Discover and Read the Best of Twitter Threads by @patio11

. @eladgil wrote the High Growth Handbook, regarding the challenges startups weather after product-market fit. Spoiler: great problems to have are still problems and can still kill you.

We excerpted a chapter on product management: stripe.com/atlas/guides/b…

Thoughts:

In the early days one of the founders, likely the CEO, is going to own the product *thoroughly*, inclusive of roadmap but down to obsessive detailed decisions. Eventually, even with continuing interest in owning product strategy, you'll need people to expand scope of the role.

Truly great PMs can have a wonderful conversation in their own head, with the product team, with customers, with "the business", and with external non-customer stakeholders, at appropriate level of detail, while keeping the narrative fabric straight.

There are some desirable products where successful use of the product causes you to graduate and become a non-user. These are rough to build businesses around.

(Ironically tertiary education, despite having invented the word “graduate”, managed to avoid this biz model problem.)

(“How?” Multigenerational product use, aggressively pumping alumni for donations, and diversifying revenue streams away from tuition alone.)

But if you’re selling a $20 widget that the average user will foo the bar with and be totally done with their lifetime use... that’s a rough, rough business to be in, and your channel partner is going to be happier than you at the end of the day.

Here’s Hertz:

https://twitter.com/hunterwalk/status/1018708784812720130

Generally when you are in a “Only one of these charts can be right” situation I trust the one with billions riding on it, but genuinely uncertain here.

Hmm some weird threading behavior there by Twitter.

. @matt_levine on a very widespread moral intuition about the markets: bloomberg.com/view/articles/…

Amusingly, it is in many people's interest to sell unsophisticated investors on the notion that they're only a little work from outperforming sophisticated investors.

"Yep, ignore the fact that hedge funds very literally do automated satellite surveillance of WalMart shopping carts to estimate their earnings before the quarterlies come out. You, too, can watch CNBC and noodle your way to superior-to-market returns!"

s/shopping carts/parking lots/ ; sometimes the brain-finger connection doesn't work nearly as well as I wish it would.

This is how many developers think contracts work. Notably, most businesses do *not* think that this is how contracts work. This is why contracts are drafted carefully by professionals and are really effing expensive.

I would ordinarily cite a comment on HN but I have a strict no shaming policy; take it as "a conveniently copy/pastable example of a very common flawed belief in the developer community."

Free professional output is available from many people, including yours truly, and it does exactly what it says on the tin, not what you might wished it did. That second thing? That's called a "deliverable." You can ask for it to be specified in a Statement of Work.

15 years of being a professional software engineer: can *almost* publish static HTML to my blog with the same likelihood as HTTP 200 that I had when doing my Warcraft 2 fan site in middle school on AOL.

*Almost.* (Freaking toolchains.)

How do folks learning now survive?!

I'm trying to think how I would explain this process to a newer professional:

"So what was the problem?"
"OK so I named a new type of content for the site with numbers."
"OK."
"And that worked with Jekyll."
"OK."
"So I deployed."
"OK."
"And everything broke because Nginx."
"Wat"

"Yeah that sometimes happens."
"So what did you do?"
"Oh I changed the template for my configuration file to add a regular expression specifying try_files for a particular subdirectory and then rebooted the server. You know, as one does."
"And that worked?"
"Not the first time."

1) Assume that product differentiation is a meaningful but small contribution to eventual success; your current edge always has an expiration date.

2) Understand your market enough to be able to say why "they just build X" isn't incentive-compatible.

3) Small steps; big vision.

https://twitter.com/athyuttamre/status/1016512327720394752

For startups in financial technology, I generally say some variant of "You have three years and eighteen months. Three years until they realize that what you're doing is working. Six months until they decide to do anything. A one year product cycle. And then..."

"... you will get hit full in the face by an organization which has every partnership it could ever want, regulators on speed dial, tens of millions of customer relationships, a marketing budget denominated in billions, and capability of hiring in any tech stack.

So, move fast."

I think people are insufficiently amazed at credit cards. You can walk into a store in a country you’ve been to, pull out a piece of plastic they’ve never seen before, and walk out with basically anything, in seconds, with almost no words exchanged.

And it’s one of the few forms of magic where explaining how it works makes it seem even more improbable rather than less.

“OK check it: a local affiliate of BigCo convinced this shopkeeper to put out a reader. He trusts that anything the reader says is good will actually be paid at end of month. His bank trusts a network which trusts an issuing bank. Most of these parties don’t know each other.”

