How to hire smarter than the market: a toy model

2020-01-13 Let’s consider a toy model where you’re hiring for two things and that those are equally valuable. It’s not very important what those are, so let’s just call them “thing A” and “thing B” for now.

What can startups learn from Koch Industries?

2019-12-19 I recently finished the excellent book Kochland. This isn’t my first interest in Koch—I read The Science of Success by Charles Koch himself a couple of years ago. Charles Koch inherited a tiny company in 1967 and turned it into one of the world’s largest ones.

We're hiring at Better

2019-12-09 Just a quick note that my team is always hiring at Better. A lot of new people have been joining the team here in NYC lately—the tech team has actually grown from 35 to 60 in just ~3 months.

Buffet lines are terrible, but let's try to improve them using computer simulations

2019-10-16 My company has a buffet every Friday, and the lines grow to epic proportions when the food arrives. I’ve suspected for years that the “classic” buffet line system is a deeply flawed and inefficient method, and every time I’m stuck in the line has made me more convinced.

Miscellaneous unsolicited (and possibly biased) career advice

2019-09-26 No one asked for this, but I’m something like ~12 years into my career and have had my fair share of mistakes and luck so I thought I’d share some. Honestly, I feel like I’ve mostly benefitted from luck.

Modeling conversion rates using Weibull and gamma distributions

2019-08-05 This is a blog post originally featured on the Better engineering blog. If you want to link to this article or share it, please go to the original post URL! Separately, I’m sorry it’s been so long with no posts on this blog.

Why software projects take longer than you think: a statistical model

2019-04-15 Anyone who built software for a while knows that estimating how long something is going to take is hard. It’s hard to come up with an unbiased estimate of how long something will take, when fundamentally the work in itself is about solving something.