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Zack Kanter Profile picture
Zack Kanter
@zackkanter
Founder/CEO @Stedi (modern EDI platform) & previously Proforged (acquired by Huron Capital), serverless enthusiast, occasional blogger, all-around nerd.
3 subscribers
Mar 6 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
Change Healthcare – the nation's largest clearinghouse for insurance claims and payments – has been down for 13 days and counting due to a cyberattack. It's an absolute crisis – doctors, hospitals, and other providers can't get paid. What is a clearinghouse? What is going on? 🧵 Everyone knows HIPAA as a privacy act – forms to fill out at a doctor’s office. What people don’t know is the *Portability* part of ‘The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act’, which directed the department of HHS to establish standards for electronic transactions.
May 27, 2022 • 14 tweets • 6 min read
'If "fear is the mind killer," toil is the soul-killer.'

A few of my favorite, well, excerpts from 'Excerpts from the annual letter'. stedi.com/blog/excerpts-… Image I think about this in terms of preferences vs principles: many companies have a preference for operational excellence – but when push comes to shove, principles are defined by what you're willing to sacrifice for them. Image
Apr 1, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
A while back, @martin_casado asked me: "do you really think there are *no* circumstances under which it makes sense for a company to go on-prem / bare metal?" In all seriousness, I do think there are several cases where doing so might be necessary. (1/n) 1. You cannot afford to offer your product otherwise. I don't mean "you could do it cheaper yourself" – I mean *your unit economics would be negative* if you used public cloud infra. This is the case in certain rare circumstances. (2/n)
Dec 2, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
(1/n) The entire world of commerce – supply chain, logistics, retail, financial transactions, healthcare, and much, much more – is driven by an arcane technology called EDI. The world around you is powered by transactions that look like they came off a dot matrix printer in 1985: (2/n) Trillions and trillions of dollars flow through these legacy systems, locked away beyond the reach of modern developers. @Stedi is a collection of composable, API-driven building blocks that make these systems more legible and approachable: edi.stedi.com/inspector?valu…
Dec 2, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
I'm extremely excited to announce that Mappings – @Stedi's first broadly-applicable, developer-focused product – is now Generally Available. Mappings provides a powerful UI for defining JSON transformations, which can then be invoked via API for data mapping at scale. 1/n Mappings is particularly useful for building integrations – say, transforming Stripe payloads to some custom format – but can be used for any JSON-to-JSON transformation. Just upload a source & target file, then use simple functions to transform fields as necessary. 2/n
Aug 24, 2021 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Bezos interviewed by @om (2008) on the origins on AWS: "We were finding we were spending too much time on fine-grained coordination between our network engineering groups and our applications programming groups...we decided to build a hardened interface between those two layers." Full video: om.co/gigaom/gigaom-…
Jun 24, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
With DynamoDB, everyone says "make sure you understand access patterns up front." This scares off many startups – tough to predict access patterns with any certainty. How do you square that with the fact that DDB is Amazon/AWS's default DB for its own new projects? 1/n Seems a bit of a paradox! A general rule to help: if it's hard to predict your access patterns for a new service, you either i) are (mis)using Dynamo as an OLAP DB, and/or ii) haven't decomposed your service far enough. 2/n
Jun 16, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Good thread on being a Chief of Staff from my Chief of Staff, who has the same last name but is not related, which, yes, is the 9000th time I've explained that. A few thoughts on why the 4 criteria are important…

‘Responsiveness’: trains the founder to trust that you’re first line of defense, which allows them to optionally ignore anything you’re involved in when available bandwidth is low. I call this quality “the steel trap.” 1/4
Jun 1, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Discussion at Stedi this morning on functionless vs "just" serverless architecture – i.e. when/why to eliminate Lambdas in favor of direct managed service integrations, even when a Lambda works just fine; in this case, API Gateway-Lambda-EventBridge vs APIG-Step Functions-EB. 1/n Perhaps the hardest part of serverless development is building a team that is completely committed to it philosophically. Until that point, there are exhausting repetitive arguments about basic decisions; after, there are nuanced energizing debates about applied philosophy. 2/n
May 30, 2021 • 17 tweets • 4 min read
Excellent *financial* analysis of using *commoditized* cloud infrastructure (vanilla servers). It misses: i) the (long-term devastating) cultural cost of recruiting world-class engineers to do undifferentiated heavy lifting; ii) it's unfeasible to recreate noncommodity infra. 1/n On i: saving 50% on COGS sounds great – until you realize that it means recruiting & retaining engineers instead of paying an AWS/GCP invoice. Opportunities to buy technical competence with a credit card are extremely rare; you can't buy core product competence per API call. 2/n
Apr 12, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Story time. I’ve had sleeping issues for most of my adult life – easy to fall asleep, but have weird things like waking up in cold sweats from vivid sci-fi-like night terrors. Was always groggy in the morning. Sleep study turned up nothing. (1/n) Then I met @SamCorcos and invested in @Levels – and signed up, too, mostly out of curiosity...my dad got diabetes when he was 50, but my bloodwork (A1c) always came back excellent. Got my kit in January. Glucose was all over the map. (2/n)
Dec 19, 2020 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
Lol I can’t believe the editor signed off on this.

