Dave Urness

I'm often asked about the difference between full-time and fractional product work. Here's one of the things I always tell folks -- fractional is all about impact, impact, impact 🔥 This means that the ability to develop context quickly, ramp up (and get educated) around new problem spaces & industries and sniff out potential challenges for a product and team are crucial...and also what makes the role so damn fun and dynamic. Side-note: This is not to say this isn’t the case with full-time work. The best full-time folks certainly adopt this mindset. But I know this to be *particularly* the case with fractional work and what you should expect when working with a stellar fractional professional.

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The newest issue of The Pragmatic Engineer found a surprise uptick in eng hiring in the typically slow summer season - I'm curious to see how the macro environment impacts this uptick as we head into the fall, but I remain hopeful. I asked Gemini to give me the tldr of the article to share with my team (sorry, Gergely Orosz) and found it missed one of the most interesting pieces of the article. Gemini's highlights - Unexpected surge: Tech recruitment has seen an unusual spike in June and July, contrary to typical trends. Increased demand: Startups, especially AI-focused ones, are driving the hiring uptick. Global phenomenon: This trend isn't just limited to the US; Europe is also experiencing increased recruitment activity. Reasons for hiring: Companies are backfilling positions, investing in growth due to improved financials, and responding to increased VC funding. Challenges remain: While the job market is improving, finding qualified candidates and offering competitive compensation remains difficult for many companies. What I found most interesting - The nature of the backfills: the article finds that a lot of new headcount are actually backfills of folks that were "over-slashed" during rounds of layoffs. Not entirely surprising with the "trim the fat" and "rebuild lean" mentality, but interesting nonetheless. Either way, the uptick is encouraging (and don't always rely on Gemini's tldrs). #hiring #startups #VCbacked #softwareengineering

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🚀 Today's the day, engineers and operators! In a few short hours, I'll be hitting the stage for a fireside chat at the Going Early: Engineering & Operator Meetup, co-hosted by Asymmetric and MGMT Boston Expect some AI wisdom, a dash of startup reality, and maybe a bad joke or two (no promises on the quality, folks). Afterwards, grab a drink at the happy hour and find me or Hao Xu (our Founding Engineer extraordinaire), and let's geek out about the latest in AI and tech. Last chance to be part of the action! Drop a comment if I’ll see you there tonight! 👇 #AIRevolution #StartupMeetup #TechNetworking #GenerativeAI #BostonInnovation

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Big news from WeaveGrid! We are excited to announce that we have raised $28M in strategic funding led by Woven Capital, Toyota's Growth Fund. I came to WeaveGrid three years ago with the goal of building a real ecosystem of OEM partners to create a more efficient grid full of EVs. Today we're taking that one step further in announcing investment from the world's largest automaker, Toyota Motor Corporation. With this strategic round fundraise, I look forward to continuing to scale our solutions across brands, utilities, and geographies, allowing us to support grid resilience and enable widespread EV adoption. Consider the grid… WOVEN 🪡 ⚡ 🚘 Woven Capital 🤝WeaveGrid = #WovenGrid #electricvehicles #ElectricFabric #climatetech #sustainability #energy

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Having worked at Cruise and Waymo on self-driving taught me many things. I hope to bring some of these learnings to healthcare so it too can soon have the magical, "no-driver-at-the-wheel" moment. Here's a short conversation I had with Louie Cai, MD on this topic!

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TLDR: 🚀 In 6 months, I've transformed my challenging homebuying experience into Home inSights—an AI-driven app I built to help navigate Portland, ME's challenging market. Like, share and read on to see how you can help. 🏠 Like many of you, I've faced the challenges of today's housing market firsthand. In just one year, we made 10 offers, toured dozens of homes, and combed through hundreds of listings. After repeatedly coming up short, I had a realization — the current tools weren't serving the actual consumers: homebuyers and homeowners. 📈 In Portland, home prices have surged by 85% and mortgage costs have tripled in just five years. We're in the midst of a nationwide crisis marked by limited supply, skyrocketing prices, and escalating borrowing costs. With this increased pressure on consumers, homebuyers need all the help they can get. 🔍 Home inSights is built to empower buyers and homeowners with personalized insights, community discussion, and smart comparison tools. You may be a home owner wanting to better estimate the equity you can roll forward, waiting for the right home to popup within a school district, or a new buyer with constantly changing buying power. Existing apps prioritize lead generation, and maintain this information asymmetry. There is a better way. 🌅 This version of Home inSights is only the beginning, currently focused on the Portland market. I’m racing to keep building this, but I want to begin including you all. Here’s my backstory on why I’m embarking on this journey: 💼 My career began in the aftermath of the last housing crisis. I worked on mortgage-backed securities lawsuits worth billions, reviewing tens of thousands of mortgages. The countless stories of hardship have stayed with me, fueling a deep-seated desire to make a difference. 👔 As a CFA charter holder, I love markets and valuations and feel driven to help make the market better by empowering consumers through information and tooling. 🥒 Later, I grew my family's pickle company to $3M revenue, gained hands-on business management experience, learned to listen to customers, and how to grow and lead teams when the future is unknown. 📱 Most recently, at Appex, I managed dozens of mobile apps with hundreds of thousands of consumers, worked with many founders, and learned how to build a mobile business. 💡🤖 But I wasn't a coder. Determined to create a solution, I turned to AI. In a few months, I launched not one, but two apps. These unique keystone experiences laid the foundation for what has become Home inSights. If you have read this far, thank you thank you thank you. 🫵 Any help is appreciated: 👍 1. Like, share, comment and/or tag someone on this post 🫶 2. Follow my progress on Instagram: @Buildwithphil.ai 📲 3. Download Home Insights on iOS, subscribe to support ongoing development, and share feedback https://lnkd.in/eQQc8tm9

