15 May 2023
From Jon Kabat-Zinnās Wherever You Go, There You Are:
Meditation is simply about being yourself and knowing something about who that is. It is about coming to realize that you are on a path whether you like it or not, namely, the path that is your life. Meditation may help us see that this path we call our life has direction; that it is always unfolding, moment by moment; and that what happens now, in this moment, influences what happens next.
I lucked into reading this book at the right time, when I was ready to do the work it proposes and open to the possibilities it presents. I found it to be a gentle and nurturing introduction to mindfulness ā āpaying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentallyā ā and a practical overview of how to cultivate it through meditation. I also found it to be a peaceful companion to pick up and just enjoy āthe bloom of the present momentā with. Iād find myself looking forward to when I could pause to share time with this book.
It guided me, in an unstructured way, into meditating. Iād read a bit of the book and then try meditating. Or, Iād try meditating and then read a bit of the book. The line between the two could blur, and reading the book slowly, carefully, and openly became a bit like (I at least imagine, having never participated in oneā¦) a guided meditation session in itself.
This book has provided some serious upgrades to my thinking, perceiving, and ultimately, being.
It gave me some powerful visual metaphors: imagining my mind as a lake; my thoughts as the winds that blow across its surface; my emotions as the waves that get stirred up. Sometimes all is tranquil; sometimes light waves start lapping at the shore; sometimes rough and stormy ones come crashing down on it. I can observe these conditions without getting caught up in them. Or imagining myself as a mountain, rooted deep in the ground and shooting into the sky, yet for all that might, humbly and tolerantly observing all that comes and goes.
It provided practical techniques, like finding my breath while meditating ā in, out, in, out ā as an anchor to the present moment. It also helped me start to find my breath when Iām not meditating, and to glimpse how itās probably possible to transcend the meditating/not meditating boundary such that Iām always mindful and in the present moment.
It helped me discover that my mindās eye has peripheral vision too, and that if I expand my awareness to include this periphery, it has an immediately calming effect: instead of being trapped inside my own thoughts, I lovingly encompass them (positive and negative) and hold them in acceptance.
These upgrades have generally led me to see how if I improve my awareness, and see things as they actually are, here and now, in this moment, just about everything else naturally falls out from that. Iām finding that living in this awareness and acceptance is more efficient, and that things can at times even become effortless, because Iām no longer straining against my own judgments, or insecurities, or whatever.
Itās not as if itās easy, though, or that I can always sustain this, or that I even know how far I am in whatever this journey is. And I often find myself back at the beginning, and have to just set out anew, one breath at a time.
I could go on, but I hesitate, and have already shared more than I prefer, if only because I wish to preserve the positive intuitions that this book has instilled in me, and to protect them from any judgment that somebody else might bring to bear on them. But my desire to keep my own experience with this book private is overridden by my hope that sharing it might help somebody else start to form theirs.
So Iāll just leave it at this: this is one of those rare books thatās so good, I started rereading from the beginning as soon as Iād reached the end. I imagine I will do so again and again, and Iām certain Iāll get something new out of it every time I do.
Itās timeless and true.
02 May 2023
We built our founding team at Accompany by recruiting from within our personal networks. Hiring close friends and colleagues ensured everyone we added to the team was phenomenal, and it let us rely upon our past experience working together in place of a formal interview process. As we started to scale our team, though, we had to expand beyond our personal networks and source candidates we didnāt already know. This meant we had to design an interview process that worked just as effectively.
To do so, we approached interviewing very deliberately. We treated our interview process like it was another product we were building ā one to be designed and iterated on. This consumed a lot of our teamās creative energy, but it paid to get this right. In the end, we designed an interview process that candidates enjoyed and that consistently led to hiring great engineers. 1
In this post, Iāll present how we designed each step of our interview process and why. Every startup is unique, and their interview process should be too. Still, my hope is that a lot of what we found can serve as a useful starting point for founders designing their own interview process from scratch.
Introductory Chat
We began with a thirty minute introductory chat with the candidate. This was a chance for both sides to determine if we wanted to commit to interviewing.
We asked ourselves: āIf this candidate were to pass all of our technical interviews, would we want them on the team?ā If we wouldnāt, there was no point in proceeding, no matter how good at programming they might be. To determine this, we asked the candidate about their favorite past projects and what they were seeking in their new role. This quickly identified candidates who would be a great fit ā friendly and optimistic hackers at heart, who prized a high degree of autonomy and responsibility, who wanted to make stuff that people actually use, and get equity for it. The kinds of people who would make great startup founders themselves. It also quickly identified mismatches, like candidates who either just werenāt very nice, prioritized more work-life balance than we could offer, or (whether they realized it or not) wanted to join a company much larger than ours. 2
We tried to help the candidate answer the same question for themself by telling them about our team, product, and ambitions. This introductory chat was always a blend of assessing if the candidate would be a good fit for us and pitching how our startup could be a good fit for them. Contextualizing the role to the specific candidate ā by exploring where their prior experience could prove useful, discussing how our upcoming projects could meet their interests and goals, and imagining the impact they could have for our customers ā enabled us to naturally do both at once.
We also used this call to check basic things like start date, employment status, location, and compensation ranges. We didnāt want to go through the entire interview process to only then discover the candidate was seeking a salary twice what we could offer.
We told candidates at the end of the call if weād like to move forward. With practice, we were able to accurately determine this on the spot. Doing so pleasantly surprised candidates and helped build momentum. If we werenāt going to move forward, we found it was smoother to just let the candidate know the next day over email.
Iāve noticed founders can be tempted to either skip this introductory chat entirely or outsource it to a recruiter. This is a mistake. Nobody can tell if a candidate would make for a great addition to the team better than the founders. And the candidates you ultimately hire are only as good as the ones you decided to interview, so thereās a huge return on spending the time up front to get this right. 3
The other benefit is that candidates are more likely to decide to interview if they get to learn about the company directly from one of the founders. And in the early days, when your startup is still unknown, you have to do whatever you can to stand out. If done right, this introductory chat is a chance to convey to the candidate that you are keenly interested in them, their goals, and the contributions they could make at your company. Youāre building a relationship with the candidate over the entire course of their interviewing with you; the sooner you start, the stronger it will be by the time theyāre deciding if they want to join.
Technical Phone Screens
After the introductory chat, we conducted two thirty minute technical phone screens. 4 The goal of these calls was to determine if we should invite the candidate onsite for a full day of interviews.
We found that a single thirty minute call wasnāt long enough to accurately assess the candidateās abilities and yielded too many false positives. But a single sixty minute call often resulted in us getting stuck spending an hour with a candidate that we could tell wasnāt a good fit a few minutes in. So two thirty minute calls ended up working best, and had the added bonus that two different interviewers could vet the candidate before we brought them onsite.
On each call, weād spend five minutes getting to know each other, twenty minutes working on a programming problem, and then five minutes debriefing with the candidate on their solution. We had the candidate code up their solution in a collaborative editor in the browser or just by screen sharing their desktop. We had them actually run their code, and we provided test cases for them to work against. This helped remove some of the superficial dynamics that can creep into interviewing and let the candidate work more naturally.
We were surprised to find that easy questions told us more about the candidateās abilities than hard ones. In only twenty minutes, good candidates could nail an easy question, and weād get to see how they designed, implemented, and debugged their solution. When we tried hard questions, candidates had to spend too much time just figuring out how to even solve it, and we wouldnāt cover enough ground to determine if we should invite them onsite.
Inviting the Candidate Onsite
If the phone screens went well, weād invite the candidate to come in for a full day of interviewing at our office. Initially, we fell victim to the mistaken belief that we should share very little information about what to expect. We thought it was important to preserve secrecy; why give away whatās going to be on the test? This was a huge mistake. It made candidates nervous ā like they were entering into some mystical rite of passage ā and left them unprepared.
Over time, we learned to invert this and became extremely transparent, arming candidates with as much information as we could to set them up for success.5
Hereās what we shared when we invited them to come onsite:
Telling candidates what qualities we were looking for was especially helpful. Donāt expect them to magically know what you value. Tell them in advance, and if you notice them falling short on it during the interview, coach them to see how they adapt. Once we started doing this, candidates had a better sense of what to prioritize and performed better.
The Onsite Interview
We began our onsite interviews with lunch because none of us could reliably manage to get in much earlier than that. At first we felt a bit guilty about this, but it ended up being ideal, because it gave the candidate a chance to meet the entire team and work out any nerves before diving into interviewing.
We conducted three interviews: 6
Every startup is unique and their interviews should be too. Our product required strong software architecture and algorithms abilities, so we designed our interviews to assess that. Other startups should design theirs accordingly. A less algorithms heavy startup might benefit from replacing the algorithms interview with a debugging exercise or a second coding session.
Interviewing will always be an approximation of what itās actually like to work in the role. Our aim was to make it as close of an approximation as possible. We needed to figure out how good the candidate would be at the work they would actually do if they joined the team, and not just how good they were at interviewing.
We found a few ways to shrink the distance:
We gave candidates problems that weād actually had to solve. Our system design interview asked candidates to design an API endpoint that weād actually had to build, our programming problem emphasized coding skills that we used every day, and our algorithms interview tested concepts that we needed to know in order to maintain correctness and performance in our product.
We encouraged candidates to work the way they normally do. In our coding interview, for example, we invited them to Google and Stack Overflow anything they werenāt sure about, and we reassured them not to feel embarrassed if it seemed like a dumb thing to look up. We all do this every day in our regular work; why shouldnāt candidates do it in their interview? We also suggested they run their code early and often, because we noticed candidates who did so produced better results.
We tried to make the candidate feel like they were collaborating with a future coworker rather than being judged by an interviewer. In our coding segment, for example, we encouraged the candidate to treat their interviewer like a peer they were pair programming with. Ultimately, the candidate was responsible for designing the solution and writing the actual code, but we invited them to talk through anything they were grappling with. This let both parties get a feel for what itās like to really work together. If we made a suggestion, did the candidate run with it or ignore it? If they got stuck on something, did they just need a nudge, or did we have to perfectly spell things out? If we pointed out a bug, did they get defensive or eagerly jump on a fix?
We actively interviewed. We werenāt on Slack, clearing out messages while we waited till the time was up to see if the candidate had coded up the right answer. Instead, we engaged fully with the candidate, observing how they think and approach their work.7 We realized this mattered more than if they came up with a completely correct answer. There were rarely circumstances on the actual job (production outages aside) where we had to perfectly solve something in under an hour. But we always needed to work productively. Actively interviewing let us assess if the candidate did.
It was helpful to ask the candidate to reflect on their work at the end. What were they happy with? What did they wish was better? If they had another hour, what would they do next? We treated this like an informal code review, and would share what we liked and wished were better too. This told us a ton about what the candidate valued and how receptive they were to feedback. We gained a lot of confidence in making offers to candidates who didnāt come up with a perfect solution if we were able to discern that they saw its shortcomings and had good ideas about how to address them.
Sometimes candidates really struggled at certain points in our interviews. If it became clear they were completely stuck, weād make a mental note and shift from testing to teaching. This was just the nice thing to do, and it also enabled us to move onto the next question, which a candidate might do better at. Itās important to help candidates preserve their self-confidence along the way. Nobody does great work when theyāre feeling demoralized.
The Hiring Decision
It took practice to become proficient at deciding if we should make an offer.
After a long stretch of rejecting nearly every candidate we interviewed, we had to take a step back and remind ourselves that the goal of interviewing was to hire great people onto the team. Since we werenāt doing that, we needed to improve our interview process until we were. This may seem obvious, but it was surprisingly easy for us to lapse into assuming that the reason we werenāt making any offers was that the candidates just werenāt good enough, when in fact it was actually our interview process that wasnāt good enough. Over time, we improved how we sourced candidates, changed the questions we asked and how we asked them, and refined our criteria for determining if a candidate had passed our interviews.
Making good decisions required rigor. The mechanics mattered. We made each interviewer write up their feedback right away while their memory was still fresh. Everyone followed the same template, noting the candidateās strengths, weaknesses, and if we should hire them. Each interviewerās decision came in the form of: Strong No, No, Yes, Strong Yes. 8 The same evening as the onsite, all the interviewers would get together (including whomever conducted the introductory chat and phone screens) and share their feedback with each other. Weād discuss, debate, and decide.
We didnāt have a fixed rule treating Strong Noās as vetoes; we just discussed why the interviewer gave that vote. But usually, if a single interviewer had strong objections, that would be it. Or if all the Yes votes were only lukewarm, we still might not hire. Having all interviewers in a room made this a more consensus driven process rather than just tabulating the votes and applying some formula.
Ultimately, our decision came down to if we believed the candidate would be effective in the role we were hiring for and if the company would be stronger for having them on the team. However they had performed in the interviews only mattered insofar as it answered this question. For example, weād hire candidates that didnāt quite perform at the level we were hoping for if we could tell that they were determined and were fast learners.
Making an Offer (Or Not)
Speed was one of our competitive advantages, so we let the candidate know the next day if we would be making an offer.
We didnāt always give the actual offer right away though. Instead, we asked candidates when theyād be ready to decide by (which was typically whenever they finished interviewing with other companies) and then gave them our offer a week prior to that. This let us avoid giving an offer without a deadline ā we didnāt want candidates to shop it around, or to have to rescind it if we ended up filling the role with someone else ā without having to give an āexplodingā offer that forced the candidate to decide before they were ready. Once a candidate had all the pieces on the board, a week tended to be plenty of time for them to decide.
When we gave candidates the good news, we also shared a quote from each interviewer capturing something that had really impressed them during their time with the candidate. This showed candidates that we were genuinely excited to have them on the team and what the camaraderie would be like if they joined.
If a candidate didnāt pass our interviews, we let them know via email and offered to do a phone call to debrief. Most companies donāt do this, and it meant a lot to candidates that we did. It just seemed like the right thing to do ā the candidate spent all day interviewing with us; the least we could do was spend half an hour on the phone giving them feedback. But we discovered it was a great way for us to get feedback too. When candidates agreed with our remarks, we knew our interview process was working well, and when they disagreed, it often identified things that we could improve. Following through like this left such a positive impression with candidates who didnāt pass our interviews that they would often later refer friends who did.
Closing the Candidate
Once we made an offer, we kept in close touch with the candidate over the week that they had to decide. Different members of our team emailed the candidate to share why they were excited to work with them and to offer to chat. The hiring manager (namely, me) would schedule a call to check in and see how the candidate was leaning. We found that encouraging open communication let the candidate share any concerns, and if needed, let us adjust our offer to ensure we were competitive. It also provided an opportunity to share our own perspective on how to think about the decision, which new grads found especially helpful.
Some candidates wanted to dive deeper into the company because itās always too rushed to fully do so during the interviews. Weād invite them to swing by our office or hop on a call so that we could further demo our app, share more about our roadmap, tell them about our customers, and even have them meet some more people from our team, advisory board, or customer base.
We were careful to never pressure candidates to join and to always respect what was best for them. This was less stressful for everyone, and things ultimately wouldnāt work out well if we forced it anyways.
Only the Start
Interviewing was a tremendous amount of work, but it was only the start. To make all that work pay off, we then had to successfully onboard the new hire and retain them over the long run. Thus began the great craft of management. Since interviewing and managing are such a full time investment, it pays to put it off for as long as possible, at least until you reach product market fit. Once you do, youāll have the fundamentals of your startup in place, and recruiting and retaining will become easier anyways.
But when the time is right for your startup, itās worth intentionally designing your interview process like this. The greatest joy of working at our startup was our team, and none of what we accomplished would have been possible without it. So go forth and build the best one you possibly can.
Iām only going to be covering how we interviewed engineers, although many of the ideas will be applicable to other roles. Early stage software startups should mostly be hiring engineers, though, if theyāre hiring at all. The founders should do the rest.Ā ↩
Candidates who hadnāt worked at early stage startups before would often be seeking things that only make sense at larger companies, like specializing in a single deep technical problem for multiple years straight, building out a team of engineers underneath them upon joining, or frequenting various conferences.Ā ↩
Eventually the Head of Engineering, and then after that the hiring managers for their respective teams, can conduct the introductory chat. Here Iām talking about before the team has scaled to the size that those roles exist. And arguably, if youāve hired the right kind of people along the way, those engineering leaders will be like founders in their own right.Ā ↩
In its episode on hiring, the excellent Metamuse podcast points out how āphone screenā is a bad name because it implies that the goal of the call is to filter out bad candidates instead of to attract great ones. This emphasis on filtering comes from the few big tech companies like Google who were flooded with so many candidates that their primary problem actually was screening out bad candidates. But most startups have the opposite problem: attracting great ones. I wish weād realized this and called this stage something else, like āTechnical Skills Fitā.
