Stealing Signs - Issue 18
People Platforms, WoW vs. COVID-19, We Don't Sell Saddles, & Wartime Influencers
Worth Reading
Transforming to Build A People Platform
Arjun Sethi & Jonathan Hsu, Tribe Capital
“When you’re building a platform for your team, you’re parsing out the core functions of your company into an extensible architecture. You’re growing an ecosystem around your company and making it more valuable than the sum of its parts. That enables new behaviors to emerge between your people that allow you to save time and adapt to change.”
Arjun and Jonathan break down what a “people platform” is, why it’s the key to long-term success, and four key design principles founders can leverage to build one. I particularly like principles 1 and 2.
Principle 1: Flatten the Ladder. It’s critical to create conditions that allow leadership within — flattening the ladder to provide upward mobility for the troops on the ground. Arjun and Jonathan use a stellar example here — Google’s Associate Product Manager program. It gave new hires real responsibility immediately and exposed them to multiple sides of Google’s business. As they note, it’s produced some of the most talented project managers in the tech world.
Principle 2: Create Clean Interfaces and Autonomy between Teams. Teams should be loosely coupled — few dependencies between teams, able to move quickly and independently, and have bounded context — “the ability to communicate in a ubiquitous language without needing deep, domain-specific expertise.” Arjun and Jonathan use Amazon as an example here — the company is made of of many decentralized teams with decision making independence and autonomy… the famous two-pizza teams!!
Principle 3: Burn the Ships, is particularly relevant given our current environment. It seems the ships have been set on fire for us…
Lastly, a takeaway for me is that a successful complex system has very likely evolved from a successful simple system. Rarely does a complex system built from scratch work.
This is seriously one of the best pieces I’ve read on startups and company building. Tons of great examples and especially thoughtful analysis. A great read.
World of Warcraft vs. COVID-19
Nikhil Krishnan, Out of Pocket
"Even once we figured out what was going on it made it really, really hard to fix it," [World of Warcraft lead engineer John Cash] adds. "Our choices were either to go through every pet in every server in every country in the entire world and check if it had corrupted blood and get rid of it, or get really hacky code in where every time you summoned a pet it would check and see if it had corrupted blood on it and get rid of it."
In 2005, a virtual pandemic infected in World of Warcraft — The Corrupted Blood Incident. I’d never heard about this, but woah! Nikhil covers the details of the pandemic, the game developer’s response and efforts to contain the disease (Blizzard had to reset the entire server and shutdown the game!), and draws parallels to the current COVID-19 outbreak. There’s also a research paper studying the potential of virtual game worlds to impact our understanding of real world epidemics!
Nikhil’s new newsletter, Out of Pocket, is the most unique health care content out there. He’s now building it full-time, so expect some great stuff from him moving forward.
Lessons From Tandem on Raising in Uncertain Times
Brianne Kimmel, Work Life Ventures
“Hanging out in Tandem means you can see what apps your colleagues are currently using, providing you with a sense of what they’re working on and whether they’re heads-down coding or free for a video coffee chat. Ayyangar underscores the importance of “presence” in building a high-trust remote environment that resembles the dynamic and high-connectivity relationships we see in person, but for the digital workspace.”
Brianne distills 5 key lessons from her interview with Tandem founder Rajiv Ayyangar. Tandem is a collaboration tool specifically designed for remote workers — Ayyangar’s approach to remote work is particularly relevant now that many people are WFHers for the first time. The lessons are also helpful for startups raising capital in what have become extremely uncertain times, including some of Founder Equity’s portfolio companies.
The most interesting lesson in this piece came from how Tandem allocated their time during Y Combinator — they spent the first 80% of the program working on the product, limiting their time spent pitching investors to a short window at the end. It clearly worked for Rajiv, as they were one of the most sough-after YC companies, and imo seems like it could be an effective approach for many YC companies. However, this strategy conflicts with much of what I’ve heard about YC’s value proposition. YC offers unmatched access to the top VC and operators, and grants access to a world-class network of YC alums — the value is the access and network, not dissimilar from what I’ve heard about business school 😉. I anticipate many future YC companies will adopt Tandem’s approach over time, especially as the upcoming YC summer program is 100% remote and the networking is less accessible. It’s not unreasonable to think YC will stay 100% remote beyond this summer’s cohort — I actually think they will — but, it's unclear if this will alter the value proposition. My guess is it’ll be hard to keep up the stellar performance.
Lastly, I particularly enjoyed Brianne and Rajiv’s insistence that remote-fundraising is both possible and not exactly a new phenomenon:
“You can still build the same kind of trust and relationship and high bandwidth communication as in person. I think we're going to see a shift towards that and the ecosystem isn't unfamiliar with that mode of fundraising.”
We’ll see this put to the test over the coming months — many have suggested remote fundraising is likely to continue after the pandemic dies down, but I’m not so sure. I think it’s a matter of preference, much like remote work, and that investors may change behavior slightly, but those who insist on in-person meetings will likely always do so (sorry, no hot takes here 😎).
