a la altura del regalo». Respetando esa bonita filosofía de honrarla, Boro Mas, empresario y cinéfilo, sí cree que el dinero es buen KPI para tomar decisiones vitales. Él se gana la vida creando negocios rentables.Escucha el podcast en tu plataforma habitual:Spotify — Apple — iVoox — YouTubeArtículos sobre finanzas en formato blog:Substack Kapital — Substack CardinalApuntes:La riqueza de las naciones. Adam Smith.La teoría de los sentimientos morales. Adam Smith.The pretence of knowledge. Friedrich Hayek.Information rules. Carl Shapiro & Hal Varian.The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits. Milton Friedman.Financial markets. Robert Shiller.La noche americana. François Truffaut.Ramen profitable. Paul Graham.Buddhism and modern psychology. Robert Wright.Gratitude. Oliver Sacks.Manhattan. Woody Allen.You want it darker. Leonard Cohen.Índice:0.28. El dinero es el verdadero KPI.6.49. La mano invisible en las transacciones voluntarias.27.47. Montar una empresa es como hacer una película.39.59. Intenta ser rentable para ganar independencia.45.18. La falta de dinero despierta la creatividad.56.47. El lado oscuro de la sociedad tecnológica.1.06.25. La revolución anarquista del blockchain.1.32.33. La huída hacia adelante de Walter White y Don Draper.1.37.05. Woody Allen es pesimista y por eso hace comedias.1.41.26. La paz espiritual, la iluminación, de Leonard Cohen.