Currently reading: Foundation by Isaac Asimov

Rereading it because I started watching the TV show, which definitely isn’t the same but might still be good.

Check

Picture of my foot. Sunlit post

Testing GitHub push

After 8 years as a General Partner here at Greylock, I’ve decided to step back to be a Venture Partner. The Venture Partner title means different things in different situations, but here’s what it means for me: I’ll continue to focus on working with existing portfolio companies as an active board member to help them grow and thrive, but I won’t be looking for new companies to invest in. These are companies I’m in love with and excited about: Caffeine, Figma, Crew, Angle and one more that I backed last year but haven’t announced yet.

For those of you who know me personally (or via Twitter, I guess!), you know that I care an awful lot about improving the state of our country and world, and it’s crystal clear that 2019 & 2020 are crucially important years — certainly the most important time in a generation, but maybe much longer than that. I’ve been on the board at Code for America working on this for several years, but lately have wanted to spend more of my time in this area — so that’ll be one area that I will ramp up. In fact, I’ve also just taken a board role at a new non-profit startup Voting.Works, led by my friend & former Mozillian Ben Adida. Their mission is to build new, secure, affordable voting systems that all Americans can count on. I’m excited to be able to spend more of my time & energy towards this kind of work.

My time as a GP at Greylock has been challenging and rewarding and fun and interesting and above all a great privilege. And while the work that I really love doing will continue, I want to take a second to note that I’m grateful to my partners here, and to the entrepreneurs I’ve gotten to work with along the way.

I talk & write about “finding your tribe” a fair amount – knowing & understanding & nourishing my own has been critical for me many times over the years.

This week I was reminded how important it is – our family went to an annual gathering that we’ve been going to for about a dozen years now – long enough that I can’t quite remember when we started. It’s hard to describe the grouping of people – it’s a mix of different people with different professions and perspectives – Silicon Valley and Hollywood and New York and D.C. and lots of other places. It doesn’t really matter where they’re from – what matters here is that it’s probably the closest IRL manifestation of how I conceive of my own tribe of people. Not complete, for sure – lots of folks who are important to me aren’t there – but representative.

Over the past decade plus, we’ve all gotten older and changed. Gotten married, had children, gotten divorced, changed jobs, started companies, changed the world.

What I was struck by this year is how all these relationships have developed over the years. These are people who have seen each other at highs and lows; who have worked shoulder to shoulder with each other on too many projects to mention, and against each other on some, too.

The special thing about having that much context, and people around who know & believe in you is how much they can frame the year that’s past, and the year ahead.

Your tribe has the context about you & your life – and can remind you, when you need it, of who you are, and who you can be.

And beyond all that, it just feels good (and restorative, and challenging) to come home once a year, and see friends & allies, and tell all the old jokes, and just listen about where you’ve each been, and plan about what’s to come.

I enter 2019 grateful for this communion and connection, and reminded again how important it is to find your people, and keep investing in them always.

Happy 2019 everyone.

Today I hit a milestone which is totally arbitrary, but is a meaningful one for me personally: I achieved my “Move” goal on my Apple Watch for the thousandth time since I got my first Apple Watch in May, 2015.

It’s important to me because it’s enabled, or at the very least, coincided with, a pretty dramatic change in the way that I live day to day, and even more dramatic change in the way that I think about myself. Before 2015, I got to the gym a couple of times a week, but always struggled with consistency and achievement. I’ve gone through some periods of my life where I’ve been more consistent – training for a half marathon about 15 years ago, for instance – but I’ve always had a hard time with it, and more than that, have always viewed it as a little bit separate to my life.

But I like games and competitions and goals and streaks. So the idea of trying every day to hit my goal of physical output has worked for me in a big way. It hasn’t been 100% – otherwise I would’ve hit 1,000 a year ago – but it’s been consistent, and when I get out of sorts and miss a few days (or few weeks), it’s something powerful for me to come back to – for the past few years, I’ve wanted to get back to it, which is totally new to me.

There’ve been some other pieces that have been useful – we got a Peloton a few years ago, and I can’t recommend it highly enough – it’s an amazing and transformative piece of equipment, and, astonishingly, it’s proven durable.

And this year I got my diet into shape for the first time in years, which meant my year on the scale looked like this:

I’m up a little bit over the past few months, but after getting some guidance from Dr Suhas in February, everything got better. As good as it’s ever been for me, actually. Lots of people are amused that it was an Ayurvedic diet that unlocked things for me – not exactly a tradition that I come from – but my point of view is: whatever it takes. It helped my weight, lowered my cholesterol, and helped my head.

Lots more to unpack – and some work to do going forward, as I’d like to get down under 160 (and am pretty sure that I can) – but mainly I just wanted to write about this arbitrary milestone, and what it means to me, and say that I’m grateful for this little piece of technology on my wrist that keeps me honest and motivated.

Well.

So.

I mean.

It’s been way more than a year since I’ve blogged. I think longer than I’ve gone without writing since I started blogging something like 15 years ago. I can’t tell you exactly why it’s been so long, but think there have been a bunch of things in my life happening over the past 18 months that have all added up.

For one thing, it’s been a little busy. Tons & tons of stuff going on at work – a few new things I can’t talk about yet, lots of help with company building at the ones I’ve talked about in the past, and just a busy time in the markets overall. Raising 2 boys with my wife has kept me pretty busy as well – they’re getting bigger & more capable all the time, and between school, soccer & Fortnite (alas, FIFA time has fallen way off), we’re pretty busy on that front as well. And lots of (totally fine) health stuff going on, including an appendectomy, losing 30+ pounds (unrelated) and a few other things.

I think, too, that the state of our country, and the state of our own particular corners of the media world (like Facebook and Twitter) have simultaneously taken a lot of my attention, but also have really been discouraging. I’m not sure that will get better anytime soon, but I have really ratcheted down posting on and reading Twitter and Facebook, and only vomit in my mouth after reading Politico once or twice a day. Progress? 2017 & 2018 have been a little weird. I’m thinking 19 & 20 might ratchet that way up, too.

But now it feels like time for me to write again. Every day if I can get after it. But I don’t think I’ll push everything to Twitter or Facebook. Maybe once in awhile. I mentioned to some friends the other day that back in the mid-2000s, the first time I saw Joi Ito’s site – the mix of posts and WoW info and Dopplr whereabouts, etc – I thought to myself: “That’s Joi’s home online.” And then I went off and built my own straightway. I moved through Typepad and Wordpress and Tumblr Medium and Twitter and Verst and a lot of other places online, but I feel like I’ve really been an Internet nomad over the last decade or so.

I think that’s a hole in our current online lives – there’s no “home” for any of us anymore. I hope that someone is building that now, with everything we know about how the internet has evolved, and how it feels in 2018. I’m looking for it myself.

In the meantime, I’m going to get back to writing. Probably about the same old things – the Internet, apps, books, raising a family – because, well: fish gotta swim. It’ll take some time to get back into the groove and write much that’s worth reading, but that’s cool too. For me, the act of writing illuminates and clarifies, and mostly just makes me happy.

Feels good.

PS – the image at the top of the post is my 13 year old’s last soccer game of the season, which happened today. Watching the boys play, and develop into teammates and leaders, is my very favorite pastime. There’s a simplicity and power to starting out every season anew, building a team, and just focusing on getting better every time you go out.

I’ve been interested (and obsessed, really) with design for my whole career, stretching back to the early nineties when I got to work on early human-computer interaction at Stanford. A lot’s changed since then — the rise and dominance of the Internet; then the absolute ubiquity of phones and other connected devices — because computing has permeated every facet of the way humans live, intentional design has become a necessity for just about every product.

