Moawia Eldeeb

Here are 13 things I’ve learned from hiring for Rasayel these past few years 👇 A huge thanks to Shane Mayes and Tarek Khalil (TK) for their thoughts and guidance over the years. 1. Fighting biases is hard 🥲 I came to know my own biases in a painful way, by hiring the wrong person and expecting them to succeed, then blaming them for not. Biases can include: Influence by certain personality types, personal history, body (skin color, gender, etc), or other subconscious biases. p.s. If you think you're immune to these, you're mistaken. 2. Do you KNOW who you need? Like really, really know. If you think you do, think again. 3. Job hunting is painful. Don't add to the pain Don't make people's lives hard. Looking for work is tedious and draining. Make it enjoyable, and keep it simple (related to #8). 4. Hire only for the next 12-18 months! This sounded odd to me at first. The problems you’ll face 5 years from now are NOT the problems you're facing today. Later, your team can take on bigger roles, or you can hire. 5. Hire for the right company stage (i.e. why are you hiring an Uber exec?) Hiring someone with heavy enterprise experience to join your 5 person team will kill you. Only do this if you’re aware of the decision and what it means. 6. Cultural fit matters most Some of the best people on our team were fresh graduates with little experience. They’re now superstars. A result of their honesty, hunger for learning & action, and for owning their life & doing good work. But don’t hire only for culture ;) 7. CVs & portfolios — meh They tell you more about the person’s personality, not their skills. 8. Learn, then build a process Read. Reach out to people who have hired for this role before. This needs to be robust, so don’t get lazy with it, and improve it as you go. It also helps you fight those biases. 9. A process that works for role A won't necessarily work for role B What can I say 🤷 Life is hard. 10. Be absolutely fucking clear about your expectations. Don't paint a rosy picture of life at your company if it's not the truth. Tell them everything upfront. The amazing, the not, the messy, the painful. They need to know what they're walking into. 11. Nothing is predictable. Be ready for that Trust that no matter what you do, you WILL hire the wrong person once, twice, three times. 12. Direction, support, & onboarding As with anything, starting a new role is scary. In the first few weeks of joining, your new teammate will learn a lot about you. Don't fuck this part up 😄 Make sure you make sure they fit well, receive a warm welcome, and have everything they need to succeed. 13. Respond, and don't ghost people I'm sure I've done this a few times, but I'm more careful now. It doesn't feel good to be ghosted. If you’ve started a conversation, end it. "It's hard to stay on top of it all!" I know. Now reply to that email. ------- How has your experience with startup hiring been? Let me know. That's all for today ✌️

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Today, I’m incredibly proud to announce a major milestone for PayZen: we’ve just closed a $232 million Series B round in equity and debt, led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA). This round includes $32 million in equity and a new $200 million credit warehouse from Viola Credit and a syndicate of insurance companies. I’m thrilled to welcome Mohamad Makhzoumi, NEA’s Co-CEO, as a PayZen board member! Partnering with the right investor at each stage of our company’s growth is both an art and a science (with a bit of luck thrown in). We were fortunate to find strong alignment with the NEA team in terms of business philosophy, mission, market, and strategy. With their extensive experience and stellar track record, I look forward to collaborating with the NEA team as we guide PayZen into the future. This funding will enable us to continue leveraging our AI-powered platform to tackle healthcare affordability. Our proprietary AI/ML models and seamless EMR/EHR integration simplify patient payments for health systems while making it easier for millions of patients to access and afford the care they need. We’re committed to driving innovation in the Revenue Cycle Management market and are excited to expand our affordable, customized healthcare payment options to even more Americans. This partnership with NEA brings back memories. Twenty-five years ago, I fondly recall pitching Webex Communications to NEA alongside my then CEO and mentor, Subrah. That investment certainly worked out for everyone! Time seems to fly, but it’s comforting to know that some things remain constant. I want to thank all the investors and individuals that supported us along the way (Viola Ventures, Omry Ben David, SignalFire, Chris Scoggins, 7wireVentures, Lee Shapiro, Alyssa Jaffee, Ido Vigdor). Mostly, I want to thank my team for raising the bar every day, creating magic and making all of this possible. #healthcare, #fintech, #affordability, #RCM,