We weren’t in a position to afford a computer to program on but the library had a book on BASIC for video games. Since I really wanted to make my own video games, I taught myself BASIC and hand-simulated programs on graph paper.

https://twitter.com/prinxemu/status/1015765362170826752

I suppose it would be more On Brand if I had charged for them but while I tried to start a shareware business in high school (plugins for VGAPlanets) I never successfully shipped due to a) C b) worrying about parents reacting to checks in the mail from the Internet and c) C.

(I had forgotten that! It seems like a natural thing now but “Wait people who you don’t know just *pay you* for this *thing that doesn’t even exist*; is that even legal?” was a major worry for my family and I when I got started for real.)

An avocado toast store has opened in Ebisu.

Tokyo: “Do you think this means we should stop building housing? ... Nah that would just be silly. Homes and avocado toast for everyone!”

Ebisu is one of the beating hearts of salarymandom and, if you’re willing to walk 10 minutes, you can get a starter apartment for about $600 a month and a family sized one for about $1k.

(“Salarymandom has a heart?” Yeah, one social issue per tweet storm limit, sorry.)

My comic book swearing that I occasionally do in tweets was semi-valid liquid templating syntax, but only semi-valid, and so attempting to put them on my blog killed Jekyll.

#{I%#)ing computers.

Trying to style 140 ~ 280 #{I%#)ing characters is to be something other than awful is reminding me why I embrace the soothing oblivion of dea^H^H^H decided not to become a front-end engineer.

Twitter even has a way where you can slurp down their Javascript to do the styling for you ( developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitte… ) but this feels to me like it defeats the purpose of the exercise...

No dog in this fight, as an American who has spent his entire adult life in Japan, but if I had been subject to this regulatory suite when founding my first business I would have just opted not to start.

https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1014367940148260864

I operated under a relatively high-ceremony US regulatory regime (HIPAA, for healthcare information privacy) for several years. I sympathize with the general normative direction for the regulations, but the compliance steps themselves very rarely added value for anyone.

A fun example: a regulated business has to train all of their employees annually on their responsibilities under the regulations and keep a record of them having attended the training.

I had a very surreal discussion (with myself, alone in a room) and recorded that I had had it.

Wife wants an air conditioner.

Me: “OK honey be home late I’m going to buy us an air conditioner.”
“You don’t know anything about air conditioners.”
“Yes but I know about sales guys so will walk into the store and say ‘I am definitely going to buy an an AC today.’ Solved.”

“But how do you know you get the best air conditioner?”
“If I devoted the next ten years of my life to the subject I could, maybe, get a better answer than ‘I want the best-selling one.’ but ain’t got time for that so spoiler alert.”
“They’ll be mortified.”

“No see this is the great thing about sales guys: when you say you have definite purchasing intent and want a named product with minimal opportunity for either side to screw it up they are literally impossible to offend.”

I use this app which is the Japanese equivalent of Mint to aggregate and categorize transactions from all the cards/accounts/etc, and because machine learning, 30 transactions for “Starbucks Harajuku” got flagged as “fashion”, to the great amusement of my wife.

Harajuku’s four industries: fashion for young Japanese women, tourism for 20-something foreign tourists, extremely sugary snacks, and tech startups.

(No really; that last one is legitimately why we put our office there.)

I wonder if I’m second guessing a computer which would say huffily “OK human it is literally the case that more receipts I see with Harajuku on it are fashion that receipts I see with Starbucks are for coffee can you even math human they are a diversified lifestyle brand.”

I will never, never stop facepalming about people with “capitalist” very literally in their job title complaining about what labor costs these days.

I’d be at least mildly sympathetic if they e.g. ran a charming local cafe. But when your literal job is allocating efficiently...

... and you complain that AppAmaGooBookSoft are corrupting young engineers minds by promising them enough money to live in your neighborhood, your remedies are:

1) hire people AppAmaGooBookSoft won’t
2) execute better at business or
3) clear the field for better operators

I also have to point out that capital is more abundant than it has ever been and is chasing returns. Your LPs did not give you that pot of money to #*{^#ing buy Bitcoin.

Making software/etc businesses in a radically more efficient fashion than BigCo is the trade!

Actual no exaggeration quote from a debugging session with a non-technical colleague earlier:

“What are you doing?”
“*aigh* Yo dawg I heard you like virtualized environments so I put a virtual machine in your machine and then I put a Ruby version switcher in your virtual...

machine and then I put a virtual dependency subspace in your version switcher. Actually that sounds hard so yo dawg, I heard you like virtual machines. Still following?”
“Oh God no.”
“Oh God yes, dawg, because the virtual machine in your virtual machine can’t find the virtual

machine it needs to machine, so I need to virtual machine into your physical machine to log into your virtual machine to tell its virtual machine where the virtual machine is.”
*I do. It works.*
“... I don’t know whether to be happy or scared.”
“Welcome to engineerig!”

