Venture Lab02

Developed a framework for problem space exploration, concept generation, and idea validation. Using it to explore business opportunities worth building.

Venture Builder

Athena

Senior Platform Engineer

My Therapy, LLC

Building a generative AI therapist application to help people realize they have more information about their behaviours that they can improve their lives.

Founder

Drotion

Acquired a no-code landing product page built around Notion.

Refounder

Fractional CTO

PerkUp

Building a next generation perk program for business. Running the engineering team, and co-op programs.

Head of Engineering

Flow

Technical leader. Process improvements to tune the engineering group and product teams to a more engineering focused and product delivery methodology. Design high performance architecture to handle scaling issues. Hiring new engineers to help the team as necessary, and helping my engineering group hit their goals however possible. Technical due diligence on a product we acquired, managed transition of IP.

Principal Engineer

Easy Coin LLC

Designed and built a financial trading bot for use in cryptocurrency markets capable of monitoring hundreds of pairs in real time, generating signals based on technical analysis for consumption by custom strategies. Principally responsible for architecture, implementation, and led this project to a successful exit.

Principal Software Engineer

Skafos, LLC

People/strategy/roadmap. Working largely in the Elixir and Python programming languages, and a small team at a young startup, grew the team 3X while designing and building a distributed machine learning platform.

Vice President Of Engineering

Greenshire, Inc.

Advisor

Hello, world! I'm your go-to startup whiz with a decade-long affair with SaaS, mobile applications, and large-scale data systems. In essence, I'm a software engineer turned entrepreneur who doesn’t just code but also cooks up compelling business ideas from scratch.

I run a Startup Studio that's not just a business for me, but a passion project. My goal? To turn it into a beacon of trust, creativity, and top-quality projects. How? By leveraging my knack for creating efficient backends, wrangling complex data systems, and navigating the thrilling waves of early-stage startups.

I carry a toolkit filled with integrity, humility, creativity, and drive. But what's my secret sauce? A relentless hunger for learning and the thrill of turning a "light bulb moment" into a reality.

I'm drawn to the SaaS landscape like a moth to a flame and have a soft spot for many things AI. However, my arms are always open for anyone needing a touch of my expertise. Whether refining your data needs, creating effective software solutions, or validating a business idea, I've got you covered!

I believe in making a difference, one line of code at a time. So if you're ready to ride the roller coaster of innovation and bring your projects to life, hit me up! Let's make tech magic together.

It's not a sexy software Sunday, but here's what I'm doing today...

I've got this SaaS boilerplate code I've been working on, and it's in good shape, but it's missing a few pieces.

I use Campfire from 37 Signals as my chat app, and it's got a rudimentary (but workable) webhook interface I can send events to and they'll be received as chat messages from an agent.

So when a new user signs up, fire a message to the chat.

When a user subscribes, fire a message to the chat.

Not rocket science, and not strictly required, but I want it, so I'm going to build it.

What are you getting up to today?

Jeremy Tregunna

Alright, keeping it short today.

This post is for anyone who's ever been burned out, and especially those who are currently burnt out.

I'm not gonna say it's easy, but:

It's humiliating, so much so that it's hard to convince yourself to take action.

I get it.

But the rule is to make what you need to do small enough that you'll actually do it.

If you're burned out, this does work. Figure out how to do it, and if it's humiliating to yourself, consider that a sign on the road that you're in the neighbourhood.

Go.

Don't let metrics ruin your remote work culture...

Meet FlexiCorp, who introduced an idea of "Productivity Points" to measure employee output. Sounds good, right?

Here's what happened:

- Employees gamed the system, sacrificing quality for quantity.
- Busywork flourished, and important tasks were neglected.
- Collaboration suffered, as workers focused on individual scores.
- Burnout and stress skyrocketed.

FlexiCorp learned a lesson the hard way: When metrics become targets, they cease to be good measures. This is called Goodhart's Law.

Whatever your approach to measure performance, remember to balance accountability and autonomy. Motivate your employees with meaningful work, not numbers.

If you're talking to someone you're considering joining them on their entrepreneurial journey, and you can't feel comfortable telling them ways you might not be the right co-founder...

Grow up.

At the end of the day, becoming a co-founder with someone else is a lot like a marriage; yes, I'm using that old trope.

When it comes to your project, you'll both have ways you want to do things, values you live by, ways you work, etc. Share the good stuff and the bad stuff. Trust that the person who will become your co-founder is a grown-up and able to process it like a grown-up.

Get these issues on each other's radar, and consider it a green flag for you if they use this same approach, telling you things you might find objectionable.

What are your thoughts on this matter?

The best thing you can do if you are exploring writing code, even if you've been doing it for years but want to learn something new...

Find something that annoys you.

