Douglas Qian
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on the atlas · 31
- Child’s Play, by Sam Kriss75 savers
- Kira (Hindsight Capital) on X: "The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis That Wasn't A Macro Memo from the Actual June 2028, Not the Fanfic Version The unemployment rate printed 3.8% this morning, roughly where it's been all year. The market yawned. The S&P 500 is at 7,400, which is somehow both a record high and a" / X1 savers
- Government Energy Spending Tracker – Analysis - IEA1 savers
- Baby It’s Cold Inside - Treehouse Christmas Carol - Google Docs1 savers
- chore(deps): bump aiohttp from 3.8.4 to 3.9.0 in /lambdas/ocr_post_processing by dependabot[bot] · Pull Request #903 · spiralsprotocol/streamline1 savers
- feat(editor): Add AI Bullet Point Blocks by EricHasegawa · Pull Request #524 · spiralsprotocol/streamline1 savers
- The 2023 comprehensive guide to clean energy transferable tax credits1 savers
- Nadia Asparouhova | Mapping out the tribes of climate37 savers
- fix(general): Fix issues causing command line noise by EricHasegawa · Pull Request #477 · spiralsprotocol/streamline1 savers
- auth(migration) pt 1c: create `organization_users` for all cases by douglasqian · Pull Request #452 · spiralsprotocol/streamline1 savers
- Why you need to worry about the ‘wet-bulb temperature’ | Climate science | The Guardian1 savers
- Why San Francisco Can’t Be Fixed – Eye on SF1 savers
- Should SF stop building housing? – Eye on SF1 savers
- How Unions Prevent Affordable Housing In San Francisco – Eye on SF1 savers
- Four Reasons to Hate SF Rent Control – Eye on SF2 savers
- Settings - Settings and Privacy — Mailtrack1 savers
- Google Keep1 savers
- Ways to Win in Climate Software #9: "You Never Get Fired for Buying IBM"1 savers
- Ways to Win in Climate Software #10: When SaaS Metrics Fail in Climate Tech1 savers
- The SaaS Adventure | TechCrunch1 savers
- How to Work Hard22 savers
- Having Kids3 savers
- How to Start a Startup15 savers
- Hire people who give a shit. - by Alexandr Wang10 savers
- Frameworks for Hiring - Erik Torenberg1 savers
- Zachary Perret on Twitter: "Someone asked how we hire at Plaid recently, and it reminded me of some tenets we wrote early-on: - Slope is more important than Y-axis - Everyone owns the product - Hire for spikes, not lack of weakness - Have them teach you something interesting - Did they read the docs?" / Twitter1 savers
- How Firebase Interviewed Software Engineers • Andrew's Blog1 savers
- The biggest bottleneck for large language model startups is UX | by Davis Treybig | Innovation Endeavors | Nov, 2022 | Medium3 savers
- How to hire - Sam Altman12 savers
- Patrick Collison – Lecture 11: Company Culture and Building a Team, Part II | Genius1 savers
- Not All Vector Databases Are Made Equal | by Dmitry Kan | Towards Data Science3 savers
highlights · 72
“I’m like Roy. I’m like Trump. We have the same swaggering energy. There is a kind of source code underlying reality, and this is what we understand. Your words have to have wings. Roy and I both know that social media is the last remaining outlet for self-creation and artistry. That’s what you have to understand about zoomers: we’re agents of chaos. We want to destroy the whole world.” Did Donald consider himself to be highly agentic? “We need to ban the word ‘agency.’ I’m a dog.”
Child’s Play, by Sam KrissAn AI might be able to code faster than you, but there is one advantage that humans still have. It’s called agency, or being highly agentic. The highly agentic are people who just do things. They don’t timidly wait for permission or consensus; they drive like bulldozers through whatever’s in their way. When they see something that could be changed in the world, they don’t write a lengthy critique—they change it. AIs are not capable of accessing whatever unpleasant childhood experience it is that gives you this hunger. Agency is now the most valuable commodity in Silicon Valley.
Child’s Play, by Sam KrissIn short, they modeled the economy as a physics problem and forgot it's a biological one. Systems adapt. Humans are stubborn. Institutions are slow but not dead. And the most powerful force in the American economy is not artificial intelligence. It's inertia.
