Becoming the boss is an exciting transition, but it can also be a nerve-wracking one. This is especially true if you are now managing people who used to be your peers. You need to establish your credibility and authority, without acting …

I spend roughly 73% of my life thinking about web performance — hitting that sweet 60FPS on slow phones, loading my assets in the perfect order, offline-caching everything I can. Other examples.

Is that the sun? No, it’s our business. Read on…

Voice is a Big Deal in tech this year. Amazon has probably sold 10m Echos, you couldn’t move for Alexa partnerships at CES, Google has made its own and, it seems, this is the new platform. There are a couple of different causes for this …

I used to write a lot of Angular back in 2015. But recently, the JS community has largely moved on from Angular 1 to other libraries, and in turn, so have my projects. I always knew in the back of my mind that technology — and the knowledge …

A question I originally answered on Quora : What are some of the dark lessons that life showed you?

Are you good at your job?

Example of message designed to remind harassers of the humanity of their victims and to reconsider the norms of online behavior. (Screen shot from Twitter by Kevin Munger/TMC)

Last week, Gallup released its State of the American Workplace study (read it here ). This is yet another of their comprehensive looks at what really motivates and engages employees.

Amazon’s Leadership Principles

Mon, Jul 21, 2014 in

Toward the tail end of 2015, Kevin Systrom, the CEO of Instagram, came to a realization: The photo-sharing app he had founded five years earlier was straying too far from its roots.

Four days into 2017, Medium’s employees came to work and were told that one-third of them, 50 people, were fired.

In 2004, ten years after Netscape launched, Tim O’Reilly launched the ‘Web 2.0’ conference, proposing (or branding) a generational shift in how the web worked. There were lots of trends, and none of them really started in 2004, but to me, …

Lately we’ve been on a bit of a tear internally working to eliminate operational complexity from our business.

Written 38w ago · Upvoted by

We were keeping our eye on 1984. But it’s Brave New World we should have feared instead.

Benedict Evans at a16z recently tweeted the following:

Do you ever feel like your entire life is on a schedule

David Friedberg is a serial entrepreneur and investor in Silicon Valley, having started a number of notable companies including The Climate Corporation, a climate-prediction startup, Eatsa, an automated quinoa-based fast food chain with no …

Once upon a time we categorized companies into two broad categories with regards to decision making: Centralized & De-centralized. This model is easy to comprehend when we think of a central headquarters housing centralized functions and …

Image via Giphy: http://giphy.com/gifs/someone-robot-typing-RPZu7v6zA2WOI

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These opinions are entirely my own, distilled from my experience at Dropbox in 2012–2015 as well as working with other startups. Since it’s been a few years, I’m sure Dropbox and their process look quite a bit different now.

I remember working as a developer at a company and complaining that I had no idea what the bosses did all day. It felt like while we engineers were working hard and shipping stuff, managers just talked to a lot of people all the time, or …

How do you work best throughout the day?

“People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others,” the great seventeenth-century French physicist, philosopher, and inventor Blaise Pascal …

We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here. (Or see a preview.)

This manifesto documents my minimalism and simple living guidelines.

“I need to give my notice. I’ve found another job.”

First off, I hate using the term micromanager***,*** it is so negative. Before deciding to write this post, I read a few articles just to make sure my experience matched the general consensus regarding micromanagement. I certainly do not …

It’s a warmer-than-average December day in Selmer, Tennessee. A diverse group of farmers, from teen-aged to late fifties, are all waiting around patiently, mingling and sipping coffee. Everyone has a name tag with his or her home state on …

You probably do a lot of one-on-one meetings at work: with your manager, teammates, folks from other teams. Unfortunately, most people totally waste their 1:1 time. The problem: the 1:1s aren’t awkward enough*. Here’s how to make them …

It’s an Engineering Manager responsibility to guarantee the team health measured in terms of qualities such as performance, commitment, accountability and predictability (among lot of others). However this can’t be forced by the Manager. …