But for all that the orientation towards and understanding of design has changed, the technology we use to design hasn’t really. Despite advancements in cloud computing and graphics processing, most design tools have remained stubbornly stuck in the 90’s. Designers must run them locally on their computers, syncing to file storage services and exporting inert versions to share with collaborators. In other words: in a world of collaboration, design has remained a stubbornly solo activity.

This has never been a great state of affairs, and more than that it just doesn’t work at any scale at all. As technology companies grow, and the reach of the products they make extends, workflows to create those products are getting extremely complicated — it’s generally a mess of hacks to allow basic communication among engineers, marketers, product leaders and designers. Which means that companies like Airbnb are employing entire teams of people to build custom software to make this work.

And so: design becomes the bottleneck to great companies’ growth, instead of what it should be — the driver of their success.

There’s a big opportunity here, which is why in 2015 I was so excited to invest in Figma, the first collaborative design tool that runs in the cloud. From the beginning, Figma had a lot of things going right for it. It broke down barriers to collaboration between teammates because it ran on any operating system, its files are always up-to-date, and multiple people could work together in real-time.

But in the first version of Figma, it fell short on a few key areas — prototyping (for design feedback and user testing) and developer handoff (so engineers could pull the data they needed from design files).

These aren’t optional features — designers need ways to communicate their work quickly to people in other departments and receive their feedback.

Before now, they’ve relied on hacked-together systems that are painful. Plugins loaded on top of plugins cause design apps to freeze and crash whenever there’s an update. Presentations go out of date as soon as they’re exported because they’re not tied to the actual design file. And of course everything gets much more complicated as groups and companies grow — the number and type of stakeholders grow, and everything gets slowed down.

That’s why the next chapter of Figma’s business is so significant. Today the company announced Figma 2.0, with prototyping and developer handoff integrated into the design tool itself. That means that for the first time, the entire product team can work together in one live, always up-to-date environment for ideation, design, prototyping, and code delivery. No other design tool today offers this.

It doesn’t take a fortune-teller to see that this is the future. Virtually every other creative activity has moved to the cloud & the collaboration that it offers.

It’s well beyond time for design to follow suit. Computing and interactive devices like phones now power much of the underlying fabric of our society, and so the demands on designers and product teams are become larger and more acute every day. More than that, though, every company that builds digital products today must become a design first company, designing products with intentionality. And so every company needs tools and workflows that let everyone in the process be part of the process.

Figma 2.0 is an awesome new release— go check it out.

With the news of Robert Pirsig’s death last week, I’ve picked up Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to reread it. It was an important book to me growing up – it helped me think through my own value system and also to think through technology and its relationship to ourselves and our communities.

It’s a slower paced book from a slower paced time. It was originally published in 1974, when I was just 3 years old, and 2 years before Apple was founded.

It’s a bit of a cliche (although true) to talk about how relevant books like Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death & Technopoly, McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message, Orwell’s 1984, and Huxley’s Brave New World are today – but this book of Pirsig’s seems (to me) to capture so much of the tension between technology & progress & self.

I’ll quote an early passage at length. The author is taking a cross country backroads motorcycle trip with some friends – he is himself a very capable motorcycle mechanic and loves the work of keeping his bike running well. But he’s puzzled by his friends' relationship with technology.

Long passage follows. Pretty sure I’ll post more as I slowly work my way through this rereading of the classic. Lots of these thoughts keep rattling around in my head days later.

What is it they say about history? That it doesn’t repeat but it often rhymes? I’m sure feeling that a lot these days, for better or worse.

They [his friends] talk once in a while in as few pained words as possible about “it” or “it all” as in the sentence, “There is just no escape from it.” And if I asked, “From what?” the answer might be “The whole thing,” or “The whole organized bit,” or even “The system.” Sylvia once said defensively, “Well, you know how to cope with it,” which puffed me up so much at the time I was embarrassed to ask what “it” was and so remained somewhat puzzled. I thought it was something more mysterious than technology. But now I see that the “it” was mainly, if not entirely, technology. But, that doesn’t sound right either. The “it” is a kind of force that gives rise to technology, something undefined, but inhuman, mechanical, lifeless, a blind monster, a death force. Something hideous they are running from but know they can never escape. I’m putting it way too heavily here but in a less emphatic and less defined way this is what it is. Somewhere there are people who understand it and run it but those are technologists, and they speak an inhuman language when describing what they do. It’s all parts and relationships of unheard-of things that never make any sense no matter how often you hear about them. And their things, their monster keeps eating up land and polluting their air and lakes, and there is no way to strike back at it, and hardly any way to escape it. That attitude is not hard to come to. You go through a heavy industrial area of a large city and there it all is, the technology. In front of it are high barbed-wire fences, locked gates, signs saying No TRESPASSING, and beyond, through sooty air, you see ugly strange shapes of metal and brick whose purpose is unknown, and whose masters you will never see. What it’s for you don’t know, and why it’s there, there’s no one to tell, and so all you can feel is alienated, estranged, as though you didn’t belong there. Who owns and understands this doesn’t want you around. All this technology has somehow made you a stranger in your own land. Its very shape and appearance and mysteriousness say, “Get out.” You know there’s an explanation for all this somewhere and what it’s doing undoubtedly serves mankind in some indirect way but that isn’t what you see. What you see is the No TRESPASSING, KEEP OUT signs and not anything serving people but little people, like ants, serving these strange, incomprehensible shapes. And you think, even if I were a part of this, even if I were not a stranger, I would be just another ant serving the shapes. So the final feeling is hostile, and I think that’s ultimately what’s involved with this otherwise unexplainable attitude of John and Sylvia. Anything to do with valves and shafts and wrenches is a part of that dehumanized world, and they would rather not think about it. They don’t want to get into it. If this is so, they are not alone. There is no question that they have been following their natural feelings in this and not trying to imitate anyone. But many others are also following their natural feelings and not trying to imitate anyone and the natural feelings of very many people are similar on this matter; so that when you look at them collectively, as journalists do, you get the illusion of a mass movement, an antitechnological mass movement, an entire political antitechnological left emerging, looming up from apparently nowhere, saying, “Stop the technology. Have it somewhere else. Don’t have it here.” It is still restrained by a thin web of logic that points out that without the factories there are no jobs or standard of living. But there are human forces stronger than logic. There always have been, and if they become strong enough in their hatred of technology that web can break. Clichés and stereotypes such as “beatnik” or “hippie” have been invented for the antitechnologists, the antisystem people, and will continue to be. But one does not convert individuals into mass people with the simple coining of a mass term.

In just a decade since the introduction of the iPhone, our mobile phones have become the dominant technology we all use in our everyday lives. We send messages (text, pictures, video) all day long, every day. It’s no exaggeration to say that the way we communicate with each other has changed fundamentally over the past 10 years.

And so it’s no surprise that the way we work has also changed dramatically. We text and chat with our colleagues and rely less on email and in-person meetings. We work on projects collaboratively and at the same time, not independently and behind closed doors.

But the focus of software innovation for the way we actually work — our core productivity — has been mostly for the benefit of knowledge workers in desk jobs that look a lot like our own in the technology industry. Productivity software is an area that I really love, and over the past few years I’ve invested in software companies like Figma, Quip, and Dropbox that have dramatically advanced how (desktop & laptop) computer-centric workers create, share and collaborate with one another.

