We closed our seed round and some interesting links
It’s June! Summer is coming and Paris is opening up.
This month was intense:
Got my first jab of the vaccine
We announced a $1.85M seed round led by Point Nine
Caught up and partied in Paris with my best friend from middle school (big hug Pietro)
Wrote a blog post on why throughput is the only thing that matters to me
We closed two key engineering hires that have the right skills and energy we want to be surrounded with every day
I set up my home office with a better camera, microphone, and ergonomics
Worked on a big datastore migration for June to keep scaling with our users
Started getting fit again - exercising and always doing 3 meals a day again
Other than this I had time to explore interesting ideas and books
Steward Brand & the Whole Earth Catalog
I think in the office at Stripe press they have a picture of me as the ideal customer persona.
After seeing that they made a documentary on Steward Brand (btw if you work at Stripe send me a link to watch this 🙏). I got into the rabbit hole of the Whole Earth Catalog.
I have a copy of the “Last Whole Earth Catalog” and I love skimming through it as it feels like reading a medieval alchemy handbook, with descriptions of how to make random interesting objects
Wong Kar-wai’s aesthetic
My roommate is into these Wong Kar-wai movies and I find the scenes to be extremely fascinating
I find this Hong Kong cyberpunk aesthetic extremely charming, the storylines are awful but the way the images and scenes are built is mind blowing
Zenly is so cool - Buying Snap stock
Over the last month after hanging out with a friend that works at Zenly/Snap and after seeing the Snap partners summit I’ve become quite obsessed with the user experience of their apps and their vision for the future
Over the next months, I hope I’ll be walking around looking goofy wearing these
Innovation in user experience seems to flow from games to consumer apps and then into business software.
Building June we’re trying to turn getting insights from data into something playful and approachable. I want to take inspiration from Super Mario and social apps in the way we build our onboarding.
If we design a user journey that doesn’t require talking to a human or reading a manual to figure things out, we will win
That’s it for this month! Reply with interesting books and ideas you’ve been fascinated with in the last month