Making Quality Stuff

Culture fit just means no assholes

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 21:52:00 -0700

A lot of companies claim they look for a “culture fit” when hiring. In practice this just means “we don’t hire assholes”.

Does culture fit mean hiring people who share the same sense of humor? Or who think in similar ways? Or with similar personalities? When that 100x engineer comes along with mad skills and is incredibly nice but has nothing in common with everyone else at the company outside of work, are you not going to hire him/her because of a lack of “culture fit”?

A more useful definition of “culture fit” is whether they fit with the company’s core values. E.g. Zappos defines “weirdness” as part of their culture. However, if someone is not quirky in any way but is a great hire otherwise, would they not hire them? If they are nice to the limo driver, get along with everyone well and are functionally superb, I doubt they’d get a no.

Hiring for “culture fit” is often just a euphemism for “we don’t hire assholes”. It pans out this way because companies often have similar, positive core values e.g. humble, works well with others, determined etc. It’s rare that a company defines one trait as more important than another e.g. we’d rather hire extremely ambitious people and don’t mind if they’re arrogant. If they do, putting that into practice when hiring takes a lot more guts, especially when there’s a glut of supply in the market for talent.

I don’t think this is a bad thing. I think companies should be accepting of people with different backgrounds, interests, personalities and judge them on how they’d function on the job, and being great to work with is definitely a large part of how they’d function. But turning people away because they might not have the same personalities or values as everyone else might lead you to turn down super talented people that were just fine to work with.

Culture is a natural extension of everyone in the company. When you hire someone new, your company culture is infused with that person’s values, character and personality. This means company culture keeps evolving. It emanates from the founders and can be controlled to the extent of who you choose to hire. Nobody wants a company of assholes, but there’s also value in diversity of personalities and values, [1] so in the end, most companies are open to hiring different types of personalities as long as they’re functionally superb, have good character/integrity and are good to work with.

Have you seen a company where “we hire for culture fit” can’t be substituted by “we don’t hire assholes”? Has it been a contributing factor to their success?

[1] Perhaps diversity slows you down at the super early stages: http://www.quora.com/Entrepreneurship/Among-Max-Levchins-lessons-learned-as-a-young-entrepreneur-which-are-the-greatest/answer/Max-Levchin

Use your advantages

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 23:08:00 -0700

When I went for Startup School 2010, Adam D’Angelo, the founder of Quora, gave a talk about using your advantages. He cites some examples:

He used his engineering experience at Facebook to build scalable, powerful technology to power Quora
He and Charlie Cheever, his co-founder at Quora, used their reputations from Facebook to seed the site with big name people from the valley, and to raise money

You can check out the full talk at http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272178681

Just last week, Xianhang Zhang wrote a post on Quora (http://www.quora.com/Xianhang-Zhang/Startup-Advice-Strategy/Disregard-ideas-a…) titled “Disregard ideas, acquire assets”. It talks about how many successful businesses are built on the founders acquiring assets long before they start their companies e.g. Joel Spolsky & Jeff Atwood having huge readerships at their respective blogs, and leveraging that to publicize Stack Overflow. He talks about how acquiring these assets takes a long time, but that they can potentially become the reason why your startup makes it.

It’s easy to find reasons (or excuses) to not be able to do something. It’s also easy to focus on why life sucks—too much work, too little time. Focusing on your advantages starts with identifying them, then thinking about how you can use them in the best way possible. For example, when you’re in college, you have access to the college network, to professors, to students. You can do a lot of things while you’re in college that will become a pain in the ass to do later in life. If the founders of Facebook were not in college when they launched it, it would have been much harder to acquire the initial user base at 1 college—you can’t send out invites to an entire mailing list, you don’t have connections to the school newspaper, etc.

