Over-Regulation is Doubling the Cost
After building a software company to a multi-billion dollar exit, I made the jump to hardware. Now I’m working on carbon removal + steel at Charm Industrial,…
Peter Reinhardt
Latest posts
Judging Product Market Fit
In the past few years we’ve tested many different product ideas with Segment’s customers to see what resonates with who. Finding product market fit with new…
Driving Data as a Defensible Moat for Self-driving Cars
In a future where self-driving cars are available for $0.25 per mile with less than 5 minute wait times, the cars are clean, and you control the music… Uber…
Finding Product Market Fit
There’s a fine line between the “reality distortion field” founders create and just being a bit delusional. During our first year and half as a company — May…
Startup Finance for Founders — Part II, Strategic Finance
This is part two of a series outlining practical lessons I’ve learned about finance at Segment. Part I covered accounting. This article covers strategic…
Startup Finance for Founders — Part I, Accounting
When we started Segment, we knew nothing about business finance. My background was in aerospace engineering, and my co-founders came from computer science and…
Replacing Middle Management with APIs
There’s a trend in Silicon Valley startups to create a software layer in industries that were traditionally pure human services. Uber and Lyft have created…
Milestones for SaaS Companies
When you know your next milestone, you can focus on it. But between product market fit and profitability most startups will only hear the mantra: “grow! grow!…
The Impact of Self Driving Cars
The average American drives for 101 minutes a day. That’s 10% of waking life. Driving. Even our neighborhoods and cities are constructed around the needs of…
MVP Doesn't Mean Anything
“Minimum Viable Product” has always confused me. What the hell does viable mean? Is an idea “viable” when someone says they like it? Tweet it? Sign up for it?…
Online Education's Dirty Secret — Awful Retention
I’m extremely excited about online education, but I’ve noticed that online education products have a really serious problem: low retention. I’ve used Coursera,…
radioactive.js
One of the biggest problems I’ve encountered in writing about nuclear reactors is that people don’t understand radioactive decay. This is a huge problem…
Gravitational Lensing to Observe Ancient Earth
I was at SFMOMA with Erika a few weekends ago and we saw an exhibit showing the work of Lebbeus Woods – a futuristic architect and illustrator.
Thorium Reactors
My last article about thorium as an alternative nuclear reactor fuel drew way more readers than I expected. I intentionally glossed over the complexities of…
Thorium
About a century ago, an adventurous Scandinavian discovered the first black thorium rock on a remote island in the Norwegian Sea. Now thorium is slowly heating…
Better Email Search
Email holds all of our conversations, contacts, notes, and plans. All that information is languishing in my archive folder. I should be able to access this…
Build your CRM in an afternoon with Google Scripts
We’re expanding our private beta at Segment.io, and in my dual frontend dev/account manager role I need a time-saving, flexible CRM. I’ve tried Salesforce and…
One Year Since Leaving MIT
I left MIT one year ago - I had one year of coursework left as an undergrad in Aerospace Engineering. After [a long story] I co-founded Segment.io with Ilya,…
Building a Movie Showtimes API
I built TheReelBox.com to demonstrate an easier way to find nearby movie showtimes than Fandango or Google Movies. (More importantly, it generates demo data…
Using the Heap Profiler in Chrome Dev Tools
At Segment.io we have a one-page app used to explore analytics data. Good memory management is a very important us, and the Heap Profiler in Chrome developer…
How fast could you cross the country (without killing yourself)?
Crossing the United States on a train is an incredible experience. North Dakota fields ooze an evil early-morning fog that will make your spine shiver. The…
Testing our UAV in an Underground Parking Garage
At the end of the Spring 2010 semester, Mark and I built (and rebuilt, and rebuilt, and rebuilt) a small UAV. The UAV was controlled by two Arduino…
Give My Smartphone More Sensors
I’ve been thinking about what the mobile revolution means, and I agree with Paul Graham’s points. Mobile devices are our constant connection to rest of the…
Onboard Video from a 12ft Rocket
This summer I worked at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA on the Solar Cell Array Tester (NPS-SCAT. ha. ha.) It’s a nanosatellite, and it’s…
Datamining News Channels to Determine National Interests
NewsMiner is a C# program that mines CNN, Reuters, Xinhua and RIA Novosti for casualty counts around the world.
Collapsing Binary Star Systems - Visualizations
As a UROP project I produced some visualizations and audio-zations of gravitational waves, orbits and spin wobbles. Some of the visualizations are for extreme…
Semi-Truck Aerodynamics
Mark Chodas and I put together a project to test the viability of boat-tails as a way to reduce drag on semi-trucks. We built a 1/27th scale model for initial…
Huge N-Body Simulations
During high school I wrote a C++ program that simulated thousands of masses and their gradual accretion via mutual gravity. Some simulations were designed to…
Measuring the Moon's Gravity... or Seismic Intelligence Gathering
Due to a miscalculation, I thought I could measure the position of the Moon using the analytical balance in my chemistry class. By the time I had discovered my…