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Category: essays

Linkedin Recruiter Spam and you: LinkedIn has a candidate experience problem

Linkedin Recruiter Spam and you: LinkedIn has a candidate experience problem

  LinkedIn solved a real market inefficiency in hiring.  By mapping the professional networks of millions of people worldwide in the 200s, they lowered the barrier to search for talent by skill, connection, or location in a really really useful way.  They were able to monetize the data they had on professional networks because by lowering the barrier to search for employees, they lowered Read the article >>
Information Addiction

Information Addiction

A few days ago, I was taking a break from hacking to get some coffee downstairs.  StepOut's offices are on the 4th floor, so I press the 'down' button, enter the elevator, and take out my iPhone.  One tweet, 25 seconds later, and I'm downstairs.  Cross the street.  Light's red.  Take out phone, scroll more tweets.  There's a line at Starbucks.  Check Email.  Still waiting in line -- Better Read the article >>
Dissonance

Dissonance

When we first started StepOut, I used to get really stressed out by the dissonant signals that come from the day-to-day of running a web startup.   There's just so much shit that can go wrong when you're shooting to build a $100mm+ company. Lately, I've come to view dissonance as part of the process.  You can't scale a company without it.  It's kind of like in music when the composer creates Read the article >>
Beginners Mind

Beginners Mind

This weekend I went through my first zen retreat.   My interest in meditation has ebbed and flowed over the past several years.  The scientific evidence is piling up - Meditation increases mental clarity, healthy sense of self,  critical thinking, decreases depression, and my personal experience seems to comport -- it increases overall mental well-being.  As an engineer, my mind is often spinning Read the article >>
Engineer Mind

Engineer Mind

Foremost, stop yourself from distractions. Study your change request, first, as a user of your product. Do not forget that before you were an engineer, you were a user. Read and re-read the objectives and their supporting data, let them marinate with your conception of your product. Open your browser, type in your products URL & immerse yourself, but only with your user mind. Understand the Read the article >>
On Identity

On Identity

The first thing people ask me when they haven't seen me in a while is "How's StepOut?". I find it playfully amusing that, to others, I'm the "Indian online dating guy". Not because I have any particular special amused sentiment towards India, online dating, or the web itself, just because it's something I never thought I'd be doing professionally. Work as Self I used to hate pitching the company. Read the article >>
On Equanimity

On Equanimity

One of the biggest challenges you'll faces as a technical co-founder of a social startup is that of equanimity. You sit at the intersection of product and technology. The contrast in approaches in those areas is often under-stated and always under-recognized. In product, as CTO, you're injected into the thought-stream torrent that results in strategic decision making, yet have little-to-no influence Read the article >>
“Create more value than you Capture”

“Create more value than you Capture”

I have a new personal maxim. For myself. And a new personal standard for the people I spend time with, both socially & professionally, in 2012. Create more value than you capture. ~Tim O'Reilly As we grow our business, I'm finding than the type of people that are worth my time follow this maxim, whether consciously or unconsciously. Think about the traits of someone who creates more value Read the article >>
On Systems

On Systems

One of the amazing things about our human mind is that it enables the capacity of abstract thought. As software developers, we are taught to program computer systems. Doing so, we are learning to disembody ourselves from the physical everyday world of our lives and speak the language of bits and bytes, 0s and 1s. We use our capacity for abstract thought to put ourselves into a world where statements Read the article >>
Running a Startup? You”re standing on the shoulders of giants.

Running a Startup? You”re standing on the shoulders of giants.

I was having a conversation with my father the other day about the opportunities that advances in science and technology have created for the future-minded and tech-savvy in my generation. He''s a physicist by calling, so it shouldn''t have been a surprise, given the context, when he quoted the founder of classical physics, Sir Isaac Newton: If I have seen further it is only by standing on the Read the article >>