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2 Jul, 6 tweets, 2 min read
Thread of amazing Wave videos/stories/memes/etc. Hype levels in Senegal/Cote d’Ivoire are increasing rapidly and the results are awesome:
Some distributors (people who go around to markets etc getting users signed up) wrote us a song!!! Really impressive production quality too.

Chorus (translated): “Deposit?” “It’s free!” “Withdraw? “It’s free! “Transfer?” “It’s super cheap!” “What is it again?” “It’s Wave Money!”
A team of distributors ran into their counterparts from a competitor, so obviously there had to be a dance battle:
When I was in Kenya I saw a lot of random products appropriating tech company brands, eg Twitter brand perfume. Honored for Wave to join this tradition with Wave brand beignets:
On the occasion of a competitor cutting prices (and still not matching us): “What Wave has done to [competitor] in the world of money transfer should inspire men that only a second wife can give courage to their first to take more care of them” uhhhhh ok 😬
If dancing in the streets wasn’t awesome enough already, sometimes we do it in penguin costumes:

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More from @benskuhn

Ben Kuhn Profile picture
23 Jun
Six (!!) years ago today was my first day at Wave! This has now surpassed elementary school to become the longest period of time I've *ever* spent at the same place. (For some value of "the same" and "place".)

To celebrate, 1 like = 1 thing I learned:
1. important problems >>> "hard problems"

I learned way more by building a simple UI around some arithmetic—that mattered bc people loved it—than out of my previous job building ML models and reading stats papers.
2. the ceiling for "trying hard" is ~2 orders of magnitude higher than you think. If you haven't spent entire years failing, you are trying medium-hard at best.
Read 48 tweets
Ben Kuhn Profile picture
14 May
More late-stage companies are switching from four-year vesting to one-year grants. Stripe, Lyft, and now Coinbase (blog.coinbase.com/how-coinbase-i…).

Seems like a good time to talk about why being an early startup employee is (used to be?) a much better deal than it might seem:
1. Picking winning startups is actually not *that* hard: benkuhn.net/vc-emh/ It's not *easy*, but some VCs, and TechCrunch award voters, do it regularly.

"If it's not hard then why aren't you rich?" Because plebs can't invest at those valuations, only name-brand VCs can.
("Why do name-brand VCs get a good deal?" Because many companies don't optimize very hard for valuation when fundraising. Instead they try to minimize distraction, risk of down rounds, etc. See post for a more fleshed-out argument.)
Read 10 tweets
Ben Kuhn Profile picture
3 Apr
Why is building shiny tech more popular than tackling core problems head-on?

I’d guess because the most important trait for the latter is utterly stupid + painful amounts of determination.

For instance, here are some of the brick walls we bashed our heads against at Wave:
(Context: we’re building a mobile money system—a network of agents where people can deposit, withdraw, or send money—to replace banks in sub-Saharan Africa, where most people are unbanked because most banks are terrible.)
Our first attempt was to launch it as a "feature" of our existing, successful international money transfer product (sendwave.com)—you could send money from the US to our agent network in Ethiopia.
Read 21 tweets
Ben Kuhn Profile picture
30 Mar
Hot take: the outside view is overrated.

(“Outside view” = e.g. asking “what % of startups succeed?” and assuming that’s ~= your chance of success.)

In theory it seems obviously useful. In practice, it makes people underrate themselves and prematurely give up their ambition.
One problem is that finding the right comparison group is hard.

For instance, in one commonly-cited statistic that “90% of startups fail,” (national.biz/2019-small-bus…) “startup” meant all newly-started small businesses including eg groceries. Failure rates vary wildly by industry!
But it’s worse than that. Even if you knew the failure rate specifically of venture-funded tech startups, that leaves out a ton of important info. Consumer startups probably fail at a higher rate than B2B startups. Single-founder startups probably fail more than 2-founder ones.
Read 14 tweets
Ben Kuhn Profile picture
28 Mar
A lot of managers (including me!) find it hard/scary to give critical feedback.

I realized recently that this is often downstream of a less obvious blindspot—giving people enough *positive* feedback! If you've done that, critical feedback "magically" becomes much less fraught.
Basically, the hard part of giving people critical feedback (at least for me) is worrying that it'll make them feel bad (as opposed to motivated to improve). The biggest thing that makes people feel bad is worrying that their manager thinks they overall suck at their job.
So you need to give positive feedback not just for things that are *surprisingly* awesome (which I think is many managers' default), but frequently enough that the positive:negative ratio accurately reflects how good they are at their job.
Read 9 tweets
Ben Kuhn Profile picture
26 Mar
This is another great takeaway from last thread, which I *should* have learned from changing jobs, but actually took ~20 more cycles on the motivation roller coaster to realize.

For me, bad focus was ~always a response to circumstances, even when I wasn't consciously aware!
My first years at Wave, I repeated variants of the following ~monthly:
- notice I'm stressed/unfocused
- "huh, having an off day"
- go climbing, read books, etc.
- still stressed
- gripe to boss eg "accounting sucks"
- boss helps fix accounting problem
- ✨happiness returns✨
Eventually I started interpreting stress/unfocus as a sign, not that I was having a bad day, but that I was working ineffectively or on the wrong thing. Eg, I'd know I needed to be hiring faster, but kept getting distracted by other, less important, more urgent projects.
Read 6 tweets

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