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...
Learning
Review: The Last Lecture
On my bookshelf, there's one shelf that I keep a couple of my favorite books, and on occasion, I rotate one book out for another as I finish a hard copy of a...
Aspirational AI Utility
I've been reading Brave New Worlds. It's a book by Salman Khan, founder and CEO of Khan Academy, on how Generative AI will change the way students learn and teachers teach,...
Strong Opinions, Strongly Held
The aphorism is "strong opinions, weakly held." Now, I've always been skeptical of what, on its face, is a contradiction. At best, it's useful as rhetorical insurance, allowing its...
Pulling Up vs. Pushing Down
We're now 2+ years into the tech downturn. Companies, with or without AI as a driver, continue to announce major layoffs, seemingly every month or two. No one advocates for teaching everyone to...
Losing Thinking by Losing Writing
This tweet from Paul Graham a while back gave me the perfect excuse to write about one of my favorite topics, the idea of thinking by writing: Observation suggests that people are switching to using ChatGPT to write things for them with almost indecent haste. Most people hate to write as much as they hate...