Executing Organizational Cartography
A few years back, during my early days at Affirm, a couple of us engineering leaders[1] were trying and struggling to orchestrate a reorg across our teams. There were a number of strong personalities...
Year in Review — 2025
This was a quick year. Perhaps it’s an effect from aging time acceleration—when the subjective experience of the passage of time speeds up as I get older. Maybe it’s the result of...
Law of Conservation of Vehicular Modularity
Most in the startup world have heard of the idea of disruption; many have peddled it for their own benefits. This is, after all, the theory that gives hope for David to topple Goliath. But...
Year of the Linux Console, Steam Edition
A few weeks back, Valve—the company most famously behind the Steam platform for PC games—announced a trio of hardware devices slated for an early 2026 release. Adding to their already-excellent portable-gaming console, the...
Exclusively "A" Players
Steve Jobs supposedly said, "A players hire A players; B players hire C players." Silicon Valley takes this to heart, a guiding light for tight hiring process and keeping a high bar when...
Review: The Money Trap
My dad gave me some life advice as a kid: If I wanted to make money in my career, I needed to be close to money. Now, we had immigrated from Hong Kong, back then...