I forget who mentioned The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change to me as an interesting book to pick up, but I do remember thinking that it sounded like the …
Impressions of the Switch, Three Months Later
The Switch is my first Nintendo console since the SNES. Having missed all the great Nintendo franchises in the past decade or so, I’ve been excited to wait for the updates the classics, and so …
Review: The Upstarts
The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley are Changing the World is a journalist’s take on how Uber and Airbnb came to exist. These two startups are two …
Revisiting the Square IPO
Unicorns are overvalued.The general trend was obvious for a while: the emergence a glut of companies just clearing the $1 billion valuation mark with special conditions, funds downgrading or writing off their private company shares, and …
Review: Arkwright
I’ve been on a sci-fi reading binge lately, and between the likes of Seveneves and the Three-Body Problem trilogy, I’ve had a good dosage of high-flying, civilization-wide stories that tickles the imagination. From that context, …
Educational Tradeoff
My new favorite podcast is Exponent, a podcast hosted by business analyst types Ben Thompson and James Allworth. They tend to talk a lot about the tech industry and its movements, but often provide subtle …
Hiring for Potential vs. Experience
I’m a people optimist. When it comes to building and managing a team, this optimism manifests itself in trusting people on the team to do ultimately do the right thing. It may take them a …
Review: The Wandering Earth
Given that I wanted more epic short stories after going through Invisible Planets, Liu Cixin’s The Wandering Earth—his collection of classic science fiction short stories—seemed like a good bet on delivering grand scale in short(ish) …
I Built my own Financial Planning Spreadsheet
I’m a personal finance geek. Starting with Mint and their budgeting tools and having moved on to Personal Capital for their investment tracking, I appreciate understanding where my money is coming and going, both in terms of “fixed” inputs …
A Bifurcation in Photography
Parenting catalyzes photography. I had dabbled with point-and-shoot cameras in the past, but those devices offered little once smartphone cameras took good enough pictures for most. When the kids came along, the cliche that the …
Review: Chaos Monkeys
I picked up Chaos Monkeys curious about how it would portray the same Silicon Valley that I’ve been a part of for over a dozen years. In particular, one of the characters in the narrative—Gokul …
A Counsyl Retrospective
It started when I was thinking about how technology has failed. Or, to be more accurate, where it has failed. Post-Square, I had approached my job hunt slightly differently than in years past. Opportunity and …