What about industries like retail, healthcare and hospitality, where most workers aren’t working on their laptop all day?

Messaging is a behavior that is already happening for most of these teams — but it’s via some awkward mix of text groups and social platforms that aren’t really built to help co-workers be more productive. These approaches are ad hoc, chaotic, and unloved since they blend personal and work lives, and are generally impossible to manage from the employer side of things.

This is why I am so excited to share the news that Greylock has led the Series B in Crew and I have joined the board.

When I met co-founders Danny Leffel and Broc Miramontes, they told me story after story about the people who use Crew to get work done — people on teams who aren’t well served by our traditional computing-centric tools, but still need to communicate and organize with each other to be successful in their own work. Within just a few minutes in that first meeting, I knew we’d found a team we wanted to work with who was on an important mission. Productivity is bigger than helping folks do their desk jobs more efficiency. It’s about everyone, regardless of industry, being on the same page so they can do their jobs better.

The beauty of Crew is that it connects workers in the way they’re already connecting, via messaging. With Crew, everything and everyone is in one app, and colleagues can swap shifts, change schedules, request time-off and coordinate on daily tasks and responsibilities. When you lower friction to participate and communicate — just like our mobile technology has done in the rest of our lives — interactions across team members are simplified, teams stay organized, and people feel more engaged.

High performing teams across the board — from grocery stores to fire departments — are already using Crew to share schedules, cover shifts, and communicate with each other. In just under two years, there are more than 10,000 active organizations sending over 10M work related communications on a weekly basis.

Everyone needs — and deserves — to have technology that can help them work more collaboratively within their teams and do their jobs better. Danny, Broc and the Crew team are building something really important and I’m very happy to be a part of their journey.

Not sure whether I’ve posted about this before, but I’ve been having a great time teaching a class this quarter at the Stanford Business School – HR282: Startup People Operations. I’m teaching it with Huggy Rao and Sujay Jaswa, and we’ve been having a great time – this is the second year we’re teaching it, and I think it’s getting better & better.

The course content is what you’d expect – lots about recruiting, hiring, firing, cash & equity compensation, equity plans, etc. And we’ve been lucky to have a number of amazing guests.

The past couple of classes we’ve been talking about how you build and operationalize culture – one of my favorite things to talk about.

Today I gave a talk on cadence – how you build the rhythms and pacing of companies from no structure. (Word nerd quiz: what does the root of “cadence” mean? Answer: comes from the Latin “cadere” which means “to fall” – like a drumstick falling on the beat.)

When companies start, the founders are usually going as fast as they possibly can go. Founders can often finish each other’s sentences, and in the early days they can get huge parts of the product and business created without much coordination with each other at all. As companies add people, this gets harder and harder to do – so you start do create process as a way to help more people lead in the organization. But processes sometimes have natural rhythms, sometimes they don’t. It takes intentionality to get them to line up with each other – and over time, to be able to increase pacing (and overall output of the organization).

That’s what we talked about today in class – the slides I used follow. They’re designed for an interactive session (and the HR282 students had a ton of great material to add) – but you’ll get the gist.

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Also published on Medium.

I’ve been blogging since 2004, and have always loved the freedom of expression and the ease of distribution. Blogging has given amazing super powers to anyone anywhere in the world who’s got something to say. But even as it’s gotten more powerful over time, it’s also become more challenging to keep up to date with all the tools and options.

Over the years, in addition to using just about every type of publishing software around, I’ve also invested in different platforms that help people share content in various ways (notably Tumblr & Instagram). In 2015, I invested in DWNLD because of their focus on solving a big problem for professional publishers — with the rise of mobile & social (especially Twitter and Facebook), professional publishers didn’t really know where to put their “home” on the web. DWNLD focused on offering a smart and easy way for publishers to build and maintain connections with their audiences through creating their own dedicated apps. When we first invested in DWNLD, I said:

So much has gotten better with mobile technology. Which makes it all the more painful when you come across the areas that have not yet caught up. It’s not easier or better to read things from our favorite publications or brands.

DWNLD launched during the ascent of apps, but it became very clear during the following year that custom apps aren't the right solution for most professional publishers. But the pain point for publishers still exists: it's still very hard for anyone but the largest publishers to build and maintain a smart, dynamic home on the web. Today, publishers need to hack together a chaotic bundle of various plug-ins to help solve for optimization, engagement, SEO, and design. It's a burdensome process for even the most sophisticated publisher.

The DWNLD team saw these trends very clearly and so over the past year have built on their base technology for easy but powerful publishing (enabled by machine learning on the back end) and built something new. Today, they are introducing Verst (the company and the product name), a new platform that’s purpose built for the unique needs of professional publishers.

I won't spend a lot of time on the details of the product because CEO AJ Frank does a great job of detailing all the goodness here. Beyond the elegant design, search engine optimization, and dedicated customer support that you’d expect, Verst adds a new layer of integrated machine learning and intelligence that’s simple and intuitive to use — it means that machines can help publishers deal with so much of the complexity that's painful today. In short, they are delivering on the same vision that initially convinced me to invest:

It incorporates (and hides!) hugely sophisticated technology that analyzes and transforms web content into a first class, high performance native mobile experience, coupled with notifications, easy commerce options, and subscription capabilities built in.

AJ is a talented entrepreneur with unique experience helping build and scale publishing platforms like YouTube and Vine. He brings a critical publisher orientation to the company and he will work hard every day to build and innovate on behalf of professional publishers. I am happy that the Verst team is launching today and sharing what they've been up to with the rest of the world. We look forward to continuing our partnership with AJ, Fritz (founder & chairman) and the rest of the team as they continue to build Verst.

P.S. - You might check out my partner Reid’s new blog at reidhoffman.org as well.

Also published on Medium.

The other day I wrote a post about how 2017 has felt to me so far and how I’m trying to manage my own psychology.

This post isn’t about that. This one is about what I’m actually paying attention to, and what I’m doing about it. (And what I’m trying not to focus on.)

[Side note: I’m using the first person singular in this post, but a lot of it – most, really – is shared between Kathy & me.]

Here are the areas I’m thinking the most about (in no priority order):

1. Protecting people. Lots of categories, but in general, thinking about how we take the best care of our most vulnerable citizens and residents; people trying to build their lives, do their jobs, and contribute to society.
2. How we govern. We've gotten ourselves to a place where we just aren't very good at governing to create the society that we want. Lots of things we can do here and should. One of the main ones, I think, is to work to strengthen local and state governments, who are stressed and underfunded -- but they're more human scale and understandable than our federal government is.
3. Jobs. Lots of things have changed in the USA over the last couple of decades, but I'm not sure that anything has changed as profoundly as the movement of economic opportunities into the cities and away from our rural areas. Economics and technology are likely to exacerbate the problem. But unless we figure out how to connect economic engines to more of our country, we won't find our way out of the situation we're in.
4. The Media. The state of our media doesn't seem great. In lots of ways, reporting is more vital than ever. In lots of ways, the way we get and consume and understand our news is busted. This is the only category where I don't really have many ideas on what to do right now to help.
5. Candidates. This is more partisan/election oriented than I generally think of myself as caring about. But we need better candidates and we need to support them and help them win. I lean Democratic for lots of reasons right now, but have historically supported thoughtful candidates of all stripes.
6. Home & Friends. Lots of people unsure what to do. Lots of people trying to act like everything's normal. Lots of people under real stress. And it's tricky to know even how to talk to our kids about what's happening.

Clearly, this is way too much stuff to think about, let alone make a really meaningful commitment of time and resources too.

