The original iPhone was released twelve years ago. When a new technology is released it takes time before we go from “this is the most amazing thing ever” to “maybe we should think about if this is good for us.” Henry Ford released the Model T in 1908 but drivers licenses weren’t adopted until much later. By 1930, only 24 states required a driver’s license to drive a car. Just 15 mandated a driving exam. I believe we’re at the beginning of this transition for phones and social media. Facebook’s early adopters, millennials, are running away from facebook. Over 11,000,000 users in the US alone have left. We will continue to see this trend continue across other domains in technology.[…]

Stripe announced their new engineering hub on Thursday- remote! They have “hubs” in San Francisco, Seattle, Dublin and Singapore already, and remote will be their fifth. They said they were hoping to hire 100 remote employees this year. Stripe went out of their way to praise their remote workers, saying “Stripe has had hundreds of extremely high-impact remote employees since inception” and “…remote employees have outperformed all expectations”. It is exciting to see a silicon valley unicorn (for lack of a better word) pushing forth the remote work trend. Although remote work continues to be on the rise, large companies haven’t fully embraced it. No huge tech companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, Netflix have fully embraced remote work as Stripe[…]

Earlier this year I finished the book Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss. I could say a lot about this book (and Tim) in general, but I’m going to focus on one of the sections that was valuable to me: The Canvas Strategy (AKA Canvassing). I don’t recall the name’s meaning but the strategy goes like this: Do stuff that nobody else wants to do to make yourself valuable. My favorite example that Tim gives is that of Patriots’ head coach Bill Belichick. Belichick volunteered to watch film for hours on end to prepare for upcoming games. He did this extraordinarily well and shared his learnings during team meetings. His expertise eventually made him useful in increasingly important decisions which[…]

Finding remote work is difficult. The best way to get remote work is to have remote experience, which leaves us with a nice chicken and egg problem. The easiest way to get your first remote job is to convert your current job into a remote job. Working from home is a great joy and convincing your manager to have some time to work from home (WFH) can be rewarding. If your company already has a flexible WFH policy, then great! Take as much time working from home as your company allows. When I was working for a major hospital, they allowed employees to WFH one day every two weeks. Almost nobody utilized this benefit but I was sure to take[…]