The AI-powered "replacement of engineers" that everyone keeps talking about will look less like existing engineers being laid off, and more like reduced hiring of recent engineering graduates. And, as with any large-scale technology trend, it will take a while before we can say we've come out of the innovator/early adopter phase, which we are clearly still in. In my opinion, it's always easier to invent new technology than to get people to change the ways they currently do things.
> And yet, for the people using the app, it won’t look or feel much different.
Yikes. Okay, I know I'm maybe being a bit unfair here, but I'm sorry to say that this is one of the weakest engineering blog posts I've ever read. This seems to be a massive "let's end the craziness and finally pay our tech debt" effort. Good for them, but not something that excites me about working at Facebook.
I wonder how many great marketing opportunities/channels are written off because they seem to deviate from the values of focus or frugality? And inversely, how many distractions are hiding under the cover of unconventional marketing? I genuinely don't know.
I don't understand how reports like these make sense. A mile driven by a Waymo/Cruise car on route/conditions carefully chosen to test an update, or gather data on a new type of route/conditions is way more valuable than another mile driven on the same freeway stretch/conditions that already works perfectly. Just totaling up the number of miles driven seems to be the vanity metric of the Self-Driving Car industry.
Starting Stripe Atlas, writing Guides to help entrepreneurs, acquiring IndieHackers, and now launching Stripe Press is a very well thought out growth strategy.
Stripe benefits when every new indie hacker or entrepreneur planning to start their business uses their free resources to learn how to go about doing this. The goal of marketing is to be in the mind space of your potential buyer when they feel the need your product serves. If you use Stripe's free resources to learn about building an online business, you're more likely to pick them to accept payments over Braintree/Paypal, etc.
Also, the easier they make starting a business by providing these free resources, the more smart people will take the leap to launch their startups (or side-projects) thereby expanding their overall market.
Lastly, spending your content marketing resources on evergreen content like this has very high leverage — it's a one-time investment that pays off for a very long time, unlike a blog post about a current trend that goes stale quickly.
Goes without saying, but the more businesses Stripe gets using their core product, the better the core product itself gets by amortizing development costs over a larger user and transaction base.
I disagree with you on "Measure What Matters" book. I was really looking forward to reading John Doerr's book, and I stuck along with it longer than usual, but had to ultimately abandon it before hitting the 100-page mark. It seems that just reading GV's blog post[1] on OKR's will teach you as much as reading the whole book.
In addition, the book is one content chapter, followed by a few success stories chapters written by founders themselves. These chapters are written in a very uninspired tone (almost as if they wanted to write something and get it done for JD, not because they wanted to share their story) and barely inspire you or bring in any new insights over the meatier content chapters.
This is not a criticism of the OKR system — arguably it's one of the best goal setting systems out there. But does it need a whole book to understand? I think not. It just seems to be a vastly missed opportunity to me. John Doerr is pretty much a legend in the valley, and maybe my expectations were sky high hoping for a book on the same level as High Output Management or Hard Things About Hard Things.
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