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Reliability is still one of the main issues plaguing AI agents in the wild. Sohil and I know this because our coding agent Tusk (YC W24) pushes code to production apps for customers with mature, complex codebases. As such, we're always looking for step-level improvements in code generation quality. Proud to show off some new agent improvements that have achieved this leap for our AI agent: 🧑‍💻 Tusk now refers to a semantic graph when navigating your codebase for context. This allows it to more reliably find files and symbols that are relevant to your engineering task. 🧠 Tusk now uses past merged PRs as long term memory to solve future tasks. This replicates how humans recall completing similar tasks in the past when given a new task. Check out the video below showing how these improvements assisted in solving a user-reported bug with our marketing website––all from a Loom video. Thanks Ilya Subkhankulov for the bug report :)

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Unlocking the Secret to Software Success: The Essential Trio In my journey at ENO8, I've collaborated with an array of startups and growth-stage companies, each striving to craft remarkable software products. Through these partnerships, I've distilled the essence of success into three indispensable roles. While many positions contribute to a project's success, the absence of any of these three often leads to noticeable gaps. Here’s the powerhouse trio every software team needs: 1. Product Owner - Far beyond a typical stakeholder, this is your visionary. A deep-rooted expert in the problem space, the Product Owner is the driving force who ensures that every feature reflects the core needs and solves real-world issues with precision. 2. UX/UI Leader - Imagine a champion who embodies the user’s perspective, crafting intuitive and delightful experiences. This role transcends traditional design; it’s about empathizing with users and constantly advocating for their needs throughout the development process. 3. Technical/Delivery Leader - This strategist ensures that your technological solutions align flawlessly with business goals. More than just overseeing code, they bridge the gap between complex tech solutions and strategic business outcomes, guiding your project to success with foresight and adaptability. I’m curious to hear your thoughts: Are there other roles you consider just as critical? Perhaps even more crucial than these three? Let's discuss what makes a software development team not just functional, but phenomenal. #saas #softwaredevelopment #founder

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I was in a conversation with Khaled Hussein and we started talking about AI and the gloom & doom and a question came up about "Will AI replace recruiters?" Even though I believe we are currently at the peak of AI hype cycle, the promise of it is ever so real and everyday I get to see some incredible products being made that earlier were just outlandish to even think about. To predict the future, Khaled looked at history. Industrial revolution came and created 10s of thousands of different jobs apart from making traditional jobs way more productive. Absolutely no reason to believe that AI will be anything different. Link to our full conversation in the first comment below.

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Did you know that DevHuddle is a force multiplier for ALL software development stakeholders? Check out how we help folks like Product Managers, Support Teams, and Managers by providing an easy way to track what's going into your source code. Stop by to sign up for an account and learn more at https://devhuddle.ai #innovation #chat #productivity #software-development

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Story time: I talked to Plaid's DevRel team last month I learned 30% of devs who get API access NEVER onboard because they never make it through the integration process. Imagine you're Plaid and you worked super hard to get developers to use your products — but then they quit and use a competitor because yours is too hard. 𝑻𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒄𝒐𝒖𝒍𝒅 𝒎𝒆𝒂𝒏𝒔 𝒎𝒊𝒍𝒍𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒔 𝒐𝒇 𝒍𝒐𝒔𝒕 𝒓𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒏𝒖𝒆 𝒐𝒏 𝑨𝑷𝑰 𝒖𝒔𝒂𝒈𝒆. This is the problem that we're aiming to solve at Layer. We add an Integration Expert (ie. extension) on top of VSCode to help DevRel teams at companies like Plaid make onboarding devs easier.  Like a cake with icing, VSCode is better with another Layer.