When downplaying something positive: “35,000 promotions sounds like a lot, but it’s actually tiny!”

When talking about how bad they are: “more than 4,000 employees on food stamps!!”

What an embarrassment for Bloomberg. 1/n Bloomberg journos find very representative examples of ‘Desperate Homeless Amazon Worker’ and ‘Good Paying Union Job Worker Who Vacations On Lake Havasu With His Boat And Was Definitely Not Introduced To Journos By Union Reps’ 2/n
May 8, 2020 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
1/ Stedi is now fully-distributed, and we're hiring serverless engineers & designers to build one of the last missing pieces of global infrastructure: a commercial trading network to automate the trillions of dollars in B2B transactions exchanged by every company on Earth. 2/ We have one goal: to process every B2B transaction on the planet. We are driving towards this goal with six tenets - many of which led us to a 100% serverless, AWS-native approach, and all of which strive towards an ideal of what we call 'Zero Touch Operations.'
Mar 12, 2020 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
All the dominoes fall now. It is socially acceptable for normies to cancel everything. Economic bloodbath tomorrow. Hanks getting it shows normies that anyone can get it. Trump speech means MAGA crowd doesn’t have to hold the partisan ‘virus nothingburger’ line anymore. NBA suspension means it’s okay to cancel without looking like a nut.
Mar 10, 2019 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Fascinating. Since Walmart, Home Depot, et al have third party marketplaces, they would have to eliminate all of their private label products, which would ~double the cost of common household items for poor people. Oh well, it's for their own good. medium.com/@teamwarren/he… Google Search would have to be spun off from Ads but nothing will change w/your search experience. Nevermind that 87% of Google's revenue comes from ads; when you don't need to worry about realities of business, it's easy to imagine how companies will just magically make it work.
Jan 6, 2019 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Perhaps the best description I’ve seen of why learning is important for anyone building something, physical or virtual: the quality of your decisions is governed by the mental patterns available to you at the time of decision-making.

(book is ‘The Timeless Way of Building’) Image “Your creative power is entirely given by the power of these patterns...the only way of acting fast is to rely on the various rules of thumb which [you] have accumulated in [your] mind.” Image
Jan 5, 2019 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I find myself less worked up about this topic now that I understand the position better. Proponents want to reduce income inequality, full stop. Either the gov’t takes 90%, wealthy are disincentivized to work, or they leave the country altogether. Proponents see a win-win-win. I very strongly disagree, but it is much less maddening when you realize that there isn’t a misunderstanding of what the effects will be.
Dec 4, 2018 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
1. It’s a problem of perspective. Large companies worry about lock-in because *their* strategy is to lock customers in and then raise prices - so, naturally, they are fearful of this happening to them. They think low prices are a sales gimmick, not a long-term strategy. 2. No one wants to get fired. BigCo tech projects are always over budget, behind schedule, and under-performant - making it worse by going multi-cloud won’t get you fired. But if the ‘lock-in’ boogeyman shows up one day and it’s your fault, you’re fired.
Sep 19, 2018 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
1/It’s possible that tariffs might actually “work” in cases like Apple (tons of cash to repatriate & enough scale to run an automated US factory). But man, it’s going to devastate small business.

Ex: avg auto parts brand does 7% EBITDA. 25% increase in COGS and you’re dead. 2/The price difference for fully-automated manufacturing in US vs China at large scale isn't that bad. But at low volume (say, 500-2000 units a year, which is actually 'high volume' for a small business), price difference can be 5-10x - if you can find someone to make it at all.
Apr 1, 2018 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Critics who think Amazon is killing retail should talk to the millions of businesses/products that were rejected by retail gatekeepers and only exist today because of Amazon’s ‘infinite shelf space.’ Retail had been artificially stifled by more than a century of a ‘Big Man’ (gatekeeper) system. Amazon Marketplace has spurred a Cambrian explosion of SKUs and the businesses who create them. ‘The Origin of Wealth’ captures this problem perfectly:
Mar 13, 2018 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
1/ As a former/recovering 4HWW disciple, I've been thinking about writing a post on this to other 'lifestyle' business founders who have fallen into the trap. Some quick thoughts to follow... 2/ A 'lifestyle' business can be a great fit for some people, but you have to ask yourself what you want to do with your free time once you have it. After automating my last business to the nth degree & moving to Argentina (the 4HWW mecca), I had practically unlimited free time.