Thrilled to share we've raised $21.7m for
@ColumnTax
to scale up our fundamentally new tax filing product
It's been so much fun building the first-ever IRS authorized tax filing API with the amazing team here
people underestimate how working at Google gives you access to the best free worldwide gym/lounge membership
land in any major city in the world, work out at a beautiful gym, shower, get a coffee, and a full meal
a VC friend of mine told me that when a company won't respond to his outreach...
he'll make a market map and *purposefully* put the company in the wrong category so the founder will respond asking for it to be fixed!
It's interesting how much reading Twitter can warp your worldview.
I asked a friend (in tech, in SF) the other day if they had heard of
@LambdaSchool
. They hadn't.
It's impressive when a co the size of
@Stripe
cares as much as they do:
I incorporated using
@Atlas
& happened to notice a tiny typo in a legal doc. Wasn't a big deal so I sorta forgot about it... their team *called* to thank me, fixed the bug, & proactively issued new docs!
1/ Thrilled to announce we've raised $5.1m for
@ColumnTax
to reimagine personal income tax software in the US
In February (tax season) of 2021,
@GavinNachbar
and I set out to find a hairy software + ops problem to solve...
🚨new side-project alert
I've spent the last 5 years closely following the self-driving space and compiling _every_ company (and acquisition).
Now I'm ready to share:
1/ There's an internal tool at Google that makes engineers _much_ more productive (dare I say 10x?)
It's also an incredible startup opportunity in the devtools market
This is why more people should know about Code Search 🧵
This was the easily the hardest week of my life...my partner had to go to the ER and spent 4 days in hospital
We are accepting any and all good vibes you can send our way!
Really thankful for all the doctors & nurses at UCSF
I'd like to offer free software engineering practice interviews to anyone affected by layoffs.
My qualifications: I've given over 500 algorithms and system design interviews at Google and elsewhere.
DM me if interested and we'll schedule 45 minutes together!
we got featured as one of the "61 most promising fintechs [sic]" in Business Insider!!
unfortunately, i've never met a single person with a Business Insider subscription, so i don't know anyone will see this, but here's a screenshot so that you can!
@cauchyfriend
was really confused when i thought this was talking about an Ernst & Young corporate podcast about using AI to advance strategic business metrics for a second
Congrats to the
@Chime
team for announcing their launch of free, in-app tax filing!
We’re excited to partner with Chime to build on their mission of helping everyday people unlock financial progress with embedded taxes. We're proud to help Chime members get their taxes done
SF is amazing: I just got on the subway, saw an old co-worker, chatted for 10 minutes, and now I know the roadmap for the next set of BigCo LLM products
something just happened for the first time ever in years of hiring:
a software engineering candidate sent a follow up thank you email
we are definitely in a tech recession
Two years ago my partner was diagnosed with a _really_ rare (1 in 100M) form of cancer and it was the scariest day of my life...
Luckily we caught it early and had an amazing doctor
Here's a photo from the day she got surgery and has luckily been cancer-free ever since ❤️
I'm so glad people noticed I left Tesla off the list 😏
The website is called , not
What's the point of building side projects if you can't do some light trolling ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I joke with the team that you could replace my presence in a 30min meeting with a video of me saying:
- (Start) What are the goals?
- (5min) Is there any way we could do this faster?
- (10min) How can we break this down into smaller chunks?
- (25min) What are the next steps?
Tax filing with Current is live!
For many Americans, their tax refund is the largest check they'll receive all year. Current is helping their users secure their maximum refund and access to much needed funds. Congrats, Current!
Has anyone ever tried creating a role that's combined Product Manager & Engineering Manager?
I imagine managing a team of ~3-4 and doing all of the PM work. Seems like it could lead to some really great small team execution.
My new startup CTO mantras:
- Can we solve a simpler problem?
- Can we break down the problem into smaller chunks?
- What are the immediate next steps?
- What can we do now? What are we blocked on?
- Are there any shortcuts to getting this done faster?
the bad news is i got covid while traveling and was stuck in a 200 sq ft nyc hotel room for a week
but on the bright side, i'm now Marriott Elite Silver status
~~some personal news~~ (am i doing this right??)
I'm super excited to be part of the inaugural class of the
@southpkcommons
Founder Fellowship
@GavinNachbar
and I are working on Something New™
@patio11
We think so too 🙂
Your blog posts throughout the years have been a huge source of information & inspiration. Really excited that you dug into to what we're working on. Thank you!
a friend who works at a FAANG company sent me this (real) project timeline for a small feature...in case you were wondering why Google never ships anything
Truly, thank you to everyone for the well wishes. It means a lot.
Things are looking a lot better now than a few days ago!
So now back to the regularly-scheduled snarky tech tweets
This was the easily the hardest week of my life...my partner had to go to the ER and spent 4 days in hospital
We are accepting any and all good vibes you can send our way!
Really thankful for all the doctors & nurses at UCSF
1/ Lots of software engineers ask me how they can switch from working on web & mobile apps to building self-driving cars.
If you're a software engineer, you can work on autonomous vehicles TODAY.
You don't need to wait for more "experience".
Here's how 👇
I have a connection to a very talented high school freshman underrepresented programmer stuck in school in rural KY.
He's already finished the HS math curriculum & taught himself C++ for graphics programming.
Anyone know of any stipends/sponsorships for him over the summer?
A friend of a friend at Google interviewed at Facebook right as the virus hit. Accepted new job in March. Didn’t quit old job. Apparently does both jobs at home in 55 hours/week. Neither company knows yet. Might have reversed the co’s, not sure. I have so many thoughts on this.
Today, Kelly Smith, former VP at TaxAct, joins the Column Tax team. Kelly brings 20 years of experience as a leader in the tax industry. We're so excited to welcome Kelly to the team! 🚀
Too much demand means we're hiring for our GtM team. If you're interested in working with the absolute best sales & partnerships team I've ever seen, reach out.
One amazing thing about startups is that you can build a gigantic company on incredible hacks:
- Honey is a terrible chrome extension that sold for $4B to PayPal
- Plaid is literally phishing software worth $6B
- Zapier glues APIs together and just sold secondaries at $4B
got this notification yesterday
then i hacked together an analytics script with Ruby + SQL, ran it against the prod DB, and definitely did not feel like a "Portfolio Executive" :)
you know you're really focused on building product and talking to users when an article about you comes out in the morning and you don't have time to read it until the late afternoon
5/ We're building APIs so that every mobile bank and fintech can embed the future of tax software -- from year-round tax refund unlock to seamless year-end filing
Today, we're also launching our product with
@KloverApp
&
@YottaSavings
powered by Atomic payroll rails
i've used literally every productivity tool: RescueTime, Rize, Freedom, Opal, etc. etc.
the best productivity tool is just working on things you really care about