brettgriffin

You don't see the risk that is created when you allow unexercised options get called at a later date, when they're in the money, because the company is 'doing well'?

I would liken it more to the male equivalent of facial beauty or weight: most men have a general level of facial beauty and weight they expect in a partner. And if not met, there is really nothing else that can help bind the attraction. For women, that is height. But yes, it is "evolved intuition."

Anything else I can read about smol?

also, are you using a tool to collect those metrics? what is it?

I met with ~80 funds over two rounds and they were all great experiences. Especially in the early ones, when I was still learning the dynamics of pitching, they were all overly patient and polite.

I'm following this trend on Twitter. It's shown a few abhorrent ones, for sure. But mostly just benign interactions with people who have to do this ten times a day, every day.

The P&L of every software company has an R&D expense (R) in a total cost (T). We can debate what R is, and R might be approaching 0, but it is not 0.

This does not mean that R is on the only cost (T-R grows over the life of the company). It does not mean that, even if R were 0, you could launch a product. But R is a real cost.

Apologies. When I met you in circa spring 2019 you described Ashby to me as mid-market ERP, which I had quite a few thoughts on given the amount of ERP work I had done. Sorry for droning on about ERPs to you, then.

He didn't say there wouldn't be competitors. He was actually acknowledging the competitors exist, but he was expressing how none of them are in the consideration set of Greenhouse's buyers because they lacked an enormous number of features that Greenhouse had. My point is, at least behind closed doors, he and most CEOs would admit that their features are an eroding defense as the cost of code approaches zero.

> Our thesis is that the cost of producing code is heading towards zero

This (correct) thesis should illicit an interesting question about the future of SaaS markets: What happens to the SaaS markets when the cost of code approaches zero?

Coincidentally, the company that authored this post is a perfect case study.

Few people truly grasp how hard bringing a software product to market is. The feature density required to even begin selling your product often requires more human capital than early stage investors are willing to underwrite. Some founders have the background to command those terms, but most have to wedge into a market with some very small insight.

I was at a dinner with the CEO of Greenhouse in 2021 and vividly recall him explaining just how deep the feature set of a new ATS needs to be to even enter the consideration set of a buyer.

One serendipitous way companies could enter these markets is by being founded in one market, and pivoting into another. Ashby didn't start as an ATS. They were originally targeting a mid-market ERP (a hot thesis at the time). Ashby is a prime example of a company that likely could not have entered their current market because of the sheer engineering resources required to break through (and kudos to them for doing it!)

But as the cost of code approaches zero, the deterrents of entering the market also drop to zero. The next Ashby could just pursue ATS from day one. In a sense, this is the entire story of humanity and especially software (consider the cost of building an ATS in 2012 when Lever was founded vs the cost Ashby faced in 2019).

But the slope of this change is unlike anything before it.

ATS, like many other markets, has a handful of big players and a long tail of smaller offerings. No matter how many long tail providers there are, the economics of entering a market suppressed that number compared to what can and will exist tomorrow. The cost of building an ATS a decade ago was literally orders of magnitude more than it is today.

In 2016 I heard a A16Z partner describe a future where every software market would have offerings in virtually every little niche one could imagine. Years before the LLM renaissance, this sounded insane. How could the market afford to build and sustain each offering?

I don't think companies are going to start building their ATS in house, but I do believe that cost of producing code is approaching to zero, and that means hundreds or even thousands of offerings will exist in every shape, way and form we can imagine.

This is just a tragic way to view the world, on so may levels: 79 is a great run for anybody. And more importantly, Craig Venter did more in 79 years than most people could do in two or three lifetimes. Lastly, of course, life is literally the longest thing you will ever experience, regardless of how long it lasts.

I learned a lot about Craig Venter after reading My Life Decoded in college. Truly an amazing person.

> That’s what dies if I can’t keep going.

Your priorities are completely wrong. You need to redirect the time and energy you're spending on this project towards getting back to stable ground, starting with utilizing the safety nets that your government and community make available to you. You need to find psychiatric care and shelter immediately, and eventually, gainful employment of any kind.

It's curious to see the rational argument against the emotional choice the author makes.

The critical piece here is the anecdotal (but true) insight that engineering orgs have been flattening over the last few years.

There are a lot of factors, but rarely discussed is the realization that senior engineers are completely capable and often willing of managing other engineers directly. The definitive text on this subject is literally called "Herding Cats" :facepalm:

In reality, senior engineers often have strong communication skills (albeit different than the styles of other management and leadership positions), very good time management, and likely can perform many of these 'soft skills' that engineering management is doing out-of-band from the teams directly responsible for shipping software.

The engineering manager role feels like it was borne out of a very west-coast ideology from another era responsible for removing agency from people based on dated stereotypes. There was a self-fulfilling prophecy wherein we said engineers aren't capable or willing to have agency to work across teams, manage resources, or communicate about career goals or blockers, and then plugged someone in the middle to take these activities away from engineers.

I'm exposed to a lot of teams with high-aptitude/techincal people that are not software engineers and almost never do you do see the equivalent of a traditional software engineering manager.

I wouldn't be surprised to see a continued and dramatic compression of these roles going forward.

> I believe this cultural divide is a big reason America won't make it back to the top

What top are you referring to?

We're in a thread about a US company announcing its new $30B fundraise from a group of elite US growth investment funds arguing about whether this company will be able to overthrow the $4T US tech behemoth and suggesting that all the other US tech behemoths are actually stifling progress.

Put winter tires on your vehicles. I'm surprised by the number of people who tool around in snow and ice in 'all season' tires.

Also, that writing tone is obnoxious.