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Sam Gerstenzang
Formerly ran product, data and design @imgur. Before that, investment team @A16Z, Stanford, Lerer Ventures, BuzzFeed, elsewhere.
Latest posts
Hiring is your brand: 9 small things to improve your interview process
Interviewing potential hires is the most important brand building exercise your company will go through and it’s conducted primarily by people whose primary day jobs are very different. This should scare the bejeezus out of you. But it’s a completely solvable problem, and the solution comes when you recognize that hiring is sales: a repeatable process that involves convincing others with good…
The cost of an introduction
In Silicon Valley, it is valuable to make an introduction. I want to be seen as someone in the middle of things. I am valued by those in my network if I introduce them to interesting people. Elsewhere, it is a favor to make an introduction. I’m spending my social capital in order to benefit the requester. Why is this? The rest of the world assumes introductions are primarily about perpetuating…
No network for Uber
This post was co-written with Jess Peterson . Uber, love it or hate it, is one of the most fun companies to watch in Silicon Valley. Semil Shah just launched a newsletter to cover everything Uber, and it’s easy to understand why. The company is a bad-behaving operational machine, with an unquenchable ambition. Despite all the scrutiny, there’s a common misconception: Uber is a monopoly due to…
Three companies I didn’t start
Below find three ideas for companies that I spent some time thinking about over the last few months. For various reasons, I didn’t end up starting any of them myself. But I’d love to hear from you if you think I’m making a huge mistake. 1. Mechanical Turk for the Masses. Mechanical Turk is ten years old. It feels like one of those things that should have enabled all kinds of new businesses, but…
5 things I learned as Wagon’s first EIR
Wagon kindly hosted me at their office as a faux-EIR for a few weeks, which means they gave me free internet, coffee, a desk and the chance to spend time around some smart humans. Here are a few things I learned from their team while I was there: 1. Beautiful, beautiful process. What most people think about process, it’s a sign of bureaucracy. Process at Wagon is about optimizing a thing they’ve…
What happens when programmers don’t want to program
Coding bootcamps, summer sessions, online classes: everyone should learn to code, we’re told. It’s a tool of empowerment, but it’s also a solution to an industry challenge. We’ve got programmer demand, but a lot less supply. I’m worried about the other end of funnel. A shocking number of some of the best professional programmers I know aren’t interested in programming for the rest of their…
No room for preachers in Deadwood
There are the folks who have zero code debt, are using all the best practices, and have airtight hiring processes. And then there are the folks running their entire businesses out of an overworked Google Spreadsheet, with a hacked together stack that was meant to be a prototype. Doing things the ‘right way’ doesn’t mean you won’t win. But it does mean you’ll be spending time on things might not…
The reddit rebellion and the challenge of commercializing communities
The most recent reddit rebellion has quieted down but it’s not the end. Online communities have a history of rebellion spanning over 30 years (my former employer, Imgur, had its own rebellion complete with homepage takeover a few weeks ago) but Reddit is the largest collective identity online community the world has ever seen. This makes it a fascinating experiment in community governance and…
21 management things I learned at Imgur
It’s terribly difficult to manage unmotivated people. Make your job easier and don’t. Different people need different kinds of management. Be adaptable to figure out what drives each person’s best performance. Give feedback frequently and directly. As a manager, it’s easier to wait and then hedge critical feedback in soft wrappers, but that’s selfish. I’d try to give feedback as soon as I could…
16 product things I learned at Imgur
Every interface can be made simpler. One useful technique is to have a separate meeting focused just on cutting and simplifying. You can also appoint an individual ‘cutter’ to take this role outside of the meeting, but only after brainstorming. Every feature you launch is a feature you’ll need to support with users, infrastructure and development. So launch as few things as possible. Data has two…
The difference between hard things and impossible things
I’ve recently been talking to a number of people about ideas for the future. I’ve been surprised by how strong an inclination there is to shy away from hard things, ie schlep blindness. A hard thing is difficult to do. Most hard tasks are actually a collection of sequential easy tasks: the challenge is knowing what those tasks are, in what order to do them, and then having the endurance to do them…
How to learn from mentors
I am very lucky to have had many people in my life who I’ve learned a great deal from. Here are a few things I’ve learned about how to learn from them: They don’t need to be called “mentors” and usually aren’t. They don’t need to know you’re learning from them: watching them make decisions can be far more useful. Don’t expect to learn everything from anyone. Instead, figure out what you can learn…
The tyranny of geography
In 1950, a classic MIT study examined the effect of proximity on friendship, using college dorms as the subject. Would young men who were randomly assigned to live physically closer to each other become better friends? You’ve probably already guessed the answer: the closer you lived to a randomly assigned person, the more likely you would become good friends. Your friends are from your hometown,…
GovCo
Here’s an idea that I want you to take and run with. Successful execution will make this country a better place. I want you to start a government contractor, based in San Francisco. You’ll bid on those massive IT projects like Healthcare.gov, although you might have to start at the city or state level first. You won’t be a normal government contractor though: you’ll have free lunches, a nice open…
Seven things I learned in venture
I left Andreessen Horowitz 5 months ago to join Imgur. Below are seven things I learned in venture that have been useful. The winners always have something that looks hugely wrong with them. Like spectacularly wrong. That’s why no one else has invested/hired/built this opportunity. But you can. Value strength over lack of weakness . Venture (and everything else) is a service business. That means…
Knowledge units
There are two models of online education: Preparatory knowledge, in the form of course-based video-delivered teachings: Coursera, Udacity, Thinkful, etc. On demand knowledge: Wikipedia, StackOverflow, Genius, etc. Of the two, the latter has been much more widely spread and far more influential. What works about on demand knowledge is that it is pull based (the knowledge you need, when you need it)…
The peace dividend of the self-driving car wars
Making self-driving cars for mass consumption is difficult. Why? 1. The software. Problems involving computer vision and perception, processing low resolution information and decision-making. 2. The sensors. Far from solved in ambiguous environments. It seems like the current approach is a cocktail of sensors that mitigate failure or low resolution in any particular type of sensor and environment.…
The future photograph
[Ed. note: My colleague Benedict’s great post on photo volume growth encouraged me to dig up the following from my drafts folder, although I disagree with his provocative conclusion.] When an expensive thing becomes free, new behaviors emerge. When a private thing becomes public, new behaviors emerge. Below, some thoughts on the swirling cloud of photographs that we are creating together. We are…
How might a public market investor invest in self-driving cars?
I am not convinced that the winner will be Google, nor can I can choose between the existing car manufacturers. If you were to attempt to invest in self-driving cars as a phenomenon, what would you invest in? What is a proxy investment for the public investor? Below are a few of my investment ideas, although I’m afraid all are subject to many other forces beyond self-driving cars. I’d love to hear…