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I am incredibly inspired by and grateful for my teammates at Verse for achieving our first fundraising milestone together: we recently secured $20.5 million in Series A financing led by GV (Google Ventures) 🙌🏾 🎉 with participation from Coatue, CIV, and MCJ Collective. I've been trying to contain my excitement for weeks 😊 as am sure are my colleagues now that we can share the good news. I'd like to give a big shout out to the engineering team - Jessica Greenfield, Kaleb Pace, Shawn Toubeau, Brandon Clayton, Ryan Kladar, Ryan Triolo, Yuzhou Jiang, and Mahdi Kohansal - for the speed and precision of every line of code they've written, and to Seyed H. Madaeni, Ph.D., Matt Penfold, Shehzad Wadalawala, Dane McKay, Alison Mickey, Debi Ryan, and Tanner McAuley for leading and driving us on the business front. We'll be on the look out soon for more folks to join us 😉 As we used to say at my last job: "We haven't won yet." The path to decarbonization will be a multi-decade, if not multi-generational effort. Verse is just one organization in a constellation of thousands developing real solutions to the climate change problem. Until we achieve net zero emissions at a global scale 🌏 🌍 🌎 our mission remains to be done. #software #ai #energy #sustainability #climatechange #startups https://lnkd.in/gG-DEX5x

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Big thanks to the Scale Venture Partners infra investing team for having me this summer. At Scale, I spent a lot of time thinking about advanced build systems that help software engineers compile and test code. Software projects are becoming more complex as teams embrace monorepos, import more third party software, and expand their use of CI/CD. Advanced build systems are making builds faster and more reliable, changing the way that companies ship software. Mature systems like Google’s Bazel are finally becoming usable enough for the average team thanks to help from startups like EngFlow (https://www.engflow.com/). Newer tools from teams like Nx (https://nx.dev/) and Determinate Systems (https://lnkd.in/g8p-UNns) are also powerful and worth taking for a spin. Check out the blog for more. Particular thanks to Javier Redondo and Eric Anderson for being great mentors during my time at Scale.

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I’ve been playing around with YC Founder Matching and it seems like everyone and their mother is interested either in 2-sided marketplaces or B2C businesses, even though they’re ostensibly the least profitable and hardest-to-get-off-the-ground business models there are. Why do people do this? You only have to take a glance at enterprise vs individual pricing to want to switch gears.

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👀 Hidden jobs! 👀 (Sorry/NotSorry for the clickbait title) 😎 I recently learned that there are many VC (Venture Capital) firms out there that maintain their own job boards for open positions at the companies that they invest in. This is a great resource to find openings at startups (and some pretty well established companies, too) that may not be listed here on LinkedIn or other boards. I thought it would be useful to put together a list of the ones I have found so far. If you are looking for work, check out my list! (A work in progress, but please repost and share). https://lnkd.in/gnQsb3H8 Oh and did I mention that I am #opentowork and looking for a new role in Engineering Management? Check out my profile and HMU if you've got something interesting! 🙏 Thanks!