In general, a lot of Silicon Valley startupsā interview processes have been cargo culted from big companies like Google, and it really pays to challenge assumptions, think from first principles, and do things differently whenever it makes sense. Whenever we did, we got better signal and candidates appreciated the authentic reflection of what we were all about.Ā ↩
This was an instance where treating our interview process like it was just another product we were building paid off. We just asked ourselves what we would want if we were the ones coming in to interview, and the answer was clear: information about what to expect. In general, asking what interview process we ourselves would enjoy going through helped us improve it for candidates.Ā ↩
At one point, we had four interview segments, but we found this was too draining for candidates.Ā ↩
To ensure everyone on our team interviewed with the same level of care, we had new interviewers shadow seasoned ones until they felt comfortable conducting their own. Once they did, we reversed it and had the seasoned interviewer shadow the new interviewer until they no longer had any feedback.Ā ↩
āMaybeā wasnāt an option, and if an interviewer ever was unsure, we diagnosed what we needed to do differently next time to ensure they got enough signal to decide.Ā ↩
18 Jan 2023
Yesterday, Apple announced the M2 Pro and M2 Max, and updates putting these new chips into the Mac mini and MacBook Pro. The bits of this that I find most interesting:
An announcement video presented like a segment of a keynote. I canāt recall an instance where Appleās done this before, but I like it. It makes for less than a standalone event, but more than just a press release, which feels about right for an announcement of this scope. I hope they do more releases like this throughout the year. It seems like it would free up Apple to announce new updates as soon as theyāre ready, without having to hold them for a marquee event like WWDC. And it would also free up space in those marquee events, which are increasingly crammed to the gills.
The Mac mini still only comes in silver. This will come as a disappointment to the many people who speculated that Apple would offer a higher-end Mac mini in space grey. Their rationale was that in the last of the Intel Mac mini line, the regular Mac mini came in silver but the souped up Mac mini came in space grey. And that the darker space grey says āproā. But I called it when Apple released the M1 Mac mini two years ago: Apple seems to be moving all the desktop Macs entirely to silver. While this wasnāt entirely obvious when Apple first released the M1 Mac mini in silver, it seemed pretty clear once they later released the (more pro) Mac Studio in silver as well. If a forthcoming high-end Mac mini were going to come in space grey, wouldnāt the even more high-end Mac Studio have come in space grey too? Iām personally fine with this. The allure of space grey wore off for me a while back. At some point it stopped seeming intensely cool and just kind of⦠drab. And I like having my Studio Display, Mac mini, and MacBook Pro all in matching silver on my desk.
Appleās leading with comparing the performance of the M2 Pro/Max MacBook Pros against the old Intel-based Macbook Pros. This seems silly. Why donāt we also compare against a processor from 10 years ago while weāre at it? Benchmarking against the Intel-based Macs of course yields more impressive numbers than comparing against the regular M2 (or even against the M1) does. But thatās a credit to Apple, not a mark against them. And weāre well enough past the Intel transition (Mac Pro asideā¦) that comparing to an Intel processor feels kind of irrelevant. That said, maybe Apple is targeting a subset of the customer base that has yet to switch to Apple silicon, and this messaging is specifically aimed at convincing them to do so. Our new MacBook Pros are 6x faster than your old Intel one⦠Now will you switch?
It feels a little asymmetric and funny that the Mac mini (you know, the desktop) doesnāt get the most powerful chip, and the MacBook Pro (you know, the laptop) does. But Apple positions the Mac mini as their affordable desktop, and there is the Mac Studio, so I suppose it makes sense.
As for me, I still have so much performance headroom in my M1 Mac mini and M1 Pro MacBook Pro that I wonāt be upgrading, but itās nonetheless heartening to see a more regular cadence of updates coming to these machines now that Apple controls the silicon. He who controls the spice controls the universeā¦
07 Jan 2023
Speaking of Le Guin, I just came across her recounting of how she got her earliest work published, and her start as an author:
I had entered the field of science fiction two or three years before via publication in genre magazines. Academia and literary criticism snubbed it, but it had a lively, informed, and contentious critical literature of its own in magazines and fan-zines, and it was notable for the close connections among its writers and readers. Young writers in the genre were likely to get more intelligent attention and more sense of their audience than those who, having published a conventional realistic novel, were often left in a great silence wondering whether anybody but the proofreader had read it.
ā Hainish Novels & Stories, Volume One, Introduction, page xiii
Itās strikingly similar to the way successful startups often get their start: in some nascent niche ā thatās ignored by incumbents, and small but growing ā building what to outsiders looks like a toy, and where thereās a clear and concrete need from early users, whom the startup forms a deep understanding of. Le Guin found writer reader fit the same way good startups find product market fit.
Itās neat that this is shared across different fields. Most pursuits benefit from early and frequent feedback. Great stuff isnāt made in a vacuum. So just make stuff you love to make, share it with others, and use their feedback to iterate and improve. If youāre ever tempted to stop short from fear of failure, turn to the last bit of the quote. Better to share something with others and learn they donāt like it than to pour all your effort into something and wonder if anybody saw or cared. You can always try again.
06 Jan 2023
I enjoyed reading Rocannonās World, Ursula K. Le Guinās first published novel.1 It was neat to discover that many of her signature ingredients were in place right from the start:
Le Guin realizes most of these ingredients more fully in her later work (The Left Hand of Darkness and A Wizard of Earthsea particularly come to mind), but theyāre all here.
If youāre curious to read Ursula K. Le Guin, Iād recommend starting with one of her more famous books (like Earthsea or Left Hand). Theyāre better. But if you were curious about this book for whatever reason, or if youāve already read those ones, Iād happily recommend this. Itās good, and I was both satisfied and a little sad it was over when I finished.
I did not enjoy Planet of Exile, her second published novel which is set in the same Hainish universe, as much. This surprised me. I figured that as an early author finding her form, her second pass would be better than her first. Maybe she had more time realizing Rocannnonās World? Or maybe itās just a matter of taste; the two books have similar ratings on Goodreadsā¦
In her courses on writing, Le Guin emphasizes the importance that a story moves. From her excellent writing guide, Steering the Craft:
What it has to do is move ā end up in a difference place from where it started. Thatās what narrative does. It goes. It moves. Story is change.
Well, Rocannonās World moves. Quite literally: Rocannon moves clear across the planet of Fomalhaut II as he journeys on his quest, and the narrative and reader move with him. I enjoyed some deep flow while reading it, immersed in the storyās movement, propelled by Le Guinās minimal and pure style.
I didnāt find the same kind of movement and accompanying flow in Planet of Exile. The plot kind of meanders, and we end up somewhat in the same place as we started. The characters and communities they live in do change, so Le Guin is still following her own advice. She just isnāt doing it with the singular aesthetic that the focus and drive of Rocannonās World and her later works offer.
I appreciate Planet of Exile nonetheless, as a brief stop on the way to greater things. And I enjoyed some of the ideas, like how both peoples (one native, one alien) think of themselves as human and the others as other. I liked the further exploration of mindspeak, which we first encounter in Rocannonās World. And I enjoyed the alternating viewpoints that Le Guin experiments with here; the counterbalance of Rolery and Jakob as wife and husband feels like a prototype for the gender exploration that Le Guin masterfully realizes in The Left Hand of Darkness. In all, though, I might skip reading Planet of Exile unless you are an avid Le Guin fan or interested to see what the early work that comes before a masterpiece can look like.
The original cover that it was published with is so bad! It completely misrepresents the novelās ethos. Le Guin pushed the genres of science fiction and fantasy, and it really shows in artifacts like this. Whatās that old saying about judging books by their coverā¦?Ā ↩
03 Jan 2023
Iām hoping to write more this year and have been considering how Iāll go about it. I strive to write things that are both true and new, but itās hard to always say something new. I donāt want to let that limit how much I write, because the way to get better at writing is to write a lot.
So hereās my plan: true and new is my goal, but just true is sufficient. So long as what Iāve written is correct ā or at least as correct as I can get, given my current understanding ā I can post it.
Writing something thatās true but not new is still useful to me. It cements my understanding of the topic, yields a handy reference for my future self, and is good practice. I write first and foremost for myself, so as long as itās something I want to write and read, Iām happy doing so.
But I do want my writing to be useful to others too. Even if the ideas in something I write arenāt new to me, they could be new to some readers. And saying something novel is a matter of degree. The core idea may not be new, but perhaps putting it into my own words and sharing my perspective adds something that is.
I wonder if writing things that are true, but not new, will push me into the territory of ideas that are both. Maybe I need to first travel through the land of familiar ideas, honing my powers of observation and expression along the way, in order to reach the land of unfamiliar ones.
I wonāt overthink it. Writing is better than not writing, and that can be my compass. Iāll write about interesting things, and seek out interesting things to write about.
Iāll experiment ā with both what to say and how to say it ā until I find my voice and the constellation of topics that feel like an authentic fit. Iām hoping to play around with different formats like shorter posts, link posts with commentary, and posts where Iām still in the midst of figuring something out.
If all goes well, my writing this year will be a journey of discovery, which I hope to get to share with at least a few readers, and which I hope will yield interesting new things.
Happy writing, happy reading, and happy 2023.
18 Nov 2022
I recently started angel investing and have now invested in seven startups. Iām treating it as an experiment, and I donāt have any results yet. Even so, Iāve learned a ton from making these first investments, and want to refine what Iāve found before making more.
At YCās Investor School, Ron Conway prefaced his advice to aspiring angels with: āTeach yourselfā. I now understand why. All the advice at Investor School was super helpful, but thereās no teacher quite like experience.
So, hereās what Iāve taught myself about angel investing⦠So far.
Itās Fun
The most important thing Iāve learned about angel investing is that I find it to be super fun.
Before I got started, I wasnāt sure if I would. Iād loved doing my own startups, but would I enjoy investing in somebody elseās? There was really only one way to find out, so I just made a few investments. Happily, I had a blast doing those first ones, so I kept going with it.
Itās exhilarating to meet energetic and optimistic founders who have the kernel of an idea and the conviction to try it. And itās gratifying to be able to help them in some small way. Thereās this special feeling in the air when these ingredients come together. Itās just pure potential.
If I didnāt find angel investing to be fun, I would have stopped. Itās hard to get really good at something I donāt like doing. And with angel investing in particular, if I was only doing it to make money, I think Iād make worse decisions. Itād push me towards worrying about the wrong things, like valuations and what other investors think. Since Iām just having fun, I gravitate to the right things, like the founders, their product, and their customers. Just like the way to start a great startup is counterintuitively not trying to start a startup, I wonder if the way to make great angel investments is to not worry too much about making moneyā¦
At the very least, if my main motivation was making money, Iād be disappointed if all my investments went to zero. Whereas Iām currently having so much fun with each that itāll just be bonus points if I see a return on any of them. But I really think I will. The founders Iāve invested in are all really good!
Founder Over Idea
The founders matter the most, so Iāve made each of my investments because of them more than their idea. 1 But theyāre still pitching me on their idea, so I had to figure out how to evaluate it. After a few pitch calls, I found a trick: just assess the idea for what it tells me about the founders.
Why are they working on their idea? It needs to be to solve a problem they have deep conviction in. One founder that I invested in saw his Dadās long standing restaurant suddenly go out of business during the last recession. That got him thinking about software to help restaurant owners improve their bottom line. Thatās conviction. Whereas another founder I met with was trying to build a better version of X, but didnāt have a compelling case for why the current X isnāt good enough. Something, something, āours is going to be betterā. I didnāt invest. It felt like a solution in search of a problem.
Are they obsessed with their idea? The founders Iāve invested in think about their idea all the time. They know their problem domain inside out. Theyāve tried all the existing solutions, and not just out of due diligence; they really want something that solves their problem! But theyāve come up empty, so theyāre building their own. This also means they are their own first users (or close proxies), and that they know where to get more.
And are they also flexible with their idea? Will they experiment their way from the initial idea ā which rarely works ā to something that does? I try to discern this by tossing out a bunch of related ideas to see how the founders respond. The ones Iāve liked are open to considering any of them and quickly cook up ways to test the promising ones out. Whereas founders Iāve decided not to invest in let the ideas just kind of pass them by. Being flexible doesnāt mean being easily swayed though. The best founders always seem certain of what to try next.
I do still weigh the idea itself. Can I imagine it growing into a billion dollar company? If I canāt imagine some way, Iāll pass. And I also need to be just plain excited about the idea. Itās hard to do a good job helping the founders I invest in if I donāt care about what theyāre working on.
How do I assess the founders themselves? One trick Iāve found is to ask myself if Iād want to work on a side project with them. This reduces the question of deciding who I should invest in to the much more familiar one of deciding who I should work with. Iāve had a lot of practice answering that over the years, so it lets my subconscious serve up the answer. Thinking in terms of a side project calls for the right attributes in the founder and ensures Iām exacting enough without being too exacting. āWould I cofound a startup with them?ā would be too exacting. Thereās just no way to know that after a thirty minute call. Whereas thatās plenty of time to determine if itād be fun to work on a side project together.
One nice property from all this is that investing in the best startups means investing in the best founders. And investing in the best founders requires meeting the best people, which is something I already want to be doing anyways.
How To Be Decisive
For each of my investments, Iāve taken one meeting and then decided within a few days. 2
At first I did this for the foundersā benefit, but Iāve found itās my preference too. Agonizing over a deal is stressful and unproductive. To avoid getting stuck in limbo, I aggressively address my remaining concerns after the pitch call. I accept that there will be some I canāt resolve. And then I just make my best guess. Itās helped me to write out the concerns I have, and why Iām investing despite them. If Iāve decided not to invest, I write all the reasons I might regret the decision. Formalizing this brings me closure. It lays plain how Iām making difficult decisions on imperfect information, and that there isnāt a right answer.
Iāve discovered thereās also a nice reward for deciding quickly: everyone feels great! It conveys to the founders that I believe in them and am eager to get to work. And itās a helpful test for me. If I canāt decide quickly, I probably donāt feel this way, and so I probably shouldnāt invest.
Itās helped me to decide on all the knowns prior to the pitch call, like how much Iād invest and what my key concerns are.This frees me to focus on the unknowns that come up during the call. I try to learn as many new things during the call as I can instead of just validating what I already think. This generates more data points for me to work with when I later decide.
Itās helped to stay focused on the founders. I canāt overthink that after the pitch call in the same way I can overthink an idea. And Iāve already established that the founders are more important than the idea anyways.
And itās also helped to lower the stakes by writing smaller checks. I thought this might make founders less inclined to talk to me, but it hasnāt. Especially after I show that Iām easy to work with and will provide concrete help in addition to money.
How To Help
I like helping before even starting to talk about investing. It provides an organic way to explore things and ensures Iāve earned the foundersā time.
I can start by getting them some users. I can always get at least one⦠Me! Trying out the product is fun, and also helps me decide if I should invest. Is it any good? Does it improve each week? How attentive are the founders to me, their humble user? 3 In the process, I come up with useful feedback that I can share with them. Win win.
Sometimes I can introduce the founders to other potential customers. If they convert, Iām way more inclined to invest.
After Iāve invested, I try to bring a few more good angels into the round. Itās a lot of leg work ā checking if the angel is interested, ensuring the founders are interested, and crafting the intro ā but itās worth it. Itās rewarding to connect good founders with good angels. And I like getting to work with my angel friends in this ad hoc way. Win win win.
I enjoy providing ongoing advice and mentorship most of all. Iāve found this works best if I meet with the founders on a regular basis. 4 Since every startup is unique, it helps to have the companyās context and history in order to give good advice. So far, the topics that come up the most are getting users and figuring out hiring.
Iāve learned not to speculate. Bad advice is worse than no advice. If I donāt have direct personal experience with something, I just say that. At first I felt bad about this, but Iāve noticed the founders donāt mind. They just go ask some of their other angels. But I do make a note to go learn whatever it is firsthand, so that the next time it comes up I have useful experience to draw upon.
Sometimes the most valuable help is offering moral support. Real moral support is giving the founders energy and promising directions to channel it. Itās helping them identify their most pressing problem and possible ways to solve it. Itās giving them feedback on their work, especially until they have users to do that for them.
I benefited immensely from this kind of support when I was doing my own startup. Things could get really demoralizing when I wasnāt sure if it was going to work, and it was helpful to share my burden with mentors who really understood my company but sat outside its emotional gravity well.
Iām extremely grateful to the few angels who took a keen interest in providing that to me, and am glad to be finally paying this back to other founders now.
Leaps Of Faith
My first investments were in close friends that I have a long history of working with. Those were no brainers. Iād invest in them again and again. But when I wanted to make more investments, I had to branch out and invest in people Iād just met. The first time I did that felt extremely weird, but I got used to it surprisingly quickly. Formalizing the qualities I look for in founders helped, as did officially committing to experimenting with angel investing. At that point, investing in new connections just came with the territory.
