/Startup

Early Security For Startups

- Devdatta Akhawe tl;dr: Figma's Head of Security is often asked how to approach security. Here he covers topics such as ransomeware, cloud misconfigurations, credential stuffing, and more. 

featured in #307

Making Engineering Team Communication Clearer, Faster, Better

- Derek Parham tl;dr: Derek shares his design review process, starting with the design doc (he shares his template) through to the in-person meeting, where he outlines specifics around planning, moderation and process. This review process helps with org-wide comms, understanding of technical infrastructure, knowledge of legacy work & current projects, better design, and saves time.

featured in #274

Software Development Pushes Us To Get Better As People

- Jessica Kerr tl;dr: Jessica discusses "participatory sense-making." In software, this is developing a shared mental model of the software we're developing, what it’s going to be, how it works. In humanity, participatory sense-making is our shared reality of made-up concepts i.e. money, economy, justice, etc... "When we’re good at participatory sense-making, we can build conscientiously, instead of reducing everything to numbers."

featured in #274

ISO 27001 For Startups: What You Need To Know

tl;dr: Managing your startup has many challenges, including understanding your compliance needs. If you use secure data and you want to do business with any customers or partners outside the US, ISO 27001 certification will be among them. Consider this to be your introductory guide to ISO 27001 for startups.

featured in #274

Fast/Slow In 3X: Explore/Expand/Extract

- Kent Beck tl;dr: As an idea, product or company grows, "value-maximizing behavior" changes dramatically and comes in three phases: (1) Explore - where companies try small experiments. (2) Expand, as an experiments takes off, bottlenecks are identified and tackled. (3) Extract, these projects can increase revenue or decrease costs.

featured in #231

Crazy New Ideas

- Paul Graham tl;dr: "Most implausible-sounding ideas are in fact bad and could be safely dismissed, but not when they're proposed by reasonable domain experts." Paul advises us to listen and pro-actively encourage these ideas.

featured in #230

Early Work

- Paul Graham tl;dr: "We just don't have enough experience with early versions of ambitious projects to know how to respond to them. We judge them as we would judge more finished work, or less ambitious projects." Optimism and imagination become urgent.

featured in #212

Building Companies In Times Of Change

- Reid Hoffman tl;dr: LinkedIn founder discusses notable trends during this period - a move towards distributed founding teams, rise of telehealth, and more.

featured in #194

Good Businesses Have Margins

- Justin Jackson tl;dr: Justin advises entrepreneurs to optimize for margin - both business margins such as profit and personal margins, by creating boundaries for yourself. 

featured in #171

The Lesson To Unlearn

- Paul Graham tl;dr: "Schools train us to win by hacking bad tests" so we can get good grades, but not learn. Good grades reward us in obvious ways. This mindset filters into the startup world, founders want to hack the system. This is correcting itself and that makes Paul optimistic.

featured in #165