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I'm looking for senior front-end engineers to build tools that enable healthcare providers to get paid fairly and quickly. https://lnkd.in/gXUzdCvJ At Anomaly we're solving one of the biggest problems in healthcare-- payments. We are on a mission to fix the broken payment system in healthcare. Despite billions of $ invested in EMRs, revenue cycle vendors, clearinghouses and insurance companies, the outcomes have only gotten worse for everyone (except...shockingly...insurance companies). Providers see 15%+ of all claims get denied and lose 3%-5% of net revenue due to fatal denials, millions of patients have care delayed and receive unnecessary bills, and we all end up paying for the $300+ billion in annual administrative waste that plays a big role in the double digit annual increases in insurance premiums. We are using healthcare expertise, modern ML techniques, and common sense to break through the crap and reinvent the way financial transactions work in healthcare. We are early in the process and have a lot of work ahead of us, but we have the best client partners, a big vision, backing from great investors, and an amazing team...if anyone can do it, we will. Please share and email me at [email protected] if you're interested

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Throw more than half a dozen instructions at an LLM and its reliability decays noticeably. That should worry you if you are running customer support in a complex business and you and your leaders want to just ✨use AI ✨. Betting on GPT-5 to solve it? You might want to reconsider. Leading LLM players are struggling to build more Advanced AI, according to Bloomberg. At Lorikeet, we combine the best parts of today’s LLMs with prevailing wisdom on business logic in a unique tech architecture to deliver you high quality AI customer interactions that feel human.

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Some context from the #Founder perspective. As liberal as Seattle is as a city with policy and politics, it's incredibly conservative from an investment standpoint. One of the reasons you may not hear big "home-run" type pitches or pitches with sizzle, is simply because investors in Seattle don't like those types of pitches and Founders have been ingrained to not present in that manner. They may say they do, but ask any Founder and they'll tell you how they have been told to size down their pitch or talk about MVPs, first customer, first revenue, etc. or how what matters more is what you can do first couple years rather than the home run. Those early metrics are important by the way, but different from the big home run. Do you know who is receptive to homerun pitches? Investors in the Bay, NYC, Miami, Hong Kong. Seattle is not great for early-stage Founders with many prioritizing raising outside the city. We will be raising capital in the fall and as of now, have no plans of reaching out to Seattle-based VCs. I should also add that our company has a blockchain component and sadly Seattle VCs have not embraced crypto or blockchain. Welcome to #Seattle, Kyle Lui! Hopefully, you can help change the narrative! GeekWire

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A Simple Two-step Process for Career Advancement Want to get ahead in your company? Do these two things: 1. Give away your Legos 2. Generate more impact I didn't say it would be easy! Only simple. Giving away your Legos means sharing responsibility effectively. By finding (and training) others who can take over for you, you free yourself to take on new things. And, of course, you create opportunities and growth for your team. But remember the word, "effectively." You can't set it and forget it. You are still ultimately responsible for the results, and you have to ensure the quality and results are there. Finding new, more impactful projects is even harder. The farther (or higher) you advance, the harder it gets. Playbooks run out. Mentorship is scarce. Stay focused on business impact and prioritize your time ruthlessly. Scores of books have been written on both topics. But ultimately the formula is simple -- free yourself by investing (and believing) in others, and use that freedom to pursue impact and generate results.

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Want to build an AI chatbot, companion, or copilot for your product? Look no further than Vectorize! Want to simplify your billing stack, making contracts easier to manage while keeping more top-line revenue in your pocket? Look no further than Maple!

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https://lnkd.in/gQ6RzjiJ Exciting news! Jianlong Zhong (Jay) will be showcasing "AirAgent" at 12PM PT on Thursday, 9/12, 2024, during the "Airflow Summit 2024" in San Francisco. Airflow depends on continuous scanning files on disk and parsing DAG definitions in Python codes, this design pattern does not go well with the typical Blue/Green deployment mode for microservices (especially, the disruption to the long-running stateful jobs/tasks). To effectively make Airflow deployment "continuously", Jay came up with the design pattern of a deployer agent which takes care of 3 major functions: [1] fetch a specific DAG tarball (usually the latest) commit from github as well as the new Docker image (of runtime Python dependencies) if image is modified [2] point the symbolic link to the new DAG directory on the EFS/NFS [3] restart the worker and scheduler one-by-one accordingly AirAgent is currently deploying updates hundreds of times a day on both staging and production environments. It has been a game changer in terms of Airflow development lifecycle and developer velocity at Coinbase. Missed Jay's captivating talk last year in Toronto? Check it out here: https://lnkd.in/gBC_udTg. #airflow #deployment #airagent #cicd #velocity

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I spent most of last week in SF at TechCrunch Disrupt. I met some great people and learned a lot at the fantastic panels. My biggest takeaway was a lesson that is crucial for all founders - remember why you are building and who you are building for. Your goal in creating software is to make people's lives easier, not introduce complexity. Ideally, your solution should be doing one or more of the following: 1) Making people money 2) Saving people money 3) Saving people time 4) Saving people effort If what you're building doesn't check one of those boxes, it might be time for a pivot.

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