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Meta Llama 3 came out less than a month ago, and has unlocked so much for builders! Nipun and I hacked away last weekend at the Meta hackathon, shipped all night overlooking the ships 🚢 at Embarcadero, SF! Built out a Zoom-like app that lets you choose any real/fictional character and talk with them, in real time, in their voice! They say, you're the average of the 5 people around you. The idea was to let you curate your Top 5, and to learn & grow by simply talking with your idols! It's wild that the tooling for this exists, and you can spin up something like this in under 24 hours. The stack we used: - Groq + Llama-3 for text completion >> INSANELY FAST! - ElevenLabs for voice gen (just needs one minute of audio as training!) - OctoAI for image gen - Whisper(faster-whisper) on local for transcription - Streamlit for the User Interface Sharing a video demo of the product in the comments - if you watch it, you'll realize how latency of 1-2 seconds still makes it feel a bit unnatural. Was blown away to see OpenAI then turn up the next morning, and roll out GPT-4O that breaks through that uncanny valley! Such a beautiful time to be building in 🚀

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Talk to Buildstash and Robbie Cargill if you want to manage your game or app binaries.

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My service in the IDF taught me almost everything I know about building startups. (Keep reading so you can skip the army part, lol) I spent 4 years as a combat officer, leading a team of 40+ amazing people. Along the way, I picked up some serious skills in leadership, team building, and figuring out how to get things done. Here are the 3 biggest lessons I learned: 1/ Mission first, always 2/ Make your people the best they can be 3/ There’s literally NOTHING you can’t do These lessons have shaped who I am and how I run my company every single day. ◆ Focusing on the mission keeps me dialed in on the big picture, even when things get tough. It also makes daily tasks easier. Being mission-driven means your tasks get done by the end of the day—if they’re not, then it’s not the end of the day! ◆ Sure, we all want A-Players on our team, but even A-Players need fine-tuning. Helping them grow = helping your company grow. Simple as that. (How do you grow the people around you? That’s a great question for another post!) ◆ Believing anything’s possible if you put in the work? Total game-changer. When you truly believe in yourself, things start to click. Sounds cliché? It’s a mindset. I know I could learn how to play the cello tomorrow morning or be an astronaut—it’s all about how much effort I’m willing to put into it. Military service was hands-down one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, but it was also the most rewarding. Honestly, I have no idea where Windmill Growth would be without it! 😂

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Navigating the Path to Product-Market Fit with JIITAK Achieving Product-Market Fit (PMF) is a critical milestone for any venture, and at JIITAK, we're dedicated to helping our clients navigate this challenging yet rewarding journey. Our process is designed to be iterative and responsive, adapting to real-world feedback and evolving market demands. By prioritizing user needs and continuously refining our solutions, we ensure that each product not only meets but exceeds market expectations. How do we ensure success? By focusing on three core areas: Business Design - Transforming raw ideas into strategic plans that effectively address market needs. MVP Development - Rapidly creating minimally viable products to test hypotheses and validate solutions in real customer environments. Sustain/Grow - Defining and implementing feature requirements based on user feedback, optimizing the product to achieve and sustain PMF. At JIITAK, we believe that navigating the path to PMF isn't just about technical execution; it’s about aligning every aspect of the business model to deliver continuous value to users. This approach not only helps in achieving PMF but also lays a strong foundation for scalable and sustainable growth. Are you ready to explore how JIITAK can help your product succeed in the market? Let’s connect and make your product vision a reality. #ProductMarketFit #BusinessStrategy #MVP #Innovation #Sustainability #JIITAK

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📣 🎉 We've hit an inflection point in growth at Founders You Should Know and we're hiring for a full-time Head of Operations and Community! This role is US-based with a strong preference for the Bay Area, as we're looking for the perfect person to help us scale the FYSK showcases for 2025. If the following sounds exciting to you, DM me, we'd love to hear from you. == You’re excited to take the reins of a platform which has immense product market fit and turn it into an execution machine. This role is a perfect fit for a detail-oriented, self-directed leader who is excited about technology and startups. We are accelerating the pace of technological innovation by helping connect the best engineers to the fastest growing, breakout founders and the startups they lead. We’re at an inflection point here at FYSK: we’ve already built a top tier brand among engineers and founders, a very strong network of top founder and VC relationships, and a promising new investment platform of our own. Our monthly showcases generate thousands of applications, we have over 8k subscribers to our newsletter, over 2k subscribers to our YouTube channel, and a fast-growing community of top talent. Now we’re looking for the perfect person to help us scale the growth, value and quality of the community. Here are some of the activities that are already working for us that we’d like your help with doubling down on: - Organize and execute 10 showcases in 2025: 7 in SF and 3 in NY - including planning, rehearsals, day-of operations, and post-show follow-up activities - Grow our bespoke process for making matches between the best high-growth startups and top engineering talent from our network - Co-host monthly founder dinners and happy hours for the FYSK community in SF We’re looking for someone who is extremely detail oriented -- owning the production of an epic show for 250 people and 12 founders every 4-6 weeks requires meticulous detail-orientation and impeccable execution. A great candidate will also excel at written and verbal communications with sponsors, co-hosts, founders, and talent, planning, and resourcefulness. This role has tremendous growth potential because it requires the ownership of clear results and will be at the center of a community that includes many of the fastest growing startups, best founders, and top-tier investors. We expect this to be a minimum 2-year position, which will give candidates enough time to grow the network, services, and platform, get exposure to a new type of community-driven investing, while working on new product launches and experiments with the team. This will be a career-defining experience and we hope you’ll consider joining us!

