👋 Hi! I’m Julie Zhuo. I help companies scale and build people-centric products informed by data. I’m the author of a popular management book. I used to lead design for the Facebook app. The Looking Gl
Not a lot is written about being a female founder and CEO. I used to believe that my journey as a startup founder was the same as any other founder's experience, regardless of gender, in that it is lo
Most (all?) of our portfolio companies have been working remotely for over three months now. So have we at USV. The initial experience with remote work has been mostly positive. The typical comment ha
To effect social change, companies need to talk about money — how they make it and how it might reinforce racial disparities. Published in Marker · 10 min read · Jun 29, 2020 -- Photo: Matt Crossick —
Back when there were rumors of Google building an operating system, I thought “Lol.” Then I watched then-PM Sundar Pichai announce Chrome OS. My heart raced. It was perfect. I got my email through Gma
This is a topic of great importance and one that we in the tech/startup sector have not done a good job with. We wait until a company is ready to go public and then address it. While that is better th
On Friday, September 13, 2019, Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn, cofounders of the San Francisco internet security firm Cloudflare, stood on a slim marble balcony overlooking the floor of the New Yo
Trump Prepares Order to Limit Social Media Companies’ Protections The move is almost certain to face a court challenge and signals the latest salvo by President Trump to crack down on online platforms
The Hot New Thing in Clubby Silicon Valley? An App Called Clubhouse For all the high-minded talk among techies, their new favorite app is an invite-only (so far) social network for mingling with one a
Disruptions, downturns, and recessions make the weak weaker and the strong stronger. It was true centuries ago, and it is true today. The 2001 downturn turned telecom and cable giants into the Interne
Content creators are some of the most underappreciated and misunderstood people in the entertainment industry. Over the past few years, I’ve become obsessed with the world of content creators, the fut
2010-08-21 A huge challenge for user-generated websites is overcoming the chicken-and-egg problem: attracting users and contributors when you are starting with zero content. One way to approach this c
In my position I probably shouldn’t have a favorite AWS product, just like you shouldn’t have a favorite child. I do have a fave service but fortunately I’m not an (even partial) parent; so let’s hope
At a recent happy hour, I struck up a conversation with a product manager. I told him I was a product designer, and he asked “one of the good ones, or one of the bad ones?” A designer on his team — a
John Allspaw has a great tweet on problem discovery: I’ve always loved the tweet, but I only recently noticed the paper he cites in the thread. It’s called “ The Art of Problem Discovery: Adaptive Thi
Search Shouts & Murmurs September 16, 2019 Illustration by Luci Gutiérrez Hello, I am a woman on a blue-and-green sphere that has dollops and doinks of mountains all over it. Some of the mountains on
Note: This story has not been updated for several years. [This post is adapted from an item from the November Six Colors members-only newsletter. Become a subscriber today to support the site and get
There’s a sort of breathless industry-specific fact in software that goes around every so often. Revenue, and the underlying source of revenue, in the consumer web, whether impressions or sales, track
If there is one debate that is the endlessly circling “Star Wars versus Star Trek” of product development, it is what I refer to as “The Tradeoff Between Quality and Time” (TTBQT). Here’s how it typic
When it comes to the so-called “consumerization of the enterprise,” a workplace tool that looks an awful lot like Pinterest seems like it would be the trend’s final form. Brooklyn-based Air is buildin
awaldstein Dec 1, 2019 Truer words were never said.Spent a big chunk of my career as the fixer, hired gun brought in to public companies to turn them around brand and distribution wise, startups to fi
If you took a minute to think back and pick your favorite conference talk, I have no idea what it was about, but I bet the talk was designed to tell a story. Likewise, I bet your favorite book, even i
This is a draft guide for staffeng.com Most career ladders define a single, uniform set of expectations for Staff Engineers. These career ladders attempt to identify the commonalities across many folk
hing to do with the coronavirus: what this change really means is the biggest missing piece in the Anti-Amazon Alliance is now all-in.
Swiffer and Shelf Space
Posted April 18, 2020 Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for th
On March 30, 2020, we enabled folks to opt into a beta dark mode on Stack Overflow. Let’s talk about the work that went into it. Dark mode opt-in banner I’m Aaron Shekey, Stack Overflow’s principal pr
I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost
A greater portion of the world’s work, organizing, and care-giving is moving onto digital platforms and tools that facilitate connection and productivity: video conferencing, messaging apps, healthcar
To stop coronavirus we will need to radically change almost everything we do: how we work, exercise, socialize, shop, manage our health, educate our kids, take care of family members. We all want thin
Published inMatter · 13 min read· Mar 25, 2015 -- In the new world of on-demand everything, you’re either pampered, isolated royalty — or you’re a 21st century servant. By Lauren Smiley Angel the conc
Are you chained to the green dot? Turn it off and break free. As a general rule, nobody at Basecamp really knows where anyone else is at any given moment. Are they working? Dunno. Are they taking a br
The Shift We’ve always hoped that our digital tools would create connections, not conflict. We have a chance to make it happen. Credit...Rebekka Dunlap By Published March 17, 2020Updated April 2, 2020
When meeting notes startup Hugo decided to instate a maximum of four hours of meetings per week, they noticed something interesting. By forgoing meetings, and sharing company information through notes
“Technical debt” is a metaphor for all software design choices that turn out to be suboptimal, no longer valid, or just plain wrong. These choices incur a cost on future development, and the shortcuts
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Over the years, Apple has built up a portfolio of services and add-ons that you pay for. Starting with AppleCare extended warranties and iCloud data subscriptions, they expanded to Apple Music a few y
Last June, more than two years after his father-in-law assigned him the task of bringing peace to the Middle East, Jared Kushner held a big kickoff conference in Bahrain to unveil the economic portion
I first met Mark Zuckerberg in March 2006. At the time, I was the lead tech writer at Newsweek and was working on a story about what we were calling Web 2.0—the notion that the next stage of the inter
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