Eddie Thomas

The Stoke Space team in Seattle has built a rocket company faster than many people can build software. Morgan Beller breaks down how this is helping them capture a huge opportunity: https://lnkd.in/gc5jv2-c 

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A clear articulation of Elon’s clearly stated direction at Tesla re/ working in the presence of one’s teammates in the office, on the factory floor, etc. It’s simply a matter of optimizing productivity, creativity and results, in my experience. That’s doesn’t mean there aren’t workable exceptions for some companies. It’s a choice. His choice is clear. My point? “choose carefully and wisely”. It’s really hard to push on this ime. It’s way harder to have the market put us out of business because someone else slept on the factory floor to drive results and we chose not to. 🙏🏼🇺🇸🚀 https://lnkd.in/gK8Xaven

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This is a cool project, and another example of the emerging "replace stateful storage with S3" trend. I do wonder at what point someone will package this sort of thing up into a FUSE filesystem to make it generally usable across existing services. Or maybe every service has unique enough needs that it's better to handle it custom each time. https://lnkd.in/etcVBfVf

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Hiring and working with excellent people is what makes starting a company so fun

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Anthrop\c Anthropic Claude for Android is here Today we’re announcing the Claude Android app. Now, you can use Claude anytime, anywhere on your Android device—for free across all plans including Pro and Teams. The app is designed with the following features:  Multi-platform support: Pick up and continue conversations with Claude across web, iOS, and Android apps  Vision capabilities: Take new pictures or upload files for real-time image analysis  Multilingual processing: Real-time language translation to help communicate or translate aspects of the world around you Advanced reasoning: Claude can help you tackle complex problems, like analyzing contracts while traveling or conducting market research to prepare for a meeting Among many other things, Claude can help you solve problems and make decisions in real time, provide creative inspiration and support productivity on the go. Whether you're drafting a business proposal between meetings, translating menus while traveling, brainstorming gift ideas while shopping, or composing a speech while waiting for a flight, Claude is ready to assist you. To download the Android app, find us on Google Play. Don’t have an Android device? Claude is also available on iOS through the App Store. —The Anthropic team

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Is this the end of embeddings? Hear from Josh and Tashrish on the pros and cons of using embeddings-based RAG for document data extraction and our experiments with switching to completions-only RAG.

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Polls can be a cheat code for earned media, and a great way to build authority. But there are levels to this. Here's how one of the best I've seen - Capital One - does it. (And what I'd do differently to increase earned coverage). Led by Shena Ashley, PhD, Capital One's Insights Center is a masterclass in leveraging polls to create unique insights that would do incredibly well via earned syndication. Here’s what they do great: ✅ Content that sticks: Crucial issues > fleeting trends. Focusing on topics like financial stability, mobility, and entrepreneurship, it's easier to rationalize investment on topics with a longer shelf life. Their insights + stories can drive coverage for months to come. ✅ Visual storytelling: Data doesn’t have to be dry, and Capital One presents original insights through clear and eye-pleasing visuals that are easy to understand. Publishers like charts, they love colorful charts, and they LOVE colorful charts that are easy to understand. Check, check, check. ✅ Strong methodologies and extensive polling numbers: Capital One frequently involves 7k+ participants in their studies - they are not half a**ing it. Well explained methodologies are table stakes to get your polls covered, and Capital One does a great job outlining their data collection process, sample size, and research methodologies.   ✅ Easy to steal: Each report has multiple easy to take stories/soundbites, and are also written as full pieces of content, which can be taken as whole. Finally --- if I could change one thing... Add a byline. Brand publishing NEEDS a byline - no news outlet wants to cover a story that can't be credited back to a human. All in all, polls can be incredibly valuable for driving earned syndication - check out Capital One's Insights Center in comments for killer examples.

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#p99conf is next week, 10/23-24, and the lineup is 🔥! One talk you cannot miss is Mike's, with the classic Stonebrakerism title "𝐘𝐨𝐮'𝐫𝐞 𝐃𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐈𝐭 𝐀𝐥𝐥 𝐖𝐫𝐨𝐧𝐠". Mike will discuss how to save an order of magnitude in development cost and run an order of magnitude faster, especially for data-oriented, service-oriented applications. Spoiler alert, the answer is to use a database 🙊. Don't miss out!

