Startup life and tech, mostly.
"Can one of us fire another?" Five years ago, before Datha, David, and I agreed to cofound Steadily, we spent several hours discussing fail-states. It morphed into this list as we cobbled together other peoples' question sets. Suggested process: Each cofounder/partner should take the time
Imagine a horrible world where the only internet connection (laptop or phone) is from the inflight wifi beaming down from Southwest flights criss-crossing overhead – basically dialup.  Then one day Google Fiber announces that 2Gbps fiber is coming to your neighborhood.   What’s the most you
Virtually all tech companies offer a 401K plan with some level of employer match. 87% of large employers make an employer contribution that averages 4.7% of salary ( 2019 data ). For example: Indeed: 3% of salary Intel: 5% of salary CVS: 5% of salary But when I decided what level
What do "zillow", "trulia", "figma", "mercari", "strava", "zapier", and "spotify" have in common? Twenty minutes ago a VC emailed me: Hey Darren - wanted to ask you if you'd heard of {company}. ai ? We'
Last week our weekly team pulse question for Indeed Assessments was “What’s something we should stop doing?” The best answer was: “Stop posting important updates, documents, or answers to questions in Slack and expecting everyone will see/read them.” Another goodie: “I think
Indeed Assessments  is primarily a remote team and that makes it harder to keep a pulse on how the team is feeling. Our team of software engineers and IO psychologists is 50 people strong and only 15 of those sit in one of Indeed’s offices in Austin,
Thinking about starting to train In 2016, I finished my first Ironman in Cozumel with a finish time of 11:43. I took all of 2017 off from training to focus on Interviewed so by Christmas I was itching to start training again. When Lanae and Danny brought up registering
The race I’m training for, an Ironman, consists of a 2.4 mile swim, a 112 mile bike, and a 26.2 mile run. Pros will average around 9 hours and 20 minutes to the finish line, but I’m an age group triathlete. That means that
Six months ago we created a homegrown A/B testing framework wherein we randomize traffic between three servers running different branches of our codebase.  Conversion rate has since increased 251%. Original article published here:   Using split testing for office space search My goal in sharing our results is
Choosing a new domain is usually a gut-driven decision. Maybe you’ll spend a few hours getting domain suggestions, check out a few Sedo auctions, build a shortlist, ask some coworkers for opinions, then pick one and hope for the best. It doesn’t have to be
We’re about to sign a lease on a new  office space  for 42Floors.  The architect suggested this floor plan (see below).  It looks great… unless you code. Our current office is a 3,000 sqft 2-story townhouse with an open layout.  
“Hacker News is going to love you,” was the first thing I said when   Jennifer Dewalt   told me about her plan to leave the art world and become a coder by building a web site every day for six months straight. HN did indeed
This is a repost of my original post on  42floors.com . Sumit Suman recently visited a site, did not sign up for anything, did not connect via social media, but got a  personal email from the site the next day . Here’s how they did it. I&
Whenever I have a startup idea I send myself an email with the subject “IDEA: {description of idea}” and gmail quietly archives it into a buried folder.   The list is pretty short from 2007-2010 when I was running SFI. After the acquisition closed I was looking
TLDR… Single-player RPG games should include an Auto-Leveling off-switch.  Instead of scaling up or down to match my character, a level 35 dungeon would stay at level 35 whether I’m level 15 or 38.  This would make certain bosses impossible, which would