Thereās also this question of making money⦠Itās required a leap of faith to invest in startups raising on such high caps. Theyāll have to become unicorns in order for me to see a meaningful return on the investment. And itās required an even bigger leap of faith to keep making investments before I have any results back. That will likely be years from now, when the startups Iāve invested in have successful exits or die. And while I will get some partial results along the way, like if they gain traction and raise subsequent rounds, I donāt even have that data yet. But this seems like the kind of thing that doesnāt work until it does, and like the way to succeed is to just keep going. 5
Iāve been surprised by how random it all feels. Super angels and top VC firms get to see every deal, but I donāt. So itās all a bit haphazard as I invest in people I happen to meet and decide I like. Iām hopeful that over time, as I work with more founders and other angels, Iāll get a feedback loop going and things will feel more comprehensive.
But itās always going to be at least somewhat random because itās impossible to predict the future of technology. Thereās no way to know if a startup will work. And the founders I invest in may end up working on completely different things anyways.
In most of my other work, Iām accustomed to arriving at a correct answer through rigorous effort. Angel investing just isnāt like that. Iāve learned to just accept this, make the best investments I can, and trust that it will all work out.
Always Be Closing Coding
The last thing Iāve learned about angel investing is that, as fun as it is, I donāt want to spend all my time doing it. If I did, I wouldnāt have time to make things, like this essay or cool computer programs. Thatād be sad. Thereās a satisfaction in making good things.
Itās not just for the art though. I think writing and hacking will improve my investing. It will lead me to interesting technology and the people working on it. And it will keep me empathetic to them through frequent reminders of how hard it is to bring something new into the world.
Making things maintains balance. If I was angel investing full time, Iād find myself always seeking āopportunitiesā, essentially looking at the world through the lens of a salesperson. That sounds terrible. All the magic would go out.
Iād rather be first and foremost a maker, curious and always learning. And whenever that brings me abreast of founders I can help, through angel investing or otherwise, I will.
So as I ramp up my angel investing, Iāll keep working on projects in parallel, and let one reinforce the other. Who knows where it will take me.
I would decide based on traction (growth rate of revenue or active users) if I could, but most of the companies Iāve considered are too early to have any.Ā ↩
Iāve sometimes decided the same day, and Iāve decided two of them on the spot. Those may prove to be my best investments yet, but Iāve since made a rule for myself that I have to sleep on it just to be sure. But rules are made to be broken.Ā ↩
One founder emailed me a personalized warm welcome onto their product within minutes of my signing up. Thatās attentive! I invested.Ā ↩
The frequency is up to them and tends to change over time.Ā ↩
Or maybe this will just accelerate the car off the cliffā¦Ā ↩
09 Oct 2022
I tend to assume that a new project, like writing something to post here, will take a lot of time. But today I realized a neat productivity hack: What if I tell myself it will only take a little?
Maybe Iāll trick myself into actually finishing it faster! But even if I donāt, Iāll at least have tricked myself into getting started. Often times thatās the hardest part, and it seems less daunting to start something thatās only supposed to take a few minutes than something thatās supposed to take a few hours, days, or more. 1
I donāt think this is just because of time commitments. A project that is supposed to take a long time feels serious, which causes me to have higher expectations. Things suddenly seem intimidating. I cautiously take a step back to try and see the entire thing, which isnāt even possible yet.
Whereas a project thatās only going to take a few minutes or hours⦠no big deal. āOh, this? Itās just a little blog post about a quick idea I hadā¦ā.
This effect seems similar to how iconic products can start out as ātoysā, massive companies can grow out of side projects, and entire essays can come from a few passing conversations.
So maybe the real hack isnāt to tell myself a project will be quick, but to actually shrink the size of the project. If I do this each step of the way, Iāll eventually grow it into something bigger, and in a natural way where I never got stuck.
Bonus: Iāll also procrastinate less. It doesnāt seem that bad to mess around checking the Internet for twenty minutes before settling into working on something thatās going to take a few hours. But procrastinating for twenty minutes on something that is itself only supposed to take twenty minutes feels catastrophic!Ā ↩
25 Jul 2022
I finally received my Studio Display after much supply chain related delays. I went with the tilt and height adjustable stand with the standard glass option.
The Studio Displayās aesthetic design is exquisite. Itās a beautiful object atop my desk. It exudes a sense of calm. The display seems like itās just floating in space. Thereās something about the black bezel surrounding the display, and the standās minimal footprint which only barely extends in front of the display, that yields this effect. It imparts this ineffable quality that makes me want to work at the display. The minimalist design lets the display all but disappear, automatically pulling me into focus mode.
I like the 27ā size. The Pro Display XDR comes in the larger 32ā size (and with 6K resolution, instead of the Studio Displayās 5K, in order to maintain Retina), but I donāt find myself wishing for it. 27ā feels right to me: large enough to comfortably fit two windows side-by-side, and large enough that thereās some content in my peripheral vision, but small enough that I hardly have to turn my head to view the outer edges of the display. Itās mostly just contained right in front of me. I really like this form factor for physical ergonomics.
Iām happy with my decision to stick with the standard glass. I thought I might want the nano-texture option, which is why Iām only just now receiving the display. By the time I made it to an Apple Store to see the nano-texture in person, the display was backordered by a few months. My personal preference is for matte displays; I canāt stand glare or reflection when Iām working. I really liked the matte upgrade option on my 2011 MacBook Pro, back when Apple still offered that on their notebooks. Surprisingly, I donāt like the nano-texture option on the Studio Display.
While the nano-texture is extremely effective at eliminating any and all glare ā truly impressive; I tested it out at the Apple Store in the Stanford Shopping Center, which is basically a glass box with sunlight streaming in from all directions ā this black magic comes at a cost. Thereās an effect that I can only describe as being somewhat like having a film layered over the screen. It reminded me of the plastic screen protectors libraries installed on their computer screens back in the day. In practice, I found the nano-texture imparted some ātextureā to content, almost like a subtle but perceptible pixellation. I especially noticed this with text. This tradeoff wasnāt worth it to me: eliminating glare some of the time by taking on this effect all of the time.
If I was in an environment where I had to deal with sunbeams directly hitting my display for much of the day, Iād have chosen the nano-texture anyways. But my home office where Iāve set this up thankfully doesnāt have that problem; it has a very large, north facing window which lets in lots of ambient light, but no direct sunlight. The window is perpendicular to my display. For ambient light, even in a room with a lot of it, the standard glass eliminates just about all glare. Apple mentions that the standard glass is already engineered for extremely low reflectivity, and empirically this seems to be the case. My main advice would be that if you think youāre interested in the nano-texture, be sure to see it in person first. The other thing to be aware of is potentially finicky maintenance and care issues with the nano-texture etching. Iām pretty careful with my stuff, but even so itās relieving now that I have my Studio Display set up for daily work not to have to worry about one errant fizzy water or sneeze destroying it. Yikes.
The tilt and height adjustable stand is gorgeous and easy to use. It solidly holds the display in place wherever I set it. Itās very granular; you can set the display to any point along the curve. I actually wish the stand let the display go a little lower. Set at the lowest setting, the top of the display is still just slightly above my eye line. Optimal ergonomics sets the top of the display even with your eye line. Itās close enough for me that this is only a minor concern, but Iām six feet tall so imagine it could be an issue for others. Though I bet most people will feel like they want it higher than the lowest setting anyways. As Iāve gone down the ergo rabbit hole, Iāve learned that everything (chair height, desk height, display height) should be much lower than youād naturally think.
The standās moment of truth for me, after setting everything up just so on my desk, was to type at my keyboard and see: does the display wobble? I am happy to report that it does not wobble. This was a huge problem with the LG UltraFine 5K that Iām switching from. I type fairly lightly, but I use a standing desk, which only has two legs instead of four. The LG display wobbled like crazy. Letters literally jiggled when I typed. It was maddening. The Studio Display is entirely immune from this problem when my desk is at sitting height, and almost entirely immune when at standing height. When standing, thereās a tiny bit of wobble, but itās so minor that I donāt find it distracting.
The Studio Display has a bunch of other attributes that I like better than the not-so-ultra-fine LG. The macOS integration is way better. The LG had weird problems like sometimes taking forever to wake from sleep and letting the displayās brightness get out of sync with the macOS brightness setting. Iād have to adjust the setting to resync the displayās brightness. With the Studio Display, everything just works.
Everyone has critiqued the built-in cameraās poor image quality. I agree; I find it makes me look like Iām made out of plastic. Itās a shame, because the bad camera prevents the Studio Display from entering the rarefied air of a perfect product. And itās so agonizing, when the Studio Displayās Achilles heel is something so obvious! Itās literally in the name ā the Studio Display. Shouldnāt it have a great camera that makes you look amazing in your home⦠studio? 1
The consensus seems to be that the image quality is so bad because Apple went with an Ultra Wide camera, and that they did this in order to offer Center Stage. Everyone disses on this decision, smugly pointing out that Center Stage doesnāt make any sense on a display where youāre sitting directly in front of it. I disagree and have been pleasantly surprised by two very nice benefits from Center Stage:
Iām not sure the Ultra Wide + Center Stage was the right tradeoff to make, but at least what we lose in image quality we gain in ease of use.
Confounding camera issues aside, Iām extraordinarily happy with the Studio Display. There was such a long stretch where you were just plain out of luck if you wanted a Retina display, made by Apple, at a palatable price, for your Mac. Thankfully the Studio Display is exactly that.
Iām enjoying my first few days of working on it mightily. Great craftsmanship benefits from great tools. The Studio Display is a great tool.
The built-in microphone and speakers do befit a home studio, though. Itās so liberating not to need to use headphones on video calls. Everyone Iāve Zoomed with has reported that I sound great. And Iāve found my video call fatigue is way less without being wired in with headphones.Ā ↩
01 Jul 2022
Thereās something special about summer reading. It feels different than the reading I do throughout the rest of the year because of habits I formed growing up. When school let out for summer, Iād have three glorious months of being left mostly to myself. For me, that meant visiting the library, checking out the biggest stack of books theyād let me walk away with, and then reading them all week before returning to do it all over again. The good life!
Even though summer doesnāt really bring a sudden abundance of free time like it used to, I still like to let it bring a sudden abundance of reading. I love immersing myself in a period of intense reading, knowing Iāll come out different on the other end.
Hereās what Iām hoping to read this summer and why.
This feels like the perfect way to kick things off. Rereading this will be full of nostalgia and a great way to limber up my imagination. I last read this in middle school up in a walnut tree that grew in our backyard. Iām hoping to once again read this out in nature and without a care in the world, but this time with much better reading comprehension.
Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
Ishiguroās The Remains of the Day is one of my favorite novels. Iād like to read some of his more recent work (Klara and the Sun, The Buried Giant), but really want to read Never Let Me Go first. Itās been on my list for too long, and is too highly recommended. Iām anticipating getting a lot out of this.
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Iām super curious to read this seminal work that (I think?) established the genre of magical realism. Iāve managed to keep completely clear of the plot or premise.1
We had a fabulous excerpt from this read at our wedding ceremony, and so Iām hoping to read this short book to nourish my spirit on some cool, quiet morning this summer.
Rocannonās World - Ursula K. Le Guin
Le Guin is one of my favorite authors; I aspire to read everything sheās written.2 I havenāt read any of her stuff in a while, so sheās definitely on my list for this summer. But which to choose? One of her most highly regarded books that Iāve yet to read is The Dispossessed. But itās at the end of a series of loosely related novels, so Iām going to instead start at the beginning of that series with Rocannonās World and then work my way forward to The Disposessed. Bonus: itās short.
Iām always reading for productivity these days⦠but I love escaping into great Fantasy & Science Fiction. Summer reading should be filled with great Fantasy & Science Fiction. I really enjoyed Leckieās Ancillary Justice for its novel ideas and immaculate writing (a rare combination in this genre). Iām hopeful that The Raven Tower will have both as well.
Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure - Jerry Kaplan
Iād somehow missed this (seemingly classic?) book on the company Goās failed attempt to make a pen based computer. Iām actually halfway through and just canāt put it down! So far, itās especially fascinating to see how much Silicon Valley has changed since the heyday of the personal computer in the late 80ās and early 90ās.
While weāre on the topic of Silicon Valley⦠Iāve had this on my shelf since it was published in 2011, right next to The Everything Store (which is excellent). Iāve somehow still not read it, but Iāve heard from a few friends that itās really good. Iām hoping to get some fun new stories about the early days of Google.
The Soul of a New Machine - Tracy Kidder
I donāt know anything about this book, but it was so strongly recommended by a friend that Iām going to read it no matter what itās about. Plus, it won the Pulitzer.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind - Yuval Noah Harari
Iām actually in the middle of this and put it down when things got busy. The first part was so fascinating that I want to reread it and take notes to post here. Iām going to read it at the same time as some of the others on this list so that I donāt have to wait to get into some great fiction.
This could end up being a great companion to a summer coding project idea I have. Iāll definitely read it if I commit to that project, but hopefully will read it regardless as multiple friends have recommended it to me now.
I recently read Bill Gateās How to Avoid A Climate Disaster and found it provided a helpful birdās eye view on climate change. Iām a few chapters into Speed & Scale and am finding it similarly helpful, especially to see where Gates & Doerr agree and disagree.3
Can I really read all these books this summer?! Weāll see. My only reading rule is: there are no rules! Iām totally fine aborting a book if I dislike it, reading books that arenāt on this list, and skipping books that are⦠Just like I did with the stack of books I took home from the library each week back when I was just a kid reading his way through the summer.
More and more, I try to go into books cold without reading their descriptions or reviews. Itās startling how much they give away. I get a lot more out of the reading if I donāt come in with any biases, or somebody elseās lens to look at it through.Ā ↩
Most of Le Guinās work is great, but of course, some of it isnāt. I hope to read all of it anyways because itās interesting to develop an intimate familiarity with a creatorās work, see how it evolves over time, how they refine techniques, approaches, and ideas, and what I can bring from that into my own creative work.Ā ↩
In a fun coincidence, John Doerr also figures prominently in Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure, earlier in my list.Ā ↩
06 Jun 2022
This WWDC keynote was crammed with updates for iOS 16, watchOS 9, the new M2 chip and redesigned MacBook Air, macOS Ventura, and iPadOS 16. Each year, Appleās empire seems more sprawling than ever⦠So rather than try to cover everything, hereās some impressions on the bits I personally found most interesting in this yearās keynote.āØ
New Lock Screen + Focus Filters
The redesigned Lock Screen lets you customize the font and color of text (time, date, etc), add widgets (which come in a new compact form factor), and drag your custom photo to position it optimally amongst everything. This work seems to build on the momentum from introducing Widgets to the Home Screen last year, which has been a hit amongst users.
The new Lock Screen also moves notifications to the bottom. This seems ideal. We already swipe to unlock from the bottom of the screen, and the top of the screen has become hard to reach with one hand as iPhones have gotten larger. I especially like the idea of being able to assign different Lock Screens to different Focus modes. I can imagine creating a work Lock Screen, with a more understated wallpaper and work widgets (calendar, Slack, etc); a personal Lock Screen, with a family photo and personal widgets (Home controls, Fitness, etc) and an evening Lock Screen when I want to tune out all the noise but still have my iPhone at hand for e.g. reading as I wind down for bed.
Apple is taking Focus modes a step further by introducing filters inside of apps. When youāre in your Work focus, you might only see work related browser tabs in Safari, and when youāre in your Personal focus, you wouldnāt see your work email in Mail. I love Appleās continued push to provide tools to be present and intentional with how and when we use our devices and the constant stream of information they put at our finger tips. I hope these filters will be helpful, but I think they will only be as good as their weakest link: third-party app support. Things could break down quickly when you leave the walled garden of Appleās own apps. Will Chrome, Slack, and other apps that straddle peopleās work and personal lives support Focus filters?
FaceTime Handoff
This lets you seamlessly move a FaceTime call across your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. I canāt count the number of times Iāve gotten all set up at my desk, rearranged my windows, double checked my webcam, and prepared for a FaceTime call on my Mac, only to have it come in on my iPhone or iPad instead. Cue the awkward dance of me asking to call the person back, doing so from my Mac, only to have the call get routed to their iPhone, etc⦠Ideally, a FaceTime call would always come in on the device Iām actively using, but being able to seamlessly hand it off to different devices will be really nice.
Shared Tab Groups
Iāve come to really like Tab Groups in Safari. They help me be more intentional with actively researching something, keep track of everything good that Iāve found, and then destroy the group when I complete the project. (Or just āarchivingā it by dragging the Tab Group to the bottom of my Tab Group list for posterity). They also help me stay more organized and focused on the task at hand, instead of having a messy mix of tabs and minimized browser windows for different suspended processes in my brain.
It will be really useful to be able to share them when researching something with others. Weāll each be able to add tabs to the group, and weāll even be able to see who is viewsing which tab in real time. My wife and I are planning our honeymoon to Italy right now, and I so wish we had this. We currently drop links in our wiki, and then just huddle around each otherās computers to see what the other is looking at.
Continuity Camera
Continuity Camera lets you use your iPhone as a webcam. You have an incredible camera in your pocket, and (sadly) a fairly crappy one built into your Mac. Why not unlock that potential? This is a great feature, and Iām excited Apple is introducing it.
