A collection of talks, interviews and publications where I shared my learnings.
How do I know if I should keep working on something vs pivoting?
Knowing when to pivot and when to keep going is hard. I still struggle with it after building 4 startups. On the #thisisnotadvice show, Minn Kim, Roy Bahat and I chat about the mistakes I made and what I’d do differently to pivot faster.
Bloomberg Beta, 2021
Series A Ready - a tool to help startups raise their first priced funding round
Series A is often a startup’s first serious funding round, with complex terms, raised from larger venture capital firms paying a defined share price. Prepping for and closing the round is taxing, even with support from law firms that specializing in venture financing like Orrick. I speak to Kaitlin Bagby at Orrick about collaborating on Series A Ready, a tool that ease the Series A raising process for founders.
Orrick, 2020
Coding as a Hobby and Saving Time With JetBrains IDEs
I switched from TextMate to WebStorm 10 years ago. It was like I suddenly had a superpower. Ekaterina Ryabukha and I talked about using JetBrains tools to write open source software, and how we use her tools to build America’s newest stock exchange at LTSE.
JetBrains, 2020
Global Outcomes Career Essentials
What do hiring managers look for in resumes? What questions do they ask? How do they review your work portfolio? I talk about how I hire with recent design and engineering graduates at General Assembly.
General Assembly, 2020
Building Products from Zero to One
I share my learnings from building products from the ground up over the past decade, and how we apply The Lean Startup methodology at LTSE, with Wharton Executive MBA candidates.
The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, 2019
Managing Startup Runway
Startups are default dead. They raise 18 months of runway, then must hit the next milestone or achieve profitability. SVB, Pilot and I facilitate an unconference for founders to share their learnings with each other, on how they manage their runway levers like revenue, expenses, and fundraising.
Silicon Valley Bank x Pilot, 2018 / 2019
Fundraising - Negotiating Smarter
Pavitra Bhalla and I share our learnings from building Captable.io’s fundraising and exit modeling products that help 20,000 founders negotiate smarter.
South Park Commons, 2019
Hiring for Startups
How can a small startup complete with Big Tech for talent? How do you quickly deploy your new funding round? How do you know if you’re paying your staff fairly? Google Cloud, SVB and I facilitate an unconference for founders to share their learnings with each other on how they built their teams.
Google Cloud x Silicon Valley Bank, 2018
Startup Runway
Why is a startup’s runway the #2 most important factor in fundraising and IPO? I present the key elements of the startup runway, how to extend it, and what’s typical for various types of businesses. The incubator cohort and I dive into a live model building session for a enterprise SaaS business using Runway by LTSE.
Envestnet | Yodlee Incubator, 2018 / 2019
从金融、软件工程，再到产品管理的华丽转变
对现在的工作失去激情？发展遇到上升瓶颈？不知道要不要转行？从零开始值不值得？ 在职场中打拼的你有过这些顾虑或者疑惑吗？ 我和主持人许川讨论如何利用自己的优势来追寻兴趣，从而得到梦寐以求的工作。
职得听道, 2017
Sales and Trading at Merrill to Software Engineer
Podcast host Alex Grodnik and I chat about my colorful career path, and going after your life passion regardless of where you started.
Moving Up by Wall Street Oasis, 2017
Using Artificial Intelligence to Enhance Research
Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be used as a new kind of ontology to transforms information into knowledge. AI technologies like machine learning, computational linguistics and graph analytics can be used to extract concepts from scholarly content to form a knowledge graph. Knowledge graph can be used for exploration and inference proposal, aiding scientific discovery. I present our learnings at Yewno during the 2017 International Council for Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI) Washington Meeting.
Library of Congress, 2017
What Does Discovery Mean for Libraries?
Discovery tools are an important topic for academic libraries. How useful are they to our patrons? What priority do we give them on our websites? How do we use them to distinguish one resource type, or group of resources, from another? How do we manage access across consortia without confusing our users? And how do we keep them usable, accessible, and maintainable? I join librarians Sofia Slutskaya, Jonathan Bodnar, Heather Jeffcoat and Jeffrey Mortimore to discuss what discovery mean for libraries at GLC 2017.
Georgia Libraries Conference, 2017
Next-Generation Knowledge Discovery
What are the challenges of unearthing knowledge and inferences from a massive amount of content? Why is conceptual search backed by a knowledge graph superior to traditional keyword search? I discover the latest approaches to improving academic search engines at SLA 2017.
