👉 What Happened on Tech Twitter in December

Work hard in your 20s or else, writing tips, Twitter goes crypto, Tanay Jaipuria Tweeter of the Month, and more!

Jan 9

Yo! I just wrapped up a quick trip to Berlin where I had some time to pause and reflect on 2019 (hence why there was no newsletter last week) and of course drink lots of tasty German beer. Before jumping into the regularly scheduled programming, I just wanted to share some feelings with y’all:

✨THANK YOU!✨

I launched Tech Twitter TLDR in July with very few expectations but over the last six months, a hell of a lot has happened:

Subscribers grew organically to almost a thousand
Open-rates jumped from 20% to over 50%
Colin Goltra and I launched Crypto Twitter TLDR, which is also seeing promising growth and engagement
Ian Kar, Zak Kukoff, and Nikita Singareddy guest curated some of the most shared TLDR newsletters
Lenny Rachitsky, Erik Torenberg, Zak Kukoff, Brianne Kimmel, Nikita Singareddy, and (now) Tanay Jaipuria were crowned Tweeters of the Month

Thank you so much to everyone who subscribed, read, or shared Tech Twitter TLDR. Special shout out to Lenny, Colin, Ian, Zak, and Nikita for being incredible advisors, peers, and collaborators.

2020 will be a year of iteration, expansion and growth. I hope to continue improving the TLDR format, bring it to new verticals (like we did with Crypto) and perhaps form factors, and share it with a wider audience. If you would like to help out or just want to share some ideas, please reach out (reply here or DM me on twitter)!

I’m incredibly thankful to have all of you along for the ride.

- Brett Goldstein (@thatguybg)

And now, here are the best tweets from December.

Most Controversial

Well, this opened quite the can of worms. A slight majority of tech founders, execs and investors seemed to be in agreement that despite “success” being fairly ill-defined here, the more hours you work toward something, the more likely you are to achieve it. That said, working smart is better than working long, the tortoise and the hare, etc.

Ryan Selkis @twobitidiot

If you don’t work nights and weekends in your 20s, you’re not going to have a successful career. Sorry.

Jason Fried @jasonfried

If your company requires you to work nights and weekends, your company is broken. This is a managerial problem, not your problem. This is a process problem, not a personal problem. This is an ownership problem, not an individual problem.

Vinay Hiremath @vhmth

1. If you want to start a high-growth company or be at the absolute top of your field, this is common sense. You probably have to work very hard or take a much lower chance of success. I think this ambiguity is where most of the debate is coming from.

Balaji S. Srinivasan @balajis

Two kinds of people who pathologize hard work 1) Smart, hard working people who are unconsciously cutting down their competition 2) Those unfortunate enough to believe them

Ryan Selkis @twobitidiot

If you don’t work nights and weekends in your 20s, you’re not going to have a successful career. Sorry. https://t.co/rUdvMzauij

Tobi Lutke 🌳🌲🛒🕹 @tobi

I've never worked through a night. The only times I worked more than 40 hours in a week was when I had the burning desire to do so. I need 8ish hours of sleep a night. Same with everybody else, whether we admit it or not.

Most Insightful

David Percell shared out an old photo of Amazon’s writing tips for employees. Everyone should read this.

ᴅᴀᴠɪᴅ ᴘᴇʀᴇʟʟ ✌ @david_perell

These Amazon writing tips are fantastic. 👏C

It’s not every day that you get career advice from incredibly successful people - jk, they do this all the time. That said, Isabel Tewes’ advice to college graduates is so to the point, that I thought it was worth mentioning as runner up.

Isabel @isabeltewes

What advice would you give your younger self? Did some brainstorming for a chat with students 📝 thanks for hosting me @housepartyx

While we’re at it, here are some thoughts Erik Toernberg (re-)shared on career strategy as well.

Erik Torenberg @eriktorenberg

1/ Here's an on-going thread of threads on career stuff: At a high level, I think one wants to build a Personal Moat, or a unique accumulating advantage.

Erik Torenberg @eriktorenberg

I'm increasingly interested in the idea of "personal moats" in the context of careers. Moats should be: - Hard to learn and hard to do (but perhaps easier for you) - Skills that are rare and valuable - Legible - Compounding over time - Unique to your own talents & interests https://t.co/bB3k1YcH5b

Most Inspiring

Alexandr Wang, CEO and founder of Scale has been sharing a lot of inspiring ideas lately. This is his best from December.

Alexandr Wang @alexandr_wang

The reason you can do what people say is impossible is because the world is incredibly miscalibrated. People wildly underestimate how feasible it is to do something new. At the same time, they underestimate the difficulty of doing something again. Do not listen to other people.

Maybe controversial putting this in the Most Inspiring section, but Travis Kalanik selling 100% of his stake in Uber is one of the ballsiest moves in tech since Steve Jobs literally did the exact same thing when he was fired from Apple. Remember that Jobs returned years later to turn Apple into one of the most successful companies in history. Inspiring AF.

Pomp 🌪 @APompliano

Travis Kalanick has sold all his shares in Uber and is leaving the board of directors. It appears he doesn’t want to come back to Uber. Instead, he wants to beat them with his new company. Directly competing with Travis in a game he created has to scare anyone running Uber.

Most Interesting

Jack has been interested in crypto for some time and spun up some resources at Square to explore applications last year. It’s extremely exciting to see him doing the same at Twitter. Check out Crypto Twitter TLDR for more crypto-related tweets like this.

jack 🌍🌏🌎 @jack

Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard. 🧵

December marked Christmas season so everyone was paying attention to eCommerce numbers. Amazon continues to be an absolute beast. Here’s the runner up for Most Interesting.

Jeff Morris Jr. @jmj

Amazon’s Christmas numbers are astonishing: * In one week: more than 5M new customers started free trials or became paid members of Prime (insane) * Billions of items ordered on the site * 10s of millions Amazon devices purchased worldwide Hard to comprehend this scale.

Tweeter of the Month - Tanay Jaipuria (@tanayj)

Tanay Jaipuria is a student at Harvard Business School and former product manager at Facebook. He is one of the best people on Twitter to follow for analyses and data points anything tech or tech-adjacent. His also a voracious reader and podcast listener, and regularly shares summaries to Twitter. Here are some of his best tweets from December.