Yesterday we interviewed two junior candidates. Hopefully it’ll speed up the development process. Honestly, I’m lazy to code all things on my own - it’s just a no-grow. I want to take the role nobody else takes - the Forward Deployed Engineer role - the guy that is constantly communicating with users and translates their needs into product vision and programming tasks.

Our CTO has a different look on things - more waterfallish, long release cycle. He’s the guy who made the first versions of all our services. It probably took him some time to do that. It’s also interesting to know how maintainable and expandable the server-side will be in the end. I haven’t yet seen our PHP back-end, but it sometimes behaves strangely - so I expect anything.

Two juniors started performing surprisingly well and fast. I nearly have a feeling that now I'll be busy all the time just lying them the path with tasks. Which probably will turn me into a product thinker.

I somehow should track the progress of both juniors to value them by next Tuesday to make an offer with a reasonable salary. I'm lucky to have both at the same time, still it's gonna be hard to compare their skill and productivity.

The ultimate goal of life is to maximize oneself’s net present luck. Which in my case with Asap breaks down to maximize my career growth (skills + self-brand) and maximize my net present earnings. The latter turns into salary and option. Option turns into its percentage of the total valuation and the valuation of the company itself.

For now let’s only concentrate on the very last component. How can I grow the company’s valuation more efficiently? Asap raised $150k kinda two months ago. It looks like I’m the only guy who’s going to hire tech team members. Salary expenses is the biggest term on the cost breakdown during the seed round (say, 90%). If I knew how much free money we have left to have the runway of 12 months, my goal is to hire the right guys to implement our hypotheses in the code asap.

I wonder if I can finally not write any more code myself.

I’m slacking a little bit and searching for a work-life balance for the weekend. Looks like <> works the entire weekend because he may have a lack of many other hobbies - we’ll figure that out.

PHP wasn’t the choice of <>, there was some earlier guy that wrote the initial version of the back-end and then left the team. <> also says that we have a medium-size codebase - it can’t be rewritten overnight, but it’s also not that huge. So we can consider rewriting it in some more reasonable framework - holding the database the same. I wonder what kind of ORM lies in there.

Asap is a cool lifestyle - awesome and diverse - and we share a lot of dishes to enjoy the taste we can discover in the restaurants that we signed up for partnership. We’re also working in the most NYCish district in Moscow - it gives a sane dosage of dopamine at night on my way from the last cafe to the subway station.

It also allows me not to code. I enjoy learning architectural patterns and teaching guys software practices but I’m not passionate about digging into current quirks, chasing for a typo and spending life in the debugger. It distracts me from thinking about competition and customer love.

This week is gonna be our rollout to many cafes - or at least the next week for sure. Let’s see how it goes.

We had a long call with founders and agreed that we need to hire one more back-end guy (PHP Laravel 4.2) to match the capacity of the front-end. <> had big concerns that “our code may leak to some third party that may benefit from it eg. by rapidly launching a clone”. His idea is that our back-end consolidates the two-year knowledge obtained by iterations of what are the exact “parameters” under which the back-end with this particular product requirements starts being valid. Finally we managed to lower his concerns by explaining that business is not just “back-end” and NDA means quite a lot in the US, where we’re trying to establish a business eventually.

Yesterday I also started coding the order logic and I felt like I should spend some time deeply understanding React/Redux concepts to make better architectural decisions. It’s hard to find the time slot for reading manuals, books and docs, though.

I assume that we’ll spend the next two-three weeks in a steady development by figuring out the team process - ticket system, who does what, code review, cross-project priorities - and then we’ll maybe try to grow.

<> has accepted the offer with a great question afterwards: “How do you yourself think about your offer? Is it average or lower than market or higher or what?”. It’s a great trick to gain a negotiation power for the future.

I kicked off a major refactoring in an attempt to match industry cleanness and architectural standards. Not only do I personally feel bad about coding into our codebase, but I also want to understand it as a whole before it’s not too late. I also feel like I’m the only guy in our team who’s capable of setting up the most efficient coding patterns to speed up our development process.

I don’t yet have time to pull our task list from my Google doc into any Trello-like board, as CEO is asking it for a week already. I’m balancing on their credibility and I’m trying to make an integral effect of super-rapid development during the next 4 weeks. And then, maybe, there can be a point where we can negotiate something.

I still haven’t seen the back-end source and I got eager to see it soon. Given the stub structure of the front-end app that <> provided I suspect that he might adhere to coding practices that generally slow down the coding process 2x-3x - bad architecture, code repetition first of all. Good signs are that his documentation for the API is clean and well-written, but so far our back-end is performing slowly even on basic request. I’m yet to find out if there’s any reason related to a “home-made-ness” of <>'s programming skills.

On Friday evening I said to <> and <> that I’m gonna be off for two days and at the same time I managed to delegate the preparation of the next release to <>. <> worked the entire Saturday sitting next to <> and <>, and therefore the release is nearly ready. Therefore the self-managing front-end team is not far from reality, and I can concentrate on more product and more expansion.

I asked <> about the actual blockers of our American expansion. By inertia he thought it was the development, but actually the B2B sales cycle is gonna be way longer than our software building cycle. So he confirmed to rethink this more during the next week. The path is actually clear, and we should actually start if we don’t want to sit in Moscow for ages.

On Sunday I started making Snakify 2 a reality. My focus is:
- Exercises only, no extra content
- JavaScript first
- Clean, flat, responsive
- Teacher’s access
- Hidden monetization through sell of access to extra content.

