mgadams3
Joined 13 years ago
Karma
668
Submissions
131
Member since
Jan 20
3x Founder - currently building grain.co, previously co-founded MisionU.com (acquired by WeWork) and Degreed.com
View on Hacker NewsRecent submissions
Comment · 3 years ago
I'm an R1T owner and I can't even put into words why the truck is just so much better and differentiated. It's not just that it's an EV Truck... my friend has a Lightning and it has none of the magic of my Rivian. Magic in a vehicle.
Comment · 3 years ago
Grain | Senior Software Engineer | Remote (US timezones) | Full-time | https://grain.com/careers-detail
About Grain: We're a 4 year old company with an Elixir/Phoenix backend and React front end, 10 engineers (mostly remote) and raised a $16M Series A from Tiger Global last year. We found ourselves perfectly timed w/ digital conversation shift due to COVID 2 years ago and now find ourselves with a large data set to leverage LLMs to solve important problems for our users (by automating the mundane parts of their workflows and surfacing the useful parts).
https://www.businessinsider.com/most-promising-productivity-... (we're #7)
Comment · 4 years ago
I've owned 3 EVs and Tesla is the lowest quality car I've ever owned. Teslas weigh down the average b/c they're the majority of EVs on the road.
Comment · 5 years ago
IMO it's generally more of a tooling problem than a methodology problem... like trying to build a skyscraper without power tools.
The main challenge with taking notes during meetings is that the tools use were designed for drafting in a non-linear environment. But notes in meetings are directly related to the content of what is being said at a specific moment in time, and the text-only notes usually fail to capture the full essence compared to watching that part of the video.
When building my last start-up, an online school on Zoom, we recorded every lecture so our students could go back and review the content during the working sessions. But they found it hard to correlate their Google Doc notes with the moment in the recording they wanted to go back and watch. But since we pulled over the Zoom chat log with timestamps back to moments in the recording, they started taking notes there so they could keep track of the part they knew they wanted to watch later or reference.
Long story short, when the online school got acquired I started my current start-up https://grain.co to turn that insight into software anyone could use to better capture and share knowledge during any kind of meeting.
Comment · 5 years ago
Great stuff Jake, thanks for sharing. I watched that pricing change very closely as we have a similar progression from solo to multi-player at [https://grain.co/pricing] but very helpful to hear the reasoning behind it.
Completely agreed that the nuance is critical to this discussion and the absolutism makes the great clickbait but isn't supported by reality.
Comment · 5 years ago
Most new companies in this space have been using "AI" marketing to pitch a better world of video conferencing and it's been largely a failure. (unless you call getting bought and then shut down by Cisco a win)
But I 100% agree with you that this is a design problem to be solved first with better interfaces and workflows, not AI. Innovation is the sum of behavior change and AI is not going to be doing our knowledge work for us anytime soon. Given we're doin the work, we deserve better tools to do it ourselves.
I'm currently building grain.co that layers a new kind of video conferencing on top of Zoom, focused on brokering the recorded information gathered during sync calls into the async tools where knowledge lives and actual work is done after the convo ends.
Our approach is to make it easy to annotate in real-time, clip out those parts you want to save/share, and then push them into async tools where anyone can view them like it were text in a document or a message in Slack.
Comment · 6 years ago
Thanks Dariel! Time is a crazy thing ;)
Comment · 6 years ago
The cited article pulled out a catchy headline from an extrinsically motivated context like Telemarketing. Not surprising that people who fail from a rote task get de-motivated and quit, learning nothing.
I don't believe that study has any relevance to the world of creative work -- like building products or becoming a Jedi ;) -- that is driven by intrinsic motivation to iterate and improve. Success rarely requires the same level of self-evaluation and reflection in creative contexts.
Comment · 6 years ago
completely agree with this. This is why the idea behind Cagan's "Empowered Product Teams" [https://svpg.com/empowered-product-teams/] is so important. Founders are often too blinded by their initial approach of solving their own pain that they are blinded to superior alternatives that could be more easily seen by fresh eyes. Key is to empower those people to solve the problem, not just implement a solution.
Comment · 6 years ago
For sure, ideas matter A LOT. But we over-index on product solution ideas by default.
I think ideas that matter most for is for founders are the ones around a strong conviction on the market opportunity and then be flexible about the solution that is built to capture that opportunity.
The latter is where I think process is more important than the product solution idea having seen my product solution ideas fail hundreds of times without changing my market vision ideas.
Comment · 6 years ago
Thanks, I agree that the default path of "be like Steve Jobs" is a trap that I've fallen into enough times to realize that there are more ways to build where you don't have to have the insights up front.
The key in my opinion is to be able to identify market opportunities and problems to solve, then be REALLY flexible about how you go about solving them b/c your first product solution ideas are very unlikely to work.
Comment · 6 years ago
Thanks Scott. I remember back to our convos in the Grain office from a year back that helped to inspire the structure of this post. Was cool to see you invest in it at Tipe and reap the rewards!
Comment · 6 years ago
We did concierge onboarding and set up shared slack channels with many of our early teams. This made it really easy and expected to ask for more feedback and to have users give it proactively.
Community channels are key as you grow. Frankly this is an area where we've underinvested as we've been heads down building/shipping product and is going to be a huge area of focus for us in 2021. The job of the founder is to really to give people who love your product a venue to share their ideas, questions with other users. Customer advisory boards work well too.