So, here’s what we (Kathy & I) are doing: we’re picking a few (fewer than 5) things to really focus our time, effort & expertise on. We’re picking as many things to support financially in these areas of interest as we can, too. And then we’re trying our best to stay focused on that set.

As for the things we’re doing actively:

• I'm spending more time with Code for America. I believe in state & local governments -- they're more human scale, more immediate, and in lots of ways, the problems are more addressable. I've been on the board for several years and am amping up my involvement -- this is my main commitment outside of my day job at Greylock and my family responsibilities.
• I'm looking for companies that can really address the jobs situation, especially outside of cities. Economics favor cities pretty clearly. And automation enabled by computing will ravage whole sectors of our traditional industries. It seems clear that fighting against manufacturing automation is a losing battle. But certain service sectors, enabled by computing, seem likely to drive jobs in the future. And investing in education to support this transition will be the work of a generation.
• We're trying to be as open and honest talking with our kids as we can. This one has been tough, honestly. Our kids can see our stress and distraction -- so we're trying to be honest about the situation as we see it, why we're stressed about it, and what we're doing. But we're also being clear with them that we're trying (with incomplete success) to defocus on the slings & arrows of daily news, and instead focus on the things we want to build.
• Some stuff related to candidates and helping the best ones get elected that I'm not really ready to get into much detail on yet. Real work to do here.
• A couple of additional things that we can't talk about yet.

The things we're supporting financially:

• Code for America - as noted above.
• Fight for the Future - some of the very best defenders of values that I know.
• Union of Concerned Scientists - we've always needed scientists who are reflective and thoughtful about their place in and impact on our world. Now even more.
• Southern Poverty Law Center - more people need protecting than ever, unfortunately.
• ACLU - I never really thought of myself as someone who would want to support the ACLU -- partly because I grew up more conservative than I am now, but: thank goodness for the ACLU.
• Pro Publica - we need talented, aggressive, supported investigative journalists maybe more than we've ever needed them -- certainly in my lifetime.

There's other stuff, too. Honestly lots of things falling on the floor. I'm trying to stay in touch with as many other folks who are working through these and other issues, too. Doing as much matchmaking as I can, too.

But these are the areas of focus that so far have made the most sense to Kathy & me. Undoubtedly some will change, and some will increase.

None of this is as tight or focused as I’d like it to be. But that’s just the reality of 2017.

I haven’t been writing a lot lately. Partly because it’s the beginning of the year and a lot of (really uniformly amazing) things are going on at work. Partly because Kathy & I have two young kids at home who need (& deserve) a lot of our attention. Decidedly not because of how great the Stanford men’s basketball team is.

But the real truth is that I’m having a hard time coming to terms with what’s happening in Washington, D.C. and our country more broadly.

Someone asked me the other day how I’m doing — my reply was, “Oh, you know: read crazy Trump tweets first thing in the morning, work it off in a workout, work during the day, rage tweet at night. Normal.”

But I check Twitter a fair amount during the day, and it’s not ever for great reasons. I read a lot of Politico, and Washington Post, and NYT. In the car I’m listening to tons of CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and Fox News (holy shit). I even peek at Breitbart, just to get a glipse of the raging garbage fire going on over there. I read the news at night and want to read every angle. I go to sleep, but wake up every night around 2a or 3a thinking about what’s going on.

So yep. I’m struggling.

I’m functional, and I think making progress at home and work — but I’m so distracted. And clearly not healthy w/r/t my media consumption.

It’s easy to articulate why: I am, and always have been, an American exceptionalist. I believe that for all our increasingly obvious faults, there are many, many things that make the United States, and the American experience, unique in world history, and I’m very proud of who we are and how we work. But I’m also a globalist, and want our whole world to improve — the thing I love about America is how hell bent we’ve been on being so inclusive and diverse. Again, the flaws, including our original sin of slavery, are obvious. But I’m an optimist (even though many people read me as a pessimist), and I’m an American optimist more than anything else.

So it’s hard to watch so many of our core institutions under attack. Every day we can see the work of Jefferson, and Washington, and Madison, and Hamilton, and Lincoln, and Roosevelt, and on and on — trampled on with such disregard by the current occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania.

I’ll write more about all this in the coming days, not that anyone needs any more hot takes on what’s going on. I’ll write about some of the things that I’ve been getting involved with and actually doing to protect and nurture the values of our country.

I’ve decided to write again mostly for myself, though.

It’s been hard not to be snarky or negative or weak or unsure. I’m all those things most every day, and I don’t really want them to reflect in my writing. (My tweets are another matter — snarky is pretty much what I’ve got!)

But for now I’ll end this with a bit of a breakthrough mentally I had last week — and it came from the unlikeliest of people, Mitch McConnell (who I think is probably the worst, most obstructionist and damaging lawmaker of my lifetime.)

It came when Elizabeth Warren was reading Coretta Scott King’s letter and McConnel shut her down with Rule 19, saying “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about that word: persist.

And how it relates to another word of so many Americans right now: resist.

[Nerd alert!] I love etymology, and was thinking about these two words and their roots. “Resist” comes from the Lating roots “re” (meaning against) and “sistere” (meaning to stand) — so of course means to stand against. And there’s a lot of standing against our goverment that needs doing right now. Persist comes from the same base word meaning stand, but with “per” — meaning through. Stand through. Be steadfast.

For me that simple switch, from thinking about resisting, to thinking about being steadfast — that’s made a huge and positive difference for me. Because instead of just standing against this awful administration and being defined by them — instead of that, it’s about the idea of being steadfast to my own — our own — values, and holding them tight and inviolate. It’s not about bouncing these people out of power, although that needs doing. It’s not about raging against this dumb law or that insane executive order.

Rather it’s about continuing to build our families and communities and businesses and governments, and holding our values steadfastly.

Persist.

I had an opportunity this week to speak on a panel to some newly elected members of Congress about technology policy, and it was an interesting and positive experience.

I won’t go into all the things we discussed (although not difficult to imagine) since it was off the record, but I started off by quoting David Foster Wallace in a commencement address at Kenyon College some years ago. Starts off with a joke:

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

I started that way to make this point: technology isn’t a tool or something we use to get a job done anymore. It’s the actual water we are swimming in.It’s the way we talk. It’s the way we work. It’s the way we think.

This isn’t a new idea, of course. Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman figured it out ages ago. The medium is the message, &c.

But the degree to which it’s true now is, I think, is more extreme than ever, and it’s been sneaking up on us for awhile. Facebook & Twitter, Snapchat & Instagram — they’ve all changed the way we think and work. And this will sound insane, but to a significant degree, I think we really don’t understand most of the implications.

In fact, most of the time we don’t even really totally grok that there’s nothing natural or inevitable about these particular communication patterns at all. They’re constructs that flow from how the technology works, and they have strengths and weaknesses just like any other medium does.

Anyway, my more prosaic point was just this: there really isn’t any “technology policy” anymore. It’s all just policy. Technology is so foundational to how we work and how we think that it always has to be considered as part of a broader fabric.

If you have time, go back and read that speech by Wallace. It’s one of the most thoughtful and self aware speeches I’ve ever come across, and I read it myself often. It seems relevant in many, many ways as we gratefully and nervously draw a close to 2016.

I read it just to remind myself:

This is water, this is water.

A couple of weeks ago I attended a reunion for Stanford CS198 — the program at Stanford that runs undergraduate section leading/teaching assistants for the introductory CS classes there.

I’ve said many times that deciding to be a section leader was probably my best career decision ever — no exaggeration. It’s been instrumental in creating a ton of great leaders over nearly 3 decades now.