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Day 3/1000 of posting cute cat pictures on LinkedIn instead of doing my work. While you're here, my co-founder Tarek Khalil (TK) just published an insightful blog post on why #WhatsApp is the next big platform, with some excellent guiding info for anyone who wants to build on or invest in it. Check it out and give him a sub if you'd like more 👇👇👇 https://lnkd.in/dMY8vxsW

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🌟 Introducing Our New Founding Team at MealMatch AI! 🌟 When you first start a company, one thing becomes abundantly clear: the team you begin with is everything. Building a team isn’t just about finding people with the right skills—it’s about finding people who share your passion, your vision, and your heart. I’ll be honest—the journey to find this team has not been the prettiest. I’ve sifted through hundreds of candidates, searching for those who could truly share in the mission we’ve set out to accomplish. But today, I am so incredibly proud to say, we’ve found them. MealMatch AI is about more than just business, and we're building more than just an app. MealMatch AI is about unity, about helping others, and about changing the world in ways that truly matter. In a time when inflation continues to rise, grocery prices soar, and food waste is at an all-time high, our mission is to make food more affordable, reduce waste, and offer healthier options to people who need it most. Our platform will provide personalized meal planning, grocery shopping, and even health tracking all powered by AI—so that families can spend less time worrying about their next meal and more time enjoying it. This isn’t just a technological solution—it’s a social movement. And I’m beyond excited to introduce the individuals who are now a part of this mission. Each of them is as dedicated, as motivated, and as ambitious about these issues as I am. Together, we’re tackling the problem of food insecurity, inflation, and health disparities head-on, with the shared belief that we can make a difference. To everyone joining the MealMatch AI family—welcome. I am deeply honored to work alongside such talented and inspiring people. This journey is just beginning, and I can’t wait to see what we’ll achieve together. Here’s to a future of unity, innovation, and real change. 🌱 Stay tuned, world! MealMatch AI is just getting started! Tykeria B. - Founder & CEO Abhignya Kannaiahgari- Co-Founder Stephen Salaka, PhD, MBA, PMP, CSM - CTO Michael Riley - Product Manager Umadevi Rajangam - Front End Engineer Varun Rao - Front End Engineer Adhrushta Arashanapalli - Backend Engineer Tejaswini Bharatha - AI/ML Engineer Maneesha Inavolu - Data Scientist Anika Tasnim - Data Scientist Tarun Bhadouria - UI/UX Hanan Mohammad - Marketing Specialist #NewBeginnings #FoundingTeam #MealMatchAI #FoodForChange #AIForGood #InvestmentOpportunity #InnovateWithUs

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Last week, Zach and I headed to Seattle for 2 days of our executive offsite. The goal? To set our vision for 2025. We focused on: → Solidifying our vision, → And allocating resources across our 3 product lines. We answered critical questions like → How can we get our customers to find even more value? → How can we be the rising tide that lifts all boats for our target industries - moving & insurance → How and when can we scale Yembo beyond our first two verticals I think this was our most productive offsite yet! Looking forward to executing on these priorities in 2025 - making ideas into code and into customer life improvements!

