Essays on technology & capital in the real world.

AI Benchmarking Is Broken

We should take AI models seriously, which means taking their evaluation seriously

The Venture Activity Index – Q4 2023

Capital deployment remains depressed, sitting about 50% below trend

The Series A Bust

Investors have lost faith in Series A as a sign of product-market fit. In other words, they expect more but believe less...

How Redpanda is Taking Data Streaming Mainstream

Monitoring that even (Franz) Kafka would approve of

The Venture Activity Index

Measuring the state of the venture "business cycle"

The Shadow Price of Venture Capital

Valuations are 60% too high relative to the volume of venture funding

Don't Discount Interest Rates

It's Jay Powell's world. We're just living in it.

We Don't Have Nearly Enough Startups

Where did the explosive growth in venture activity come from?

Old Valuations Die Hard

Private valuations substantially lag public tech valuations

It's Valuations (Almost) All the Way Down

Venture funding hasn't grown as much as you think

Beats and Misses Are Forever

Revenue surprises permanently shift the trajectory of SaaS companies

Layoffs Don't Tell the Whole Story

Hiring freezes matter more than layoffs

COVID Hurt Most Software Companies

COVID put software companies on a permanently lower growth trajectory.

The Dark Matter of Software Valuations

Exploring the vast "dark matter" of the software universe

Series A Rounds Are a Math Test

Low monetization requires extraordinary traction, and vice versa.

Funding Simply Shifts the Bottleneck

A frothy funding environment means more competition for talent. Funding gets easier; hiring gets harder.

Breaking Apart the Rule of 40

Rules are meant to be broken, and the Rule of 40 is no exception

Schrodinger's Balance Sheet: When Equity Becomes a Liability

Preferred equity exists in a constant state of quantum superposition. It's neither equity nor debt, until it is.

Introducing a New and Improved SaaS Metric: Weighted ACV

ACV isn't as useful a concept as people think. We need a different SaaS monetization metric.

Companies Rarely Grow Into Their Valuations

Companies don't catch up to their valuations; their valuations catch up to them.

WebAssembly-ing the Pieces: Vectorized’s Data Policy Engine

Rather than ship data to code, which is expensive and latency-prone, why not ship code to the data?

You Can't Eat Relative Growth

In startup land, we talk way too much about relative growth. We'd do better to ground our thinking in absolute growth.

Do Wealthy Investors Have an Edge?

The super-rich earn more on their investments than the rest of us. Something nefarious, or something else?

PhDs Aren't Starting Companies Like They Used To

The burden of scientific knowledge and managerial complexity is crushing our best and brightest.

Awesome Developer Advocates Are Hiding in Plain Sight

Why you shouldn’t filter for social media following or prior experience

The Developer Productivity Manifesto Part 3 — Leaving Software on the Table

Quantifying the billion dollar impact of developer inefficiency

The Developer Productivity Manifesto Part 2 — More (Developers) Isn’t Always More

Adding more cooks to the kitchen rarely helps

The Developer Productivity Manifesto Part 1 — The Flywheel

Developer productivity is falling. But it doesn't have to. The solution? The Developer Productivity Flywheel

Four Challenges Facing Developer Productivity Startups

The biggest challenges facing developer productivity startups today

Robinhood Traders are Last to the Party

Robinhood traders get fleeced not by HFTs front-running milliseconds before their order hits but by other retail investo...

Why Developers Love Redpanda

Why Vectorized's focus on developer experience will unlock real-time streaming for the great majority of developers

There's Nothing Magical About the SaaS Magic Number

Magic number is a bad metric. Sales and marketing drives much less revenue than this not-so-magical number implies

Product-Market Fit is Lindy

The longer you search for product-market fit, the less likely you will find it.

Why We Will Never Have Enough Software Developers

Developers are dropping out of the profession in large numbers

Enterprise Software Monetization is Fat-Tailed

In enterprise software, averages are meaningless. Instead, focus on the tails.

An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition (Paper Explained)

Large Transformer trained on large datasets outperform CNN-based architectures and achieve state of the art results on i...

Pre-training via Paraphrasing (Paper Explained)

Transformer model pre-trained on document retrieval and reconstruction performs well on both fine-tuned and zero-shot do...

Top Three Strategic Priorities of Developer Productivity Startups

What's top of mind for developer productivity leaders

Six Trends Shaping Developer Productivity

We interviewed developer productivity leaders. Here's what they said.

Why Don't VCs Index Invest?

VCs are picky, not because they have so many options but because they have so few.

The Value of College May Be Negative for the COVID Generation

You might think the value of a college degree has been increasing. You would be wrong.

Do College Degrees Matter for Software Engineers? Maybe

Do college-educated developers earn more? Yes, but less than you might think

Pandemiconomics: Viral Volatility

How the virus rocked stocks

Byron Deeter and Jason Lemkin on the State of VC and the Cloud

When to raise capital, what to expect from VCs, and the "new normal"

Remote Software Developers Earn 22% More Than Non-Remote Developers

Working remote even just a few days per month leads to higher pay

How Age, Race, and Gender Affect Software Engineering Pay

Progress on narrowing pay gaps among software developers

The Highest-Paid Software Engineers: 2020 Edition

Engineers are the basic economic unit of modern software development. The software production function depends critical...

How Uber and Lyft Dominated Ridesharing By Seeing Red Where Others Saw Blue

A quick visit to the Red Sea

Pattern Matching is Dead. Long Live People Matching

Venture capital is changing — for the better

High Retention = High Volatility

Why SaaS revenue retention is a double-edge sword

Waitlists are a Vanity Metric

Waitlists, registered users, and other cumulative measures better measure the size of your pride than the size of your b...

How to Conquer Cohort Analysis With a Powerful Clinical Research Tool

Entrepreneur's Ruin, or How Not to Go Bust

Meet Dev, the Highest-Paid Software Developer in America

The Growth-Share Matrix of Software Development

You Don't Understand Compound Growth