Kira (Hindsight Capital) on X: "The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis That Wasn't A Macro Memo from the Actual June 2028, Not the Fanfic Version The unemployment rate printed 3.8% this morning, roughly where it's been all year. The market yawned. The S&P 500 is at 7,400, which is somehow both a record high and a" / XIt turns out that the same cost arbitrage that made Indian developers attractive for manual coding also makes Indian firms attractive for AI implementation, training, and management.
Kira (Hindsight Capital) on X: "The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis That Wasn't A Macro Memo from the Actual June 2028, Not the Fanfic Version The unemployment rate printed 3.8% this morning, roughly where it's been all year. The market yawned. The S&P 500 is at 7,400, which is somehow both a record high and a" / XThe negative feedback loop had a natural brake, and its name was liability.
Kira (Hindsight Capital) on X: "The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis That Wasn't A Macro Memo from the Actual June 2028, Not the Fanfic Version The unemployment rate printed 3.8% this morning, roughly where it's been all year. The market yawned. The S&P 500 is at 7,400, which is somehow both a record high and a" / XBut the "fire everyone, let the robots handle it" thesis ran directly into the wall of "the robots are confidently wrong 3% of the time and that 3% is extremely expensive."
Kira (Hindsight Capital) on X: "The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis That Wasn't A Macro Memo from the Actual June 2028, Not the Fanfic Version The unemployment rate printed 3.8% this morning, roughly where it's been all year. The market yawned. The S&P 500 is at 7,400, which is somehow both a record high and a" / XA new class of "AI operations" roles emerged — not the fake "prompt engineer" jobs from 2023, but genuine systems integration, agent orchestration, and reliability engineering roles.
Kira (Hindsight Capital) on X: "The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis That Wasn't A Macro Memo from the Actual June 2028, Not the Fanfic Version The unemployment rate printed 3.8% this morning, roughly where it's been all year. The market yawned. The S&P 500 is at 7,400, which is somehow both a record high and a" / Xhe fastest-growing job categories of 2027-2028 were things nobody predicted: AI output auditors, "authenticity consultants" for brands that wanted to prove their content was human-made, in-person experience designers (turns out when everything digital gets commoditized, people pay more for analog), and — our personal favorite — professional "vibe curators" for corporate events, which is just party planning with a $300/hour rate and a LinkedIn title.
Kira (Hindsight Capital) on X: "The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis That Wasn't A Macro Memo from the Actual June 2028, Not the Fanfic Version The unemployment rate printed 3.8% this morning, roughly where it's been all year. The market yawned. The S&P 500 is at 7,400, which is somehow both a record high and a" / XPeople don't want the cheapest flight. They want the one that doesn't leave at 5am. We knew this. We have always known this. We briefly forgot because a Substack told us machines would make us rational.
Kira (Hindsight Capital) on X: "The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis That Wasn't A Macro Memo from the Actual June 2028, Not the Fanfic Version The unemployment rate printed 3.8% this morning, roughly where it's been all year. The market yawned. The S&P 500 is at 7,400, which is somehow both a record high and a" / XThe median consumer's agent spent more tokens trying to cancel a $9.99/month meditation app than the consumer had spent meditating in the entire previous year.
Kira (Hindsight Capital) on X: "The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis That Wasn't A Macro Memo from the Actual June 2028, Not the Fanfic Version The unemployment rate printed 3.8% this morning, roughly where it's been all year. The market yawned. The S&P 500 is at 7,400, which is somehow both a record high and a" / XThe difference was that back then, nobody did it because maintaining software is horrible, and in 2026, nobody did it because maintaining software is still horrible.
Kira (Hindsight Capital) on X: "The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis That Wasn't A Macro Memo from the Actual June 2028, Not the Fanfic Version The unemployment rate printed 3.8% this morning, roughly where it's been all year. The market yawned. The S&P 500 is at 7,400, which is somehow both a record high and a" / XMany of these packages are designed as direct responses to the United States’ Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which still represents almost one-quarter of all clean energy support globally since 2020.
