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. Read more…
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. Read more…
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. Read more…
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. Read more…
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. Read more…
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. Read more…
Headcount goals, feature factories, and when to hire those mythical 10x people 2019-02-21 When I started building up a tech team for Better, I made a very conscious decision to pay at the high end to get people. I thought this made more sense: they cost a bit more money to hire, but output usually more than compensates for it. Read more…