Fix it however the hell you think it should be fixed.

Make something.

Don't worry about social media cred; find something annoying and improve it.

This is the same strategy you should employ for any side project; side projects are one way to get experience.

Any questions?

Never be afraid to ask 'dumb' questions!

In fact, if you ask 1,000 'dumb' questions and you genuinely listen to the answers...

...then you'll know 1,000 things you didn't before!

So be a little smarter than you were yesterday and be curious.

Remember that the only 'dumb' questions are the ones you don't ask.

Business isn't a hard science.

Business cannot be predictive because it relies on qualitative data and subjective decision-making rather than quantitative data and objective analysis.

Conversely, the sciences operate under strict laws of nature that are universally true and can be empirically tested.

Business, on the other hand, is more complex and fluid, requiring an understanding of human behaviour, emotions, market trends, externalities like regulatory policies or other economic conditions, corporate culture, leadership style, etc.

As a result, the "science" of business is far more nuanced and open-ended than the hard sciences.

Having a good framework can be the difference between being able to hit your crazy "launch a new thing every month" target and missing it.

I'm building mostly SaaS-type stuff, and the modern web has trended toward complexity, so I will simplify where possible.

Front-end frameworks aim to make developing front-ends more manageable, but often, for a solo dev, it makes it harder to build a great backend. HTMX gets me about 85% of what I'd need, Alpine, where needed, gets me the rest.

Things like user auth, template rendering, payments, file storage, etc., shouldn't be things you build more than once since you should be focused on solving your business problem(s).

So I've built a small tool that's essentially some boilerplate to build SaaS-type stuff. User account management, payment, template rendering, user auth, file storage, admin dashboard, etc. All the things I don't want to build more than once.

I can focus on the problem I'm trying to solve instead.

Excited to start work on the first project in June.

Building a world-class engineering team? Focus on these key strategies:

Maximize your mass...

- Prioritize data over hunches when decision making.
- Develop a business case for each initiative and understand its rationale.
- Stay focused; avoid spreading your team too thin.
- Be able to adapt to market changes quickly.

Maximize your velocity...

- High-velocity decision-making (HVDM) involves knowing which decisions can be reversed swiftly.
- Buy-in isn't about consensus but trusting each team member to make informed choices for decisions that can be reversed if needed.
- 70% of the info is oftentimes enough to start; you don't need near-certainty.
- Make being wrong less costly than being slow; get good at course correction.

Ship fast and learn quickly...

- Not all initiatives will succeed, and those that do will require multiple iterations.
- Value rapid, efficient iterations over perfection in any single release.
- Balance speed with quality, HVDM doesn't mean compromising on product standards.

Improve Execution Efficiency...

- Implement standard processes to identify and remove blockers quickly.
- Focus on high-impact areas of your product for new initiatives.
- Embrace better tooling, technology, and infrastructure to enhance your software delivery.
- Disagree and commit when necessary to maintain team alignment and forward momentum.

Ultimately, it's about making informed decisions quickly, learning from successes and failures, and continuously refining processes to ensure your team is always moving forward at its top speed.

The best way to remember something is to assign it meaning.

You could also try and associate the thing with something absurd.

For instance...

Let's say you want to remember a password, and that password is "Giraffe88". To make it more memorable, you might think of a tall animal with a long neck, naturally, but maybe that giraffe is wearing sunglasses, because why not? The number 88 reminds you of roller skates, and so you picture said giraffe with those sunglasses roller skating.

What if you need to pick up some milk, eggs, and bread? You could imagine that the milk is actually a magical potion that gives you superhuman strength. The eggs are actually tiny drums that play a funky beat whenever you crack them open. Finally, the bread is a special kind that can only be sliced by a ninja warrior, so you picture a stealthy ninja sneaking up behind and slicing the bread quickly. Tie it all together and you have a ridiculous way to remember your grocery list.

Assigning meaning or absurdity to the information you want to remember helps to make it more memorable and engaging for your brain.

By creating vivid ridiculous images or stories, you're making the information more 'sticky' and increasing the chances that you'll be able to recall it later.

Some EVs' coil whine is way worse than a 5-ton big rig with its Jake Brake active while descending a hill.

That's all for now.

If you're asking me to rate the performance of your customer support team before I've resolved my issue...

...you won't like how I rate their suggestion since I haven't seen results.

So while I'm still waiting for results, don't pester me about it, because I might just take the 2 minutes you say it'll take to leave some feedback, and leave some feedback.

Be careful what you ask for.

Any framework that leverages LLMs for application developers cannot be production ready if it doesn't allow for full prompt control.

It also can't be if the tools it has access to aren't written defensively.

There, I said the quiet part out loud.

I'm looking at you... AutoGen, CrewAI, LangChain, etc.

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