Government Energy Spending Tracker – Analysis - IEAThe IRA entitles the tax credit buyer to carry the TTC forward for 22 years and back for three years, meaning that the buyer has up to 22 years of future tax filings to utilize the full value of the credit, and can also carry the tax credit back and apply it to previous years, as far as three years in the past. The carryback is not as simple as applying the credit to the previous year’s return, however. Unused tax credits must first be applied to the earliest tax year in the carryback period, which is three years before the current tax year. Any unused tax savings can then be allocated to the …
The 2023 comprehensive guide to clean energy transferable tax creditsDoomer industries, on the other hand, can attract high-quality talent because they are adjacent to some underlying commercial opportunity that either makes it possible to get paid well, or attracts the overflow from workers who already made money in the adjacent field and are now in the “second act” of their careers.
Nadia Asparouhova | Mapping out the tribes of climateFrom a historical perspective, then, someone like Shellenberger might say that the reason we have doomer industries is because, in a secularized world of comparative peace and prosperity, it fills the role of some primal human need for community. Preventing a doomsday scenario is a way to feel connected to millions of other people, all working towards the same purpose, just as previous generations once felt in rallying around war efforts, or the race to beat the Soviets. Environmentalism is a rare natural fit for this topic compared to other cause areas, because the environment affects everyon…
Nadia Asparouhova | Mapping out the tribes of climateConcern often centres on the “threshold” or “critical” WBT for humans, the point at which a healthy person could survive for only six hours. This is usually considered to be 35C, approximately equivalent to an air temperature of 40C with a relative humidity of 75%. (At the UK’s 19 July peak temperature, relative humidity was approximately 25% and the wet-bulb temperature about 25C.)
Why you need to worry about the ‘wet-bulb temperature’ | Climate science | The GuardianThe City – your tax dollars – owns the taxi industry at this point. It will spend a stunning $39,300,000 on taxi services in 2021, up from $32,300,000 just 3 years before, according to the newest SFMTA budget:
Why San Francisco Can’t Be Fixed – Eye on SFNot only does the legacy business get $500 per employee per year of city funds, the landlord that leases space to them gets a payoff of $4.50 per square foot. According to the city, 7,500 businesses qualify for the subsidy, not including their landlords. Imagine running for city office on a platform to end this graft. Your opponent is sure to be flooded with votes and donations from those who benefit.
Why San Francisco Can’t Be Fixed – Eye on SFIt’s a stretch to say SF owns the local print media, but it’s less of a stretch every year. Since 1994, the city has allocated money for ads to newspapers around the city. This was only a small portion of a paper’s revenue during the glory days of print media, but with the decline of subscriptions and other ad revenue, city money has become increasingly important.
Why San Francisco Can’t Be Fixed – Eye on SFLand costs are obvious – you can get an acre of land in rural America for $2,000, while a single MacDonald’s parking lot in SF costs $11,500,000.
Should SF stop building housing? – Eye on SFFor another example, listen to Michael Cheng, who, in 2017, was building a high rise in San Jose. The total cost of the building, without high end finishes, was $80M. Building somewhere less expensive than San Jose might decrease labor costs by $20-30M, but building in San Francisco would increase them by the same amount. So an $80M San Jose building would cost as little as $50M to construct in a less expensive area, and at least double that in SF, mainly due to labor.
How Unions Prevent Affordable Housing In San Francisco – Eye on SFWell, jobs at fair wages certainly are. But, arguably, unions have taken wages far beyond fair here. For example, a New York Times article titled “Why Does It Cost $750,000 to Build Affordable Housing in San Francisco?“, found that construction workers here earn $90 per hour – $200k/year with a little overtime. That’s about the same as the average physician.
How Unions Prevent Affordable Housing In San Francisco – Eye on SFRent control locks an existing population in place. That’s the whole point – kindly grandmothers won’t be “displaced” by young tech workers moving in and increasing rents. Protecting certain groups, like low income seniors, from dramatic rent increases might be a good thing. Even some conservative states place limits on property tax increases for the elderly, for example. But there’s a dark side to distorting rents in favor of those who’ve been there the longest, versus those who best fit the city. Urban areas grow in spurts, in unexpected ways, and their population has to flex as well.
