Blog

240 posts from 1996 to present • Page 3 of 10

2018

An Introduction to Internal Product Management

Apr 3, 201810 min read

aka "Building Great First Party Tools"...

A Skeptic’s Guide to Discourse

Feb 20, 201811 min read

It’s easier to give advice than to follow it! The below should be considered the bar I’d like to hold myself to, even if often I fall short of it…!...

2017

Reflection on Systems: Hype & Doubt

Dec 8, 20174 min read

It’s difficult to predict the future. More specifically, there is error in estimating the derivative of the economic value of a given technology over time. Errors in this estimation are underdamped and have poor impedance matching to true underlying...

Practice Interview Grading

Nov 8, 20171 min read

I gave a colleague a practice interview today. They asked me before we began to at the end say what I would have graded them and if I would recommend they be hired or not....

Apple Watch Series 3 Review

Oct 15, 20178 min read

This is my first time with an Apple Watch of any sort; my last smartwatch was a Pebble which was helpful but utilitarian. When I saw LTE connectivity from my wrist with built-in Siri capability, capacity to make phone calls apart from my phone and al...

On confusing position and velocity: process and risk in the corporation

Oct 4, 20178 min read

I have seen large and well-funded organizations use their social and monetary capital to acquire large and highly experienced teams. The great danger with this is the ensuing confidence of success. To visualize this linearly, that collective experien...

Consumer Tech: Failing to Innovate

Sep 26, 20174 min read

I’m feeling baffled. I’m on a three year old laptop with a two year old smartphone and a four year set top box hooked up to a six year old receiver and projector....

Medium and Message: Thoughts on Our Devices

Sep 16, 20175 min read

It was a generation ago that Marshall McLuhan noted that the medium was the message. It was very apt. Norman’s Design of Everyday Things gave further insight that objects are inherently good at helping us perform certain things and not good at perfor...

August Meditations

Aug 17, 20172 min read

Your heroes are more flawed than you realize, Your enemies, more noble....

Anatomy of a Malware Injection

Aug 10, 201721 min read

Today I got a number of pretty questionable “friend requests” from young females on Facebook with zero mutual friends and with very racy profile pics. Of course they were fake, but I was curious to safely explore what was at the bottom of the rabbit...

Tips on Fatherhood

May 1, 201711 min read

Stuff I wish I could have read about before becoming a dad....

2016

Acing Your Product Manager Interview

Dec 5, 201610 min read

I’m a Senior Product Manager at Google and was also a PM at Facebook. I’ve done over 100 product management interviews, shadowed PM hiring committees, and created a class called “The Path to PM: Learning if Product Management is Right for You” throug...

California 2016 Elections

Oct 14, 201610 min read

We voted! I love that I sit down with my wife Rebeccahttp://www.facebook.com/rebecca.lipon to go through our ballots and discuss together. We don’t agree on everything but having a counterparty to talk things through with is fabulous. Maybe we should...

California 2016 Fall Elections

Oct 14, 20169 min read

We voted! I love that I sit down with my wife Rebecca to go through our ballots and discuss together. We don’t agree on everything but having a counterparty to talk things through with is fabulous. Maybe we should have a “voting party” where everyone...

What I Think

Aug 18, 201625 min read

Many people seem broadly nervous to write about their own personal political platform stances which may be nuanced and not in alignment with any one party or candidate, instead preferring to stump for a party and candidate and re-share uncritical pro...

Clouseau: A Postmortem

Jul 26, 201610 min read

How I vetted and dumped a startup idea in ~20 hours and for under $1000....

The Mechanics of AngelList Syndicates

Jul 19, 201612 min read

for Investors & Startups, by David E. Weekly, written mid-2016...

Avoid LendingClub

Jul 18, 20161 min read

Summary: Don’t ever put money into LendingClub. You can invest in seconds but will spend years of your life trying to get it out, and the returns are unimpressive....

Equity compensation at several public companies like Google and Facebook is in the form of direct…

Jun 11, 20162 min read

Equity compensation at several public companies like Google and Facebook is in the form of direct stock grants, yes. Employees can sell these shares once vested on the public market for full retail value during either an open trading window following...

While this article correctly notes that a little negotiation at onboarding can result in…

Jun 10, 20162 min read

While this article correctly notes that a little negotiation at onboarding can result in significant gains, there are some serious errors in the suggested approach....

Silicon Valley, Startups, and Labor Pricing

May 18, 20164 min read

Looking back over the past twenty years here in Silicon Valley there have been some remarkable transformations in how knowledge worker labor has been priced....

Startups & Macro Markets

Feb 16, 20163 min read

I’ve had a number of folks ask me about the macro markets and if that should change their stance on angel investing or their startup. TL;DR: nope....

2015

Why The Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

Jun 13, 20153 min read

Mildly technical post about Internet performance in emerging markets....

#HackGenY Keynote

Jan 24, 201514 min read

Keynote speech given to kick off Hack Generation Y on January 24, 2015...

The Things I Like

Jan 17, 201512 min read

One of the benefits of aging is that we get to discover the products that we really like; we’ve had the chance to try out lots of different things and so we can be sure of our preferences. Life brings lots of petty satisfactions from sleeping on your...