But hereās the thing ā thereās this amazing app called Camo that has let you do this for a long time. I have a soft spot for it, because we used it to shoot our Zoom wedding during the pandemic, and it worked great. So itās a little sad to see Apple sherlocking it.
On the other hand, the Camo creator has a thoughtful and optimistic take on how everythingās going to be Just Fine. And it will be nice to also have Apple offering a solution that just works out of the box, and pushing an ecosystem of accessories for mounting your iPhone to your Mac or (gasp!) Studio Display. 1
Messages: Edit, Undo Send, and Mark Unread
Apple mentioned that Messages has hundreds of millions of users⦠Itās often overlooked how huge their messaging platform is. Iām pleased to get support for editing messages (no more follow-up bubbles with ā*typo: bats, not catsā), undoing sends2, and marking messages as unread. I find myself using Messages with friends and colleagues more and more, so more power for managing it is very welcome.
Family Photo Library
Family Photo Library lets you share photos and videos with up to five other people, so that everyone can share a family photo collection. This seems long overdue. I do wonder how much overhead and cognitive load it will introduce in practice. Will I default to my personal or family photo library? Can a photo live in both? Will it count against storage for both?
Apple seems to have designed helpful suggestions both for creating your Family Photo Library from all of your existing photos, and also for adding new photos as you take them. For example, the Camera app will suggest a photo go in your Family Photo Library if you take it when family members are nearby.
M2 + Macbook Air
The M2 chip looks impressive, but the M1 and then M1 Pro/Ultra are already so impressive, itās less interesting to me than the redesigned MacBook Air. The new form factor looks amazing, and I especially love the lean, mean Midnight machine.
Despite such a great looking design, the announcement somehow felt⦠underwhelming. Maybe itās because this industrial design for the Air takes its cue from the recently redesigned MacBook Pros. It may also be because Steve Jobs set such a high bar when he first announced the MacBook Air by pulling it out of a manila envelope in 2008. And the excitement might have been dulled by sandwiching the segment in the keynote amongst everything elseā¦
Regardless, this machine looks sweet. I went from the M1 MacBook Air to the 16ā MacBook Pro. Iām now tempted to switch back, but Iāve come to love the larger display⦠Which brings me to my one disappointment. Iād really hoped that Apple might introduce a 15ā or 16ā version of the Air. I donāt actually need the Pro functionality that comes with the MacBook Pro: the faster chip, the extra ports, the fans⦠I just want the larger display. It would be really nice to see Apple separate the larger display from Pro specs. Perhaps they have no incentive to. It would complicate the lineup, and they know that people who really want the larger display will just pay extra for a MacBook Pro anyways.
Some Curiosities
Iām curious to try the new Freeform app, which provides a collaborative whiteboard to brainstorm ideas with others in real time. This looks like a cool tool for thought. Iāve recently been playing around with the awesome (and already launched!) Muse App⦠Itās hard to imagine Apple isnāt aware of it, and will be interesting to see how Freeform compares.
Iām curious to try the new Running Form on Apple Watch, which will provide a few metrics: your vertical oscillation, stride length, and ground contact time. This seems like a really tricky task to get right; inferring all of this from a single sensor on your wrist is bound to be error prone, and the science on what constitutes a āgoodā running stride seems somewhat mixed in the first place.
Itās curious to see that Apple has not only completely redesigned the Home app, but has also reset their marketing. In todayās keynote, they positioned their Home strategy as being early days, they reminded users why they might want a smart home in the first place, and they oh-so-nobly took the stance of being happy to help the ecosystem evolve. I think this is a tacit acknowledgement that their home strategy has been a total mess to date and in need of a reset. Hopefully this complete redesign of the Home app is laying the groundwork for new hardware that works well with it too.
Itās very odd to me that Apple is keeping the 13ā MacBook Pro in the lineup, and with the TouchBar no less! This is in addition to the 14ā MacBook Pro. I donāt know why they would choose to do this⦠Is there some market segment that particularly likes this machine?
Notably missing: tvOS. Nary a mention.
Some Speculation
I recently explored some ideas around Appleās rumored AR/VR headset, and how one killer use case might be watching movies in VR. I didnāt expect Apple to announce the headset today, but I did think theyād announce ARKit (and possibly some kind of new VRKit) features to help pave the way. Perhaps there will be updates to them shared in the developer sessions, and Apple will just quietly lay the groundwork before a large reveal whenever the headset is ready.
Is the new CarPlay a strategic retreat for Project Titan, from launching an entirely new autonomous car to ājustā sticking a slick UI inside existing cars? Or is it the cusp of much more to come?
I was guessing that Apple would announce the new Mac Pro today. In the previous āPeek Performanceā event when the new Mac Studio was unveiled, John Ternus teased how the Mac Pro is the one remaining machine to complete the Macās transition to Apple Silicon⦠but that it would have to wait for another day. Today seemed like it could be that day. The Mac Pro is first and foremost for developers and creative professionals, so WWDC is the perfect fit for releasing it. Maybe itās not ready, maybe Apple doesnāt want to launch it amidst supply chain woes, or maybe there just wanāt enough time in this already crammed keynote to do its new architecture and industrial design justice.
This feature must have been long in the works prior to the Studio Display Camera fiasco, but once that broke, Apple surely knew theyād just have to take the jokes around this feature on the chin.Ā ↩
Appleās fine print says you can undo sent messages for up to 15 minutes, which means you can undo even after the recipient has viewed the message, for better and worse.Ā ↩
05 Mar 2022
I was blown away by Arcane: League of Legends, an animated series set in the universe of Riot Gamesā hugely popular video game. I havenāt played LoL, but Iāve always been intrigued by video games as a medium for story telling. Iāve even played some games just for their stories. In the end, though, video gamesā stories tend to fall short of realizing their full potential. At some point, the story must take a backseat to the actual game.
Arcane realizes this full potential. Itās like if you took a video game, removed all of the gameplay, enhanced the aesthetics, and crafted a thoughtful story with fully formed characters. Iāve never seen anything quite like it. Thereās something new going on here, and I think the root of it lies in how immersive it is.
You donāt feel like youāre watching Arcane; you feel like youāre participating in it. The show drops you into a richly realized world: the twin cities of Piltover and Zaun. Theyāre deliciously detailed. Steam comes out of vents on the ground, intricate architecture unfolds to the horizon, airships float by overhead, and a full populace ebbs and flows in the streets. All of this texture leaves the impression that youāre inhabiting a real, breathing world.
But what really instills the sense that youāre inside the story, instead of just watching it on a TV, is the way Arcane plays with perspective. Every scene is shot with a depth of field that yields a kind of three dimensional effect. Focal points are established so that you feel like you are there: like youāre looking up at a monster hulking over you, or peering down a narrow hallway straining to see whatās around the corner.
Most strikingly, the perspective frequently shifts from third-person to first-person. We might watch big sister and all around badass Violet sprinting across a rooftop and hurling herself into the air, and then cut to first-person as she/we look down to see the alleyway weāre leaping over rushing beneath our feet, and then look up just in time to see our hands bracing for impact as we roll and land on the neighboring rooftop.
See what I did there? That perspective shift, where you suddenly find yourself thinking you are that character, happens all the time in Arcane. We go from seeing a character looking at something, to looking at that something through their eyes. This is interesting beyond just the exhilaration of action sequences unfolding in first-person. It conveys emotional import. You feel bad when you watch a bigger kid picking on Violetās little sister Powder. But you feel devastated when the scene suddenly switches to Powderās perspective, and you see just how big and scary that bully is to her.
All of this makes me wonder: could this be a possible path for VR?
Arcaneās immersive effect would only be enhanced when viewed in virtual reality. In the simplest case, Arcane could remain exactly as is, but instead of watching it on your TV, you watch it inside a VR headset. Now it fills your entire field of view. In the same way that going from a small TV to a large one makes a movie more immersive, going from a large TV to a VR headset would take that effect even further.
It gets even more interesting though. Arcane could let you look around. Now youāre actually participating in it, controlling the perspective yourself. When Violet and Powder are walking down a crowded street, you could look over your shoulder to get a better look at a passerby. As they scramble the rooftops of Piltover, you could look up to watch that airship float overhead. And if the narrative has you worried that theyāre being followed, you could look behind you to put your mind at ease.
Watching a show like Arcane in VR would be insanely cool⦠assuming there was a VR headset that I actually wanted to use.
Apple is widely rumored to be working on a VR headset. Itās surprising to me that there isnāt more buzz about this. If true, it could be a category defining product. Just as the iPhone completely changed what we thought we knew from Blackberries, itās easy to imagine a VR headset from Apple causing us to look back and chuckle at todayās options. Thereās still ample room for Apple to realize the ideal form of a VR headset. Itās early days.
Many of the issues that have plagued VR headsets to date are exactly the kinds of problems that Apple is exceptionally well-suited to solving. Todayās headsets are hot, heavy, and uncomfortable to wear for extended periods. Theyāre especially uncomfortable if you wear eyeglasses. The displays donāt have a high enough resolution to look visually stunning, and a combination of pixelation and low refresh rates can induce headaches (or worse).
If you do get a headset, unless itās Facebookās Metaās Quest, you need a PC
to drive it. And the specs are constantly outpacing themselves, such that you
canāt simply get a VR headset, some new VR game, and assume it will ājust workā.
And, frankly, the entire experience is awkward. Wearing a VR headset today completely isolates you from your surroundings. Itās disorienting. Some people can acclimate to this, but I bet most people wonāt. Itās also easy to feel self-conscious, since the devices look dorky and their marketing leans weirdly into this.
Todayās VR headsets just arenāt very nice. But Apple could make one that is. They could draw upon their expertise from Apple Watch and Airpods to design a headset thatās light, breathable, and comfortable to wear for long periods of time. Just as they found a unique harddrive from Toshiba that made the iPod possible, itās plausible that they could procure curved, Super Retina XDR-like displays that look phenomenal in a headset. And they could bring all of Apple Silicon to bear, building the computer right into the headset, so that no wires and no external computer is required. No specs to figure out. It just works.
Beyond making the headset itself nice, though, Apple is well-poised to make it nice to use. This may be what truly separates whatever Apple creates from the competition. Itās exactly the kind of design challenge ā sitting at the intersection of human-computer interaction, technology, and the liberal arts ā that is deep in Appleās DNA.
Perhaps thereās a Transparency Mode to seamlessly switch from displaying VR to displaying your surroundings, just as AirPods can switch from noise cancelling to amplifying what youāre hearing around you. As with touch on the iPhone, itās likely that Apple will discover novel ways to arrange and navigate UI inside VR, be it with controllers, gestures, or voice commands. And a VR headset could finally provide a good use case for Spatial Audio, so that if you wear your AirPods with the headset, the soundscape adjusts depending upon where youāre looking. That would be immersive.
All of these pieces could come together in a breakthrough product. Appleās headset could finally bring VR from feeling unnatural to natural, so that it better fits into our lives. If the device looks good, feels good, and does cool things, VR could finally go mainstream. It helps that Appleās product marketing is among the best in the world; the positioning would be less like this and more like this.
But even supposing Apple achieves all of this and ships an amazing VR headset, what are we going to do with it?
There will, of course, be many use cases. I hope the headset will serve as a tool for content creation: 3D graphics and modeling, video editing, coding⦠infinite Vim, anyone?! But in order to achieve the mainstream appeal that Apple will be aiming for, the headset will have to be great for content consumption.
Until I saw Arcane, Iād been scratching my head about this. Most VR content to date is in the form of video games, which Apple has been historically bad at supporting on their platforms.1 And most of Appleās customers arenāt serious gamers. Video games just donāt seem like a viable path for Apple to take their VR headset mainstream.
But Arcane showed me that VR movies just might be. Arcane is the demo that proves VR movies would be super cool, and my sense is that people will really like them. They would be way less awkward than VR games, which often degrade to waving your arms like a lunatic until ultimately knocking a lamp off the table. With VR movies, youād just recline on the sofa, pull on the headset, and immerse yourself in another world for a couple hours. This seems like a fairly natural thing to do. For better or worse, people like passively consuming content. Instead of asking most people to do something completely new, VR movies would improve upon something they already do.
So I can see customers wanting to watch movies in VR.
I can also see Apple and the studios theyād partner with wanting to make them:
Apple has the potential to make VR ubiquitous. To date, VR headsets just arenāt prevalent enough to merit investment from major film studios in a new content category like VR movies. But itās feasible that Appleās headset could eventually sell in volumes similar to, say, the iPad. 2 This would be ubiquitous enough to cement the idea of VR movies in consumersā minds, and to persuade film studios to make them.
Apple TV+ is only expanding and would be a natural place for Apple to release āMade for VRā movies. This seems like a good strategy for them. In the streaming wars, exclusive content is key; this would be an exclusive category of content. And the āregularā version of these VR movies could still be viewed in TV+ on a normal TV, iPad, etc. Arcane demonstrates that you can still get a sense of virtual reality on a regular display. It wouldnāt be so unlike the 3D movies in theaters that also have a regular 2D option. Supporting both formats would avoid limiting marquee content to only those with a VR headset. It would also help create buzz to entice more people into getting one. I think this may be a theme for Appleās VR headset overall: you can do something more immersively in VR, but thereās still a regular way to do it on your Mac, iPad, or iPhone.
VR movies would fit into Appleās design philosophy of tight vertical integration. They would have total control over the content, its distribution, and the hardware it runs on in order to create the best possible experience. Interestingly, this may appeal not only to Apple but also to some of Hollywoodās most progressive directors like James Cameron, Peter Jackson, and Christopher Nolan, who are famous for pushing the technical boundaries of their films and wanting total control over how theyāre screened. Itās a stretch, but they might go for an exciting new technology platform with strong guarantees over what the end viewer will experience. And Apple may now actually have the connections to court filmmakers of their stature, thanks to these past years working with Hollywood for TV+.
The video game industry only continues to grow. It surpassed the film industry a long time ago. Thereās a ton of content to leverage in video games, and a ton of money being spent on that content (look no further than the recent acquisitions of Weta, Activision, and Bungie). So thereās certainly desire to maximize revenue from that content. VR movies could grow the market by bringing all that content to a broader audience, beyond gamers. Just as Arcane came out of League of Legends, video games seem like a great source for VR movies, at least initially. Animated films more naturally fit the medium than live action, game engines are probably the right technology for rendering movies where the viewer can control the camera, and game studios have the talent and domain expertise in creating immersive worlds.
Thereās been a shift from movie-theater going to home streaming. If this is a trend that continues past the pandemic, then Hollywood will need to figure out a way to monetize releasing blockbuster films straight to the home, and a new high-end VR movie platform could be one answer.
I have no idea if VR movies will actually become a thing. There are so many open questions, starting with if Apple is actually going to make a VR headset. And if they do, am I right that people will want to watch movies while wearing it? What if itās family movie night ā does everyone wear a headset? That gets expensive fast. What if itās date night? Thatās just weird.
I think these questions point to how VR isnāt going to be instead. Itās going to be in addition. I hope VR movies will be one such addition, and Iām curious what the others will be. Itās exciting and a little wild that an entirely new mode of computing could be right around the corner.
Here Iām talking about āseriousā gaming, as opposed to the also massive category of ācasualā gaming that the iPhone gave birth to. I expect VR games would land in Apple Arcade, but Iām not convinced itās a reason people would buy the headset. It feels more like a bonus theyād enjoy after having already done so for other reasons.Ā ↩
But not the iPhone. Itās very possible Apple wonāt ever launch another product that sells in volumes similar to the iPhone.Ā ↩
04 Nov 2021
You can get way better at most things than you think. The first step is to identify what you want to get really good at and then just start.
Donāt directly compare yourself to others at the top of the field. Youāll inevitably fall short, and it will be demoralizing. Itās good to be inspired by them, but you want to measure against your previous self. Try to get a little bit better each day. If you do this for long enough, youāll be amazed by the results.
You will improve fastest by working with others who are better than you. Seek them out. This becomes easier as you gain in skill and start to feel more confident approaching them. You will also have more opportunities to do so, since impressive people tend to operate in fairly tight-knit networks.
You have to invest a lot of time and energy to get really good at something. You have to get obsessed; thinking about it all the time, even when you arenāt doing it. You have to let it take over your life. This will mean neglecting most nonessential things and carefully nurturing the few essential things (family, close friends, personal health, maybe one or two other personal pursuits) that remain.
Be very intentional in deliberately practicing your craft. When youāre on, you should be completely on, performing bursts of intensely focused work. Donāt fall into the trap of working long hours but never really getting anything done. Itās tempting to do this, consoling yourself that the long hours must mean you are improving. But you arenāt; youāre just avoiding the real work that you must push through in order to improve.
These are the trappings of working on something other people wanted you to do. But youāre working on something you want to do. You are accountable only to yourself, so forget appearances and shed extant bad habits. Your results are what matter. Your process only matters insofar as it gets you the results. This is intimidating but also extremely liberating.
The best approach looks something like two blocks of time intensely focusing on your craft, and then spending the rest of the day resting, thinking about it in the background, and tending to everything else in your life. It will of course depend upon what you are pursuing.