We’ve had a couple of other reunions over the past few years — they’ve been amazing to attend because there are just so many incredible and inspirational people who have gone through the program since its inception.

But this particular reunion was special for another reason: it was also a celebration of Eric Roberts, for many years the faculty sponsor of the program, and a huge driver of so much in the 25 years he’s been at Stanford. He’s retiring soon, and so we got to celebrate his many contributions.

6 of us got to offer a few thoughts on Eric’s time at Stanford — former University President John Hennessey, Wealthfront’s CEO Adam Nash, Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer, UCSD Assistant Professor Lilly Irani, current sponsor and Stanford professor Mehran Sahami, and me.

Anyway, it’s a humbling group to be part of (both the speaker set and the program more generally), and I was grateful and honored to have a chance to offer a few thoughts.

Here’s what I wrote (as per usual, about 50% different than what I actually said…):

I was never lucky enough to take a CS class from Eric, but I have to imagine the feeling I’ve got right now is a little bit like I would’ve felt turning in a Karel assignment. Excited & kind of nervous.

But really: this group — Stanford CS, and CS198 in particular — is probably the group of people I am most at home around and most comfortable with in the world. CS198 is the source of many of my longest and best friendships, and the source of my longest and most productive working relationships. And of course an awful lot of that was made possible by Eric. Just in case you think I’m exaggerating, I counted: 2 of my cofounders were section leaders; 5 out of our 7 first employees were section leaders. And 3 out of 12 of the companies I’ve invested in since I’ve been at Greylock. Plus: two of my groomsmen for my wedding. It’s no exaggeration when I say that deciding to be a section leader, and later getting the opportunity to be a coordinator — those are 2 of the most critical turning points of my life.

Looking back on things, I guess I actually got to Stanford in 1989 about a year before Eric came as an Associate Professor, when the also extraordinary Stuart Reges was building the foundations of CS198 — then we all went through the weirdness and dislocation when Stuart left Stanford — but I don’t know if anyone knew then just how lucky we were that Eric was already here, ready to build 198 into something essential and foundational to Stanford Computer Science and to Stanford University itself.

I applied and became a section leader right around the time Eric took over the program — Scott and Astro turned me down the first time I applied but things worked out on my second. Once I was in the program, I really, really loved it, and eventually applied to be coordinator. Didn’t get it — Sandy Nguyen did. Tried again 2 quarters later — nope! Felix got it. Just to be perfectly clear, Eric made the right call both times — Felix and Sandy were both amazing. Still, I loved the program and applied one more time, and still remember when Eric called me to offer me the coordinator job — I was over the moon, and loved every minute of my two quarters with Felix. My two quarters with Bryan Rollins were also fine.

Talking with Mehran, we figure that since Eric has run CS198, more than 25,000 students have gone through the 106s; and that well over a thousand people have been section leaders. And maybe a few dozen of us have been coordinators, although I’m pretty sure we each contributed more than our fair share of Eric’s gray hairs during our terms — or at least I’m pretty sure that Bryan and I did anyway. In a real way, Eric’s work has had an impact on virtually everything and everyone in our industry.

We’ve all learned so much from Eric along the way. About computer science for sure, but also how to find such joy in the science & the engineering, in the learning & teaching & communion of the group. The environment that Eric made possible is one that values students taking leadership and responsibility for the betterment of all. And Eric paid attention to and valued and contributed to diversity long before really anyone else was thinking about it, let alone doing something about it.

Beyond the computer science and beyond the classes, more than anything else, Eric helped create an environment and a community where each of us in it wanted to be as good as we could be, and we wanted everyone around us to be even better. He helped so many of us find our calling and our voice that it’s really hard to even get your head around.

As important as anything else: Eric helped to teach us meaningful, lasting self-efficacy: how to teach each other and learn from each other and value and rely on each other — something that lasts even now.

I am more than certain that CS198 has an incredibly bright future with Mehran at the helm — but I know, too, that we will miss Eric greatly. His intellect and enthusiasm and commitment and warmth and humanity are genuinely special. We’ll all miss him a lot, for sure, but this community of excellence that he helped create, and these relationships we all have together will persist for a very long time, and I just can’t really express how grateful I am for that gift.

Eric, thank you, and good luck with your next chapter.

My mom is visiting us this week and we were talking about machine learning and artificial intelligence — what it can do, what it probably can’t do, and implications. Because, you know, it’s 2016 and that’s what we talk about when we’re not talking about Donald Trump.

(For whatever it’s worth, I’m kind of burying the lede on this one — long windup to get my way to conclusions. Sorry!)

Anyway, I made an offhand comment to her that we’re in the very early days of this evolution — I wasn’t really talking about AI per se, but more just about how software is running more and more of our world, and that’s a phenomenon that’s likely to accelerate, and for a long time — and that as a consequence, there’s going to be an increasing supply & demand imbalance in software talent. We just don’t have enough talent to write all the systems that need to get written, and for the moment, that means that we’re getting profound concentrations of talent — especially in AI — at companies like Google, Facebook, Apple and others. I don’t really think that concentration of talent is a permanent state of affairs (and, in fact, my job is an explicit bet to the contrary), but it sure is true right now.

As we were talking about all this, something else I’ve been mulling over for awhile finally clicked in my head, and that’s the story of the picture at the top of this post — that’s a picture my dad took in Quitman, Georgia, where he grew up, of his grandfather Pappy’s cotton gin.

Here’s what my dad wrote recently about his recollections of the gin and his adventures in the 1950s:

Even cooler than the Texaco business, though, was the cotton gin. It was in a poor part of town, between the tobacco barns and the railroad. The cotton mill was in that part of town, too, but it had been closed for years by the time I was terrorizing Quitman.

Pappy let me spend a lot of time in the gin, and it was a source of endless fascination, maybe in part because of the danger. Farmers would bring their cotton to the gin in open wagons, pulled by trucks, horses or mules, or even tractors. During the peak of the ginning season (late summer, I think), wagons would be lined up way down the street waiting to get into the gin.

The gin could only take cotton from one wagon at a time, and I guess this was necessary because each farmer was paid by the weight of cotton ginned, and this must have been the way they knew who had which cotton. A gin worker stood in the wagon of cotton with a large (maybe 18” diameter) suction pipe and sucked up all of the cotton in each wagon. He’d move the pipe back and forth over the cotton in the wagon and also move it up and down. The cotton would go from there into the gin, to have the seeds removed then the other trash (hulls, stems, etc.) blown out, I think. The cotton fibers then were combed and cleaned over and over on giant rollers with combs over them, then sent to a giant press where they were made into bales which were probably 6 feet tall and maybe 4x4 at the base. They were stood on end because that’s how the press was oriented. The cotton would be blown into the press, which was a cage of strong vertical boards, and when it was filled, a pneumatic ram would compress the cotton, then rise back up. Then more cotton would be added until no more could be; it was compressed to its limit. There was a jute fabric wrapper, which was then somehow put around the bale, and metal straps were put around this and tightened. Then the pressure was released and the bale was pulled out onto the dock to be weighed and moved to the warehouse.

[caption id="attachment_1002" align="aligncenter" width="768"] Photo by Janko Ferlic[/caption]

He wrote more about it — but in these few paragraphs you can see how much Dad learned about how things work from Pappy and the gin (and other unrelated engineering explorations).

You can see, too, what an amazing system the cotton gin itself was, and how it changed the way people worked. The modern cotton gin was invented by Eli Whitney in 1793 (when George Washington was president!) more than 150 years before my dad got to explore Pappy’s.