Product vs Engineering States of Mind

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 23:04:00 -0800

In the last few weeks, I’ve been interviewing with a couple of
technology startups in Silicon Valley. At the same time, I’ve also
been trying to brainstorm for ways to pivot Askapade.com to make it
more useful and compelling for our users, or brand new ideas for a
startup. Also, I’ve been watching videos and reading articles on how
companies architect their systems, both because I find it fascinating,
and because I might have to do this someday so I’d better learn the
ins and outs earlier. I noticed that there’s a stark difference between my product and
engineering states of mind. When I’m learning about architectures, or
preparing for technical interviews, I’m in my engineering state of
mind—I’m trying to find a solution to a well defined problem, or in
some cases, learning about solutions to well defined problems. On the
other hand, when I’m brainstorming for startup ideas, or looking at
Askapade’s data to see how best to improve the product, I’m in my
product state of mind—I’m looking for the best problem to solve.

What’s also interesting is that sometimes I have to switch between
both while doing something—specifically, when I’m implementing a
feature for Askapade, I need to look at it from both perspectives.
Here’s what my process has been like so far: 1. Figure out a big picture idea with Ailian (http://ailiangan.com/)
(my sister and technical cofounder). We generally get quite specific
on how the pages should look, how the user flows should be like, and
what core functionality should be there. Sometimes we’ll even do mock
ups together.
2. Depending on how far we got in 1, I’ll fill in the rest of the
gaps, which usually means walking through the user flows and creating
mock ups. Thinking about what could be annoying from a user’s point of
view.
3. Implement it on my development server, and try it out for myself.
While I’m implementing it, I’m thinking in both product and
engineering states of mind because I notice design issues that I try
to fix immediately through changing the code.
4. I share it with Ailian through the staging server, and we go
through it together to see whether the user experience and copy makes
sense, and iterate from there.

What I’m wondering is—is switching between these a good idea? Does it
slow down development and iteration time in the end? Should I design,
implement, then design a better version etc. Are the context switches
expensive, or are these 2 different states of mind or ways of looking
at things not mutually exclusive? One could argue that engineering is
designing a solution, and product is engineering a user experience,
and engineering the question. My goal is to become skilled at both product design and strategy as
well as engineering, but I’m guessing at some point I’ll have to
choose which one I want to be truly great at.

Impact

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 14:52:52 -0700

Maybe it’s because I’m new at this, but it’s quite an amazing feeling to see my summer’s work covered in the tech media.

Now all I need to see is Apple approve the update, and for people to start using it. Until then the jury’s still out on what the impact I’ve made was.

On My Internship at Box

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 14:39:18 -0700

I wrote the following entry for Box.net’s recruiting team on what I loved about my internship at Box. I also had the opportunity to share this at our company lunch as an impromptu thank you speech. Upon reading it again, I realized these things are not specific to good internships or even just good jobs, but can be applied to what I think will make me happy in the greater scheme of things. Enjoy!

I’m Wei, a senior at Duke University, and I had the privilege of interning at Box as an iOS (iPad/iPhone) developer this summer. People’s general advice for internships is to “go and make the best of it.” However, when the company you intern for gives you amazing opportunities to contribute, and you also give it your best, you’d be surprised how much you can learn and how much impact you can make in a few months. Here’s what I loved most about my internship at Box.

Awesome Mentor
I worked with Michael Smith, Mobile Product Manager at Box. On the first day of my internship, Michael asked me what my goals for this internship were. From the start, I knew that Michael cared as much about what I got out of this internship as what I could do for Box in my time here. He also understood my interest in both the engineering and product design aspects and not only let me in on mobile product design decisions, but made me an integral part of that process. It was common for me to simply build out certain interface features as I saw fit, and more often than not these would make their way into the final product design.

Michael taught me a ton technically, but more importantly, he truly cared about my learning and my internship experience and gave me autonomy and independence to work on the iOS apps which gave me a strong sense of ownership of the product and the feature I was building.