Special Libraries Association Annual Conference, 2017
Commerce and Payments on Web and Mobile
Making and accepting payments using web technologies is quite cumbersome. Thankfully, the new Payment Request API and vendors like Apple and Stripe make the implementation simple and secure. I join Molly Dalton and Zach Koch, who work closely with Edge, Chrome and the Payment Request API. We discuss e-commerce on desktop and and mobile, and how to use new standards for seamless payment acceptance.
Modern Web Podcast, 2017
Vue.js
Vue.js is a JavaScript UI framework built to be approachable, versatile and performant. Its creator Evan You and the award winning writer of CSS-Tricks Sarah Drasner join me to discuss the creation of Vue.js, the beginner learning curve, how it handles data and animations, and how it differs from Angular and React.
Modern Web Podcast, 2017
Accessibility on the Web
Rob Dodson, Alice Boxhall and I discuss web accessibility. We talk about why accessibility matters to everyone, even beyond people with disabilities. We dive into the implementation details, such as navigation, semantics and styling, based on Rob and Alice’s Web Accessibility course. We explore various guidelines and learning resources to improve design and implementation.
Modern Web Podcast, 2017
The What, Why and How of Web Analytics
Calvin French-Owen, Andy Elliott and I discuss web analytics. We talk about what business metrics to measure and how to select analytics vendors for businesses large and small. We also discuss the technical challenges of analytics instrumentation, such as measuring web apps vs. websites, automation and data schema design.
Modern Web Podcast, 2017
UI Components - Challenges and Best Practices Across Web and Native
Benoit Marchant, Andy Matuschak and I discuss UI components. We reminisce our extensive history of framework-level web and native engineering at Apple. We debate various challenges and best practices of component reusability, encapsulation, gestures, data binding, and collaboration between engineers and designers.
Modern Web Podcast, 2016
Data Visualization on the Web with DataSketches
Tracy Lee and I interview Shirley Wu and Nadieh Bremer, long-time members of the D3.js and data visualization communities. We discuss Shirley and Nadieh’s latest collaboration, DataSketches, in which they each produce a data visualization monthly, with a common theme. We also discuss broader trends of building data visualization using web technologies.
Modern Web Podcast, 2016
Object-Oriented UI Programming with ECMAScript 2015
ECMAScript 2015 brought us convenient ways of building UI using object-oriented programming techniques. I present how to architect a single-page web app with reusable components, and how to implement it using pure HTML, CSS and JavaScript written in ECMAScript 2015, with no vendor dependencies.
Everlane, 2016
Instrumenting and Analyzing Developer Tools
Analytics data provide crucial insight into what values are delivered to the users, and how improvements can be made going forward. Developer tools are often open-source software, and open-source software typically do not gather analytics. Bower is a popular open-source package manager for web projects, used by tens of thousands of designers and engineers around the world. I discuss how we, the Bower core team, instrumented the Bower CLI tool for analytics, built a data ETL pipeline, and visualized the data for the core team and end users to consume.
Bay Area d3 User Group, 2014
Visualizing Bitcoin Arbitrage Opportunities
Multiple alternative currency exchanges around the world trade bitcoins with price discrepancies of up to 10%. I discuss how to build an application to discover arbitrage opportunities, with data visualization implemented using D3.js. The application source code is available on GitHub.
Bay Area d3 User Group, 2014
Decorator Pattern in Python
Why is the decorator pattern a popular software design pattern? How does the Python implementation work under the hood? I discuss my thoughts on the decorator pattern at the Twin Cities Python user group.
PyMNtos, 2013
Delivering Complex Pricing Models in the Field
Product pricing is becoming increasingly dynamic, personalized, and immediate. This trends applies from yogurt in grocery stories, to multi-million-dollar hardware and software solutions for world’s largest governments. Delivering such complex pricing models require a drastic rethink of pricing strategy, workflow and technology. I present how we implement and deliver such systems at Entrust Datacard, and how we enabled our on-the-go sales teams to be more flexible and self-sufficient.
Professional Pricing Society Conference, 2010
Achieving Product / Market Fit with an Apparel Startup
How do you go beyond sustainable apparel and build a sustainable business? I discuss the founding of Holy Cow Company - how we grew from selling rebranded American Apparel t-shirts in our apartments, to 60-door distribution in 3 countries and an e-commerce properties with positive return on ad spend.
University of Minnesota College of Design, 2009
University of Minnesota Entrepreneurship Club, 2009
Covering the Globe in Green, One T-Shirt at a Time
A profile of me as the co-founder of Holy Cow Company, in a monthly magazine published by University of Florida, Warrington College of Business.
The Warrington Report, 2009