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Velt (YC W22)'s engineering team has been very hard at work. They created so many features this week and as a result our weekly release notes video is going to be a bit longer than usual! Features we added this week include: - option to disable ShadowDOM - method to unsubscribe from subscriptions - notifications for users joining and creating Huddles - validation checks for audio and video permissions on Huddles - option to disable chat feature on Huddles - option to disable flock mode feature on Huddles - support to set the order of locations in the sidebar filter - configurations for the unread comments indicator - new React hook for unsetting the document ID - an option to use a specific version of the React SDK #buildinpublic #releasenotes #sdk

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"Monetization must be a first-class citizen in your product from Day 1 & if you're not thinking about entitlements early on, you're not setting yourself up for success." -- Justin Gagnon Justin leads growth engineering at Calendly, which means he's built & evolved monetization in the context of both hyper-growth & scale. We sat down last week for a conversation about feature management, monetization, and the services needed to deliver flexible pricing & packaging at scale. Some of the topics we covered: 1️⃣ Why monetization is so complex in B2B SaaS 2️⃣ The role of entitlements 3️⃣ Paying down bad product decisions vs. bad monetization decisions 4️⃣ How Justin & team built monetization infrastructure at Calendly 5️⃣ The tech & commercial debt that comes when monetization is a last-class citizen If you're a product & engineering leader, I highly recommend this episode with Justin. Schematic has learned much from him over the last year and so very excited to share the full episode (link in the comments).

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🚀 New Drop: "Spotlight"! Coming to you on July 15th! 🌟 What if your marketing data could automatically help refine your audience targeting? That’s "Spotlight" for you—launching July 15th. It takes your first-party data, like website interactions and campaign metrics, and turns them into a powerhouse for re-targeting. 🎯 📹 Dive into our video to discover how "Spotlight" can enhance your ad game. Time to turn up your marketing vibe! Link to schedule a demo is in the comment  #Metadata-Spotlight #AdMagic #MakeItCount

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In November, we released a new product for SaaS companies called Census Embedded – it lets you embed our 200+ integrations directly into your application with a world-class API. We made our battle-tested connectors accessible to any developer. Since then we've helped companies like S&P Global, Metronome & Labelbox add these integrations to ingest/export billions of records. Today, we're making it easier than ever to implement with Embeddable Components. If the v1 was like Stripe's API, this launch is Stripe Checkout/Elements. Developing integrations is challenging because each API has varying requirements – different required fields, nuanced sequences of API calls, weird combos of CRUD operations, and more. We've spent years perfecting the transfer of data between 30+ data sources and 200+ destinations. We’ve solved scalability, reliability, observability, and UI quirks too! We’ve developed a sync and data mapping UI that accounts for the quirks in all 6,000+ combinations of those sources and destinations. Embeddable Components save you the hassle of reinventing the wheel in your own app. Offer your end users full customization of their data synchronization into and out of your app (or thoughtfully constrain those options).

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On this Tech Tuesday we're talking testing SDKs. Whether you're building SDKs or consuming SDKs someone else built, here are the topics to consider and ask your SDK vendor about.

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"Probably the worst decision that I made as CEO of Loudcloud was to take ona. 10-year lease with a $30M letter of credit. We leased the space right before the dot-com crash. Rents dropped 10-fold in Menlo Park... worse yet, due to the recession, we couldn't hire so the space we already had was sufficient and we never ended up moving into the new building. So I basically lost $30M for nothing." This is from Ben Horowitz's recent interview with Big Think. Even a quarter century ago the typical office lease construct is misaligned with how a company needs to operate. Our industry could get away with this when office spaces had a monopoly on how and where work got done, but those days are dead. As global markets are crashing, we'll be looking at another disruptive cycle for businesses which will create more cost cutting pressure and the first thing to go when they roll will be inflexible leases. CRE needs to develop new offerings and fast. https://lnkd.in/ePuZgzkU

