Luc Cheung

Segment and Amplitude hired a customer success/support person as employee #1. Here’s Calvin French-Owen (co-founder of Segment) on why they did this:

“ There’s something really magical when you write in to a startup and they fix your issue within a few hours. It’s something you’d never, ever expect from a big company, and it was one way for us to

... See more

Okay, if you had infinite time, what would you build?”

If you’ll indulge me, here’s my list of potential projects, with light editorializing.

Energy supply

• Synthetic fuel.


• Better polysilicon production tech. The Siemens process feels paleolithic.


• Flexible silicon solar arrays, ground mounted and ultra cheap (<$30k/MW).


• Radioactivity applications. “M

... See more

“The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them,”

Nassim Taleb says if you’re going to panic in investing, panic early. Same goes for your career – if you’re going to quit, quit early so whatever’s next has a shot at compounding.

There are tens of thousands of people sharing insights on a long-tail of topics, but their content is buried in the deep corners of the interwebs, found only by chance, and consumed in fleeting social media feeds that strip context and discourage reflection.

If you want to know what the smartest people have to say about the future of fandom, there... See more

One thing I do look back on fondly was how incredibly focused we were. Resources and time were so tight that you could feel the weight of all the things you weren’t working on. You had real conviction that the thing you were doing was the most important thing.

To pick a somewhat trivial example, at fireside chats with Mark (the predecessor to the... See more

A trick to learning a complicated topic is realizing how many complex details are a cousin of something simple. John Reed writes in his book Succeeding :

When you first start to study a field, it seems like you have to memorize a zillion things. You don’t. What you need is to identify the core principles – generally three to twelve of them – that

... See more