Internet's only bilingual (English/中文) newsletter, written by @kevinsxu. Seen on @nytimes @wsj @washingtonpost @wired @BusinessInsider @restofworld @techcrunch
May 5, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Long before tech, I cut my teeth on political campaigns: opposition research, op-eds & letters to editors of local newspapers were table stakes tactics.
Now FB’s paid a political consulting firm to do the same & undermine TikTok. The learnings?
Political candidate = product sold to voters
CEO’s credibility & charisma = product sold to growingly big/sophisticated customers
Choice to buy tech product is ultimately emotional. CEO’s ability to build that connection as product decides ceiling of growth.
May 3, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
I’ve been struggling to come up w an elegant analogy for 🇨🇳’s regulatory crackdown on tech. After observing 2021 Singles Day, I think I found it.
It looks just like what occurs periodically in every successful tech co: removing startup debt.
(thread) interconnected.blog/removing-china…1/ Startups amass “debt” in early days: wrong stack, exec etc. Tradeoff for moving fast, testing ideas.
8-10yrs in, some maturity warrants “debt removal”, w more experienced leaders, stringent code review, compliance measures etc.
All boring but essential things to “grow up”.
Nov 29, 2021 • 12 tweets • 5 min read
“Zhang Yiming’s Last Speech”
We rarely do translations, but Zhang Yiming’s last speech as ByteDance CEO is one of the most philosophical company anniversary speeches & translation-worthy.
Here’s a thread highlighting some poignant sections of his speech.
(thread)
1/ On “ordinary mind”:
“I’d like to talk about the topic of ‘ordinary mind’ (平常心) today... an ordinary mind is: when hungry, eat; when tired, sleep... treat yourself with an ordinary mind... realize that everyone, including yourself, is an ordinary person.”
Nov 28, 2021 • 6 tweets • 4 min read
“HashiCorp: Past, Present, Future”
In this article, our guest contributor @shawnxusy takes you to explore the tech & biz model of HashiCorp $HCP, one of the most prominent open source startups to date.
(thread)
@shawnxusy 1/ Like pianola that consistently automates piano playing, HashiCorp $HCP builds consistency via automation in cloud infra space.
Ex. Terraform automates away repetitive steps in provisioning a new EC2 server instance on AWS thru template, w/o replacing infra engineers #lowcode
