“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.

It’s actually interesting why we don’t start with pair programming at first. I see it as a perfect tool for onboarding, synchronizing the experience inside the team, code understanding and such. We should detach and code separately only when the value of that is predictably gonna be higher than if we code together. It may sound that when you do pair programming, you manage to do half of the things. But if one of you isn’t effective, it leads to code review burden, bug fixing and other costs that are better to avoid at first.

Coding is easy and predictable when you need to follow a pattern of writing styles, pulling data to store via actions and reducers. Coding is an unpredictable mess when you need to fix linking issues, intuitively understand what could get broken by the newest library release and how this is gonna look like on git diff. I have no idea how to teach it - it looks easier for me to hire such a person instead.

We continued negotiating an offer. The problem is while my market value looks like 140k RUR/mo, the company doesn’t want to cut the runway that much. There are many approaches to offer a salary:
— How much money can we pay?
— How much money do you need to get by?
— How much money will they pay you in other places?
— For how much money can we hire someone with the same skills?

They want to keep the runway long, but of course they don’t know for sure, how much they need before raising series A. I don’t need any money to get by: while my cash flow may be negative, I can get by on my savings. In other places they’ll pay me 150k RUR (Moscow) or more abroad (250-350k RUR) - but with different challenges and opportunities to grow. The last question is all that hard to answer.

We started discussing an interesting idea: we split my market salary in two parts: the real part and the imaginary part - say, 60k + i*80k. That imaginary part I’ll get only at the time the company raises series A in the US. The question here to agree for the next weeks is the following: I feel like I need to get a substantial gain on my imaginary part in case we hit the next round. The startup average probability of raising A after seed is kinda 35%, so I’d assume 3x gain - 300%. That is, my salary should actually be 60k + i*240k. Which is both competitive, challenging, rewarding, not very burdensome for the company at this stage, not that burdensome to pay out after raising A and so on. The only problem is that it looks very weird and unusual.

The new concern I got this morning is whether I should actually lead a development at this time in my life. For the last year I acted according to the “straight action principle”: if I want to learn how to build B2C-startups, I should go and build some and learn in the field, rather than exploiting more subtle strategies leading me to that point. It looks easier to validate straight paths, that’s why. Now my explanation for why I’m here is that a year here can promote me faster on the career track and range of positions open for me in the industry than one year anywhere else. Which still means that I should only assess my current offer for the next year, not for the next four. Life is changing rapidly still.

I discussed an offer with my friend. Consider my market salary is $2500/mo. If the guys are planning to raise the next round in 12 months, they’ll realistically raise it in 18 months. If I take a 100% pay cut, that’s like I’m founding the company by $48k = $50k total - 2.5% equity according to the last valuation. Now his point is that because I’m not a professional VC, my funding should still belong to FFF valuation which is like $500k - so I should pretend to get 10% according to this.

I currently see three points which consist our corporate culture:
— Guys use a lot of stickers and gifs in messenger chats.
— <> and <>'s sense of humour is about shit and sperm.
— We occasionally buy each other curd snacks [творожные сырки].

The first thing is neutral yet makes distractive, the third thing is awesome and the second thing already leads to <> doing mockups that are shameful to show to clients. I’m going to bring up this question on today’s 1:1.

I’m bootstrapping a channel where I post and comment on what I read (@thingsiread). So far I’m figuring out the content style and catching the steady energy to write new stuff. I’m going to announce it around mid September. That can boost my hiring funnel during the next year.

Yesterday I visited a front-end conference for the first time, and I’m hugely inspired. That is the kind of socialization my career is missing: to see fellow programmers and managers, to talk about their work, to adopt best practices, to grow new connections in the industry, to meet old friends. It would be crazy to emigrate without experiencing this first here.

That was part of my reasoning for quitting Replit and stopping the emigration process: as I was planning my possible life in San Francisco, I wanted to try all the same tricks here in the homeland at first. As a psychologist told me two years ago, I should solve my issues in the current family first and not run away from them in an attempt to build a new one. It won’t lead to success. Her words helped me deepen my joy of reconnecting with my parent family afterwards.

I’m starting to dream about office space. One of the parts of this dream is the feeling of being surrounded by experienced tech colleagues. From the point of keeping the team cost low it’s a good skill to learn how to build a remote team. However, there’s way more speed up and learning going on when you sit next to each other. Moreover, the office feels like “your own space” - and it can be a solid alternative while I don’t have my own room and don’t feel like starting to rent one. There’s still too much uncertainty in the near future.

Now when I have an understanding of how things go on the White square and how the guys use our products, what else can I learn if I’m sitting all day long in the cafes trying to code from the bad chair and being deconcentrated by the loud music? I’ve just realized that for the last month I was mostly sitting in Drinkit on my own without <> and <>. I need endless water, fast Internet connection and constant access to power outlets - and the only cafe to provide it is far from the White square center where <> and <> are needed during the lunchtime. Which is bad, because staying in touch with the team is one of the motivational factors that determine which project I’m in.

The others remaining are: we’re making the product for real users, we have a great bizdev team, and we're planning an attempt to launch in the US very soon.

Time is the most important part of an offer. My stretch goal is to have two full-time jobs - as Jack Dorsey. I can do that working remotely, that’s probably the key, so I’m running this pilot for September. This way I feel a stronger ownership of my time, I feel like I can plan and trade-off between making my own projects, sports, culture, health, friends. It’s not a full-time-oriented life anymore. There’s no center in my day, it’s bi-centric. Wow.

It makes sense to go with this team till the end, and it also makes sense to go beyond the project. If the project fails, the team of adequate people with business skills stays the same and more cooperative over time. That leads to choosing equity over salary.

It’s always hard for me to argue with our CTO even when we already established communication and understanding. So my strategy is to say “yes” to his ideas, or “yes, but later”. Then there’s a high chance that his plans eventually change, and nothing strange happens.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23fBoqQxSgQ