Ownership
Ownership is a very powerful motivator. As the main developer for the feature to save your files for offline access on the iPhone and iPad, it basically meant that if the feature I built was lackluster, it would reflect poorly on me, but if it was great, it would be something I could be extremely proud of for a long time to come. When your developer “street cred” lies on a release, you’re going to give it your best shot. Ownership and independence gave me the space to find creative solutions to both design and engineering problems. At Box, I felt like I had ownership of the iPad and iPhone apps, and especially of the feature to save files to view offline, and this motivated me to put my best work into these apps.

Impact
As powerful of a motivator as ownership is, what got me most excited about my work was the impact I was making in people’s lives by making Box’s iPad and iPhone apps better. Millions of people use Box.net’s web application to collaborate on content in the cloud. Box’s mobile apps help our users access this content on the go. Knowing that my work is helping make so many people work better is not just important to me, it’s what gets me excited to come to work everyday.

Interning at Box gave me a unique opportunity to learn and contribute. It’s not at every company that an intern gets to contribute so much and make such a big impact, but Box is special like that. I dare say that I couldn’t have asked for a better internship experience (except maybe more free schwag.) Thanks Box, for an amazing and unforgettable summer!

"I may be wrong, but I have to believe that at some point, using his own iPad and measuring the true..."

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 01:19:15 -0700

“

I may be wrong, but I have to believe that at some point, using his own iPad and measuring the true distance he had come to make it real, Steve Jobs must have found himself crying…

No matter what you are trying to do, whether in business or charity or social enterprise, if the thought of it doesn’t scare the hell out of you — and if imagining the manifestation of it doesn’t make you cry — it isn’t worthy of who you truly are.

”

- Dan Pallotta, When Your Goal Is the Impossible

I have just spent over an hour reading Dan Pallotta’s blog archive. ALL his entries are good. Thought-provoking, original, colorful. I have yet to read a single dud. How does the man do it!

(via ailian)

Matt Cutts - How to find start-up ideas

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 00:10:00 -0700

Matt Cutts - How to find start-up ideas:

Here’s another way to come up with startup ideas: walk around your house or apartment, and look for “hot spots.” A hotspot can be an area of high information density, clutter, stress, disorganization, or any place that has a suboptimal solution. Then think about a web or cloud solution to that hot spot. Let’s take a look at a few examples:

Music CDs -> iTunes, Amazon MP3 store, doubleTwist, MP3tunes, etc. Bookshelf -> Amazon, Kindle, iBooks
Stereo system -> Sonos, Squeezebox, Rhapsody, Pandora, last.fm, Spotify, Grooveshark, MOG, Rdio, etc. External hard drives -> Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Pogoplug

Solving pains = ideas for a startup. The ideas are everywhere, you just have to look harder.

Lessoned Learned from WeiWatch

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 00:51:01 -0700

During my previous semester in school, I developed an iPhone application called WeiWatch. It lets you time how long you take to do routine activities, such as how long you to take to shower, how long your morning commute is, so you can get a better idea of how long you really take and make better estimates with your time. I wrote it to learn how to develop iPhone apps, but naturally, I also hoped it would catch on and people would find it useful.

My friends gave me tons of support, they loved the minigame I put in, they bought the app from me. For a while I was really pleased with myself—I had an app in the app store. My professor, Owen Astrachan, even showed it off on his iPhone in a class I wasn’t in. I thought I was hot shit.

I hadn’t even sold enough to make back my developer fee and I still haven’t (unless you count my internship income.) As far as it goes, WeiWatch has been an App Store failure.

Here’s what I learned:

You can’t just release something in the App Store and expect it to become a mega hit. You have to do a bare minimum level of marketing. In retrospect, I could’ve done some creative ghetto marketing: write a song about WeiWatch and post on YouTube, make some funny videos. No one wakes up and looks up the app store for something they can use to time their daily routines. It’s something I need to convince people to do, not an existing need I’m fulfilling.
If you want your product to succeed, you MUST figure out why it’s not doing as well as it can and improve it. I believe as long as the idea isn’t complete shite, you can probably get a decent amount of users through pivoting your product to become something more people want and find useful.
If your target audience is everybody, you’ll sell to nobody. I thought the more general it was the better because then everyone would want to buy it. It was a little useful for everyone but not useful enough for them to make the purchase in the App Store.