For all this to work, you have to genuinely love what youāre doing. Discovering what you love to do will feel like a revelation, as though a little furnace of energy is burning inside you. It will bring out your most authentic self. Youāll feel compelled to do it. If the thing youāre pursuing doesnāt feel this way, youāre unlikely to become truly great at it. Keep looking; as Steve Jobs imparted, āYouāll know when you find itā. It is such a rare privilege if you do.
You probably only have room to become truly great at one or two things. So choose wisely. You should try to find something that really matters. My metric is that the pursuit should benefit others in some way. Writing is one example, because great writing benefits anyone who reads it. Donāt worry about this too much though. Once you get really good at something, youāll have so much leverage with it that youāre sure to find some way it can be used to help others.
So the best way to identify what to get really good at is to just follow your nose until you find what you love to do. Once you have, it will feel so inevitable that youāll happily realize you likely didnāt have much of a choice in the matter anyways.
20 Oct 2021
In the order that they were announced:
Apple Music Voice Plan
Amusingly, this could be viewed as an upgrade instead of a budget option. You get to pay less and you donāt even have to use the clunky Music app!
In all seriousness, I bet there are plenty of people who just want to be able to stream music while driving, exercising, etc., donāt care much about curating a library or browsing content, and are perfectly happy to just have a āsmart radioā that they command through Siri. And I bet there are also plenty of people who wonāt pay $9.99 / month for music, but who will pay half that. Apple will never break out the numbers, but it will be interesting to see what analysts estimate the uptake of this plan actually is.
Speaking of numbers, I assume Apple canāt offer a free tier since they donāt do ads. But perhaps they can offer this lower $4.99 pricing for the Voice Plan because theyāve worked out a deal where they pay the record labels less for music the end user streams via Siri? The record labels have a lot of weird and arbitrary rules, and pricing their content based on how the listener accesses it is one of them.
HomePod Mini Colors
Ordinarily, adding three new colors to a product priced at $99 would mean Apple is going to sell them like hotcakes for the holiday season. Iām not sure thatās going to happen here. The new colors donāt actually look that good to my eye. Which is rare; Appleās colors are normally very on point. But even if most people like the new colors more than me, the HomePod Mini still doesnāt seem to have found product market fit. So itās unclear how much a few new colors will help.
I personally love my original HomePods⦠or at least the ideal of what they could have been. So the new HomePod Mini colors are heartening to me, if only because they indicate Apple is still actually thinking about and investing in this area.
Which is strategically good for them. As they continue to expand the Apple Home software layer, they need a solid physical presence in the home to underpin it all. I really hope Apple revamps the HomePod product line, and doesnāt just abandon the original, larger speaker. It could also be so much more than a speaker: mesh wifi router, a FaceTime device⦠It has unrealized potential that Iād love to see Apple take another crack at. Plus itās really incongruous to have a HomePod Mini when thereās no HomePod āregularā.
AirPods 3
Iām totally obsessed with my AirPods Pro, so these arenāt for me, but itās great to see the regular AirPods getting some upgrades. Itās also great to see the previous 2nd generation remaining in the product lineup, offering a more affordable option. But even at $129, theyāre still pretty expensive for a pair of ear buds that are easy to lose. Why canāt they be $99?! That would sell like hotcakes for the holiday season.
M1 Pro and M1 Max
Names first. Everyoneās been debating if the new chip would be the M1X (in the A*X tradition) or if Apple would go straight to the M2. Surprise! Itās neither.
M1 Pro seems like a good name. The M1 is in the MacBook Air, the M1 Pro is in the MacBook Pro. Makes sense.
M1 Max is a bit strange. With iPhones and AirPods, āMaxā denotes āphysically largerā. And while the M1 Max is literally larger, thatās irrelevant since nobody except nerds will ever even see it. What āMaxā really means here is āeven more powerfulā. M1 -> M1 Pro -> M1 Max.
Oh well. In the end, the names are short, so theyāre good. People will quickly stop thinking about it and just use them: āAre you going to get the Pro or the Maxā? But the delineation isnāt as clear as it could be.
Names aside, these chips seem like they will absolutely shred. I have yet to experience a single performance hiccup on my M1, and the M1 Pro and M1 Max are going to scream compared to it: 70% faster CPU than the M1, and 2x - 4x faster GPU. It makes me wish I actually needed them. But Iām excited for the real pros who do!
MacBook Pros
So as impressive as the new chips are, what Iām more excited about is the notebookās new design.
The new XDR display is going to look phenomenal, and the thinner bezels provide extra screen real estate for the same physical footprint. The raised feet, squared chassis edges, and matte black keyboard all look super Pro. They make one want to rub their hands together and proclaim āLetās get to work!ā. And since weāre all still stuck in the land of video calls, the 1080p camera is going to be really nice.1
I ordered the 16ā with the M1 Pro chip. Iāve historically used a 15ā MacBook Pro for the larger display, so when I stepped down to the 13ā Air in order to get the sweet new M1 chip, it was always with the idea that it was a stopgap for these machines. Now that theyāre finally here, Iām surprised to find Iāve developed an affection for my little Air and am sad to move on. But Iām going to be coding exclusively on a laptop without an external display for a while, and the 13ā Air is a bit cramped for this. Hence, upgrade. Anyways, Iām sure these feelings of fondness will immediately fade when I first power on my lean, mean, Pro machine.
The āUnleashedā moniker for this event was clearly referring to the new M1 Pro and M1 Max chips and what these new MacBook Pros can do with them. But it might as well refer to Apple the institution, because theyāre finally unleashed to make insanely great tools for Pros.
First, unleashed from Intel and their performance plateaus. Itās notable that this is the first time you can spec up the smaller MacBook Pro just as fully as the larger one. In the past, this just wasnāt possibe because Intelās more powerful chips ran too hot for the smaller chassis / battery. This eliminates the tradeoff of form factor vs. computing power. Now you can just select your preferred size and specs independently.
Second, Appleās unleashed from the Jony Ive design eraās relentless pursuit of minimalism. After an extremely frustrating stretch for the MacBook Pro, Apple is adding all the ports back (goodbye, messload of adapters!), adding physical function keys back (goodbye, TouchBar! Hello, physical and full-size Escape key!), and even made the machines the tiniest bit thicker. I doubt the extra thickness will be noticeable in practice, but it says a lot in principle about the new design philosophy. Form is no longer prioritized over function at all costs, and Apple is once again taking into consideration what people are actually trying to do with their machines. Awesome.
Wishful Thinking
I was really hopeful that Apple would release a standalone Retina display to go along with these machines. It seemed possible, since the two would have presented perfectly together. I really want an Apple-engineered, Retina quality display. I really donāt want to pay $6,000 (!!!) for their Pro Display XDR. And I also donāt need its reference monitor functionality. I just want a 27ā - 30ā Apple display that has Retina resolution, looks great on my desk, and works seamlessly with my Macs.2 Thereās rumors that an Apple display for the rest of us is in the works⦠I sure hope theyāre true.
People seem really worked up over the notch. But people always get worked up over something. I donāt think itās going to be an issue at all; like iPhone/iPad, it will disappear as we quickly get used to it. And anyways, it will mainly be in the macOS Menu Bar so itās not really occluding anything.Ā ↩
Right now, my M1 Mac Mini wakes from sleep faster than my Dell 4K monitor can!Ā ↩
24 Jun 2021
In 1914, Ernest Shackleton set sail for Antarctica with a team of twenty-seven men, aiming to be the first party to cross the continent overland. But when the Endurance became locked in pack ice, Shackletonās objective changed from setting a new record to simply getting his team out alive.
Endurance: Shackletonās Incredible Voyage recounts his teamās legendary feats in doing so, from schlepping across treacherous ice floes, to sailing a lifeboat through the roughest seas in the world, to climbing across South Georgia Islandās presumed impassable interior in order to finally reach help.
Individually, each of these would make for an incredible achievement. Taken together, all whilst facing extreme cold and starvation, they are truly extraordinary. Shackleton prevailed against seemingly impossible odds and made history by getting every single one of his men home safely.
How did he do it? What were the qualities that caused Sir Raymond Priestley, another Antarctic explorer and contemporary of Shackletonās, to proclaim:
For scientific leadership give me Scott; for swift and efficient travel, Amundsen; but when you are in a hopeless situation, when there seems no way out, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.
Here are some aspects of Shackletonās leadership that struck me while reading this fabulous book.
Do What You Love.
To be truly great at what you do, you have to love doing it. Shackleton loved exploring the Antarctic.
His first expedition was under Robert F. Scott in 1901 and got the closest to the South Pole to date. He then returned with his own expedition in 1907, aiming to reach the Pole:
With three companions, Shackleton struggled to within 97 miles of their destination and then had to turn back because of a shortage of food. The return journey was a desperate race with death.
Despite this life threatening close call, Shackleton was already considering his next expedition even before returning home. He was only fully alive when he was exploring the Antarctic.
Figure Out What Really Matters. Let Everything Else Go.
When disaster strikes and the Endurance becomes trapped in the ice, Shackleton fully commits to getting his men home safely. This may seem obvious, but less so is how he jettisons his concerns over everything else. Merely ensuring his menās survival is going to take every fiber of his being, and so distraction means death.
Early on, before the Endurance gets crushed and when it is merely stuck, Shackleton could still have pursued his original goal of crossing the continent. But to do so would have incurred additional risk for the rest of his men, and since saving them had become his raison dāetre, he didnāt even consider it. This is very significant, as heād spent over two years preparing (and fundraising) for the trip, and felt this expedition was the last real opportunity for glory in the Antarctic.
In addition to letting go of distractions, Shackleton seemed to let go of his fears. He must have carried them deep down, but he was so wholly set on getting everyone home safely that there simply wasnāt room in his mind for considering the possibility of failure. This prepared him to lead his team through seemingly impossible challenges that under any other circumstances he and his men wouldnāt even consider undertaking.
Pick Good People.
It may be called Shackletonās Incredible Voyage, but it couldnāt have been completed without a phenomenal team. Shackleton built his team around a nucleus of tested veterans, all 5 of whom heād been on previous Antarctic expeditions with. These were the best of the best, and Shackleton had the first hand experience to be sure of it.
He selected Frank Wild as his second-in-command; if the expedition were a startup, Wild would be his cofounder. Wild was one of Shackletonās three companions in the 1907 race for the pole where they faced starvation, and Shackleton āhad developed a tremendous respect and personal liking for himā. Similarly,
Wildās loyalty to Shackleton was beyond question, and his quiet, somewhat unimaginative disposition was a perfect balance for Shackletonās often whimsical and explosive nature.
This complementary relationship proved key time and again, especially when circumstances required that they split in two, with Shackleton leading one group and Wild the other. Itās hard to imagine things turning out the way they did if Shackleton didnāt have Wild to depend on.
Lead By Example. Put Your Team Before Yourself.
Shackleton is every bit a member of the team. He seems to always take the first night shift watching for deadly cracks in the ice beneath them. He does his full share of the menial chores, like ferrying the pot of hoosh (yumā¦) across the freezing cold between the stove and his tent mates. He takes part in all of the menās social activities, including teaching many of them how to play bridge.
He never asks anything of the men that he wonāt do himself. When he implores them to travel as light as possible, he dumps his own personal belongings into a small pile of things to be left behind. Shortly thereafter, that small pile grows into a mountain as the rest of the men follow his example.
He demonstrates that the teamās safety is his top priority in everything he does. When the ice that Shackleton and a handful of men are camped on splits off from the main floe, Shackleton sees that every man makes it safely across before he sees himself across.
This unwavering commitment to his men engenders their complete faith in him, which they honor even when he makes big decisions that they donāt all agree with.
Decide Quickly. Update As Needed.
Shackleton is extremely decisive. Before bed, he will write in his journal that he is considering something, and the next morning he will announce it to all hands. He makes hugely difficult decisions on imperfect information, and he never lets uncertainty overwhelm him into inaction.
Instead, he simply makes the best choice he can with the information he has. The key to this approach, though, is how he revisits decisions and quickly course corrects when he gets new information.
After the men abandon the Endurance, they camp on an ice floe theyāve affectionately named āOcean Campā. The hope is that the wind and current will blow the ice pack in the direction they need to go, helping them reach the Palmer Peninsula. However, after weeks of waiting, theyāve made little progress, and morale is declining.
Shackleton therefore decides that instead of relying on the wind, they will take matters into their own hands and march across the ice pack. This is not a popular decision, and many members of the party feel they should stay put and bide their time.
It turns out to be a bad call. After five days of exhausing struggle, the party has only covered nine miles out of the 200 required to reach the peninsula.
Rather than doggedly stick with the decision, Shackleton reassesses and reinstates the waiting strategy. They form a new camp and return to relying on the wind to blow them in the right direction. It does, and finally gets them far enough that they can take to their boats.
Once they do, over the course of five harrowing days at sea, Shackleton repeatedly updates their target based on the wind and currents. Initially, they aim for Clarence/Elephant Island; then, King George Island; then Hope Bay at the tip of the Palmer Peninsula, and then finally, back to the original target of Elephant Island, where they ultimately land.
This wasnāt poor leadership or haphazard planning; this was high-resolution decisionmaking as conditions unfolded and rapidly changed, and itās what ultimately saw them to land.
Shackleton doesnāt have to be perfect at deciding because he is really good at re-deciding. In this way, he ensures the party is always making forward progress towards its goal in the best way presently possible.
Move Fast.
Once he makes a decision, Shackleton moves fast to execute it. He sets his team to action right away, which leaves no time for debate or second guessing.
More generally, he knows that time is of the essence, and that he is in a race against starvation and freezing to death. He brings incredible intensity to every single day. It is amazing how much you can get done, and in how little time, when you operate this way.
One striking example: Upon surviving the week long journey across the Drake Passage to reach South Georgia island, Shackleton rests for only a few days before setting out with a small party across the islandās interior. And upon finally reaching the other side, he waits even less than that before forging his rescue attempt for his marooned men.
Shackleton is a relentless force of nature.
Leadership Is Lonely.
I am rather tired. I long for some rest, free from thought. -Shackletonās diary
Shackleton bears an incredible and lonely burden. He must always project absolute confidence to his men, which means he canāt ever confide his own fears and uncertanties to anyone else.
Beyond this, no one else is quite experiencing what he is. As expedition leader, he alone is responsible for the fate of the party, and so he alone knows what that responsibility feels like.
You Still Need Some Luck.
Even with all of the genuinely great leadership described above, there are still inflection points where the expeditionās survival hinges entirely on luck.
At one point, while waiting out the wind on the ice, the party comes to the brink of starvation. With winter approaching, most of the wildlife has migrated, and there hasnāt been a successful hunt in weeks. Then, miraculously, an entire penguin rookery moves onto their ice floe in the middle of the night, supplying them with all of the meat they need in their most desperate hour.
There are many examples like this - including that the wind didnāt just blow them out to the open sea, which was a very real possibility - but maybe the most remarkable bit of luck is at the very end of Shackletonās journey.
Shackleton has made it across the pack ice; up the Weddell Sea to Elephant Island; and finally across the Drake Passage to South Georgia Island. Help is just on the other side of the island, but the currents are so dangerous they canāt sail around it. So, Shackleton and two men set out to cross the interior. This has never been done before and the islandās craggy peaks are considered impassable. Night is setting in as they reach the top and the three men are facing freezing to death at their elevation. Thereās no time to safely descend, and even if there was, the visibility is so poor that they wouldnāt be able to make out a path.
So Shackleton rolls the dice and proposes their only option: that they slide down into the abyss. After almost two years of struggle and meticulous decision making, the success of their voyage literally comes down to sliding on their butts and hoping they donāt plummet to their death. Luck was on their side and they smoothly slid until safely bottoming out 2,000 feet lower in a snowbank.
Donāt Give Up.
Shackletonās family motto was Fortitudine vincimus ā āBy endurance we conquer.ā Nothing better epitomizes his incredible voyage. There are so many moments where sheer perseverance is what sees him and his men through. This serves as a powerful example for all of us. When we are in our own struggle, underlying everything is to just keep going. You canāt succeed if you stop.
09 Jun 2021
There isnāt an insanely great video call service for personal use. Zoom, which became the de facto standard during the pandemic, was really meant for the enterprise, and it shows in everything from their pricing plans to their UI. To my mind, FaceTime has always come the closest, but certain limitations have forced me into Zoom, Google Meet, etc. when video chatting with family and friends over the course of the pandemic this past year.
These are the three primary limitations Iāve run into:
This yearās update to FaceTime feels like the team went heads down during the pandemic, dug in, and determined to make it an all around viable option for personal video calls. In doing so, theyāve addressed each of these three limitations.
First, FaceTime will now be available in the browser, making it an option for people outside the Apple ecosystem. Steve Jobs famously promised that FaceTime would be made an open standard 11 years ago, much to the surprise of not only the audience at WWDC 2010, but also to FaceTimeās own engineers! While this yearās update still doesnāt make FaceTime an open standard, it does bring it to all major platforms (via the Web). Presumably this addresses the primary goal Jobs had in mind when he shot from the hip on stage so many years ago.