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The idea for Decipad came when I was building YLD. YLD is an engineering and design consultancy, and while working with a range of business clients we noticed the gap between tools for programmers and everyone else was massive. It was just so complicated for non-developers to collaborate and meaningfully contribute to a modern company in a data-driven way. They either: 1) Got stuck with excel on their own. 2) Needed help from a developer/analyst. I'm an open-source developer and know how much knowledge we create from working together. But outside of that, people are still emailing excel files to each other. And the worst part is that those files waste people's time because they always lead to the “Can you explain this excel sheet to me?” question (I bet most of you got this question before or asked it to someone else). We are building Decipad because most non-developer users know the problems they want to solve with data. They just lack the tool to do it.

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A couple of months ago, I was chatting informally with Ahmad Saleem about podcasts. We realized we both experienced the same annoyance in trying to find good podcasts to listen to. Current platforms like Spotify and Apple Podcasts only allow you to search on titles and show notes, if available. If you're looking for something specific on these platforms, say Eminem’s drug abuse, or the role of the USA in World War 2, etc, you will hardly find a couple of good hits, whereas these topics has been discussed in a lot of podcasts. Another unrelated pain point we discussed is revisiting your favorite parts of an episode. For instance, if you enjoy a segment of an episode and want to share it with friends (or bookmark it to revisit later), neither Spotify nor Apple Podcasts provide that feature. Hence, we created Podyssey. Podyssey is a platform where you can search for the discussions happening within podcasts. It gives you exact clips of the discussion. You can share those clips with your friends, or save them in your library to revisit later. The way it works is, it identifies conversational themes and topics in an episode, divides these topics into small clips, and enables you to search, discover, and save these clips. You can check other features and an interactive demo at https://podyssey.com As of now, we have processed around 1 Million episodes from the top 10000 podcasts, and created ~35 Million clips. We are planning to run open beta testing in a couple of weeks (around 15th July). If you’re interested in trying out the application, do visit on our website and register for early access. Otherwise you can DM me, or write to me at [email protected] Podyssey #podcasts #buildspace #aisearch

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Couple people reached out about this GeekWire article yesterday by Taylor Soper covering supply chain tech in Seattle, asking more about it. I really believe Seattle is a great spot for the following reasons: 1. Modern supply chains are built from the ground up to serve customers. While Amazon helped cement this, others deserve credit for their commitment to customer focus. Many of those companies are in Seattle (Nordstrom etc). I really believe that every supply chain will fail to modernize if it doesn't reorient towards its respective customer at the center. The 90s era operating models of push-based cost management and misaligned incentives will prevent true modernization. Because Seattle has had so many companies with this at their cultural core, a lot of the supply chain tech talent here is committed to this attitude. 2. Technology, in particular cloud based software engineering, and supply chain operations are now so intimately intertwined, that you can't have an operator who isn't technical (or have someone who is technical but doesn't understand operations) and still expect to modernize. Seattle is also a technology epicenter, with Microsoft/Amazon and dozens of excellent public and private companies shedding supreme technical talent. It has allowed a higher hit rate of leading technologists to infiltrate logistics tech. 3. Similar to above, I believe most supply chain problems are probabilistic in nature. There is little certainty in supply chains. This means data is the root most important thing to modern supply chains, but also that true data science with real data scientists powering real ML and AI models is critical to successful supply chains. Data science talent is all over the place here in Seattle. 4. Lastly, hard to put a finger on this one, but there is something interesting about the intersection of the profiles of startups (high risk based profiles) and supply chains (low risk based profiles). Startups and startup culture embraces change. You have to in order to be successful. Seattle is definitely a top startup ecosystem in the country, so a lot of people here are comfortable pushing boundaries. Meanwhile, operations and supply chains are historically risk averse, and for good reason. Physical atoms are involved. It's the heartbeat of organizations. Most tech is 90s era on prem stuff. It's really hard to change. I think there is something compelling about each side counter balancing each other for the best ideas for innovation coming out of it. When I look at the startups on Taylor's list, it's a lot of ideas are targeting the highest value and most fertile problems of supply chains. I think the talent here is focused on meaningful change that industries can absorb, versus too risky of ideas that will never be adopted or too small of ideas that will never make an impact. https://lnkd.in/gm4bikHb

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