Photo by Leticia Chamorro

December 18th, 2016 · 47 comments

Basecamp is a web-based project management tool, and like so many other software tools and startups before it, the creators of Basecamp made it for themselves. They just needed a decent way to manage projects and collaborations. It just …

Issue № 431

This article is by Dave Girouard, CEO of personal finance startup Upstart, and former President of Google Enterprise Apps. He’s well known for building Google’s enterprise apps division into a $1B+ global business. Here he shares his tips …

Please note: This post is the third post in a five part series on the main pricing methodologies, highlighting the pros and cons of each. Check out the first post on cost plus pricing and second post on competitor based pricing.

We all face complex business decisions for which there is no one, correct answer, and yet a strong and occasionally permanent decision is required of us.

A couple of years ago I drew this picture and started using it in various presentations about agile and lean development:

Everything has to be a billion dollar idea that changes the world or it isn’t worth doing.

Then he asked those same people to pull on the rope with a group. He observed that when people pulled with a group, they put in less effort than when pulling on their own.

Credit: Flickr / Ivan

Jason Fried Founder & CEO at Basecamp. Co-author of Getting Real, Remote, and NYT Bestseller REWORK. http://basecamp.com Oct 31

Opening up an API is a big commitment, one that needs to be managed well over time in order to ensure a healthy and thriving ecosystem. If a company is still in the throes of developing a product strategy and business model, it’s worth …

I was happy to read that the New York Times bought Brian Lam’s Wirecutter and Sweethome sites for $30 million today.

Kate Matsudaira has been leading engineering teams for over a decade. She’s worked at major companies like Amazon, and great startups like Decide (acquired by Ebay) and Moz. Through these experiences, she’s accumulated a lot of knowledge on …

The engineering managers at Localytics have been working together for over a year, and through ups and downs, we’ve grown and learned a lot as a team. The goal of this post is to share some of the lessons we’ve learned with the community. …

The best advice I ever read on hiring was “only hire for existing cash flows.” Naturally, I proceeded to ignore it for years. Instead I adopted the SV approach to “hire smart people and let them figure it out.”

J Nightingale Tech, Leadership, Photog, Food, Hippy, Dad. The unimaginable positive power of the global internet. CPO @Hubba. Board @creativecommons. Former Mr. @Firefox. 2 days ago7 min read

Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson.

Take a look at those herbs above. The ones on the left look like they were probably picked fresh just before I photographed them, while the ones at the right had been hanging out in my refrigerator for weeks in a forgotton plastic bag, …

You have a hypothesis you wish to prove or refute regarding your behavior in an extreme scenario. For example: after restarting the DB, all services are fully functioning within X seconds. There are at least 3 approaches:

by Tobias van Schneider first appeared on my private email list.

“That’s stupid —you’re building a lifestyle business” spat the investor across the table, flashing me a death glare. It was 2011 and I was at a roundtable event at Grow Conference, an annual gathering of investors, entrepreneurs, and …

If constant stress has you feeling helpless, disillusioned, and completely exhausted, you may be suffering from burnout. When you’re burned out, problems seem insurmountable, everything looks bleak, and it’s difficult to muster up the …

March 29th, 2016 · 44 comments

In the early years of this blog I wrote a lot about the personal struggles of people who had attained financial independence only to find out that it revealed that money was not what was standing in the way of happiness. That’s contrary to …

There are three things, once one’s basic needs are satisfied, that academic literature points to as the ingredients for happiness: having meaningful social relationships, being good at whatever it is one spends one’s days doing, and having …

Right after the Tesla Model 3 launch on March 31st, I had a few things to say on the subject. This post is an elaboration on the topic.

When I was young, there was nothing so bad as being asked to work. Now I find it hard to conjure up that feeling, but I see it in my five-year-old daughter. “Can I please have some water, daddy?”