Second, users will be able to create a link to an upcoming FaceTime, which makes it possible to schedule and share a call in advance. And third, Appleās adding a standard grid view to FaceTime calls, which looks a lot more practical for doing calls with a large number of people: everyone remains fixed in the same position on the screen for the duration of the call.
None of these features are novel. All major video call services offer multiplatform support, URLās to upcoming calls, and grid view. But bringing these features to FaceTime is still notable. It takes FaceTime from something that works great for certain use cases to something that can work great for all use cases. At least thatās what I hope will happen⦠the ingredients are finally all here; now Apple just needs to actually deliver on them. 1
Todayās announcement isnāt limited just to laying a better foundation though. Thereās some really cool, novel features that Iām eager to try out too.
Portrait Mode is the marquee feature, at least for me. It squarely solves two things that are always top of mind when I join a video call: I want to look my best and I want my background to be nice. Zoomās virtual backgrounds, which completely replace your actual background with a photo of something like the Golden Gate Bridge, are too superficial and distracting for my taste. And while apps like Webex offer āBackground Blurā, itās janky. The blur opacity often isnāt quite right and the edge detection on the subject (me!) is often flakey, doing weird things like cutting off my arms when I gesture with my hands.
Appleās deep expertise and history with Portrait Mode from all their camera work leaves me optimistic that this will work great in FaceTime. I hope it brings out good lighting and features on my face and pleasantly blurs everything thatās behind me. Iād love the blur to leave everyone else with a sense of the space but not the specifics. Weāll see how it performs in practice, but the demo looked great.
Unsurprisingly, the product marketing is superior to the competitors here too. Webexās āBackground Blurā sounds like Iām hiding something; Appleās āPortrait Modeā sounds like Iām presenting my best self. Nice.
Voice Isolation eliminates background noise so that you can hear the speaker clearly. Apple did a cute demo where a kid is playing with a leaf blower in the background. It sounds like a tornado until Voice Isolation comes on, after which the speakerās voice becomes crystal clear. 2
Spatial Audio makes it sound like the audio is coming from wherever in the grid the speaker is located. Will this really make a difference for making conversations feel more natural? I have no idea, but Iām glad that Apple is experimenting with things to help reduce the cognitive dissonance of hanging out virtually. 3
And then thereās SharePlay, which lets you sync music and movies with the other members of your FaceTime call. I would have loved this when I was in a long distance relationship; at the time the state of the art was āOne, two, three⦠play!ā Woe unto the person who gets up to fetch a snack. Thereās a slew of dead (and typically illicit) apps that have tried to solve this through something like a browser extension. None of them possessed both the deep integration into the platform and the partnerships with the content providers that are required in order to really do this right. But Apple does; thatās the power of them fully owning their platform in action.4
I canāt help but feel a little bit of irony in Apple announcing all of these phenomenal video calling features right as we are coming out of the pandemic. And Iām sure they would have liked to ship these features sooner, when we all so desperately needed them, too! But my guess is that even if they were willing to break rank with WWDC and ship early, they wouldnāt have been ready to. Even now, FaceTime engineers are probably frantically scrambling to get all of this stuff ready for the Fall.
Regardless, itās (obviously, without question, times 1000) a great thing that weāre coming out of the pandemic, and we must of course be sensitive to the fact that the same canāt be said for everyone, everywhere. And while we may no longer need these features quite so desperately, remote work and virtual socializing are here to stay. I just hope that Appleās commitment to making FaceTime insanely great is too.
Iām most worried about the multiplatform support and sharing/joining flows. Apple has a history of leaving things they bring to other ecosystems buggy or half-baked, and Appleās cut at collaboration (Exhibit A: shared Apple Notes) tends to be a bit clunky as well.Ā ↩
Sadly, this is actually a real use case for me⦠ah, the dulcet tones of suburbia.Ā ↩
One thing the pandemic has demonstrated is that different social dynamics call for different types of video calling software. The demands of a one-way presentation are very different than that of a virtual happy hour⦠I imagine there will continue to be lots of different flavors of video calling apps cropping up, but baking something like Spatial Audio into FaceTime seems like a nice touch that is useful in all circumstances.Ā ↩
Theyāve announced support for major streaming services like HBO Max in addition to their own Apple TV and Apple Music offerings, but Netflix and Spotify were notably missingā¦Ā ↩
06 Feb 2021
In How Will You Measure Your Life, Clayton Christensen begins by observing how despite tremendous professional accomplishments, many of his peers were clearly unhappy in life. Their unhappiness included personal dissatisfaction, family failure, professional struggles, and even criminal behavior. And yet each of them had started out as good people who somehow let forces and decisions derail them along the way.
Knowing that we are all vulnerable to these forces, he set forth to apply business theory (statements of what causes things to happenāand why) to the individual. Instead of using businesses as the case studies, he suggests we use ourselves. In doing so, Christensen provides frameworks for each of us to answer:
How Can I Be Sure That:
I will be successful and happy in my career?
My relationships with my spouse, my children, and my extended family and close friends become an enduring source of happiness?
I live a life of integrityāand stay out of jail?
He notes that while these are simple questions, answering them is very hard work and part of a continuous, ongoing journey through life. He hopes that at the end of that journey, the theories in his book will help you definitively answer the question: āHow will you measure your lifeā?
The book is fairly short and very worth reading in full. Doing so provided me with the time to really internalize the material and to start actually applying it to my own life.
At the same time, I find myself wanting a distilled version that I can reference from time to time, in order to correct my own course as I chart it through the āseas of lifeā. If I had to compress the entire book down into a recipe, it would be:
But there is so much good stuff behind each of these, that I think a more detailed outline of notes is the sweet spot for a proper reference manual. Here it is.
The Power of Theory
People often think that the best way to predict the future is by collecting as much data as possible before making a decision. But this is like driving a car looking only at the rearview mirrorābecause data is only available about the past. Indeed, while experiences and information can be good teachers, there are many times in life where we simply cannot afford to learn on the job. You donāt want to have to go through multiple marriages to learn how to be a good spouse. Or wait until your last child has grown to master parenthood. This is why theory can be so valuable: it can explain what will happen, even before you experience it.
Part I: Finding Happiness in Your Career
The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you havenāt found it yet, keep looking. Donāt settle. As with all matters of the heart, youāll know when you find it. ā Steve Jobs
Three things build our strategy: priorities, balancing plans with opportunities, and allocating our resources.
Whatās important is to get out there and try stuff until you learn where your talents, interests, and priorities begin to pay off. When you find out what really works for you, then itās time to flip from an emergent strategy to a deliberate one.
How do you make sure that youāre implementing the strategy you truly want to implement? Watch where your resources flowāthe resource allocation process. If it is not supporting the strategy youāve decided upon, you run the risk of a serious problem. You might think you are a charitable person, but how often do you really give your time or money to a cause or an organization that you care about? If your family matters most to you, when you think about all the choices youāve made with your time in a week, does your family seem to come out on top? Because if the decisions you make about where you invest your blood, sweat, and tears are not consistent with the person you aspire to be, youāll never become that person.
Part 2: Finding Happiness in Your RelationshipsāØ
There is much more to life than your career.
Work can bring you a sense of fulfillmentābut it pales in comparison to the enduring happiness you can find in the intimate relationships that you cultivate with your family and close friends.
They are worth fighting for.
The path to happiness is about finding someone who you want to make happy, someone whose happiness is worth devoting yourself to.
Part 3: Staying Out of Jail
But looking back on it, I realize that resisting the temptation of āin this one extenuating circumstance, just this once, itās okā has proved to be one of the most important decisions of my life. Why? Because life is just one unending stream of extenuating circumstances.
Finding Your Lifeās Purpose
The only metrics that will truly matter to my life are the individuals whom I have been able to help, one by one, to become better people. When I have my final interview with God, our conversation will focus on the individuals whose self-esteem I was able to strengthen, whose faith I was able to reinforce, and whose discomfort I was able to assuageāa doer of good, regardless of what assignment I had. These are the metrics that matter in measuring my life.
If you take the time to figure out your purpose in life, youāll look back on it as the most important thing you have ever learned.
This helped me formalize the idea that people will leave a job if it doesnāt offer them sufficient compensation, but they wonāt stay (and be happy) just because it does.Ā ↩
Sam Altman calls this the Deferred Life Plan. It just doesnāt work.Ā ↩
This succinctly articulates the deep personal gratification I have found in managing.Ā ↩
Itās neat how cleanly this ties into Herminia Ibarraās Working Identity.Ā ↩
23 Jan 2021
The most impressive thing we built at Accompany was our team. Years from now, what Iāll recall most fondly wonāt be the product we created or the outcome we had, but the incredible people I got to work with. Assembling such a high quality team was super hard, so Iād like to capture here how we went about it, focusing on the very first step: sourcing great candidates.
Our best source of candidates, by far, came from within our own personal networks. This is an amazing bit of bootstrapping to see in action: our first key hires landed us our next key hires, and so on. Once we hit a critical mass of like minded individuals who enjoyed working together, a positive feedback loop formed, attracting more like minded individuals in turn.
This is not a particularly novel idea, and lots of super stacked technical teams (Dropbox, for example) have talked about leveraging it in their early days. What I hadnāt heard them talk about (beyond ācall up all your friends from MITā) was how exactly to go about it.
We discovered a few key ingredients.
First, itās essential that your first few hires be absolutely phenomenal. Do not compromise on this in any way! Since the first key hires will seed the next N hires, if the first are even slightly suboptimal fits, those next N will be too. Happily, the opposite also holds: if the first key hires are phenomenal, their referrals will be, and in a way where the value they add is multiplicative, not just additive, thanks to the magic that happens when you get these kinds of people together in a room. So be extremely intentional in making these first key hires and do not compromise in any way.
What does it mean for a hire to be absolutely phenomenal? This will look different from startup to startup, depending upon the kind of company you are building. But there will be shared traits:
The best way to be certain that someone possesses all of these attributes is to have worked with them before and/or known them for a very long time; ideally both. Which speaks to why recruiting the first ten hires or so (letās call it the founding team) from within the foundersā and existing teamās personal networks is essential.
Once you have assembled the founding team, amazing candidates unfortunately do not just start magically showing up at your door. Drats! You have to get the founding team organically recruiting their friends and colleagues to come join in turn. This was a really big barrier for us to break through at Accompany. It ends up that getting people to tap their personal network is a tall order: they have to let the startup become a part of their identity, tie their reputation to it, and spend a lot of time and energy outside of their official job description on recruiting.
How do you overcome this? Like most challenges startups face, the answer is straightforward but difficult: hit growth and make it a fabulous place to work. If your startup is going places, and if getting there is fun, the referrals will follow. Youāve made it easy for everyone. The founding team would almost feel bad not recruiting their friends, and their friends will really want to be recruited.
That was how things unfolded for us. After some initial success where the founding team recruited friends purely on the mystique of a pre-launch startup, things stalled out. This coincided with when we entered into the Trough of Sorrow after we launched. Once we found product market fit and started to grow, people resumed recruiting from their personal networks.1
Even then, though, the actual practice of recruiting is a ton of work and takes discipline. Everyone has a million things to do, and especially for hackers, anything other than, well, hacking, feels like a distraction. So you have to rewire your own brain and the rest of the teamās to recognize that recruiting is real work, and to be very intentional about making time for it. Once a month, weād sit down with everyone 1:1 and brainstorm who they might check in with, and how we could best tailor our recruiting process to that candidateās needs. This could range anywhere from just getting coffee to inviting them to come meet the team over lunch to actually having them interview with us, if the timing was right. It was always all about the candidate and what would be best for them, given their current circumstances.
To that end, you have to treat these referrals with extra care. High quality referrals do not grow on trees! You already know the candidate is phenomenal ā thatās why theyāre a referral! And yet for some reason, itās all too easy to lapse into the default of just sending them through your standard interview track. This is a mistake and a waste of everyoneās time. (Not to mention embarrassing for the person referring them.) Instead, you should treat them like a very special guest. Invite them to come have dinner with the team2 to let them gauge if theyāre as excited about you as you are about them. If they are, invite them to come hack for a day (or more!) to test run what itād really be like to work at your startup. This lets them pair program with a few different members of the team so that everyone can really get a feel for working with each other. For us, this ended up providing way more signal than a standard interview would have, and referrals loved it for the same reason. As an added bonus, if the referral did decide to join, theyād hit the ground running because theyād already started getting up to speed during the test run.3
Lastly, and underlying all of this, is that you have to be patient and hold the long view. Everyone will be looking to refer the two or three most talented individuals they know, and such talented people are rarely available. Theyāre almost always already working on something super interesting and pretty committed to it. Thatās ok ā you just take them whenever theyāre ready. Itās the only way to get them, and it will be very worth the wait.4 But when they do become available, they tend to decide quickly. Itās too late to start the process then; you have to have already done the work.
So just focus on building a relationship between them and the rest of your team. Let them know that the door is always open, and that youād love to work together some day. This approach is extremely liberating because it aligns your interests with theirs. It lets everyone be their authentic selves, without any of the awkward or superficial pressure that so often creeps into recruiting.5 And it grows the relationship beyond just recruiting: even if it doesnāt end up being the right fit, youāre now allies and can help each other in any of many ways down the road. But it more often will end up being the right fit, because by genuinely caring about whatās best for the candidate, you naturally nudge your startup towards being the answer.
The happy coincidence is that itās best not to scale beyond your initial founding team until after youāve found product market fit anyways. When you are still seeking product market fit, agility is more valuable than top cruising speed. You have to be able to craft experiments quickly and extract just enough information from them to determine the next ones.
A smaller team makes it way easier to rapidly iterate on the software itself. But perhaps more importantly, a smaller team can better handle the turbulence that comes with finding product market fit. Since those first few hires are practically cofounders, they have the fortitude for the uncertainty and enough equity to stomach it. The opposite is true for a larger team: it takes a lot of persuading (as it well should!) to set a new strategy and get everyone on board with it. By the time youāve started turning the ship in the right direction, you should have already learned itās the wrong direction and moved onto the next idea⦠You need to be a small band of X-Wings, not a lumbering Star Destroyer.
We made the mistake of hiring beyond the founding team pre-product-market-fit, and it sucked on two fronts: it was harder to recruit great talent during that period, and it was harder to remain nimble as we did. So wait to build out the team until youāve found the crank and just need to turn it faster. Another benefit of this is that since you have no idea how long it will take to find the crank, hiring less extends your runway and buys you more time to do so.
Iām not saying you only need the founders in order to find product market fit (though this does often seem to be the case) or that youāll only face this problem at the genesis of your company. Even big companies seek product market fit for new features and products⦠itās not called company market fit, after all! So youāll have to figure out how to keep your startup ethos imprinted in your companyās DNA as you scale in order to keep finding new cranks. But youāll also have to turn to more successful entrepreneurs running much bigger companies for advice on how to do that ;)Ā ↩
This was very natural for us to do, because we did team dinner every night. Which worked great, because most of the team was on the hacker schedule and so didnāt really trickle in until noon anyways. Team dinner allowed everyone to hack uninterruptedly without worrying about making plans right up till 7pm when food just āmagicallyā showed up. (It would often go ignored for another hour as everyone kept intently hacking, presumably figuring theyād knock out just one more thingā¦)
Dinner was a great time to blow off steam, bounce ideas, get help on some code (laptops often featured prominently at our officeās kitchen table), etc., before getting back to our desks and coding till midnight⦠or beyond. It also created this magical rhythm where people wanted to have something new, even if tiny, to show off at dinner each night.
The reason team dinner and working late worked so well was that a) it was completely optional, and b) everyone really wanted to do it. This shared team conviction is one of the luxuries that comes with an early stage startup, where a tiny group of extremely talented individuals are all working together pursuing outsized upside.
But, things change, and as we scaled the team and expanded out from this kernel, we had to adjust. To new employees, dinners sure didnāt seem optional, and at some point people stopped wanting to stay for them. My gut reaction was to intransigently cling to team dinner: this is what makes us who we are! Thankfully, clearer heads prevailed and we found a better solution: just switch it to team lunch. Most of the same benefits, none of the downsides, and we still offered dinner for anyone who wanted it.Ā ↩
There are of course a bunch of caveats with this. This approach takes up way more of the teamās time, so you should only do it for referrals that you know really are phenomenal. It presumes the referral has the time and the preference for it; if they donāt, just stick to your standard interview track. And it introduces some entropy, because you have different modes of evaluating candidates. In the end, though, itās really a special case: itās for candidates you already know are so good that itās more like theyāre interviewing you. Hosting them for a hack week is a wonderful, fun, and organic way to convey why your startup is great. The last caveat is that this is way easier to do in the early days when youāre still tiny, and gets harder as you grow (as is the case with most informal processes).Ā ↩
One referral joined the team three and a half years after we first started exploring the idea! We just had to wait for the stars to align.Ā ↩
When I was once looking for a new role, I was debating between two startups. Both seemed promising. The CEO of the first invited me to dinner only to be dismissive of concerns and questions I had about her company, pressure me into joining, and insist that I make my mind up in the next few days. The CEO of the second invited me out to lunch, where we earnestly got to know each other and explored the idea maze of what her startup currently was and potentially could become, for what snowballed into an entire afternoon. We ended with her declaring that she wanted to hire me right away, but that I should take my time deciding and that the door was always open. Which do you think I walked away feeling more eager to join?Ā ↩
03 Nov 2020
Some books are so refined to their very essence that I just canāt bear to tarnish their words by describing them with my own. Piranesi is one such book. So instead, I will simply say that this is the best book I have read this year.