Received a solicitation from a Japanese bank for this savings product:

It’s a 1 year CD.
It’s renewable at bank’s option only, for 1 year at a time, up to 15 years.
The APR is 31 basis points.
They will also generously pay you somewhere between 30 and 50 bps in cash for buying.

I am glad I am not the product manager for that product.

This is designed to be sold to unsophisticated retail savers, he says unnecessarily.

"That's brilliantly boring" is one of the most positive things you can say about implementation choices. Like, there was an exciting, career-making, going-to-be-a-devil-and-a-half option which was totally on the table... but lo, it turns out it's actually a solved problem.

You sort of have to create organizational incentives for "brilliantly boring" because, left to their own devices, people often optimize for not-boring systems therefore deliver the combination of not-boring and not-brilliant.

I mean "implementation choices" substantially broader than the commentary on software that it would probably otherwise be read at, because capitalism is a repeatable engine to suggest "That problem: have you considered paying an expert money to solve it for you. Several, maybe?"

I feel like people consistently overestimate how widely distributed individual technologies are, even where those technologies are clearly better than alternatives, easy to implement, and have minimal downside risk or cost to reverse adoption.

Also the "Go to the gym" factor.

https://twitter.com/AustenAllred/status/1011323277640228865

You should go to the gym. I should go to the gym. Almost everyone should go to the gym.

I do not go to the gym, as of this exact moment in time, despite knowing that it is the correct thing to do. Anyone who successfully modified behavior could justly claim fairly major benefits

I think that that might be a little too metaphorical, even though it is my semi-informed understanding that you will, factually, be told to go to the gym by YC if they think you aren't going to the gym.

Here's another go-to-the-gym bit of advice: don't run out of money.

In a fairly frequent trope of advertising in Japan, the Japanese here about this guy actually reads “[This poor foreigner can of course] not get used to life in Japan. Therefore, he chooses to entrust **all** household duties to us, to focus on business.”

And while it is partially driven by empathy, and sometimes useful if you need social license to ask for very high amounts of help, it can get a little annoying to be constantly treated as having the executive function of a three year old.

(Sometimes less than a three year old; there are definitely people who prefer explaining things to my three year old over explaining them to me. Trash disposal rules, for example.)

This toddler would get full marks at the Japanese engineering company I worked at.

A culture/practice of saying it out loud trains you to run an evaluation process in real time, causes you to be more alert after going into verbal sudo, and signals to colleagues when you do.

https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/1009228921060110336

Specific examples of things we would say:

"I am about to log into production." (And close cousin "I confirm that you are logging into production.")

"I am executing a script which will destroy data."

"I am about to drop tbl_foo in prod." "You have expressed the intent to..."

The other part of the ritual is pointing to the things as you say them, which you're supposed to do even if you're the only one in the room, since it draws your eyes to "I know you *said* tbl_foo but, hypothetically speaking, is the argument under your finger *actually* tbl_foo*"

Some companies are easy to start. Some companies less so. Sometimes you just enjoy playing life on hard mode, and so you start a bank. Tom Blomfield (CEO of @monzo) was kind enough to chat with Stripe Atlas users about what it took to do that: stripe.com/atlas/guides/a…

Thoughts:

Many software entrepreneurs feel that there is some sophistication thermocline beneath with it's all of us grubbing about with MVPs and stuff-that-doesn't-scale and above which there are invisible magic experts.

Nope, starting a business is starting a business, all the way up.

Tom's thoughts on dealing with regulators largely track my thoughts. I've found most to be surprisingly reasonable, mostly because they're pleasantly surprised that someone actually wants to read their Handy Guide To X Compliance that they spent 6 months on last year.

An observation about economics broadly and running companies narrowly:

There are a lot of free lunches, but they're not equally distributed.

(There is a saying in economics “There is no free lunch.” which has a certain intuitive appeal but is just obviously observationally false. We live in a world where “Doctor: wash your #*{^#ing hands” before surgery saves lives.)

On the good news/bad news front, some of the people/orgs/countries/etc who most need help can still nosh on free lunches like:

“That thing you want more of: do you measure it with numbers?”

“Have you considered taking attendance and firing government employees who do not exist”

Overcooked is a great family game.

*whispers* It’s also Tokyo Production System Simulator 2018 shh don’t tell anyone.

Literally every factory game causes me to spend five hours on pencil and graph paper for every one hour playing. My pride as a (recovering) salaryman is at stake.

Do not let the cutsie graphics and cat chopping onions aesthetic fool you; this is a brutal battle of man against inefficiency.