I believe my biggest reason for failure is because I got disheartened by the weak sales and didn’t want to push to make a much better product. This is partly because I was in school, had already gotten an iOS developer job etc, but in all honesty, I gave up on it.

So what’s happening with WeiWatch? It’s still in the App Store. In fact I released an update for iOS 4 multitasking as well as a feature that lets you email yourself your timing data so you can analyze it where ever you want. Unfortunately, I’ve been focusing my time on a new project, so it’s unlikely that WeiWatch will get any more love from me ): It’s been a great learning experience to put a product of my own out there in the market.

For this new project, I’m setting the bar higher and I’m not going to give up until I’ve exhausted all my creative energy to try and make it into something people want. I’ll be writing more about that soon.

To all my friends that wondered how WeiWatch did and why, I hope this provides you with a worthwhile explanation.

Startup boot camp illustrates dearth of women in tech - San Jose Mercury News

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 22:39:48 -0700

Startup boot camp illustrates dearth of women in tech - San Jose Mercury News:

Livingston recalled that when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg spoke at Y Combinator, he talked about how as a teenager he was disciplined about getting his school work done so he could spend hours at the computer, coding. Girls, she said, just don’t seem to have as much interest in the technology.

Wonder if this will always be the case, and I wonder why. I feel the tech startup world could benefit so much from having a greater presence of female perspective.

A Googler's insights on social networking

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 22:32:48 -0700

A Googler's insights on social networking:

ailian:

Paul Adams is lead for User Research for Social at Google, and wow, this guy really really gets social networking. Yes, a Googler who gets social networking! There’s good stuff about how no one really thinks of their friends as “Friends,” designing for different types of relationships, influencing how people make decisions, and privacy. The slides on privacy make me think, “Paul, have you shown these slides to your Buzz colleagues? They could use your help.” Oh yeah, Slide 15 explains perfectly why I don’t like using Facebook.

(Bro, this link is mostly for you, since I bet you’re the only one reading who will get through all 216 slides!)

Naturally, the “bro” shares it.

Tom Stubblebine: What is success? Impact.

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 22:27:34 -0700

Tom Stubblebine: What is success? Impact.:

I just don’t think I could ever call my work successful unless people used it. I don’t want to be merely well paid. I don’t want to write great code that doesn’t get used.

My sentiments exactly.

Jeff Bezos at Princeton's Baccalaureate: We are What We Choose

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 10:23:06 -0700

Jeff Bezos at Princeton's Baccalaureate: We are What We Choose:

Jeff Bezos gives a concise but insightful speech on how gifts are easier than choices.

What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy — they’re given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you’re not careful, and if you do, it’ll probably be to the detriment of your choices. … Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions?

So much easier to think about than to do. I wonder if I’ll have the passion, courage and gumption to fearlessly follow my passion after I graduate, or even before.

Will you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling?

I grew up in a culture where playing it safe was encouraged over swashbuckling. Also, knowing that life could be easy and comfortable if I play it safe only makes it harder to risk anything given the opportunity costs.

I remember Ailian’s advice before I came to college when I was choosing between architecture and a liberal arts education:

Ask yourself which one you’ll regret more 5 or 10 years later.

I almost feel like if I don’t follow my passion and build something that’s my own, I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself later. But like I said, easier said than done. Comments/words of encouragement/discouragement are welcome.

On a side note, it seems like all I post these days are commencement/baccalaureate speeches.

I recently started using Inconsolata as my monospaced...

Sun, 04 Jul 2010 23:56:38 -0700

I recently started using Inconsolata as my monospaced programming/terminal font. For a font you spend so much time looking at, it’s important to find one that’s both pleasant to look at and easy to read. I think I’ve found the right one for me.