I highly recommend you read it, and that you go in knowing as little about it as you possibly can. Donāt read the reviews; donāt even read the book jacket. Just start, and enjoy discovering its secrets first hand.
You will be in awe of what you find.
27 Sep 2020
I first read Frank Herbertās Dune in early high school (on the temperate Orcas Island, quite the opposite of Arrakis!), and while I loved the story I was a bit too young to appreciate all of its nuances. So Iād always intended to reread it, and when I first heard that Denis Villeneuve was making it into a film, I resolved to do so prior to its December 2020 release. I finally dove in upon seeing the filmās excellent trailer, and finished in September with plenty of time to spare⦠only for the filmās release to get pushed out to October 2021 due to the pandemic. Dāoh!
Well, at least Iāll have time to read the next five novels before the film finally comes out. Just kidding; I probably wonāt do that. But I did really enjoy rereading this one.
Some thoughts (š Spoiler Warning!! š):
19 Aug 2020
In Amore Towleās A Gentleman In Moscow, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov (ārecipient of the Order of Saint Andrew, member of the Jockey Club, Master of the Huntā!), and self-proclaimed gentleman without an occupation, is placed under permanent house arrest in the Hotel Metropol for the crime of being a member of the Leisure Class in a post-Revolution Bolshevik Russia.
Confronted with a lifetime of confinement, Count Rostov might just be the perfect companion for the covid19, shelter-in-place circumstances we all suddenly find ourselves in. For when the Countās new reality is abruptly thrust upon him, he adopts as his mantra that āif a man does not master his circumstances, he is bound to be mastered by themā. And so as we all settle into our own new normal, it is with satisfying release that we can look to the Count for guidance on how we might set about mastering it:
Like Robinson Crusoe stranded on the Isle of Despair, the Count would maintain his resolve by committing to the business of practicalities. Having dispensed with dreams of quick discovery, the worldās Crusoes seek shelter and a source of fresh water; they teach themselves to make fire from flint; they study their islandās topography, its climate, its flora and fauna, all the while keeping their eyes trained for sails on the horizon and footprints in the sand.
Initially, these practicalities manifest in the form of little luxuries, like procuring four bars of the Countās favorite soap and arranging for the delivery of āa light blue box with a single mille-feuilleā from Fillipovās, the Countās favorite bakery. The first half of the book or so is dedicated to the Count reestablishing the trappings of his Leisure life within the confines of the Metropol hotel, and I think the sheltered-in-place reader could certainly luxuriate in all these small delights and even have fun adopting them at home: finding the perfect wine to pair with some homemade Latvian Stew (a dish that features prominently in a pivotal scene at the hotelās world-renowned restaurant, the Boyarsky); making the perfect cup of coffee (āThe secret is in the grinding ā not a minute before you brew.ā); and arranging our home furnishings until they are ājust soā, as the Count loves to exclaim.
For whatever reason, though, despite being so timely, this didnāt work for me. I slowly and idly read the first half of this book, often putting it down for many weeks. The Count ensures his days are full of delights, but his life is ultimately empty of any purpose, and so too was my reading. I just couldnāt find any point to all the idling. Your experience may differ, depending upon the headspace you are in.
If not for having promised my grandmother that I would read it, I might have abandoned. I am so glad I didnāt. I wonāt spoil the plot, but about halfway through the book, something very unexpected and wonderful finds its way into the Countās life, and imbues him with perhaps the purest purpose of all: caring for others. From this seminal turning point onwards, the Count steadily creates something much richer and more meaningful in his life than any of the conveniences he/we indulged in earlier: crafting lasting friendships and family relationships that are brimming with purpose.
After taking so long to get on a roll reading this book, I find Iām now a little sad that itās over, because Iāll miss the Countās cheery disposition and I feel a bit like Iām saying goodbye to an old friend. But even so, I will hold the Countās lasting values close as we continue into our covid unknown: to give myself permission to be happy (in the large things and in the little things), and to remember that above all, even in these remote times, it is our friends and family that matter most.
Just so.
16 Jun 2020
I discovered this (apparently cult-classic, published in 1978) short novel when Simon Mottram, the founder of Rapha, kept citing it in an interview as the kernel of inspiration for Raphaās brand and ethos. He spoke of The Rider so matter of factly, like it was just a part of the air that we cyclists breathe. So I looked it up on the spot, thinking Iād just add it to my queue to read later. But after reading the opening passage, I was hooked and read the entire thing straight through:
Meyruies, Lozere, June 26, 1977. Hot and overcast. I take my gear out of the
car and put my bike together. Tourists and locals are watching from sidewalk cafes. Non-racers. The emptiness of those lives shocks me.
What a way to open! This dry, blunt humor is both deadly serious and yet somehow self-abasing all at once, and it immediately sucked me in. I was compelled by how unapologetically author Tim Krabbe (also our main character) distills his devotion to the sport of cycling.
In The Rider, we donāt get chapters, we get kilometer markers, as our author and titular rider Tim Krabbe marks his progress through the road race he is recounting: the Tour de Mont Aigoual, his 309th race, this one being 134 kilometers, four cols, and four and a half hours long, working its way up and over Mont Aigoual in the South of France, the āsweetest, toughest race of the seasonā.
The Tour de Mont Aigoual is the sweetest, toughest race of the season.
What follows, then, is the interior monologue of the rider: what is happening in the race, right when it happens, from Krabbeās perspective. This of course includes the events of the race: the ācontinuously shifting braid of the pelotonā; breakaways forming and then getting caught; a break finally sticking; tactics on the climbs and crashes on the descents; the changing weather; rivals puncturing at the worst possible moment; the sprint into the finish⦠the ebb and flow is absolutely engrossing, at least to this avid cyclist, and I was compulsively turning the pages and staying up past my bedtime to see what happens next. Krabbe in the lead; Krabbe gets caught⦠oh no, the Cycles Goff rider has gained a many-minute advantage! Who is that rider anyways?
Itās possible this would all be excruciatingly boring to the non-cyclist, but I donāt think so, because ultimately it is something much more universal, the struggle against self, that forms the bedrock of The Rider. As Krabbe himself put it, āYou donāt have to like whaling to like Moby Dick. And you donāt have to like cycling to like my book. Of course, it helps.ā
Cyclist or not, we get to traverse the raw and ever-changing interior mental and emotional landscape of the rider, as mercurial as the parcours of the race, darting from supreme confidence to crippling fear; from enjoying the pleasure of fellow ridersā company to despising their presence; from soaring hopefulness to utter despair⦠through all this, Krabbe captures the essence of cycling. People ask me why I ride, and I will probably always be chasing the evolving answer, but at the very least I can now simply point them to The Rider. Itās all here.
In that same interview, Krabbe asserts that āOnce you start explaining things you degrade them. Theyāre only what they are in themselves.ā And so to that end, Iāll simply say that I cycle because I can, and Iāll conclude by selecting some passages that really resonated with my own experiences in cycling:
āGood legs?ā the guy beside me asks. āWeāll see. And you?ā
This nervous energy is so familiar; it can be found on every start line of every race everywhere. Itās so pointless, this back and forth, but we canāt help ourselves! By the time weāre lining up at the start, everyone is what they are. Youāve either trained or you havenāt; you either feel good or you donāt. I hate this banter, because it just adds to the edge and anticipation Iām already feeling. Leave me be! Donāt impose your insecurities on me! Donāt invoke mine!
The first climb wonāt be for another thirty kilometers, at Les Vignes. Iām longing for it, just like when Iām doing it Iāll long for it to be over.
So true. This might be the central paradox of climbing. It can be so excruciating ā your heart rate and breathing on the limit; your legs screaming; stinging sweat rolling into your eyes; the tendons in your forearms aching as you desperately tug on the bars; the tarmac seemingly touching your nose as you round a really steep ramp and head into the next switchback⦠I daydream about this peak experience, yearn for it, and then at some point will become desperate for it to be over. Itās the arc that matters; you need the anticipation to prepare for the suffering, and you need the suffering to enjoy the triumph of completion.
The riders had little opportunity to admire the breathtaking landscape.
This is always a source of guilt for me, especially on my āadventureā rides where Iām intentionally seeking out new routes and scenery instead of just trying to hammer out a solid training ride. Shouldnāt I be absorbing the scenery more? Shouldnāt I stop to take more photos?
The truth, though, is that flying past that breathtaking scenery enhances it in its own way. The oxygen debt and endorphins amplify the landscapeās beauty; whipping down Page Mill Road such that I can only safely cast a quick, sideways glance out over Silicon Valley only serves to make the view that much rarer and more exquisite; the sound and feeling of the wind rushing over me pairs with the visual input in a way that makes it more striking⦠there have been times when I have stopped to take a picture only to find the view somehow diminished⦠there is magic in the motion, turning a meadow of tall, dead, yellow grass into a beautiful tapestry whirring by.
Keep the steer steady, going slow here. The way I see it, your handlebars move forward and you just have to make sure you donāt let go. You need strong arms for that. I view my wrists, stretched out in front of me to the bars, straight as ramrods. Theyāve become so tanned, almost black in the wrinkles. The little hairs lie next to each other in wet rows, pointing away from me. I find my wrists incredibly beautiful. I climb.
I find this to be so funny. Cyclists can be such vain creatures. And while I canāt say Iāve ever admired my own wrists, I must admit to similar thoughts: looking down as I pedal an even cadence and marveling at how strong my legs look. Or maybe cursing how weak they look. It just depends upon how Iām feeling on the climb. Iāve even had both thoughts on the very same climbā¦
Cycling is in many ways the pursuit of perfection, and since such a huge component of this perfection stems from the riderās own physique, itās natural and almost impossible not to reflect on our own body. Itās weird to acknowledge it out loud, but doing so is a way of constantly measuring and marking our tangible progress.
A hard stretch of hill. Iām not going to shift down, though, I come up off the
saddle, Iām pushing it. One more kilometer to climb. Itās so incredibly
pitiful that I ever wanted to do this, but now Iām stuck with it.
The essence of climbing. Itās so true ā that eager excitement for a big climb, and then I settle into it, and the agony starts, but I bear it, and carry on, and then itās too much, and my power drops, but now Iām committed. Iām closer to the top than the bottom. Turning around would be defeat. The self-loathing, to want to do this, but to then have to suffer so when I do. To have to slowly wind my way up. Ah, to climb.
When I withdrew to Anduze in 1973 for my first period of cyclo-literary
hermitry, I believed that, while cycling, I would come up with thoughts and
ideas for the stories Iād be writing the rest of the time. Fat chance. The
rest of my time I spent jotting in my cycling logbook and keeping statistics
on my distances and times, and while cycling I thought of nothing at all.
I wrestle with the exact same dilemma. Youād think that all the time on the bike is ādown timeā when you can constructively and actively think about your brain work, but you canāt, really. A hard ride is too demanding and a recreational ride too liberating to productively āwork the problemā while on your bike. And once you become committed to cycling, it somehow manages to start filling up more and more of your life while youāre off your bike too: for Krabbe, jotting in his logbook; for the modern-day rider (me!), scrutinizing Strava. And reading about cycling. And planning my next ride. And, and, andā¦
On a bike your consciousness is small. The harder you work, the smaller it gets.
This underscores the therapeutic aspect of cycling and how it can be a form of meditation. I experience this shrinking of consciousness when riding. The riding demands being present, and especially as it gets harder, it can invoke the coveted and elusive state of flow. My world becomes the immediate sphere around my bike, and my purpose becomes the road before me. There is something very pure and gratifying in this.
I think this ties into why cycling has become so essential to my personal wellbeing. Itās a conduit for processing who I am right now. If Iām feeling happy, I can celebrate and amplify that on a care-free ride. If Iām feeling sad, I can reflect in quiet solitude. If Iām confused about why Iām feeling a certain way, I can do a long, slow endurance ride and just keep turning things over and over until the answer falls out. If Iām nervous about something coming up in the rest of my life, or if Iām angry, or if Iām frustrated, I can just go wring myself out on the climbs. Climbing can solve just about anything for me.
When I get cut off from cycling for whatever reason (normally because life gets busy), I get cut off from this open dialogue with myself. My wellbeing suffers.
Sometimes I can steer conscious thought on a ride, but mostly I have really dumb and small thoughts. Or hyper-focused, micro-thoughts, thoughts like: I should shift. I should shift back. Iām thirsty. This climb is going great. Sometimes I strive to empty my mind and experience no thought: if something is bothering me and I canāt even escape it out on my ride, then Iām really in trouble. Mind control. Perfect quiescence. Protect my personal sovereignty.
I rarely have intricate thoughts while riding, but stuff does seem to sift out over the course of a ride and by the time I finish Iāve at least prepared the canvas, even if I havenāt painted anything.
I try to return from a ride a better person than when I set out.
Four more kilometers uphill. I put my hand in my back pocket, pull out a fig. A drop of sweat on the inside of BarthĆ©lemyās glasses magnifies this action. The firm ripple of sinew with which that KrabbĆ© lifts a fig, like it was nothing!
This is hilarious, but gets at something deeper. How cycling on our limit can amplify our self-confidence and self-pleasure. Itās the little things.
Bicycle racing is a hard sport. A riderās body has to ripen; itās also a mature sport. The average winner of the Tour de France is twenty-nine years old. You do have the occasional prodigy, but those who mean him well keep him from exhibiting it. In 1977, the nineteen-year-old Italian Saronni was one of those. He skipped over all kinds of phases and was right away one of the so-many best riders in the world. Publicity! His managers wanted him to ride the Giro dāItalia. Saronni himself thought that was a wonderful idea. But, shortly before the race, he broke his collarbone. āThe best thing that happened to Saronni in 1977,ā Merckx said later, āwas that he broke his collarbone.ā
The Rider seamlessly weaves fiction, semi-fiction, non-fiction and history all throughout. And one more bit of history, exquisitely rendered, that I canāt leave out:
Maertens and De Vlaeminck were bitter rivals. āDe Vlaeminck is the one who let them go,ā Maertens figured quite rightly. āSo itās up to him to bridge the gap.ā He waited. The gap grew and grew. āHe wants to win, so let him bridge the gap,ā thought Maertens. āHe wants to win, so let him bridge the gap,ā thought De Vlaeminck. Both of them knew that the one who finally bridged the gap would use up energy to his rivalās benefit. What mattered now was: staying patient. Both riders stayed patient: bravo. The winner of the 1976 Tour of Flanders was Walter Planckaert.
Too good.
A disturbing thought: Iām being followed by people who are gliding along warm and motionless, and who may actually be bored to tears.
Krabbe is referring to the coaches and support staff in the āteamā cars here, who follow along behind the racers. This contrast underscores the heightened and amplified experience that the physical strain of cycling affords us. People often ask: āHow do you ride for so long; isnāt it boring?ā
Well, not when it feels so agonizingly great and you are doing everything you can just to sustain it! I think this is why watching road cycling is so much more interesting to cyclists: we can imagine what the rider might be feeling, thinking⦠I admire non-cyclists who enjoy watching cycling because I think it speaks to a certain degree of empathy. They identify with the rider even though they are not one, and they imagine what the rider is going through even though they have not gone through it themself.
A cow. Itās not watching.
Krabbeās remark as he passes the only potential spectator in sight. This is so funny to me (having passed by many a disinterested cow up in Petaluma) and highlights how pointless it all is. Itās simultaneously the most and least important thing in the world, racing bikesā¦.
Iām not having any trouble with these curves, Iām much too tired now to worry about matters of life and death. This is about something completely different: about me winning this race.
I descend so much better when Iām able to just let go. Ironically, I find itās safest when Iām not worrying about safety. When I stop worrying, I start flowing smoothly through the bends, in control, and get down in no time.
In interviews with riders that Iāve read and in conversations Iāve had with them, the same thing always comes up: the best part was the suffering.
The suffering provides the meaning. The suffering empowers me to finish the ride with a bit more than I started with. The suffering is what brings the personal fulfillment; the agency. The suffering is the necessary contrast, the counterbalance that makes the subsequent relaxing that much sweeter.
And then youāre at the summit. You look out over the land; you drink a bit; a ruddy sense of well-being courses through your whole body, and a great desire wells up in you to climb this mountain again some day.
