Lindsey Simon

After a year of work my book Building A Startup - A Primer For The Individual Contributor is finally available! https://lnkd.in/erThxvpP If you’re working in or around startups as an IC or technical leader this book is for you. It’s based on 20 years of startup work and will help set you up for success to do more with less, move faster and more correct, and spend more time building features and product people love and less time banging your head at roadblocks and bottlenecks.

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Interested in how to kickstart and scale design engineering in your organization? Check out the latest episode with Steve Saul!

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As we kick off Q4 in just a couple days, I wanted to reflect on all the new things we've rolled out to our users on Huddled just in the past month alone. We dropped Huddled v1.10 earlier this month – it was probably one of the most exciting updates we've shipped. ✨ We've doubled down on our AI tools and doing so in an ethical way. We're making it even safer and faster when connecting and collaborating online to improve the way teams, groups and cohorts work together. 🤩 Message reactions; a small touch with big emotions. Just to make it 10x easier to acknowledge a message without having to reply to it. 💡 Portfolios to showcase your work and who you are. Huddled is a great way for education providers, accelerators and organisations to enable their members to express themselves and showcase who they are. We've rolled out new tools to add images to each work experience or education as well as profile prompts to perhaps help kickstart the conversation with some icebreakers! 🖌 A much more robust post creator. We know our users love using posts on Huddled to share important news, announcements, resources...etc to those in their workspace. We always look to improve our UX / UI across the platform – so we think this change is definitely a small but important one! The full rundown is linked below, if you'd like to check it out! What to expect in upcoming updates 👉 more of 'Huddled AI', more portfolio-focused tools, revamped admin panel for analytics and workspace management, advanced tools to organise messages/posts...just to name a few!

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This is an interesting article from SaaStr sharing data from ICONIQ Capital about revenue per employee. “These are useful yardsticks for folks scaling: At less than $25m ARR, actually SaaS start-ups aren’t any more efficient than in 2017-2019, at $130,000 per employee / FTE. Although that’s still more efficient than the Boom Times. At $25m-$100m ARR, SaaS scale-ups are about 25% more efficient than they used to be, at $172,000 in revenue per employee / FTE. Time to get real at $25m ARR, apparently 😉 And at $100m+ ARR, they are 20% more efficient then they used to be, at $249,000 in revenue per employee. On the path to the $300k+ we see in public SaaS leaders.” At Worksmith in October, our annualized revenue per employee was $238K. https://lnkd.in/gqkkpjEW

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Big news! Coming up on May 29, I'll be hosting a webinar with the team from Meta to talk all things Threads. From what's new in SND to what's coming up on the platform, you'll want to sign up so you don't miss a thing! https://lnkd.in/gufFyuqN #socialmedia #threads #socialgov #socialjournalism #meta #socialmediamarketing

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Temporal Technologies has been one of the coolest pieces of infra tech I've used. In this webinar next Tuesday, I'll be doing a deep dive of how we've used Temporal to build out Ampersand's integration engine. Link to register is below.

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We hosted our first ever Hangar DX dinner in SF this week! We kept the dinner intimate with 12 DX leaders from Slack, Notion, Figma, Reddit, Amplitude, LinkedIn, Yelp, Benchling, Babylist and AMD. This gave everyone opportunity to have open unfiltered conversation about the DevEx space today, and form real connections. These were some of my most surprising findings: 🌟 None of the DevEx teams have a Product Manager - it is extremely hard to find a PM for DevEx who truly understands and aligns with developers' complex workflow needs 🌟 Even though everyone feels the pain of ownership, no one is using any off-the-shelf IDP today 🌟 Roadmap is primarily driven bottoms up - everyone uses some form of surveys and internal interviews to inform the roadmap 🌟 Influencing C-suite and explaining impact seems to be on top of mind Thank you Poya Osgouei for helping host the dinner, and Aviator for sponsoring :) #developerproductivity #developerexperience #devex

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Would it be possible to have some help updating this section of our website on Framer? Simple edits: 1) Update to say Terms and Conditions, 2) put a heart between "with" and "in" and 3) Put Space Needle within the word Seattle. 4) If possible, make "Built with <3 in Seattle a really cool mini interactive graphic. 5) Ensure that the spacing is adjusted so that it looks right. I'm new to Framer and am having some trouble.

