I also got access to prod which also happens to be our test server - served from a different clone of the repo, both leaving next to each other under /home/ directory.

I met <> - a VC analyst. He said that there are no examples when Russians launch B2C operations in the US successfully. It may happen when founders already live there for years and got to learn some specifics.

He also suggested that I just go directly to Yandex, Snapchat, Uber, Stripe and work for them for some time. Also, speaking about Moscow, SkyEng has 50-100 guys and they are great, QLean and Doc+ are also cool places to work. He suggested monitoring conferences, hanging around, reading news and closely watching for information about new rounds of investment going around. An investment is a push for hiring.

Yesterday I went to a meetup for the third time - this time it was a Python meetup. There were a lot of 30+ yo guys which I don’t know why to approach because their life seems pretty clear - senior backend developer somewhere in 100+ pps team, wife, travel once a year. So I approached a guy of my age who asked some interesting questions to a speaker, and as usual he turned out to be quite simple: 4th year at bachelor’s degree, junior Python/Swift freelance dev not committing full-time because of the ongoing education, 50 friends in VK.

That is, I need other means of networking with software engineers - other than going to meetups.

[Sep 22] Whenever I don’t see <> and <>, I feel like they are very disappointed by my underperformance, they started searching for a replacement and they’re gonna fire me pretty soon. And that they constantly want to push me for “overtime work”. Whenever I work with them together, I feel like they enjoy how our team is going forward, how things are under control and how faster and more transparent the development process becomes every day.

[Dec 2] Lol. Go try to replace a team lead if you’re low on investor’s budget, not a guru of social media networking, work from cafes and can only offer half the market salary.

Yesterday I visited BeerJS, a networking event for front-end guys from Moscow to join at 8pm in the bar to hang out while drinking together. It was way better than the last three meetups because there I could actually talk and listen to talks for hours. I so much like brunches and life stories, and especially establishing contacts to new interesting people that are thinking similarly. Yesterday I met exactly the guy I wanted to meet at such events - <>, a front-end guy from a digital agency that read Thiel’s “From zero to one” and wants to build products. Yay.

Итоги 2021:

- преподавала в ЛМШ
- отвезла детей на УТЮМ, судила там
- впервые понравилось учиться в универе
- в связи с этим, начала в мл, дл
- впервые призналась в чувствах
- снова начала влюбляться
- впервые пособесилась, реджектнули
- успешно пережила эмоциональное выгорание (диагностировано мной)
- сгоняла на митинг
- отметила Новый год с друзьями
- началась аниме фиксация, закончилась аниме фиксация
- почти не занималась ебаным курсачом, закрылась
- впервые сходила на пересдачу
- волосы покрасила, волосы закрасила в натуральный
- получила седой волос
- начала ходить на ролевки
- сходили на потрясающий джазовый концерт к соседям подруги
- перестала париться из-за себя, друзей, отношений, места и мысли жизни. крч, отрефлексировала все, не связанное с учебой/работой.
- подняла рейтинг в шахматах на ~300
- начала ходить на турнир в южку
- осознала, что алкоголь не делает тусы лучше
- по-взрослому восстановила отношения с подругой
- начала на гитаре брынькать, бросила
- перевелась с ебаной специализации на умную, но все ещё ебаную

As for the offer, <> says that it’s blocked by their negotiation with the <CTO>. Basically, we need a head of development - and it’s gonna be either <CTO> or me. Putting <CTO> to this role has several concerns:
— He wasn’t involved in our hiring pipeline when we staffed two junior positions, and he’s probably gonna continue avoiding such tasks.
— We don’t know about his ability to coordinate a team. [What else should we know if he practically failed that during July-September.]
— We don’t know if it’s productive for him to spend a lot of time on coordination rather than coding the back-end.
— <> had several arguments with <CTO> about various architectural topics. <CTO> didn’t listen to pieces of advice all the time, and it required a significant pushing force to make him do what’s actually needed from the product side

So basically I have a small possibility of taking a CTO role soon.

Once I stopped working on Friday, I felt like I actually don’t know any other way I can spend my time in order to grow personally. For the first time I thought that actually for me books are the same time-wasting and gum as computer games or TV series - for others. I was searching for a way to stop trying to be “more lucky than others” and become “just as lucky as them”. So I decided to shrink the ambitions for October and dedicate October to sorting out the chaos in my Trello which by now has around 100 links for articles to read [The relief turned out to stop feeling the necessity of reading them].

I’m still not sure that the way I grow at Asap is the right way to grow. I want to learn how to build products for customers and I want to build them along the way. I’m not sure if I should focus more on tech or on the product side. Anyways, I hope that I’ll have a dive into the business part during this weekend, which will give me more context to kick off my product thinking. I feel the anxiety of a blank sheet as I think about the product role. I can solve anything tech - building a web/mobile app and potentially scaling it. I kinda think of myself as a product manager whenever I think about Snakify. That’s not yet the case with Asap - I just don’t have any ideas [maybe because I don’t have any product tasks given out to me].

I have slept only 6:30 and I feel that my brain operates a bit differently. I just realized that the main focus for Snakify for now should be shipping 50 new problems as a Snakify Plus offer for existing teachers on the existing platform for $99/year. Clearly I was inspired by reading Intercom on starting up, especially their pricing chapter. But also that was the thing I already started doing in July and abandoned. As I realized there’s no fast and easy way to build Snakify 2 as a new codebase, I should test a smaller hypothesis first by tweaking the monolith from 2012 that I currently have.

I want this to be my lemonade. I want to make a button somewhere in the universe that says “Ship some money to this guy in exchange to the value he created, because I personally value it at least this price”. If there’s no button, no one can press it.