Onward.
18 Jun 2019
Iāve loved reading ever since I was a kid. But as I discovered computer programming in college and startups right after graduating, I started reading less and less. After selling my first startup and seemingly exhaling for the first time in years, the realization that I basically didnāt read any more hit me hard. So I resolved to start reading again, with the initial goal of one book per month.
In pursuit of this goal, I switched to eBooks in July 2013. I love paper books and independent bookstores, but the practical advantages offered by eBooks became too great to ignore. Being intentional about this decision and the role that my Kindle, iPad, iPhone, and even paper books play in my reading life has helped me to maximize the amount I read overall.
eBooks are portable.
I used to deliberate over lugging a single novel with me each time I headed out the door, but now I can just slip my Kindle in my jeansā backpocket and bring my entire library with me. This means I always have something appealing to read: if Iām not in the mood for whatever Iām currently reading, I can easily switch to something else. And, because eBooks donāt take up physical space at home, purchasing a book is a lower stakes decision. eBooks enable me to own more books and to keep them with me at all times, both of which facilitate reading more.
Reading ergonomics are better than paper books.
Kindle provides better reading ergonomics than a paper book offers. This starts with the weight. A Kindle weighs the same amount no matter how long the book Iām reading is, so itās overall more comfortable in my hands.
And because itās rigid and always perfectly lit, itās well-suited to more reading positions. I find that in long reading sessions I often want to change positions. I might simply want to shift my weight in the chair; I might want to lie down and hold the book over my head; I might want to pace around. All of this is easy to do with my Kindle, whereas paper books always burdened me with the minor but constant concern that my thumb would slip, the pages would fly by, and Iād lose my spot.
Being able to comfortably read in any scenario enables me to read more.
I can acquire eBooks instantaneously.
This often isnāt important to me, but it sure is nice in a pinch. Whether Iāve just finished the first book in a trilogy and am so sucked in I just want to immediately start the sequel and stay up all night reading it, or take off on vacation only to discover that I hate the book I brought with me, I can easily acquire another book under any circumstances. This creates more reading opportunities, which again helps me read more.
Highlighting and note taking is better on an eReader.
I always felt guilty annotating a physical book because it felt like I was defacing it. But even if I overcame the feeling, there was always the downside that I might run out of room in the margins. My eBook notes are still inline, but they can be as long as I like. Theyāre also preserved forever. I have physical books that I rigorously annotated in high school and college, but no idea where they are. And for those that I havenāt lost, at some point the pages will rot and the ink will fade. Tapping notes on a Kindle can sometimes feel more painful than writing in the margins of a physical book, but I think posterity and the leverage of being able to search my notes and easily review my highlights outweighs this.
eBook software provides leverage.
I can search an eBook for any term I like; I can view a list of my notes and get linked right to the page I took them on; I never need to dog-ear a page or use a bookmark to keep my spot. I can also easily look up the definition of a word. I often glossed over words I didnāt know when reading paper books because there was no way I was going to lug a dictionary around with me in addition to the book I was already reading. Now I can just look up the word inline, get the formal definition, and move on. And, Kindleās software remembers the words Iāve looked up so that I can easily review them for retention.
eBooks offer practical advantages.
Portability, accessibility, reading ergonomics, and the leverage of software sold me on eBooks. But given I was switching, which device was the best for reading them? Though I started out reading exclusively on a Kindle Paperwhite, I now think that my iPad and iPhone also have their merits. I read across all three, picking the right tool for the job.
Kindle
The biggest advantage to Kindle (I recommend the PaperWhite for the sweet spot of functionality and price, but the hardware is so mature at this point that there really isnāt a bad option) is that itās the closest you can get to the experience of reading a physical book. An eInk display is unlike an LCD: it isnāt backlit and it has a physicality that makes the experience extremely close to that of looking at a piece of paper, especially under direct sunlight. This allows for a natural reading experience authentic to that of a physical book. It also means itās easy on the eyes. Because the screen is front-lit, you donāt have to worry about blue light beaming into your eyes before bed.
Another advantage is that Kindle is a dedicated reading device. There are no other distractions at my fingertips. I wonāt hit a difficult sentence in my book and recoil to the guilty comfort of Twitter. I wonāt be interrupted by an inbound notification sliding down from the top of my screen and be oh so tempted to tap it, just for a second. The only activity available is reading.
The form factor is also optimal for reading: the screen is big enough that it can fit a full page of content, but the entire device is small, thin, and light enough that itās comfortable to hold for extended periods.
Above all, I find that I can get in the zone the best on my Kindle ā even better than a physical book, due to the aforementioned reading ergonomics.
Kindleās eInk does come with some downsides though. It can only display black, white, and shades of grey, so itās not great for visual books or textbooks with lots of diagrams. eInk also has a pretty slow refresh rate, so turning the page, highlighting text, and taking notes can be painfully slow. When reading fiction, I donāt perform these tasks as often and so I find the downsides to be tolerable and outweighed by the above benefits. But I do them all the time when reading nonfiction and technical reference material, and so for that I turn to my iPad.
iPad
My iPad Proās screen offers its own unique reading experience. The super retina display is fabulous and there is something luxuriously gratifying about rendering a book edge-to-edge on that magical piece of glass. Though I do feel less like Iām looking at a piece of paper and more like Iām looking at a screen, Appleās True Tone technology (which adjusts the color temperature of the display to the ambient lighting conditions) ameliorates this quite a bit. And the screen can fit a lot of content, so I can enjoy a full page of text book all at once.
Most importantly, though, the screen is fast. Highlighting, page turning, taking notes, and looking up definitions of words is the instantaneous experience weāve come to expect from our devices. I tend to perform these tasks a lot when reading nonfiction and textbooks (especially seeking back and forth, as Iāll often want to refer to something on an earlier page), and so my iPad is the weapon of choice for that kind of material.
Because the iPad Pro is larger, though, it can be tiresome to hold for longer reading periods. And, of course, itās easy to get distracted from reading by all the other things iPad can do.
iPhone
Lastly, thereās the iPhone. The biggest advantage to reading on my iPhone is just that itās always with me. Even if I only have a few minutes of downtime, I can use them to read a book instead of mindlessly triaging email. I also find it to be very comfortable. Since the entire device fits in the palm of my hand, itās very easy to grip, and since the screen is small, I donāt have to move my eyeballs very much, especially if I turn on infinite scroll and just lightly scroll as I read.
The Right Tool for the Job
Leveraging all three of these devices provides the most versatility for
different reading situations, which, again, increases the overall amount of time I can spend reading.
Physical Books
Whither physical books? Thereās still a solid place for paper books in my life. Literally, my bookshelf. I think the biggest thing I gave up by switching to eBooks is having a warm, inviting collection of books at home. After the kitchen, the bookshelf is the heart of the house: when friends come over, itās a conversation starter. If I want or need some inspiration, my bookshelf is the place I look. If Iām going to settle into some creative work, I want my bookshelf to be in sight. You know that feeling when you walk into a brightly lit, lovingly curated bookstore? Thatās what I give up with my massive eBook library. But it occurred to me I donāt have to. For my favorite books, I can just buy a physical copy too! And since only my favorite books make the cut, I can indulge in always buying the nice, high quality print version. Less clutter and more enjoyment!
A Reading Recipe
Thinking intentionally about how I read has removed barriers to entry and reading friction. Itās hard enough deciding what to read; after deciding that I donāt want to stall out because I canāt decide how to read it. So, distilled, the recipe is this:
24 May 2019
āAnd all because in January 2001 I asked my doctor this: āHow come my foot hurts?ā With that one question, Chris McDougall launches his obsessive journey to find a better way to run, and really, a better way to live. Born to Run readers get to run along side him and discover the extreme world of ultra-distance running, the essence of going barefoot, the culture of a remote tribe of super runners, and a cast of characters that is just absolutely obsessed with running in one way or another. Whether you are a die hard distance runner or have never laced up a pair of trainers in your life, the commitment to self-improvement, curiosity, and the personal sovereignty that comes from never settling for the status quo is invigorating. Read it for the infectious enthusiasm of those doing what they love, and a clarifying reminder of what is possible if we follow our nose and just keep keep asking why.
24 Mar 2019
I rarely abandon books, and even more rarely after already reading over halfway through, but I abandoned Blood Meridian with about 100 pages to go. The story is bleak and each reading session issued blunt trauma. Were I discovering some deeper meaning or following an interesting character arc or holding out for some narrative conclusion, I could push through the unpleasant atrocities described within and read to the end. But reading this book is to be an outsider denied entry: denied entry into any of the charactersā thoughts or interior. What motivates The Kid? Who is The Reverend, really? What is the point of all this?
I read and deeply appreciated McCarthyās The Road, and while that book is also very dark, the key difference is it provides something (very significant!) to hope for. Thereās a reason to keep reading. There are nuanced characters to cherish and savor and weigh. I didnāt find any of this in Blood Meridian, so I decided to abandon it and the nihilism it smothered me with.
21 Oct 2016
I found Becoming Steve Jobs by Schlender & Tetzeli to be a much more informative read than Isaacsonās official biography, particularly on the intersection of Jobs/Next/Pixar/Apple.
I captured some of my favorite quotes from the book and include quick thoughts on each.
Steve, during an interview he gave in the Next days:
As we talked, he drank steaming hot water from a pint beer glass. He explained that when he ran out of tea one day, it dawned on him that he liked plain old hot water, too. āItās soothing in the very same way,ā he said.
On Steveās instinct:
Steve was innately comfortable trusting his gut; itās a characteristic of the best entrepreneurs, a necessity for anyone who wants to make a living developing things no one has ever quite imagined before.
On his decisiveness:
Steve had a kind of hyperawareness of his surroundings that allowed him to leap at opportunities that presented themselves.
This is particularly interesting, since it proves true of acquired companies, incubators, over-funded startups, etc:
Despite what he said about wanting to repeat the experience of the Apple II and the Mac, what Steve really wanted at NeXT was the garage spirit of a startup meshed with the safety, status, and perks of the Fortune 500. It wasnāt a combination he could pull off.
On hiring the best people:
Thatās because Steve was always hell-bent on hiring the very best people in the world, especially engineers. āIn most businesses, the difference between average and good is at best 2 to 1,ā Steve once told me. āLike, if you go to New York and you get the best cabdriver in the city, you might get there thirty percent faster than with an average taxicab driver. A 2 to 1 gain would be pretty big. In software, itās at least 25 to 1. The difference between the average programmer and a great one is at least that. We have gone to exceptional lengths to hire the best people in the world. And when youāre in a field where the dynamic range is 25 to 1, boy, does it pay off.
On switching to management vs. remaining an individual contributor:
More important for Steve Jobs, overseeing this motley crew had turned Catmull into an expert, imaginative manager of creative people. For years Catmull found himself occasionally regretting his decision to abandon his dream of being an animator. But as he steered this odd and talented group past one crisis after another, he started treating management itself as a kind of art, and accepted that this was how he could best contribute. Later in his life, he would come to be recognized as one of the most extraordinary managers in the world; in 2014, he published a brilliant business bestseller, Creativity, Inc., about what it takes to lead a company of creative people.
Hereās to the crazy onesā¦
Steve, youāre not wearing shoes! Donāt you want to wear some shoes for the cover of Fortune?ā Steve shrugged and said, āSure, fine.ā He ran upstairs, grabbed a pair of sneakers, and came back wearing themāwith the laces left untied.
On becoming a billionaire after Pixar IPOād:
Catmull saw Steve pick up the phone in an office to the side. āHello, Larry?ā Steve said into the handset, once his pal Ellison was on the line. āI made it.ā Steve, who owned 80 percent of the company, was a billionaire.
All of the raw technology paid off when it became the foundation for OSX and iOS when Next was acquired and Steve returned to Apple:
The original dreamāthat NeXT would create the worldās next great computerāwas over. āWe got lost in the technology,ā Steve would later tell me.
Even Steve wrestled with existential questions and uncertainty:
But that didnāt mean he himself was ready to take on the job of running Apple. According to his wife, Laurene, he was still torn about whether to go back. The two of them debated the matter endlessly. [ā¦] But did he really want to try to ride to the rescue of Apple when it hardly resembled the company he had tried to build? Was he even convinced it had the people and resources to become competitive? Did he want to work that hard, now that he had a young family? Did he want to risk what was left of his reputation by tilting at windmills? These questions were all on his mind. He had to become convinced that enough of the ātrueā Apple remained before he would ever consider taking ultimate responsibility for it. Steve didnāt know it at the time, but his indecisiveness was actually a kind of breakthrough. Steve was developing a more nuanced, measured approach to decision making. Steve had grown more comfortable with waitingānot always patientlyāto see what developed, rather than jumping impulsively into some new venture where he thought he could once again astound the world. When he needed toāas when the opportunity arose to sell NeXT to Appleāhe could strike quickly. But from now on he would act with a piquant combination of quick, committed actions and careful deliberation.
07 Nov 2015
Shadow and Claw made for a very rich and unique reading experience ā one that was simultaneously challenging and enthralling. Set in an antiquated future, where the sun is dying and mankind has peaked, Severian ā exiled member of the Torturerās Guild ā begins his account of leaving the citadel heās always known for the greater world beyond.
The world he explores and recounts to the reader is rich and fascinating, but reluctant to give up its secrets. Language plays a very strong part in this, as the book is positioned as author Gene Wolfe translating Severianās recount. In so doing, Wolfe is translating a history from the future, so we get a mix of words that are either arcane or invented: fuligin. carnifex. hipparch. Words like these are presented in a way that I found satisfying: discovering their meaning from surrounding context is a mode of discovering the world that Severian (and therefore we) get to reside in.
A third of the way in, I realized that though the language and world is dense and intricate, the plot itself is quite simple. It unfolds as a series of anecdotes and memories which are cohesive but do not drive to any form of climax. This made for a strange feeling as I completed The Claw of the Conciliator: that I had travelled so far, but also gone nowhere. But perhaps that is the mark of just how good this book is, for Severian was likely feeling exactly the same way.
Regardless, itās a rewarding read and would probably make for an even more rewarding reread. At the finish of Claw, half way through the tetralogy, I have a number of remaining questions (spoilers follow):
Even with my curiosity around these questions and more, Iām uncertain if I want to invest the time to read the remainder, The Sword and the Citadel, to find out. Thereās a good chance my questions may simply go unaddressed, or be answered so matter of factly as to seem trivial. But thatās part of the magic of this book, and probably my key takeaway: Iād read it for the experience, the lasting imagery (the alzabo extract will be very hard to forget), and the journey ā not the destination. Donāt turn the pages in a rush ā youāll only reach the end and realize the most interesting parts were along the way.
22 Jan 2014
Had I started reading A Feast for Crows immediately upon finishing the excellent A Storm of Swords, as I was so tempted to do, I would have been sorely disappointed in the stark contrast between these two books. Whereas A Storm of Swords is momentous and significant, Feast is meandering and chooses to focus on the insignificant. Any cursory glance at the reviews for this book will inform you that GRRM leaves his most significant characters out of this installment, choosing instead to focus on secondary characters and new ones. In and of itself, I donāt think this would be a terrible thing, but in the end they arenāt compelling enough to carry the novel.
For much of the book, it felt as though GRRM simply ran out of creative steam. The unfoldings in Kingās Landing are much the same, just with different pieces in play and a focus on Cersei undoing herself. Aryaās sections are fairly monotonous and straightforward ā unfortunate, because I found her sections in the previous three books to be exceptionally clever and fun. It feels like a missed opportunity too, because her time training with the assassinās guild of The Faceless Men seems ripe for wonder; instead it bores. Samwellās passages serve some required plot advancement as we follow him moving from the Wall to the Citadel, but that is about it.
I did enjoy following Jaime on his newfound quest for honor, and also to restore the combat skills he lost along with his swordhand in Storm. Brienneās quest to find Lady Sansa was engaging, and I think sheās a deeper character for it, but unfortunately all those pages ultimately leave the reader with nothing to show for having read them. It was exciting to learn more about Dorne, but unfortunately those sections were plagued by too many minor characters to keep track of without great effort.
The writing was weaker too ā from the prologue, I had my concerns, and though the rest of the book is not that bad, GRRM adopts certain strategies that grate by the end of the book. He punctuates almost every paragraph of dialogue with the characterās internal thoughts, like this. He also betrays the realism and attention to detail in the earlier offerings by allowing implausibly chance encounters of the storyās characters in distant lands.
Ultimately, though, the core problem is it seems that GRRM just doesnāt know where to take the story, and so he bought himself time with this book. Just as the characters wander all over a desolate Westeros without much point, so does the reader trapped in his sprawling plot. There were certainly times I enjoyed this book, but in the end, Iām left feeling a little cheated, like there wasnāt much redeeming value in return on my time investment.
The question, then, is should someone read this book? The completionist in me would advise any GoT fan to see it through, especially in the hopes that the rest of the books will be better. But standing on its own, I donāt think the tale warrants the pages and time required.