Bored People Quit
Michael Lopp, Rands in Response
“There are two aspects of interesting work that equally fire up the nerd brain: the identification of interesting work and making progress on that work. And progress is not measured in interrupt-driven minutes, it’s blocks of delicious, uninterrupted hours.”
An insightful post on people management — specifically, how to detect and address employee boredom. Michael’s explanation of how to let employees experiment is particularly interesting and I think he captures a key friction point in professional exploration:
The business justification for this wild-ass effort is likely not obvious, so I’ll define it: the act of exploration is as valuable as the act of building.
This is often the norm in a startup environment. Exploration is not only expected and applauded, it’s absolutely critical to success. Exploration is building in the startup environment. The significant ambiguity and uncertainty requires constant exploration to find what sticks — what to build, and it’s a key advantage startups have over incumbents.
We Don’t Sell Saddles Here
Stewart Butterfield, Slack
“We are asking a lot from our customers. We are asking them to spend hours a day in a new and unfamiliar application, to give up on years or even decades of experience using email for work communication (and abandon all kinds of ad hoc workflows that have developed around their use of email). We are asking them to switch a model of communication which defaults to public; it is an almost impossibly large ask. Almost.”
This is the memo sent to the team members of Tiny Speck in 2013 prior to the launch of their new instant messaging product… Slack. One of my favorite sections of this memo comes at the very beginning, where Stewart notes that only a tiny fraction of their users will have imagined “Slack” on their own and likely think they want something different, if anything at all — “They definitely aren’t looking for Slack.” It’s Slack’s job to build something useful and understand what people think they want, then translate the value of Slack into their terms. It feels obvious, but I think this is an astute observation which many companies overlook.
I also love Stewart’s explanation of product-market fit (PMF). It’s one of the few practical definitions:
“The term refers to the degree to which a product could be successful, given sufficient promotion, appropriate pricing, adequate customer support and so on (before you find that fit, all the pushing in the world won’t get you up the hill).”
A point I disagree with Stewart on is that internal communication systems will eventually replace email for most organization. I think many, including Stewart, would agree and acknowledge that this hasn't happened yet — very interested to hear what Stuart thinks today. Anecdotally, Slack has become layer of communication in addition to email — email is formal, for official business, and asynchronous, and Slack is casual and synchronous. I firmly believe email is here to stay, but Slack has captured what used to be short calls and ad hoc conversations. I’m interested to know if Slack is working on anything internally re: working with email instead of to replace it. I imagine their team has realized that they’re unlikely to replace email, so I wonder if they’re pivoting to embrace it? Maybe a “send as email, too” option, ha. That would be something…
<stuff> Weekly!
LOL Weekly: Wartime Influencers
lolololol — cc: Ben Horowitz. A clever play on Ben’s Wartime CEO post…
Funding Weekly: Rheaply
“Rheaply’s platform eliminates potential waste by instituting the principles of a circular economy, a model that emphasizes “designing out waste and pollution, keeping products and materials in use, and regenerating natural systems.” With Rheaply’s Asset Exchange Manager (AxM)™, members of organizations gain transparency about available assets, which ends the hassle of double-buying, waiting for new items to arrive, and space constraints, while also diverting waste from landfills.”
Chicago-based(!) Rheaply raised $2.5M from investors, all of whom are Chicago-based as well! I know the founder, Garry, personally and I can’t wait to see what he accomplishes. It’s also a great win for Chicago — while we long for coastal investors to engage with more deals here, an all-Chicago deal is pretty exciting.
Baseball Weekly: Homemade Codebreaker
“My approach abuses the fact that these codes are generally deterministic (given a state and sequence of signs, the pitch will be the same),” Chiang said of his method. “For each pitch, I created meta-features (how many strikes were there? what are every subsequence of signs given?) and then picked the feature that most correctly ‘predicted’ the resulting pitch. This is actually the first step in how a decision tree is constructed.”
The Athletic created a homemade version of the excel model the Astro’s used to steal signs!! This awesome piece from Eno outlines how the Astro’s model was built and leveraged to crack opposing teams’ signs as quickly as a single half-inning. It also includes clips from the Astros-Nationals World Series games with their model layered on top, correctly predicting pitches from catcher Kurt Suzuki’s signs.
P.S. — The Athletic is offering new users free access for 90 days to hold us over while games are suspended. Sign up here!
Chart Weekly: Music streaming on the… decline?
“In Italy, one of the countries hardest hit by coronavirus, the top 200 most streamed songs on Spotify within the country averaged 18.3 million total streams per day in February 2019. Since Italy’s prime minister announced a national quarantine on March 9th, the total streams for the 200 most popular songs have not topped 14.4 million.”
Very interesting data from Spotify. A few possible explanations: millions of workers no longer have a commute, gyms are closed, restaurants are closed and no longer playing music. My podcast backlog is ENORMOUS. I’ve listened to far fewer than normal — my commute and gym time were key.
Art Weekly: UNTITLED (2013)
Heimo Zobernig