When the cotton gin was invented, many people thought that it would reduce our new nation’s dependence on slavery by removing the painstaking work of separating the usable cotton from seeds, hulls, stems, etc.

But ironically, it resulted in the growth of slavery.

The gin could process cotton so efficiently that more cotton goods could be produced, and it turned out that there was massive latent demand for cotton goods. So while the robots did indeed reduce the reliance on slaves to do the finishing work, they also increased demand for cotton, which resulted in many more cotton fields, and many more slaves to tend them.

I don’t know enough history to know whether this was a core issue that led to our Civil War or just a contributing factor. Probably somewhere in between. But it took us more than 100 years to really process all the implications of just this one technology advance (and I think really you’d argue that we haven’t fully come to terms with them even today.)

So you see where I’m going with this.

Fast forward to our own era, and we’re working our way through software automation instead of cotton processing automation. And it seems obvious to me that as we’re making systems and processes easier and easier to automate, we’re also generating massive new previously latent demand for software driven systems.

I’m not arguing at all that this will result in anything like the growth of slavery in the first half of the 19th century — more that we’re in a time of profound change. And that worries over whether robots will take all our jobs I think will prove to be ultimately misplaced. I think that if you look not just at the cotton gin, but most technology automation advances what you’ll find is that the demand for labor nearly always increases.

So for my part, I’m not particularly worried that we’ll find ourselves in a world where there’s nothing to do.

But the jobs will surely change, and we’ll need to learn how to do different types of things in our schools. And our society will change. There will be winners & losers. There will be painful dislocations. There will be (more) clashes between technology & policy. It’ll take time for us to come to grips with these changes, and many people simply won’t ever adjust. The changes we’re going through are that fundamental and dislocating. There’ll be tone deaf Silicon Valley titans — same as ever. There’ll be tone deaf leaders in Sacramento and Washington and our governments — same as ever.

And those are the narratives that are prevalent now: thoughtless Ayn Randian libertarians in Silicon Valley versus inept and hopeless government.

But here’s the really good news: the narratives are interesting and handy, but I don’t think particularly representative of where we are and where we’re heading. Our industries and our government are not as homogeneous as the stories.

We’re learning how to talk about what’s happening — things like Tim O’Reilly’s WTF conference for example. And we’re learning how to govern in a technologically sophisticated way.

It’s happening at the federal level with the work of Megan Smith, our country’s CTO, and DJ Patil, Ed Felton and Alex Macgillivray, US Deputy CTOs, built on the excellent work of Todd Park and many others.

And also at the state and local level, pioneered by many, but notably by Jennifer Pahlka and others at Code for America.

Ultimately, like other transitions of magnitude, this is going to take us generations to really & truly sort out. But I’m encouraged by the fact that more people than ever are talking about what’s happening, and governing in new ways.

One of the things that I learned at Mozilla from Mitchell & Brendan & Chris & so many others is that we could make the world that we wanted. That meant first doing the hard thinking about what it was that we actually wanted. And then being intentional, debating and disagreeing but also building.

[caption id=“attachment_1003” align=“aligncenter” width=“768”] Photo by Carl Heyerdahl[/caption]

Anyhow, that’s my net: now is the time we are all experimenting with what software and technology and automation can do — and that means that now is also the time that we should start figuring out what we want the world to look like. But it’s all an election that’s less coherent, and harder to get a handle on than red states & blue states and electoral college math.

This election is taking place every single day in software, in laws, in our government, in how we live and how we consume and the choices we make. There’s no single Election Day, no single tally. It’s ongoing and constant, values embedded in the systems we build.

Make sure you vote.

I’m extremely happy to be able, finally, to talk about a product we’ve been quietly working on for more than two years: Ozlo.

I introduced Ozlo’s co-founders Charles Jolley and Mike Hanson to each other in 2013 when Mike was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence here at Greylock — coincidentally, the same year that mobile internet usage exceeded the PC.

What they noticed then, to paraphrase Louis CK, was that “…everything was amazing, and everybody was unhappy.”

Everything was amazing because the combination of smartphones and the global cloud meant that we had access to just about any information in the world, all the time.

But everyone was unhappy because we were still mostly searching for it like it was 1999.

We were typing tons of keywords into search boxes. Still sifting through lists of blue links. Still trying to find information embedded inside web documents instead of accessing it directly. As a result, we weren’t asking our phones some of the most basic & simplest questions — we’d all been trained only to ask things that we thought might be “Googlable.”

Mobile is different, and the interactions and questions and answers should be different, too. Our phones know a lot about where we are and what we’re doing. We’re only paying partial attention to them — we’re out in the world and distracted, not focused like with PCs. We mostly use our phones to communicate — not at all like traditional search engines. Above all, when we turn to our phones with questions, we want answers fast.

It seemed clear that there was an opportunity to build something more modern — higher signal for our mobile lives, much faster to get to information, but mostly just better able to answer the questions we actually have when we are out in the world, living our lives.

So Charles & Mike got started. They built Ozlo, which is launching today as an iOS app but will eventually have many more ways to interact with him. Ozlo lives on your phone and answers questions like, “Where can I find good coffee within walking distance?” Traditional search engines would struggle with a question like this. That’s a point that’s worth emphasizing — even in 2016, traditional search approaches aren’t great at answering basic human questions.

Here’s a post from Team Ozlo that shows you a a few things about how he works and what it can do today. At the moment, Ozlo knows about restaurants & foods — over time he’ll learn about more domains.

I’ve been using Ozlo for some time now, and watching him learn and improve nearly every day. I use him because he offers genuinely useful information just about every time, and because he does so very quickly — generally with just a tap or two, and often in less than a second. I haven’t really found anything else quite like it (and believe me, I’ve looked.)

I think it’s unique partly due to the design and partly due to the deep technology stack that Team Ozlo has built. The design stands out for me as the best example of a conversational interface that I can find. Ozlo’s not a command line bot; it’s deeper and richer. He’s also not pure text — or rather, he can be sometimes, but also will use more sophisticated UI elements when he’s able, like in this native app. Ozlo gets the back & forth exploration of a real conversation. He knows things about who I am and what I like. And his interactions are fast & fluid in a way that feels natural and native.

The technology stands out because the team has blended approaches from the worlds of search, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and even interactive fiction — it’s a full stack developed to build rich conversational experiences, and it shows.

We know that we’re still on the very early part of this journey — lots more to build, and lots more to teach Ozlo about over the coming months and years. So consider today’s product a down payment on the future — a system that’s useful now and will be more useful tomorrow & the next day & the next one after that.

They’re opening up a few thousand slots today on the beta list, so if you’re interested in using Ozlo and helping it learn, and being on the journey, head over to sign up at Ozlo.com.

On a very personal level, I’m extremely proud of Team Ozlo. Charles and Mike first set up shop in the Greylock offices and proceeded to build a first rate team of search, AI, language and design builders — no surprise since both Charles and Mike are exceptional in their ability to innovate and build complete systems from data & algorithms through to new types of user interfaces. I’ve known both Charles and Mike for years, and really love working with them and the Ozlo team.

Ozlo provides something new: a quick & easy way to have a conversation about the world around you, supported by an extremely deep technology stack. It’s hard to overstate how difficult it is to make something so challenging feel so simple, and it’s great to finally be able to share it with the world. (Or maybe not the whole world just yet, but, you know, lucky beta users — go sign up! 👊)

I’m just back from a family vacation in Washington, D.C. It’s one of my favorite places to visit, and always overwhelms me on a number of dimensions.