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I cancelled our team's subscriptions to Github Copilot & ChatGPT after 10 days with Cursor 🌟 What Sets Cursor Apart Seamless Onboarding: The transition was remarkably smooth, reminiscent of Chrome's early days. Cursor's team clearly understands that muscle memory can be a significant barrier to adoption, and they've crafted an onboarding experience that makes the switch a delight. LLM Flexibility: The ability to switch between different Large Language Models, bring your own, or use the default Claude 3.5 Sonnet is a game-changer. This flexibility proves to be a massive advantage, freeing users from being tied to a single AI model. Multi-file Editing with Composer: This highly anticipated feature delivers 80% of the time, and when it works, it's phenomenal. It explains code changes, shows inline diffs, and allows for selective application of changes. My favorite one - https://lnkd.in/g4aYJbJQ. Contextual Awareness: The ability to @mention files, folders, and invoke web searches has transformed how I approach parallel feature development. It's like having a hyper-aware coding companion. Intelligent Auto-complete The tab auto-complete function is surprisingly powerful, working seamlessly across lines and files. It often feels like it's reading my mind, significantly speeding up coding sessions. Smart Inline Editing Cursor's understanding of the existing codebase shines in its inline code editing capabilities. It's prevented me from creating redundant utility functions by suggesting existing, similar functions—a huge time-saver. 💡 Pro Tip: Embrace smaller, more frequent code iterations. Commit changes often; you never know when you might need to start over on a change set. 🔧 Areas for Improvement Composer occasionally has UI glitches, taking over the entire window or hiding its title bar. Familiarizing yourself with keyboard shortcuts can help navigate these issues. Sometimes there's a disconnect between Composer's suggestions and what it displays. 🤔 Is Cursor Worth the Hype? For me and my team, it's a resounding yes. We're transitioning to Cursor as our primary development environment. I've noticed a significant reduction in my use of standalone AI consoles like Claude or ChatGPT, as Cursor integrates these capabilities seamlessly into the coding workflow. 🔮 Looking Ahead This shift to Cursor is part of our broader strategy to embrace AI-native development practices. I'm excited to share more insights in future posts about how we're leveraging AI to enhance our development processes. I'm curious to hear from other developers: What are your favorite Cursor features or hacks? How has it impacted your workflow? #DeveloperProductivity

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What are you doing this Friday at noon, Boston time? WRONG! You're joining me for a roundtable chat with Jellyfish's own CFO, Joanne Cheng on what many engineering leaders get wrong during budget planning. Treat yourself to some good tips and tricks for leveraging data effectively and driving financial impact at the company level. Come hang out, share your own tips and experiences, and meet other leaders. Click it --> https://lnkd.in/eDxaJ4tZ

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Great take from Orel Zilberman - Slack is killing your productivity. Derrick Schommer and I heard this message while doing ICP interviews. DevHuddle has features available (and some on the roadmap) to fix the interruption-tax of async communication tools that are treated as sync communication tools. It helps to have a culture of truly async collaboration to increase everyone's velocity. https://lnkd.in/eypeaVXV

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Pipedream helps you ship features faster than any tool I’ve used. I’ve built hundreds of automations, APIs, background jobs, and other services that power our core product. Every time we build on it, we reflect on what could be simpler, and we improve the product for everyone. You don’t have to worry about managing API auth, rate limits, queuing, or set up any infra. You get to focus 100% on the problem you’re trying to solve. Don’t take my word for it - try it!

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Today we're launching our newest candidate quality-of-life feature on Ropes - IDE themes. There's a universal dislike for the rigid IDEs that assessment co's force on candidates. These code editors are slow, clunky, and missing the styes/shortcuts that developers enjoy. Developers are unique, and we work in unique ways. Ropes offers two new options to let candidates keep their style: (1) First, many employers on Ropes allow candidates to work in their own IDEs entirely. We've developed a way to gather insights like you were in the room, while allowing developers to use their daily environments. (2) For cases that need a browser-based IDE - we're giving the ability for candidates to choose their style/editor setup before the assessment starts - so they're comfortable when it begins. --- My bet is that if we build a great experience for candidates, we'll be building a great platform for evaluators, too. I hope you'll follow along as we pursue that mission - and we need help! We're hiring founding engineers in NYC - if you're interested, I'd love to talk to you.

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I advice 1-2 CEOs each week on how to select their CTO or founding engineer The average tenure of a startup CTO is < 2 years But the impact on the company - positive or negative lasts a long time after they are gone -> Early-stage companies lose momentum by choosing the wrong CTO So it is mission-critical to look for the right attributes in your first/next CTO: 1/ Hands-on capabilities Should rollup their sleeves and get into the dirty details from day#1 2/ Experience working with offshore teams Such CTO can handle cultural & language barriers much better 3/ Obsessed about creating value every week Huge red-flag if they focus on fancy tech And complex architectures or expensive tools 4/ Clearly connects with your mission Startups are a slog A clear connection with your mission goes a long way 5/ BONUS: Has some entrepreneurial experience Can empathize with the tradeoffs a CEO has to make every day If you need more help selecting your CTO DM me with the message “world-class CTO”

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Llama3 is out. It's the new open weights model from Meta, and you can try it out for free at https://www.meta.ai/. Ollama had it ready to go within hours (https://lnkd.in/eJks-Vg2). If you grabbed a copy from Ollama within the first ~5 hours, pull again; they fixed an incorrect end token issue. In my last post, I suggested that stiff competition between models would lead to competing on price. Meta.ai is now free, even without a Facebook login. Initial claims and benchmarks put Llama3 on par with private models in many areas – a significant development. The proprietary vs. open model gap is closing, thanks to Meta's commitment to top-tier open weight models. I can't imagine where the open LLM community would be without Meta's financial commitment. I tried Llama-3-8B and a low-quant Llama-3-40B briefly last night. While I haven't formed a solid opinion yet, the benchmarks claim Llama-3-8B outperforms Llama-2-40B. If that holds true, it's a significant win, as it's not just about throwing more compute at the problem – making models that can run on consumer hardware better is a big deal. While a 40B model is currently out of reach for most consumers, it's easy to imagine that it will become increasingly accessible as new video cards with higher memory become the norm. I managed to run Llama-3-40B on a 2quant on a 3090 without running out of RAM. I don't have high hopes for great results, but after some tuning, models based on Llama-3-40B could make for a very reasonable private assistant on modest hardware. If you've tried Llama-3 let me know your experience so far. Also if you have any tips for the best options for a 3090 let me know.

