๐ Tech Twitter TLDR #1
10x engineers, superhuman drama, office dogs, and crypto Twitter dunking on Trump
Yo! Welcome back to Tech Twitter TLDR, the newsletter curating the best of Tech Twitter every week so you donโt have to! Remember to click into the tweets below to read the full threads!
If you have any feedback, please let me know hereย or on Twitter atย @thatguybg
Hereโs what happened on Tech Twitter this week:
The Elusive 10x Engineer
Shekhar Kirani from Accel India wrote a rather flowery thread on 10x engineers:
10x engineers
Founders if you ever come across this rare breed of engineers, grab them. If you have a 10x engineer as part of your first few engineers, you increase the odds of your startup success significantly.
OK, here is a tough question.
How do you spot a 10x engineer?
And everyone obviously dunked on him:
@skirani 12. A 10x engineer is usually levitating, and farting out 1's and 0's as they whiteboard a proof that P=NP. They stopped sleeping before they were born. They are usually typing on two keyboards simultaneously.
To summon a 10x engineer you must walk up a flight of stairs backwards while holding a candle in a darkened house. As your foot touches the final step, repeat โfree as in speech and free as in beer, my new startup needs a 10x engineerโ
Shekhar Kirani @skirani
That said, it did stir some interesting discussion (click each tweet for the full thread):
1/ My timeline is full of this "10x engineer" tweet, mostly hate directed at it. As a 10x engineer, I thought I'd write some comments.
The first is "how to spot a 10x engineer". It's not anything on that list. 10x engineers are as diverse as any other kind of engineer.
Shekhar Kirani @skirani
@skirani It's because your definition of a 10x engineer is a poisonous stereotype that is running our industry. We are not pissed off about great engineers, we're pissed off that you have no idea what makes a great engineer.
(1/4) I believe that 10x engineers, and maybe even 100x engineers, exist. But it's not about how much code they write, or any particular personality traits.
It's one thing only: they build abstractions that, over time, take 10x LESS effort to maintain.
You could not write a better thread on how to build a terrible engineering department.
Shekhar Kirani @skirani
Super (Angry) Humans
The drama around Superhuman tracking pixels continues.
Superhuman is STILL spying on you, even after its โfixesโ. Why last weekโs Superficial changes are not something to celebrate, and why we should expect better. New post on Mike Industries. ๐ฆ mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2โฆ
not a single word from the people who were outraged over Superhuman lol
Edin Jusupovic @oasace
I'll get some heat for this but... this weekend I put together a quick site called Supertracker
supertracker.delian.io
It lets anyone make their own pixel just like Superhuman had, and lets you track in-depth where it is opened.
Came away from the conversation last week...
Bill Gurley TLDR
This dude went through ALL of Bill Gurleyโs blogs and pulled out all the good stuff in a thread. Click the tweet to read it all.
Went through nearly all of @bgurley's blog posts and picked out the best sections.
Will be adding to this throughout the day.
Enjoy!
[THREAD]
Tren Griffin @trengriffin
Other Stuff
M&A, office dogs, Trump, goal setting, and dating!
Unpopular opinion: media buying has become a commodity.
A brands' real differentiator is in their creative, their ability/agility to test new channels at scale and speed of execution.
Today, marketers, both online/offline are forced to think more creatively than ever before.
If you build your startup as a "distributed company" your path to liquidity via M&A will be more challenging.
In 2019, most acquirers aren't structured to support a distributed team.
More acquirers will develop this capability over time, but investors/founders must be aware.
Something changed in the US around 1980. I was there when it happened, and what happened was that the country shifted from a model that was a market economy at the macro scale but not at the level of individuals to a market all the way down (if you wanted it to be).
I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air. Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity....
Most common mistakes Iโve seen (and made) when setting goals:
1. Too safe
2. Way too ambitious
3. No buy-in
4. Hard to track
5. KPI not tied to strategy
6. KPI incentivizing the wrong behavior
7. KPI too vanity
8. Impossible to know if u achieved it
9. Too many goals
10. No goal
On Deck is making our own version of a breakout list, culling recommendations of fastest growing startups from investors
Extending the prompt to Tech Twitter:
What are startups youโd put on your own breakout list?
Can be Series A->beyond but must be still growing massively. :)
Rules of thumb:
- Work expands toย fillย theย time availableย for its completion.
- Burn rates expand until you're left w/18-24 months of runway.
Joking aside, almost all seed rounds seem to last 18-24 months, regardless of a company's stage and whether it's raising $1.5m or $4m.
Brett Berson @brettberson
You may have noticed this is a different format than the last edition. Iโm still trying different ideas - let me know what you like here or on Twitter. Also, follow onย Instagramย andย Facebook.