"Cornered the boy kicked out at the world. The world kicked back, a lot fuckin’ harder now."

Sun, 04 Jul 2010 13:06:59 -0700

“Cornered the boy kicked out at the world. The world kicked back, a lot fuckin’ harder now.”

- —The Libertines, Can’t Stand Me Now

Witty but depressing.

Quality over Quantity: How We Built iTeleport into a Profitable Business on the App Store - The iTeleport Blog

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 00:28:34 -0700

Quality over Quantity: How We Built iTeleport into a Profitable Business on the App Store - The iTeleport Blog:

Great case for making higher quality albeit more expensive apps for the App Store, supported by their own revenue numbers.

Solitude and Leadership By William Deresiewicz - The Best Article I've Read Recently

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 01:37:25 -0700

William Deresiewicz’s speech to students at West Point on Solitude and Leadership is by far the most inspiring and insightful article I’ve read recently and I’m compelled to share it with you. Granted it is a speech to officer cadets in a military academy, but the insights he gives are valuable to all of us. Here are some of my favorite parts:

What we don’t have, in other words, are thinkers. People who can think for themselves. People who can formulate a new direction: for the country, for a corporation or a college, for the Army—a new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things. People, in other words, with vision.

We are never taught in school to have vision. I wonder if it can be taught in the first place, or whether it can only be learned through self discovery and concentration.

Now that’s the third time I’ve used that word, concentrating. Concentrating, focusing. You can just as easily consider this lecture to be about concentration as about solitude. Think about what the word means. It means gathering yourself together into a single point rather than letting yourself be dispersed everywhere into a cloud of electronic and social input. It seems to me that Facebook and Twitter and YouTube—and just so you don’t think this is a generational thing, TV and radio and magazines and even newspapers, too—are all ultimately just an elaborate excuse to run away from yourself. To avoid the difficult and troubling questions that being human throws in your way. Am I doing the right thing with my life? Do I believe the things I was taught as a child? What do the words I live by—words like duty, honor, and country—really mean? Am I happy?

I couldn’t agree more. I’ll be the first to admit that all these distractions provide a comfortable shelter from the more difficult questions we all should ask ourselves.

I strongly encourage you to read the whole essay. The insights are worth so much more than the 20 minutes you’ll spend reading it, and the next hour you’ll spend thinking about what he said.

Apple Design Awards - WWDC10 - Apple Developer

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 23:01:48 -0700

Apple Design Awards - WWDC10 - Apple Developer:

My inspiration for the rest of this summer.

Big Role in Small Company or Small Role in Big Company

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 22:19:24 -0700

Would you rather play a small role in a big company, e.g. an entry level software engineer at Intel or Microsoft, or pay a big role in a small company, e.g. one a few software developers in a 10 person startup?

I grew up with the goal of landing a job at a big company, hopefully one that paid me well, gave me tons of benefits, and let me do something I enjoyed on a daily basis. Halfway through my first internship as a software developer, I realized I need to feel like my work is having an impact. I need to play a part in making the big decisions regarding product development, how the code is architected. More importantly, I need to feel that my work will have a direct impact on people—that me putting my best work into something will directly affect people’s lives. If I were part of a large team, I’d find it difficult to feel like my work has big enough impact even if the product is something world changing and used by millions e.g. Google search.

There might be another reason for this preference—I love having control over a product. When I make something, I need to be able to do things my way, at least to some extent. I enjoy working in teams, discussions, bouncing ideas off each other, but if I had barely any say in what I did and was just an “implementor,” I wouldn’t be able to find the motivation to do inspired work. I thrive on the creative freedom.

This is by no means a dichotomy. You can make a big impact in a big organization by being the CEO or chairman. Or you can be shine in a big company even as an entry level employee to the extent where you can exact big improvements. However, as someone still in college and thinking about the next step, big impact in a big organization seems like an unrealistic first step. On the other hand, if you start a company or join a small company, you can have a big impact and a big say despite your lack of seniority and experience, and that’s the step I’m likely to take.