We went this spring for a few different reasons, but in large part because we thought it would be a good experience for our 10 year old son in the run up to the 2016 election.

Although, honestly, we booked the tickets well before the primary season became a raging dumpster fire. There’s a lot more to explain to a 10 year old than you’d really prefer this cycle, honestly.

Anyway. It was a good trip. One highlight for me was spending time in the Jefferson Memorial, a space that I love.

In the photo above, on the right you can see the immortal words from the Declaration of Independence, which Jefferson authored at the age of 33.

But I was happy to be reminded of another of his less well known quotes — on the left in the picture above:

“I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”

That’s a profound idea, especially from a founder: we’ll build things, and we’ll get some right and some wrong. But you learn and you evolve. You cannot stay the same.

Jefferson wrote these words in 1816, about a decade after he was president, and 40 years after writing the Declaration.

I find the political debates of 2016 so tiresome, and more than that, genuinely troubling. Originalism, conservatism, literalism.

Fine, okay: the work of our founders — and so many re-founders of our country over the centuries like Lincoln and MLK and countless others — was monumental, and much of it has stood the test of time.

But society progresses, and we learn, and we should evolve in turn.

And Thomas Jefferson knew that even 200 years ago.

Last year at Stanford University, Reid Hoffman, Allen Blue, Chris Yeh & I taught a class on entrepreneurship at Stanford called “Blitzscaling” — a strategy in which a company (most often technology companies here in San Francisco & Silicon Valley) pursues unusually high rates of growth in a way that’s tactically inefficient in terms of capital and other resources, but strategically essential to capitalizing on a large and attractive market opportunity.

The class went well, and included tons of amazing insights from guests like Eric Schmidt, Marissa Mayer, Reed Hastings and Sam Altman, plus many others.

So today we’re making the entire course content — all 20 class lectures — available via podcast on iTunes, SoundCloud, Pocket Casts, and Stitcher.

[embed]soundcloud.com/greylock-…[/embed]

“But wait!”, you think — it’s 2016 now — isn’t the era of crazy growth over? Aren’t we back to a more sober time?

The recent turmoil in the markets that has affected many technology companies — both public and private — may indeed lead some to conclude that the aggressive pursuit of growth needs be restricted to buoyant markets. But even today, those who choose to limit their pursuit of growth to favorable market conditions are forgoing potentially valuable opportunities.

The key nuance to keep in mind during these mixed market conditions is that a company’s rate of growth needs to be measured on a relative — rather than absolute — scale. In a rapidly growing market, a company that grows 100% per year might be losing share; during turbulent times, a company that grows 50% per year might be gaining enough share to achieve market dominance. You can successfully blitzscale in good times, and you can successfully blitzscale in bad times. But you can’t and probably shouldn’t blitzscale all the time.

Companies should adopt a strategy of blitzscaling when tackling a market in which becoming the first player to achieve scale confers strong and lasting competitive advantages. Blitzscaling is unlikely to prove successful if another company has already achieved the “first-scaler” advantage, or if the market itself doesn’t offer compelling sources of lasting competitive advantages, such as network effects. During the Dot Com era, both Amazon and Yahoo attempted frontal assaults on eBay’s auction business, but the network effects of eBay’s two-sided marketplace of buyers and sellers meant that its first scaler advantage was too strong to overcome — and so eBay dominated their important market for decades.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“4608”] Photo from energepic.com[/caption]

Lots of mistakes get made for sure — some companies believe they’re in a winner take all space when it turns out they’re in a commodity space — in which case blitzscaling is a disastrous strategy to employ.

Opportunity is the primary factor when considering whether to blitzscale. It is only after a company discovers an untapped and attractive market opportunity where being first to scale confers lasting competitive advantage that it should attempt to ascertain whether it has the ability to access or acquire the capital and talent necessary to support a sustained blitzscaling campaign.

During the depths of the Dot Com bust, Google followed the blitzscaling playbook by using a distribution deal with AOL to dramatically expand its AdWords business. The deal, first announced in May 2002, gave AOL an 85% share of the revenue generated by AOL searches powered by Google, with a guaranteed minimum of $150,000,000 per year. At the time, Google, had less than 1/10th that amount in the bank. This may have seemed risky, given that the NASDAQ had fallen nearly 80% from its high two years earlier, and it is precisely this perceived risk that probably allowed Google to outbid the incumbent providers, the publicly-traded Overture and Inktomi. Yet while both the revenue share and guarantee were highly aggressive, Google’s improved AdWords algorithms made the deal highly profitable for both parties, and the move allowed Google to increase its revenues from roughly $19 million pre-AOL in 2001 to $347 million post-AOL in 2003.

No one can say with certainty what 2016 and beyond will hold — but hopefully you’ll find as much wisdom from the guests in our Blitzscaling class as we have — incredible thoughtfulness on when to push on the accelerator and how.

Hope you enjoy the podcasts!

Though in-class participation of our blitzscaling course was limited to 100 students, we wanted to make the lectures accessible to anyone who wants to learn more about starting and rapidly scaling a tech company. In addition to the podcasts, here are other ways you can experience the class:

YouTube and SlideShare | Videos and Decks

Greylock Partners has uploaded all the blitzscaling class videos to our YouTube and SlideShare channels. On SlideShare, we also share the available decks from the class lectures.

 

Medium | Class Notes

Chris Yeh and Greylock’s Community Manager Chris McCann wrote summaries following each class, which can be found in Greylock’s Medium collection “Blitzscaling: Class Notes and Essays.”

Medium | Student Essays

If you’re interested in reading some student perspectives, we have another collection on Medium where class members submitted homework assignments mostly consisting of short posts reflecting on themes from the class. Some really great submissions here, which are worth a read.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been going back to some of the things we talked about during our Stanford CS183C class on blitzscaling last quarter — I think I’ll do a set of posts of the ~10 most interesting insights over the next few weeks.

But one observation occurred to me in the context of a different class that I’m teaching this quarter with Huggy Rao and Sujay Jaswa at the GSB — titled “Startup HR.”

We were talking about recruiting today, and had a guest speaker from Google’s excellent People Ops group talk about how Google has recruited and grown. I think it’s fairly clear at this point that Google is among the absolute best recruiting organizations in the world. But when our guest finished his talk and Huggy asked me what I thought, I said this: “Google is an AMAZING huge company. But it’s also a HUGE company. All the stuff that they can do now in recruiting — you literally can’t do any of it as a new startup.”

[A side point that we didn’t discuss: understanding how big organizations recruit is extremely useful in one way — it gives you a bunch of clues how to recruit competitively against them. :)]

That led us into a ton of productive discussion areas, but reminded me, too, to make a point that we tried to emphasize last quarter in CS183: technology companies scale very, very quickly — often growing 2–4x in employees each year. And so there are, literally, 5 orders of magnitude difference in employee scale between a 3 person startup and the 60,000 employees that Google has today. Humans aren’t really wired to understand that difference in scale, especially when it implies a much larger difference in organizational complexity (since the number of relationships in the limit is exponential).

What works at 1–10 might work for a while, but then totally break at 50 or 100. Technology companies nearly always go slowly for a while, and you convince yourself that you understand things. Then things start to work, and then you go very, very quickly. To make sense & survive any of it, you have to have a profoundly change-oriented approach. You have to understand that any process or organization will work for awhile, then it won’t. So you go in with a sense of intentionality and thinking about what you want your organization to do at any given stage, and you try to design to that, while keeping the wheels on the bus/wings on the plane through some chaotic times.

