More on motivations
the part of the intro bio I cut for being less practical
I apologize for such a long letter - I didn't have time to write a short one. - Mark Twain
I’d written a longer “intro to this project” post. But once I reread it, or more specifically asked someone else to read it I realized there was WAY TOO MUCH STUFF. But I still had a bunch of stuff that I wanted to share - but isn’t really helpful to those who just wanted to get down to the “value prop.” So think of this as the BTS view of that post - or for the older folks as the “DVD extras.”
I probably am starting writing publicly at exactly the wrong time. Not a single word of this was written by or edited by AI. I’m awed by what it can do, and occasionally amused by what it can’t. I realize that if I just waited a hot second than maybe instead of slaving/slacking over a keyboard I could just download my most witty and personal thoughts through some Elon brainwave connector while having a LLM punch it up to have the wit of a Seinfeld era Seinfeld with just a touch of the edge of a Raw era Eddie Murphy. But instead, here we go….
First off - who am I and how did I get here? I was going to try to riff on the “catch me up” bit from Airplane! but instead I’ll just cover some personal computing backstory.
I first got to touch a computer when some friends showed my the TRS-80 our junior high school had. I was transfixed - bought a programming book with some leftover paper route money at Radio Shack and put in the work. That and the typing class I took the next year put me on a path that I thank the universe for.
A few years later my aunt and uncle bought me a computer for my Bar Mitzvah and I could code and play with as much as I wanted to (ie; not just at my lunch period). A few weeks ago my daughter and I found some of my earliest publications in a box of old Lego my mom had mailed, but I’d forgotten to open. those Hot Coco magazine articles took me back to the beginning like a flashback in movie. Where learning about technology was joy and a wide open field. Where doing something after countless hours of focus produced an intense sense of accomplishment when I could make something work that had previously been in my imagination. While I’ve never done recreational drugs I can’t picture they deliver a better feeling than those moments.
I’ve felt that excitement from problem solving in other life moments that have seared themselves into my memory. Late in undergrad and early grad school I focused on being able to finally build things I could touch. Not just software. I remember wire wrapping a digital oscilloscope that I designed as a PC plug in board and looking at it with awe when the software I wrote reproduced a sine wave on my computer display, matching the signal I had injected. Similarly, the first time a microprocessor pulled a program from an eprom I’d programmed and generated a signal providing proof of life for a system I’d literally built by hand …. Well, it was a seriously intense joy.
I’ve done other technical hands on things I’ve been proud of - mostly during my “first”-career in industrial vision based measurement. Culminating when we took an aspect of a little bit on idea each person on our small team had incubated and jammed it into a client facing demo in 6 weeks - increasing by 5x the machines measurement throughout without increasing the cost of manufacturer. I’ll come back to that in the future when I talk about my belief that much of what holds back team throughput comes from unexamined assumptions and “need” to do too many things at once.
As I moved into larger internet scale companies the work was less by my own hand. Instead coming from working to synthesize and translate problems into action by larger groups. Though occasionally achieving similar highs as our growing teams built systems that allowed trust in Amazon’s 3p marketplace to scale with buyers - a pivotal driver of Amazon’s relentless growth. Along the way I did do some cool stuff “on my own” writing what I think was one of the first “phone interview coding” tools that was used by some rogue teams at Amazon. Sort of wish in hindsight I’d leaned a bit more into that one.
While I’ve taken many jobs since then the personal impact component has become more abstract. I think anyone without a knack for boundless self promotion would wonder at times how much they really played a role in team successes (as opposed to being more a lucky bystander). Maybe from that fear I’ve worked to capture a deeper structural understanding of what helped or maybe didn’t help over the years working with teams. Forming a set of guideposts influenced by my learning and others writing. The makeup of these frameworks steal liberally from important work across fields including the theory of constraints, negotiation teachings, behavioral economics, and Tom Cruise movies.
As I started writing I’m taking a break from the daily grind. While I think about “what to do next?” I resolved to get some of these stories and learnings from my first and second careers out of my head. Many are takes repeatedly shared 1-1 which seem to have landed well. Others are bits of semi structured bits of frameworks I’ve finally jotted down as I torture myself prepping for random interviews. Ultimately I’d like to organize them as a collected body of work.
For now I’m just going to start writing in newsletter format. If you think you’d like to follow along please do so. I at least guarantee I won’t share “ten weird tricks that if you’re not using will cause an AI to steal your job, your spouse and cause strangers kick sand in your weakling face.”
Also - a warning: if no one seems interested I may have to fall back on plan B with a series of posts on how linked-in’s video clips for you / Reels product is clearly one of the late stage signs of the apocalypse as detailed in Revelations.
‘nuff said