Four Reasons to Hate SF Rent Control – Eye on SFApartments with more than one bedroom often have a master tenant, and sub-tenants who have no direct relationship with the landlord. By law, the master tenant must charge the sub-tenants proportional rent. In practice, when sub-tenants leave and new ones come in over the years, master tenants increase the rents, eventually living rent free in some cases. When the master tenant leaves, a sub-tenant can then often take over as master, continuing the cycle. SF is full of master tenant abuse:
Four Reasons to Hate SF Rent Control – Eye on SFSo, naturally, some landlords take units off the market rather than risk a failing business, using that space in other ways. The most famous study on SFRC was done by three Stanford economists in 2010. They concluded: In sum, we find that impacted landlords reduced the supply of available rental housing by 15 percent. Consistent with this evidence, we find that there was a 20 percent decline in the number of renters living in impacted buildings, relative to 1990-1994 levels, and a 30 percent decline in the number of renters living in units protected by rent control.
Four Reasons to Hate SF Rent Control – Eye on SFTrusted technology partners like IBM, Accenture and Mckinsey have established business development relationships with economic buyers and, critically, speak the language of their customers. They frame technological innovation in customer verbiage, rather than tech buzzwords, and with a customer business case in mind. Deep understanding of industry context and customer value are essential in climate software but can be challenging to tap into with sales development reps and account executives trained in more traditional SaaS selling.
Ways to Win in Climate Software #9: "You Never Get Fired for Buying IBM"The Energize team strongly believes that climate software startups adopting an effective partnership strategy can tap into a “super lever” to increase their go-to-market efficiency. Partners can help climate software companies play bigger: enhancing brand awareness, increasing customer credibility, refining product specifications, streamlining sales and gaining access to an essential distribution channel when selling into the climate software buyer base. If done well, a small operating expenditure (OpEx) input can provide leverage for a large annual recurring revenue (ARR) output.
Ways to Win in Climate Software #9: "You Never Get Fired for Buying IBM"We often see climate software companies that are incredibly capital efficient when measured by traditional efficiency ratios like burn multiple or cash conversion score.
Ways to Win in Climate Software #10: When SaaS Metrics Fail in Climate TechHowever, it is important not to overemphasize capital efficiency in the early days (pre-Series A), or you might sacrifice the product lead you are building.
Ways to Win in Climate Software #10: When SaaS Metrics Fail in Climate TechOnce climate software is embraced by executives, it is often copied and pasted across business units. Because the software usually runs mission-critical processes that are tied to the buyer’s license to operate, climate software often becomes entrenched within the buyer’s operations. For example, many solar companies are building their entire sales and engineering workflow on Aurora Solar
Ways to Win in Climate Software #10: When SaaS Metrics Fail in Climate TechMany climate software adopters are buying software in that category for the first time. Holding their hand through the implementation process is often a requirement, not a “nice to have.” Lengthy implementation services lead to a higher cost of goods sold, dragging down gross margin. However, long implementation cycles can increase product stickiness by ensuring the software is set up for success and engrained in daily workflows. Later in this series, we’ll unpack why we advise founders to invest in customer success early, and why we dissuade them from pursuing purely software subscription rev…
Ways to Win in Climate Software #10: When SaaS Metrics Fail in Climate TechClimate software gross margins are typically 60 to 80 percent, versus the 80-plus percent target typical for traditional software. Why? A few contributors we see regularly are lower margin implementation and services revenue streams, customer success headcount that should be tagged to Cost of Goods Sold (COGS), and computationally-intensive cloud hosting costs. We think slightly lower gross margins are a feature, not a bug, of building lasting, high lifetime value (LTV) customer relationships.
Ways to Win in Climate Software #10: When SaaS Metrics Fail in Climate TechThe best climate SaaS businesses prioritize capital efficiency and only lean into burn when the market has materialized around them.
Ways to Win in Climate Software #10: When SaaS Metrics Fail in Climate TechIt is critical for climate software entrepreneurs to avoid ramping up sales and marketing expenditures to compress sales cycles that simply will not comply. As we’ll cover later in this series, we have seen climate software companies ramp up sales and marketing too aggressively time and time again, burning a significant amount of capital without capturing ARR conversion.
Ways to Win in Climate Software #10: When SaaS Metrics Fail in Climate TechBased on our team’s experience, we propose the following benchmarks for a typical Series B climate software company:
Ways to Win in Climate Software #10: When SaaS Metrics Fail in Climate TechThis can be difficult for a founder/CEO, as he or she is now three levels removed from the actual people selling the product. But at the same time, a founder/CEO can really grow during this phase, transitioning to thinking about cultivating new managers and landing really large accounts. The magic moment is when deals start closing that no founder was actively involved in pitching/closing. The seeds for massive scalability are planted here. In my experience, successfully adding a second layer of sales management is one of the most difficult milestones for SaaS companies.