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So, about dinner last night... 😁 Julianna Lamb and I co-hosted an engineering leaders dinner on behalf of her team at Stytch and our team at Orb alongside guests from Bardeen, MongoDB, Pinecone, Log10.io, Sybill, DeepScribe, meez, Census, Pocus. Here's what was top of mind: 1️⃣ We broke the ice talking about production incident stories, as always. There were some good ones - near data loss, versioning protobufs, and staging coming to the rescue. It's encouraging to see how much a team can come together when these issues happen -- says a lot about the talent you've built! 2️⃣ There was a lot of discussion around product management in early companies - what's the right stage to hire your first PM, and how do you balance the founder vision with PM strategy? Despite lots of differing opinions on this, everyone agreed that a great PM is able to exercise pointed and often non-concensus intuition to advocate for specific product investments. 3️⃣ Quality assurance in software is a hot topic - it certainly seems that the days of pure MVPs are gone, especially in B2B enterprise software. Strategies here ranged from manual outsourced full-time QA to a battery of automated, property-based tests. My sense is that there's a lot more framework to develop here (and I admire folks like Meticulous who are pushing the boundaries!). 4️⃣ When the conversation turned to favorite vendors, Fullstory, Twingate, and Conveyor came up. It's always fun and a bit counter-intuitive to see how many times a 'favorite vendor' involves lots of excellent customer support. Durable trust is still built in these interactions! 5️⃣ I suspect that the areas of cloud economics and cost management are still a severely under-invested-in area for most companies. We discussed several stories on both sides: teams racking up $100K+ bills over a weekend from a cloud provider, to having to shape their internal architectures to support free tiers and cost management for customers over optimizing performance. This is an area where I'm particularly excited to see Orb's features around spend caps/alerting make a dent. Thank you again to Ram Sriharsha, Artem H., Niklas Quarfot Nielsen, Parth Shah, Nikrad Mahdi, Brad Buda, Aniruddha, and Ujwal Bachiraju for joining us!

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Triangle startup ecosystem - first thanks for the incredible generosity that you showed over the last 2wks to help folks impacted by Helene. Here's a last update on our Hurricane Helene relief efforts with a final 'how can you help' ask. The TL;DR - our nascent effort has matured and morphed into the WCEN. The most urgent need has moved from supplies to funding the teams out on the ground that need specialty items like gas, oxygen tanks, starlinks, etc. There's a gofundme, this is a certified 501(c)(3) here-> https://lnkd.in/e4NdxuW8 What is the WCEN you ask?!.... o There were several operating groups that were able to grassroots consolidate efforts under the Western Carolina Emergency Network (WCEN) umbrella and they have a website up that is improving every day: https://lnkd.in/ePYP6_JJ o WCEN's goal is to provide services to survivors until temporary infrastructure can be re-built. There are over 1m people in Western NC without shelter and basic necessities. o WCEN is providing: -> Reconnaissance -> Search + Rescue ( + Recovery) -> Rapid Supply Response / Air Support -> Medical Care o WCEN has these network partners: -> Operation Airdrop Inc- Air support including planes and helicopters -> Carolina Calvary - Coordinator for Operation Airdrop -> Razor Nation - ATV support -> Restoration Church @restoration church - Josh Brown and Ryan Honeycutt- supply collection sites and delivery -> Apex Defense - Search and Rescue, Security -> Lincoln County Airport - Pilot coordinator -> AJ - Heavy Lift Drone support -> GSDF team - C&C logistics, Special Forces team coordinator -> Reagan Madison Inc. team- Back office, infrastructure, and fundraising,FOB coordination (Crystal Suazo, CPA - who looped this together and we connected with here on LI!) -> WRTE, Inc - Legal, tax, fiduciary support -> Christina Marie Noel - Christina Noel + volunteers - Strategic marketing & communications -> United National Weather Team - Medical support with ATV abilities if anyone, especially corps would like to donate $, volunteers, trucks, etc. please contact William McGuire (on the ground items), Rebecca Ross / Jess Porta (Triangle-based corp donations/logistics). We're getting the last truck of items at Raleigh Founded out and future donations should be made at: Electric Supply Co 207 Bickett Blvd Raleigh NC, 27608 Want more ideas on how to have an impact? https://lnkd.in/euNxS8kd Thanks again everyone!

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