There’s a lot to be said for understanding what you want your organization to look like at scale — Google is an amazing ideal model — but it’s the 5, 4 & 3 orders of magnitude smaller decisions that put you into a position to play for the big.

I’ve been experimenting with using iOS for more and more of the work that I do lately — and for the past couple of weeks, have been trying to work mostly on an iPad Pro (but think the topic of hardware is a little orthogonal to the point I’m going to make here — will probably write on that in the future).

I’ve got a few reasons I’ve been trying this experiment. One reason is that I genuinely like using iOS, and the new split screen mode (yes, yes, very reminiscent of the one first developed by Microsoft for the Surface) makes it possible to use for most things. A more fundamental reason, though, is that I’ve felt for some time that for all but a small set of endeavors, windowed shell interfaces have not been serving us all that well.

We’re all extremely used to windowed systems now — stretching back to Xerox PARC of course, but also because we use them today for virtually all desktop systems — OS X, Linux, and of course the eponymous Windows.

They really have been workhorses, and revelations — the idea that you can have multiple applications running, see them all, drag & drop between them. And for a few types of work — coding especially, but also things like presentations & other types of creation where you’re pulling from a lot of different sources, especially from the web — they’ve been enabling.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“6016”] Photo by Lee Campbell[/caption]

But for most other tasks, they’re attention-diffusing — distracting for almost everything.

That sounds sort of strange to say, especially when I’m comparing it to a mobile OS that has notifications & messaging built in. But I think that the huge wins that come from not having a windowed system, with all the UX and attention baggage that comes along with window management — and the somewhat more natural integration of messaging at a fundamental level — may outweigh the challenges.

The proximal trigger for me was the sunsetting of Mailbox — not what I expected. But with the beta version of Mailbox for OS X, it felt like we had a good, unified mail experience that had first class support for native OS X, native iOS and native Android. Here’s why that’s important: e-mail is, still, my workhorse system that I spend a ton of time in — and using different clients on my different devices introduced some real cognitive load, I found. There are lots of amazing mail clients now for iOS — Outlook, Inbox, Spark & others. Not a ton for OS X. Lots of web mail clients, including Gmail & Inbox — but I find web mail pretty hard to love. Anyhow, what I found is that I liked working through my mail better on iOS (my iPad with a keyboard) using either Outlook or Inbox — way better than I liked taking care of it on my Mac.

iOS is decidedly not perfect — there are real issues. It’s pretty hard to pull stuff from sources like, you know, the web — without weird reliance on the camera roll — and because my iOS life is a mix of personal and work, the camera roll is a pretty weird place to have work show up in, amongst pictures of family, etc.

More generally, the inter application communication model is just overconstrained and underdeveloped. Even with split window, it’s a pain to use. Drag & drop not really implemented meaningfully. (And actually, even split window itself not implemented well for most apps, even setting aside fundamental issues like not being able to use 2 instances of the same app side by side (like, say, a web browser).) And lots of weird issues about the mix of keyboard and touch screen support.

And the situation with files is really not amazing— you have to use some weird mix of cloud storage — which almost by definition is split between iCloud, GDrive, Dropbox, etc etc. So it starts to feel a little like the explosion of messaging systems themselves, where you have to remember which substrate you had the conversation in to be able to find the files themselves. Ugh.

Not to mention that there’s just a ton of stuff that is awkward at best on iOS right now, and impossible at worst. It’s not quite workable for everything you want to do, not quite.

But I really, really do like the focus that comes from being in an OS without window management. I like writing better. I like doing e-mail better. I like reading better. And I like how integrated and fundamental messaging seems, compared to OS X.

The more I work, the more I value focus and intentionality — and leaving windowing systems behind seems like a pretty nice step forward (to the past) to me.

I’m a day late writing about this, but yesterday Figma launched their 1.0, which included multiplayer simultaneous editing. Evan’s got a post that describes what they’ve done in great detail — it’s worth reading every word — Evan’s posts generally are amazing like that.

I’m really excited about this launch (and judging by the responses we got yesterday and today, lots of other people are) — for a couple of different reasons.

First off, I love love love productivity software. We’re in an absolute golden age of software that helps us do things together. For the first time in 25 years, there’s a massive reinvention of how we create things together happening — really the first time since Office solidified into its (rough) current form in 1990 or so. From about 1990 to 2007, Microsoft held an absolute distribution advantage — because Windows was on virtually everyone’s computer (95%!), Office had an almost overwhelming bundling advantage. (Internet Explorer did as well, but for some different reasons, Firefox and then Chrome broke that stranglehold for the web in the 2nd half of the last decade.)

But in 2007 we got iPhones and Androids, and Office no longer had the overwhelming distribution advantage they did before — we were all reading and creating on new screens running iOS & Android.

That move to new platforms also came with a new human behaviors and expectations: real time notifications, messaging, auto-saving to the cloud, focus on content rather than files, and a desire/demand for apps designed to fit the way we were living and working, rather than fitting the way we work to the way apps worked. And so we’ve been the happy beneficiaries of completely new systems like Slack & Quip & many other modern ways to create.

In many ways, this orientation towards messaging and collaboration also mirrored the rise of open source and collaborative development, as more and more developers started using the systems and norms and tools of open source.

I think we’re going to see a long boom in productivity software, including some things that look completely different than we’ve ever seen, truly matched to the capabilities of mobile & cloud.

So of course Figma’s exciting to me as it’s very in line with those trends.

The second reason I’m excited about Figma’s launch is that interaction & interface design is very near & dear to my heart. Learning about design and HCI at Stanford changed my life — it moved me from focusing on computer architectures towards building things that humans wanted to use. And that led me to work at Apple and Mozilla and on many other adventures.

But design has stayed stubbornly isolated — it hasn’t undergone the same collaboration revolutions that software development and office productivity have gone through — it’s remained, basically, single player while the rest of the world has moved towards collaboration.

Some of that is intrinsic — designing, like coding, really, is an act of pure creation and constraints — of figuring out how to get artifact to match intent. And that very often takes place with just one human in the loop, at least for the critical parts of it.

But I think a more fundamental reason that design has been solo is simply that the tools have been solo — they haven’t embraced the concepts of asyncrhonous open source collaboration, or of syncrhonous messaging. A lot of the reason for that is that it’s legitimately difficult to build systems that allow this type of creation from many people who aren’t staring at the same screen. You needed robust cloud technology; you needed something like the web, and you needed something like GPUs that the web could use to make everything sing.

And you needed folks like Evan & Dylan and the Figma team to put it all together in an exceptionally ambitious technology package that builds on the very best design traditions of Adobe (and more recently Sketch), but also opens up new areas for both asynchronous and synchronous collaboration.

To my knowledge, there’s never been a system built quite like Figma.

I think for some people this will be an obviously interesting & exciting cliff to jump off. I think it’ll make other people uncomfortable, with images of design by committee and bosses looking over designers shoulders.

It will definitely mean we need to figure some new things out in terms of how we work together. But we figured it out in other areas — with tools like Slack & Github, with Quip & Google Docs. I have pretty high confidence that we’ll figure it out with Figma and design, too.

Our experience with Figma so far has been exactly that — that it’s shorted design feedback loops, that it’s productively gotten more people in each company understanding and appreciating design, and that it’s just helping make better products faster.

So that’s why I’m excited, and so proud of what the team at Figma has built.

Achievement unlocked: multiplayer design.

Lots and lots of fun days and learning ahead.