The SaaS Adventure | TechCrunchThe only way to find the limit is by crossing it. Cultivate a sensitivity to the quality of the work you're doing, and then you'll notice if it decreases because you're working too hard. Honesty is critical here, in both directions: you have to notice when you're being lazy, but also when you're working too hard. And if you think there's something admirable about working too hard, get that idea out of your head. You're not merely getting worse results, but getting them because you're showing off — if not to other people, then to yourself. [6]
How to Work HardThe fact is, most of the freedom I had before kids, I never used. I paid for it in loneliness, but I never used it.
Having KidsKids have schedules. I'm not sure if it's because that's how kids are, or because it's the only way to integrate their lives with adults', but once you have kids, you tend to have to work on their schedule
Having KidsPeople don't talk about these much — the magic is hard to put into words, and all other parents know about them anyway — but one of the great things about having kids is that there are so many times when you feel there is nowhere else you'd rather be, and nothing else you'd rather be doing. You don't have to be doing anything special. You could just be going somewhere together, or putting them to bed, or pushing them on the swings at the park. But you wouldn't trade these moments for anything. One doesn't tend to associate kids with peace, but that's what you feel. You don't need to look any f…
Having KidsWhen nerds are unbearable it's usually because they're trying too hard to seem smart. But the smarter they are, the less pressure they feel to act smart. So as a rule you can recognize genuinely smart people by their ability to say things like "I don't know," "Maybe you're right," and "I don't understand x well enough."
How to Start a StartupIf you think about people you know, you'll find the animal test is easy to apply. Call the person's image to mind and imagine the sentence "so-and-so is an animal." If you laugh, they're not. You don't need or perhaps even want this quality in big companies, but you need it in a startup.
How to Start a StartupWhat do I mean by good people? One of the best tricks I learned during our startup was a rule for deciding who to hire. Could you describe the person as an animal? It might be hard to translate that into another language, but I think everyone in the US knows what it means. It means someone who takes their work a little too seriously; someone who does what they do so well that they pass right through professional and cross over into obsessive.
How to Start a StartupI have a particular line of questioning around this: What’s the hardest you’ve ever worked on something? How many hours were you working a week? Why did you work so hard? Why did you care? When were you the most unmotivated in your life? What’s the thing you’re the most proud of? Do you think it was worth it? For an obsessed person, it’s always worth it.
Hire people who give a shit. - by Alexandr WangRecruiting done right looks more like courtship. You need there to be a spark, and sometimes that is preceded by months of convincing and pursuit. Ultimately, you’re searching for people you’d be willing to spend every waking moment with, since if things go right, there will be many long nights.
Hire people who give a shit. - by Alexandr WangBut as we’ve grown and will continue to grow, it will be more common for people to interview for the brand rather than the substance. In fact, most growing companies often miss this effect entirely, and simply observe the fact they’re getting far more top-of-funnel. It makes it much easier to recruit raw numbers, but what often is missed is that the ROI of the hires drops dramatically. Before you know it, the majority of the company begins to resemble a university: there’s a constant churn of smart but uninvolved people who stay for a few years, and never dive deep enough to do meaningful work…
Hire people who give a shit. - by Alexandr WangHigh slope & learning velocity Drive & grit Bias to action High integrity & low ego Intellectually Curious Long-term oriented Micro-pessimist, Macro-optimist:
Frameworks for Hiring - Erik TorenbergYour rule of thumb should be as follows: Value protecting role? Hire for slope Value creating roles? Hire for experience
Frameworks for Hiring - Erik TorenbergBut don’t make the mistake of hiring a recruiter from FB/Google and expecting the same output. You want to find someone who can sell a company with no brand and less pay — it’s easy to sell ice cream, but hard to sell a cold hot dog.
Frameworks for Hiring - Erik TorenbergOne way to make sourcing easier is to sell managers on the benefits of knowing how to do their own sourcing. The best leaders build communities and organizations with a common vision, and if you can incentivize your own team to source new candidates, you’re one step closer to building a tight knit team. Throw referral sourcing parties, or otherwise incentivize bringing on new teammates when your company goes into hiring mode.
Frameworks for Hiring - Erik Torenberg