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“The vast majority of failure modes are attempting to polish something that shouldn’t have existed in the first place.” Linear has been releasing a cool video series on quality and I think today’s chat with Jeff Weinstein was my favorite. I pulled out snippets, all of which make me question certain aspects of Inari (YC S23), for working on the right problems, interpreting demand signals, and how to identify burning problems. 1️⃣ On whether the problem you’re working on is worth working on: “If there’s a problem that’s big enough that they’re going to block their whole day to solve - that gets me excited. How do we find problems that are big enough that you'd cancel the rest of your day to solve? If you can find one of those problems then it’s worth devoting huge amounts of energy to solving it. This is a Stripe example but imagine lots of people from Switzerland are visiting your site to buy your product and none of them can checkout. Well you might actually cancel the rest of your day. “Oh my goodness, we ran this campaign and we can't accept the money from all these new Swiss customers.” Clear my schedule!" 2️⃣ On interpreting demand signals for your product: “It wasn’t until a year later I realized how much I missed the message. While our app was down, customers weren’t screaming. They weren’t flipping tables over saying we need this service back. We got a couple emails and a text message from a friend that it’s down. One of the strongest moments I should have realized that we weren't solving a burning enough pain was if something is actually critical, the second it’s down, you will drive to the service and bang on the door and say that we need this back up.” 3️⃣ On working with customers directly + identifying problems: “It’s getting in the doc with a customer directly and writing out “hey if we had the API work like X, Y, and Z with these kinds of responses - would that work? And the customer immediately commenting saying “nope it wouldn’t work - I need it exactly like 1, 2, and 3”. This is in comparison to doing 10 months of work, a big product launch, then going to the customer and the customer is kinda scratching their head saying “I wish you had asked me earlier…” “Usually if you’re working on something that’s not burning for that audience, it’s inorganic because the problem isn’t big enough that it’s pulling you. You’re pushing your solution. You’re pitching and it’s exhausting to pitch since it doesn’t feel natural. When I find myself switching to “hey wouldn’t it be great if we did X, Y, and Z” and the customers is like “not really”, I’m like "oh shoot I’m pitching again" when I should just be listening.” “You can usually get a sense of when you’re building something and if it’s going to resonate and solve their problem. It’s little things like how quickly they email you back. When you schedule the meeting for 30 and instead they want it to for 60. They text you late at night with ideas. Or they want to join your team.”

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Sup fam!! Relationships are everything!! They're the core of your engineering platform. Your team's design docs, software patterns, pull requests, and GitOps workflows all need to pass through a complex network of relationships before becoming meaningful to stakeholders. Before that, they're just bytes sitting on Jeff Bezos' disks. How are your relationships doing? Which relationships need some light touching up? Which ones need some serious investment? How about that one person on that one team? How about on _your_ team? Are you tracking these gaps with the same effectiveness you're tracking tech debt? It takes an intentional effort to build meaningful connections and to show peers you're a stakeholder in _their_ success. It's worth your time -- not to mention you'll feel great!! Want to optimize your engineering platform? Start by investing in your relationships!

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🚀 I’m feeling a bit anxious about progress, so on a whim, I decided to start building initial versions of Asbu AI to give our contractors and future team members a clear vision of what we’re creating. (👀 Interested in joining #TeamAsbu? Check out our informational site at https://asbu.app—roles open in January-February!) I couldn’t help but get excited looking at our initial mockups, and I want to see some of our planned key features in action. Some of this functionality will be rolled out for preview within the coming weeks, while other elements will stay private until release. 💡 As a bonus, having something tangible will make it easier for #VentureCapital firms—and more importantly, our future users—to understand what we’re building. With a $150,000 pre-seed round in the works (which may even close higher), #TeamAsbu is gearing up to operate at blistering speed. Building now ensures we hit the ground running with a head start. We’ll be working through the night—and the next few days—to get this out. Stay tuned for more updates. 🙌 Happy holidays, and remember: Watch your spending… or you may need Asbu next year 😉.

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