We failed to release on time. The more we go from emulator to real device to vendor’s device, the more bugs we catch. I still don’t think we need to go for things like feature freeze, code cut-off and such, but it’s hard to predict now when we can release the thing because there are so many things that can break.

I rapidly went from “claim 3 days work week before the cool offer to go for full time” and the concept of skills - equity - salary balance (and basket) to discussing these very things with <> (suddenly today) and <> (planned for tomorrow). Looks like by the end of this week I’m gonna have a draft offer or something.

Yesterday I got access to our old mobile app and today I successfully managed to extract APIs and put them into the new one. Today I finally got an access to the back-end, initially by claiming it as a blocker to understand hiring needs for the second back-end developer and then to kick off hiring. I’ll probably dig into it this week more and implement something that I urgently need right now. There are many things in it though, 160 models, similar amount of controllers, vendor/ and management/ - a big monolith of used, projected and deprecated functionality full of minor cases and such.

I start spending evenings and weekends in ShAD where’s Mobilizatsiya currently sitting. The cowork space where I spent last two years when not being abroad - doing Snakify - was always a place full of machine learning enthusiasts. Now it’s full of 19 yo junior front-end guys moved to Moscow for three summer months - such a cool atmosphere to be surrounded while making Snakify 2. They learn how to make products using new technologies and industry methodologies, with team roles assigned and mentorship and ideas coming from Yandex.

I reread my Snakify 2 manifesto written in April. Surprisingly, nothing changed from that time except for moving towards an instant code evaluation due to JavaScript-first approach. Which isn’t the game changer in any way. It was just a cool branch explored while experimenting.

[Aug 3] We had a 80 minutes long conversation with <> - probably the first 1:1 since I started on July 6th. <> and <> are happy to have me onboard and coordinate the front-end process. <> suggests putting further team expansion on hold and investing more of my time into understanding the technologies we use, the means of simplification for routine developers’ tasks and building a more organized process of assigning bugs and features to developers. He said they’re gonna make an offer till Friday.

I specifically stressed out that my vision for full-time is 8 hours per weekday, no nights and no weekends. <> said it’s ok and it’s the responsiveness during the off-times that they value more than actual presence. This gives me a path for side projects and other fun activities.

Looks like I’ll accept any offer they make. What the offer really controls is when and why I leave :) There are no other interesting opportunities I see around so as long as I grow here and my estimated net present value of earnings is higher than all other opportunities, I stay. I still have evenings and weekends to try other things and redistribute my time in case I know how diversification can lead to a better career.

Everything is slow. Ok, I’m slow, all other guys are loaded, and the entire team is doing rather productive because I don’t see any obvious way to speed up something significantly. I spent a day chasing a stupid bug that I address to an unclear code we have. I’d really love to refactor our React Native front-end apps during August and put good review practices so that we don’t get unclear shit in our codebase anymore.

As I’m waiting for an offer, much like in April, I came back to think more about the salary vs. equity question. Now I’m being even less optimistic about equity given out to the #1 employee as before. For $100M exit in 7 years for the first year of work (cliff) on 5% offer I get 1.25% = $1.25M. Okay, diluted I get $500k, $300k post-tax. With 15% probability of startup success (given pre-seed raised) that gives $45k. Being offered 2% instead of 5% that gives $20k. Which is less than my annual bonus at Google. And I only get this money back when I’m 31. How many kids am I going to have at 31?

That is, I shouldn’t give out more than 30% of expected market salary to equity. Still, what is my market salary, if I can make $2.5k/mo net in Moscow but $7.5k/mo gross in SF? Is it $1.75k or $5k?

What matters is growth and important tasks. And, again, let me repeat my theory of VC thinking applied to being an employee:
- You should only pick a company based on the total addressable market and the team (and your role). The current state of things doesn’t matter.
- To hedge against a single point of failure, you should quit after the cliff and join another startup (given the similar perceived value of stock options offered). Repeat until no company wants to hire you with such an unreliable track of record, then start your own thing.
- Heavily push for the 10 year exercise window.
- Stay only when you learn new things and grow your skill set. Then leave unless the cliff isn’t far to happen. Plan to learn new things every week.

A new idea I found this morning is the following. How do you measure what you’re doing is sustainable? How to lean towards making things that have impact? In startups, the answer is dumb simple: the money. Up to the first order of magnitude, the more money you earned while working somewhere, the more value you created in the world. This is because no one’s gonna invest series A for something that has no users willing to pay (or somehow participate in the business model) on a certain level. And also, i’m not gonna earn much in both salary in equity, if I’m not the creator of that value.

“если сегодня последний день вашей жизни, чем бы вы занялись?»

а может быть лучше

«если вы узнали что вам осталось жить тысячу лет, чем бы вы занялись?»

продакт-менеджер с экспертизой в таск-менеджерах ранней стадии

Throughout the weekend I was partying, talking to friends and reading various stuff. I tried to understand if it’s appropriate to work around 40 hours per week for an employee #1. Many guys are saying that you work more productively if you have enough rest. I have enough rest this weekend to start thinking about how to fill in “life” in my “work-life balance”. That’s a good sign, I feel inspired and I have new ideas. Let’s see if it will boost my work week.

This weekend I spent no more than an hour in total on work: some urgent stuff and conversations. I suspect this can grow if the team grows bigger and yet works over the weekend. So this is gonna be one of the challenges.