The second insight of today is that I should join <> and <> on their first trip to LA. For me, the development is no risk. I can’t learn much here, building this product seems boring. For me, the actual risk is the ability to launch something in the US. So to mitigate it, I should get a first-person experience. I should be there, talk to venue staff and to potential users, I should learn how to pitch, I should be in the epicenter. There’s the actual learning that I can get in 2017. If I have money and credibility for it, I should get it.

Yesterday I got the offer and I accepted it. The offer details are the following:

Out of 8’000’000 shares authorized for founders during C-corp formation, I get 800’000 (10%), subject to 4 years vesting with 1 year cliff. The vesting starts on July 6, 2017. Thus, on July 6, 2018 I should get my first 200’000 shares. This is not an option, these shares are “already mine” and give me the voting power. <> claims that he filed 83(b) election on time.

Their shares are not yet written in bylaws, as no one's are. We’re still in the progress of negotiations. Namely, I assume that <> and <> have some fair split confirmed between them (maybe 2:1), and the rest of the team (me, <> and <>) will get around 30% of the founders’ shares. The exact numbers and conditions are subject to hard discussions, because the roles are changing, the demands are changing. I personally go to the milestone July 6, 2018 with the goal to show a performance that makes it ridiculous to fire me right before that date. Then we’ll see what the state of our business is.

On top of that we all get “the money to survive”. I claimed it to be 20k rubles to my Asap balance. While the offer’s conditions ask me to be Asap a primary thing I keep in my mind, I also want to maintain a financial independence, especially given that I already set up a passive income with Snakify.

The guys are happy to see me in LA helping them, and “the money to survive” in LA are gonna be around $2k per person per month - for direct living and food expenses. The only blocker here is that we have an arising project in Moscow - Asap.Staff should become a default POS terminal on a new food market launching this winter. Once I have this project set to success, I’m free to come to LA and take part.

I felt happy yesterday after I accepted it and now I still feel happy - while I was constantly nervous in August and September due to ongoing negotiations. That’s a good sign. These 10% are sharply expressing the stage I joined at, my skills, my expectations of my commitment and such.

Yesterday I started a new round of hiring. We interviewed <> - a guy of comparable experience like our juniors - maybe a bit more. He originally asked for 120k rubles per month. <> replied that while we’re on a pre-seed stage, we’re cutting the costs, and asked whether we can pay less while giving more growth, responsibility or something else to compensate.

I’m slowly recovering from the imbalance between “my backlog”+ “external backlog” (i.e. meetings with friends and attending city events) vs. work. For the fourth week in a row I’m cutting brunches and @sns_msk chat meetings - all to have some spare time with myself

Luckily, the rest of the team is unblocked: the communication paths are built between products and engineers, engineers are talking with each other as well, there are enough assigned tasks for the next couple of days, and I even have the feeling that we maintain the tempo for team size growth. So the day doesn’t require me coordinating everyone and I can take my own engineering tasks.

I don’t see any easy way to claim back the time I spent working on weekends. Once the workday starts, it’s very hard to detach from work chats. Everyone needs help, attention, advice etc. I wonder if the vacation is possible any time soon.

I’m starting a doc on back-end development. I want to implement one feature that touches many parts - DB migration, API, old admin interface, new admin interface. I hope that once I document it, the entire team and possible future team members will adopt it quickly.

I’m the guy who hires new developers using his network and skills, who plans the developers’ onboarding. <> helps me find the imperfect parts of our getting-things-done setup, and together we gradually speed up all processes and streamline the communication.

Once again I feel like the days when I haven’t slept enough are “special”. I don’t just feel like I think slowly, I think differently. It’s like a micro psychedelic trip that gives you new ideas.

<> said that she wants to start working with us. We couldn’t make her a competitive offer, so it’s a great sign for our team that she can take a pay cut. She’s going to combine working for us with working for some ICO agency - the latter should give her more money and less growth.

I also visited a coworking space at the <> high school and listened to the projects high school students are doing. I feel disoriented: it feels very hard to give any advice for the startups when they’re being done in setups I now consider “failing”. No release yet, the team consists solely of programmers, no real user pain, small market, part-time commitment - it all leads to frustration, and I don’t know how to fix it. It all gives a lot of learning points, but it's learning by pain. “Fail your first five startups as early as possible”, as I said today to high school students at our meeting.

We had a discussion with <> and <> about whether we need to know if our remote engineers work at any given time. For instance, did they already start working today, how much time do they plan to work today and so on. It sounds like micromanagement, and it is. I’m not sure it yields to any speed-up in development, as the control over constant messaging on its own shouldn’t be very motivating. Voice calls should though, I think.

Yesterday I posted our second job opening at my VK wall. Today I haven’t yet received any replies. Maybe there’s no capacity left among my friends - or I don’t actually need the guys I describe.

As now I started getting Fabric daily updates on our DAU, I don’t actually feel like our user base is growing significantly since I joined. We plan referrals - user->user and waiter->user - to boost our growth, but I’m not actually sure we can cover 10% of White Square cluster transactions in a year given the current dynamics. I don’t feel like the app implementation sucks because we just launched it. Either the product mechanics sucks or our marketing sucks. Or it’s just all going super slow. The offline materials - posters and stickers - were designed, printed and tested several weeks ago. Still for now the venue visitors still don’t have many ways to find out that Asap is launched and operating in this particular venue. It’s gonna be fixed, but it all takes time. Now I see how long-term it all is.

We should build an automatic process, a culture of clear and verbose reporting. So that when guys let us know in advance when they work today, what they’re going to do and when they expect to ship certain things (like “today in the evening” or “tomorrow morning”). Given that many of our features require support from several sides, this reporting becomes necessary to ship everything rapidly.