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.

Why don’t I do something that is pure consumerism bringing new impressions? Summer’s going by, there’s kite, stand-up paddle, surfing and many other things on the warm water that I can enjoy over the weekend. Okay, today’s our first visit to opera (Prince Igor), and then we’ll see. Hedonism helps doing great things. Let’s kick the depression out.

Again, every day I need to choose whether I invest in coding, hiring, managing or a mix. I’m going to code more this week and see if I can finally grasp everything that happens on our front-end side. After that, I’ll get an offer, adjust the hiring budget and start growing our front-end / full stack team. Development is far behind the vision of our biz devs - there’s already a plan for years ahead, and I’m the guy who needs to match it. Which is always normal for product strategists: the feeling that you’ve only done 10% of what you can imagine.

As for work-life balance, I’m pretty convinced that 9 hours “at the office” (in cafes) on weekdays is enough. On the one hand, it yields 40 hours after subtracting lunches and minor distractions (chats, readings). On the other hand, I really speed up the team if I respond to urgent things like “let’s test this new API at midnight” or “can you roll out this build on Saturday?”, which brings a sane amount of overtime and raises the bar to 50 hours.

Yesterday I got my first paycheck for ads on Snakify 1 - it’s $154 for 25 days (Carbon). I wonder if it’s gonna be the highest or the lowest of them all - it can be either an artificial trap to keep me hooked or the lowest month given the holidays in the UK and in the US.

Yesterday I spent almost the whole day discussing and formulating tasks that can be done in 4 days by <>. Looks like I have three main goals for now:
— Distilling tasks up to a point when they can be predictably done and bring the value
— Organize a feedback loop by testing everything and rolling it all out on the prod timely
— Prototype new things and plan the required workforce

I’m going to spend half of today reading articles on various topics. I also need to write down the things that we discussed yesterday with Valery regarding the app. It’s a great idea to have some guys consult us on various topics like UI and code architecture. I just need to plan the time and the budget for it, and also find the right guys.

I see three possible day structures regarding the free time allocation: 2 hours - workday - 2 hours, 4 hours - workday, workday - 4 hours. It’s great to plan for tomorrow and start implementing right after waking up.

I got a new sport goal. I want to learn to fly on my own. Paraplan and kitesurfing are already the things that I can afford, so I shouldn’t miss the opportunities that I still have given the summer. Jetpack is a stretch goal :)

Midday breaking: seriously consider slowing down from 40 h/week to 25 h/week (unconditional) during the negotiation period. I should have more time for other gigs.

We agreed to start developing a new vendor portal. Looks kinda like what I’ve seen at <>: we have a big one with many features, but no one uses it. The goal is to make a monitoring system for restaurant managers that they’re frequently looking into. This is the first truly product task: there’s no idea how to make it properly yet. I’m going to start allocating half of my time to it. It can also help me to understand who to hire next - what kind of developers.

Yesterday I spent 7 pomodoros working on Snakify. Good signal, though I felt a bit tired the next morning and needed to recover lying in the bathtub. I’m curious as to how many pomodoros I can make on side projects per week.

I finally got an offer draft. 140k rub / mo (= $2300k/mo = $28k/y) net and 1% equity vested over 4 years vs. 30k rub / mo and 3.5% equity, 10 year exercise window. This amount of equity doesn’t really make any sense for me. It’s like a lottery ticket for which the prize is gonna be determined when I’ll be 32. In a hypothetical unicorn case which is less probable than my probability to catch AIDS last year, 1% is $3M and 3.5% is $10M. This doesn’t make any difference. In contrast, as I currently still have no passive income stream (Snakify 2 is gonna be an attempt to create one), salary is all that matters. And also, this salary is only competitive if we talk about Moscow. In Munich I’d get $40k/y (less housing = kinda the same), but in the US I’d get $70k/y (less housing - still around $50k).

So what I mostly negotiate now is the free time and ability to choose whether I work 30, 40 or 60 hours per week. Of course, the minimum will be determined by the number of employees in my department and how much processes will require my constant management. But otherwise I’d like to have some time for side projects.

Interestingly, around three weeks ago I openly posted and rejected an offer for 150k rub / mo for a senior front-end dev. Clearly, <> saw this, and it could really be the case why <> claims 140k and not, say, 100k as a standard for middle team lead.

I’m going to accept the offer with the highest possible salary once I get the cap table. This breakdown has nothing to change in my decision, but as a learning tool it’ll help me understand the relationships that could emerge between co-founders. I’m clearly not one of them, as I hadn’t taken their risks half a year ago (and I can’t commit 100 hours/week now), so now I’m working as a hire and I can jump ship at any time. Which is awesome, because I can learn team leading skills, project and product management and leave to pursue my own things once I see more challenging opportunities: either again being a co-founder or being involved in a project of a bigger scale.

I shouldn’t bullshit my employer about a 30 hours work week anymore, I should just work and learn, and that’s how I can stabilize the end of this strange journey that started once I left Palantir.

<> finally told me about the cap table and it was quite surprising. I didn’t expect the breakdown to be that non-uniform. Which is actually reflecting all that happened with the project during its first two years: how the first investments were raised, who worked for salary and who didn’t.

I specifically expressed my intent:
- to choose salary over equity
- to be able to grow as a project-product manager
- to be able to quit fast.

Surprisingly, <> and <> are fine with me trying to work even 20h per week. They haven’t tried this scheme so they don’t know whether it’s gonna be all that bad and they’re open to experimenting.