applied contortionism

For a short period of time, I was the Director of User Acquisition for a company called US Mobile. In my eyes, user acquisition requires a huge amount of cross functional visibility in order to get the answers to questions like "how do I spend our budget?" or "where is the growth bottleneck?" At the time, we didn't really have easy ways to get answers to those questions, so we had to solve the problem of getting easy access to data. 
At every company that I've ever worked for (ie. Amazon), the gap between what the engineers can get access to and what the business team can get their hands on is large. There are, of course, vertical specific solutions that tailor themselves to specific demographics. For example, Google Analytics, Mixpanel, and Kissmetrics give a view into website analytics which is great for PMs and marketers. Intercom, Olark, et al. typically have some analytics for customer success. Some of the data is going to be internally in the database.…

When I was but a wee lad, I dreamed of being a janitor for NASA. There's just something awesome about playing a part, no matter how small, of something that dares to push the world forward. While I no longer hold my old lofty dreams of working for NASA, I have had to recently look for jobs. For whatever contrived reason, the conventional thinking behind how people should search for jobs falls under two categories: networking and job sites. While those approaches work, a very useful metaphor for how you might view yourself is that you're a business. You sell your product (your time) for a salary (your revenue). You might argue, most wages in the western world are $20,000 USD to $500,000 USD. If you're a business, then it's probably also helpful to think about selling your product (time) like a business. Typically, different price points in business dictate different sales and marketing techniques. Below say, $10 a month, direct sales (sales where you sell to people on …

There once lived a wise, middle aged, bald prophet named Marc Andreessen. His job, was to profit from prophecy. Today, he is one of the most well known, and respected, venture capitalists in the world. He is famous for some of his sayings such as "if you want to see where a bubble is forming, follow the MBAs" in reference to the MBAs going to Wall St during the mortgage backed securities crisis of 2008 and the dot com bust in 2002. Arguably, his most famous saying is/was "software is eating the world". Today, it's a foregone conclusion that, software has broken the way a lot of industries fundamentally operate. I think it's particularly interesting, however, to think about what that means for marketing. I'm of the opinion that, very few companies really understand what they're doing and that modern marketing should not only look like engineering... it should be engineering.

One way to think about marketing is that there are two key components to mar…

If you talked to a new grad and asked them "how can I achieve concurrency in code?" There are two obvious answers: multi-threading and multi-processing. Factually, both approaches are schemes to map instructions to the CPU/bare metal. Although from the hardware's standpoint, they are very different, from an engineer's standpoint, many use cases tend to be fairly similar. This matters for web servers.

In fact, for a long time, those two methods (multi-processing and multi-threading) were the primary ways to map HTTP requests to a web server's hardware. That is, if a request comes in, a request will map to a process or map to a thread. In Apache HTTPD-speak, you can control which scheme you use. That mapping component is called the "Multi-Processing Module" or MPM. This is all fine and dandy if the requests don't do anything requiring blocking or asynchronous behavior and all requests are short lived. However, nearly all modern web applications requir…

I’m walking down a residential street in Tianjin. Food vendors hustle their wares for dirt cheap prices. A whole Peking duck for $3.80 USD? Sign me up for that! As I bring my spoils back to my girlfriend’s apartment, I can’t help but feel like I’m caught back in time while the rest of the country is moving in fast forward. 
I’m on my computer looking at valuations of companies in the healthcare/pharmaceutical space. $500M here, $300M there. Whatever your conceptions of speed or size are in the Valley, I assure you, they have nothing on China. The game being played in China is big and aggressive. And Clay Christensen’s “Innovator’s Dilemma”? Nowhere to be found. Alibaba does everything from B2B sales to B2C pharmaceuticals. Big companies just aren’t slow here. What about the startups? Even more fast and furious. 
As a foreigner, China is a daunting place. Almost every perception of what you think you know about doing business basically doesn’t really apply here. In the Valley, the prev…

(Hong Kong)
I’m sitting in Chicago’s physical connection to the world, O’Hare International Airport. Named after the famed lawyer who stood up against the gangster Al Capone (and his son, a fighter ace), O’Hare is something of a metaphor for America. The smell of big bold flavours, the giant steel beams painted white juxtaposed against polished glass, crowds of incredibly well-fed white people. I’m drinking a distinctly crisp Sam Adams and eating a burger in excess of 1500 calories. The man beside me is reading a magazine titled “Money”. I can’t help but feel a sense of freedom. Nobody can tell me I can’t eat this ridiculously delicious burger. This burger is MINE.
At the end of WWII, more than half of the world’s manufacturing capacity belonged to the USA. Coupled with the hard American work ethic, America has been the world’s police, largest economy, cultural powerhouse, technological leader and entertainment heavyweight. America stands alone, in the last 50 years, of being the singl…