Company Culture

At a well-run seed stage startup, engineers will often describe the work experience as intoxicating . At a larger company, the best you get is "enjoyable".

I know the founders of an AI chip company that taped out and got working chips on their first go. They got their chip done, it’s pretty solid. Chip has great perf and is super power efficient, a solid delivery. I knew they'd nail it and they did.

The SW story is a train wreck, though. The problem basically was that they couldn’t hire any good SW... See more

To start with, leaders must not be afraid of their teams making mistakes. Copying from another comment: "Netflix's culture demands very strong leadership and probably works only when the company is small enough. From CEO and down, leaders in every level need to know how to set context for their teams, give enough freedom to their teams, while... See more

I really like the approach of Netflix of 10 years ago when it was still small. They hired mature people so they could get rid of processes. Indeed, they actually tried to de-process everything. As a result, things just happened. Non-event was often mentioned and expected in Netflix at that time. Case in point, active-active regions just happened in... See more

Kevin Scott, now CTO of Microsoft, would ask in candidate interviews: “What do you want your next job to be after this company?” Most of your team members realistically won’t stick with the same company forever. This is even more true as you scale to 20, then 50, then 100 team members and so on. But the best way to empower them to do good work is... See more

“Every organization sucks, but you get to choose the ways in which your organization sucks.” – Mark Zuckerberg quoting Dan Rosensweig.