On Mediocrity (from Summer 2009)

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 18:17:00 -0700

I wrote this in Summer 2009 but never posted it. I came across it again and thought it was worth sharing as the first post on this new blog. Enjoy.

Over summer, I saw a band perform at a nearby cafe. They were a 3 piece, with the vocalist playing the bass. Their music was mostly grungy, angsty rock. They were solid—technically sound, decent lyrics, good vocals, tight rhythm—but there was nothing particularly special about them or their music. It made me think about the performances I’ve done and songs I’ve written with my band, back when I lived in Singapore, through my junior college and army days. They were pretty generic too: maybe a little catchy guitar riff here, power chords blazing through the chorus, some cool instrumental breakdowns here and there(, shitty lyrics thanks to me)… but there was nothing special about them.

So I asked myself, how did anyone make music that was special. Radiohead immediately popped into my head, maybe Queen, and even less celebrated bands such as the Killers.

They all either did something new, or did something extremely well.

Radiohead pushed the boundaries of rock with OK Computer. Thom Yorke’s lyrics were piercing and the songs crafted perfectly around his lyrics; every single sound in the song was crafted perfectly around a single idea or emotion that ran through it. Each moment was special. Even for a song with 3 vastly different parts like Paranoid Android, there was a powerful emotion that sliced through all 3 parts. Something I struggle to define in words, but unmistakable when I listen to the song.

Queen makes me think of grandeur. Maybe it’s the choruses or the occasional orchestra, but it’s almost impossible to not feel it when you listen to a song like Bohemian Rhapsody or Don’t Stop Me Now.

Regarding the Killers, I’ll admit they might not be as creative or spectacular as Radiohead and Queen, but All These Things I’ve Done conjures up quite a powerful feeling of victory, a sense that anything can be overcome. It inspires me. And for all it’s genericity, I’m still playing it 2 years later.

The point is, all these bands stuck because their music or at least some of their songs were truly special. They weren’t wallowing in mediocrity. My favorite of their songs: I Might Be Wrong, Paranoid Andriod, Bohemian Rhapsody definitely don’t strike me as generic. Their music was anything but average, it stood out amongst the crowd of talented (and not so talented) musicians.

I really wonder how they do it. But here’s something I wrote down last night at the bar:

There’s really no point being mediocre. If you intend to create something, it has to be with all the creativity and thought you can muster, and even then you’re not guaranteed it’s going to be special.

Biggest Lesson Learned from Askapade: Product Management is not (just) product design

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 23:06:00 -0800

The following post is the one biggest lesson I learned from creating Askapade (http://www.askapade.com). This is not the biggest reason why Askapade didn’t work out (“fail” seems too dramatic for a project that we didn’t raise money for)—that would be because we’re not continuing to iterate on the product.

Product management is about prioritizing themes and features, figuring out what to build next given limited resources. It’s also about how best to allocate resources to

figure out what people want
build what people want

For a startup, product management is making the best use of your limited resources in pushing a product towards success.

I ignored that, focusing instead on making the site fulfill the functionality we had laid out from the start, and then making it work well and look pretty. I’m more than satisfied with how it looks, and I’d say the interactions aren’t too shabby as well.

But… no one wants to use it. The one biggest reason for startups failing is not being able to find product market fit, or in English, no one wants to use your site/service. The harsh reality is no one really gives a shit about how nice your rounded corners are if they don’t find your base product useful.

We didn’t optimize to find product market fit, and instead spent a lot of resources—mainly time—on optimizing existing features for their user experience and design. The result is a beautifully useless site. Going ahead, I have a much better idea of how important product management in the sense of allocating resources is. It cost me quite a bit of time and effort to learn this (as opposed to just reading answers on Quora [1]), but it’s clearly seared into my mind.

[1] http://www.quora.com/Product-Management