What's Teaching Done? (Notes from Feb 24 to March 1, 2020)

It's 2020. I plan to revisit a number of journeys and roles that have ultimately made the person that I am today and landed me in my current place. Being comfortable with where that is, but not satisfied, has enabled an uncommon, jagged path. In realizing that everyone has different paths, it's definitely fun to be able to share and learn from others - how they've arrived in their current states, what they think they learned, how they've best come into their place and where they may want to be shortly. That reflection is something that I believe should be a rote process for people age into their late 20s and early 30s.

I really enjoy keeping myself sharp and helpful in teaching/tutoring. I've set aside somewhere between 5-50 hours for every week since I was finishing high school for this. It was informal at first in high school - neighborhood kids or younger siblings of family friends. Similar with college - classmates who wanted some help. Right out of school, I took a role with a tutoring company in addition to a recruiter role where I didn't quite appreciate it as much. Different focus when I was first entering the workplace. There was a challenge of learning a bit inside of tech (IT recruiting), talking with founders and hiring managers there, across many industries. Sourcing candidates, gathering requirements and putting everything in line seemed like a role that had more pieces than the teaching side. However, I left that after almost 2 years to go full-time with the teaching company. I was going to become a head trainer of the full west region and manage/oversee the tutors in each of the 9 locations as well as expanding 5 more.

Over the course of nearly 2 years where I got to oversee much of the training and processes for the NorCal's tutors, as well as auditing results for students, talking with parents/students/center directors at each location for action plans, it was all very process-oriented. There were people in these students where you had to match how they may learn best, or how they operated. You can have a teacher who knows their stuff but if there isn't an adaptation, it doesn't help always. Everyone can teach but it's learning to adapt that really finetunes the learning process - both for the teacher and student. I've heard this repeatedly in talking with those still learning now - teachers that blatantly declared "online/virtual isn't the way to teach" or that they would only do video recordings or to "just read the textbook" and they've given up. That's not the norm, but it's a bit too common. Hopefully pointing out that not everyone enjoys their job and work day in and day out - it's something they can do. And, more importantly, it's not something you want to eat/sleep/breathe outside of work.

I left the full-time role due to that last point. And that's why I made it more about teaching those that I wanted to teach or saw those that were willing/able to adapt. It's fun when I know that my students know I'm helping because I want to. And that's allowed me to teach some fantastic people. There are connections I have from all of this that have attended some of the best institutions, gone on to do some very interesting work, traveled all over, have positions at some of the best firms. Others still have started business, data and finance clubs after some of our discussions. Siblings of others who recognize the work and time that was put on from both sides. It's rewarding.

It's also sometimes difficult. There are failures. And my close interaction with them puts me in the wake - deservedly so. I set extremely high expectations for most of the students and they get scared to tell me - most do still, but I'm more worried that that pressure is externalized from what they're putting on themselves. A few that I enjoy seeing or emailing back and forth every year or semester or so - check in to see that they're on a track that they're comfortable with - not that we ever know what that means in the future, but one that they're good with. Their development will always intrigue me. Then, I continue when I adapt.

All of this to say that I'm curious. Some days, talking with those that are younger teaches me about new things. Other days, it's talking to older mentors or someone out at a coffee shop who can drop some knowledge. If you can inspire someone, they may light a fire for you. Being there by just being there is adequate - a peculiar repeated check-in does more than we believe, so reach out.

• Who gets paid, and who doesn't? (Build Your SaaS - bootstrap in 2020, 1/28/20)
• Talking about not using percentages in year/life but we do in Kindle / ebooks
• The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander
• Working for yourself or remotely - some sense of not being grounded, lonely possibly
• Environment contributing to an interaction - people aren't present as often, anymore
• Wanting to rebuild the dashboard for Transistor.fm - going from SemanticUI (all-in-one library, CSS and JS)
• New Rails app and getting integrated with Tailwind UI
• Not truly valuing the CMS because of Wordpress/Webflow, etc
• In podcasting, tools like Audacity and Grabband are free
• Dave Sims, co-CEO of Floify, Flux (The Indie Hackers Podcast 11/18/19)
• Start with naivete - starting first business in 2000, 2 initial failed and the third took hold
• Started another 13 years later, had recruited and retained important people
• 90% Floify and 10% Flux
• Successful CEOs of mortgage companies with hundreds of employees, who partner with motivated entrepreneurs to help
• Partner legally - each own shares and do it together - pumping out profits
• Used short-term financing to get into house when moving to Boulder with his wife - did long-term refinance after 90 days
• Talked to local credit union - worker emailed requests for the long-list of papers
• Didn't want to email tax returns - for security, he encrypted and sent them
• Wanted to make the loan officer assistant's life easier, so he figured he could solve it with 5 people
• 400k loan officers in the US, big enough market
• Had another idea - meeting with JPMC where you can create bank accounts with APIs
• Excited but not sufficient enough people that were interested, and it was too slow
• Finding a business idea - medium level of effort and insight
• Work on what you know, but industries are so deep where you never knew much of it or tech need or business
• He knew nothing about the mortgage industry other than as a consumer
• Some small software companies that weren't that big, not with much traction doing similar stuff
• Borrower/loan officer assistant in operations don't get the same love as officers/compliance
• He wanted to make Floify as 1 screen that a borrower could go to where he could interact with the mortgage loan officer/co, bank/cu
• Make it easier to do encrypted docs, w2, pay stubs and DL, such (at the start)
• First customer - down in Austin, TX and he'd visit the office a few days a week to see how it worked
• Built capabilities for messaging realtors
• He thought the loan officer would be his customer - but occasionally the loan officers would be part of company to wrap up
• What's happening in email? Spreadsheets? - he has customers in other real estate, solar, commercial
• Could use it as attorneys or accountants, also - but stayed niche
• To get someone to pay - GitHub check-in from June '13
• He wrote a press release in August of 2013 - was doing thirty day trials, screen share and trying
• He called and took the credit card over the phone in September
• Backend was Java, NoSQL D/B (no longer there) and helped for speed of development - just had to work, MVP and value
• Selling $50-100 subscriptions a month, want <2% churn
• Went after smaller customers first - shorter sales cycles - actually doing loans compared to higher up who said they had software
• Missing cloud with Salesforce in 1999, 2000 - had kept other people's files on his computer in 1984 (DropBox)
• Paul Gift, Joe Lemire (Wharton Moneyball, 2/26/20)
• Playoff expansion discussion - what are the leagues looking to optimize
• Find best team, more teams in, more randomness
• Stylistic conflict for Heinke and the 76ers
• MMA analytics - round by round currently for FightMetrics (owned by UFC owners)
• Not many camps have this data, let alone the money to get it
• Training has quite a bit of analytics but not necessarily fight/cage data
• Testing fight dynamics for smaller/larger cages
• Technology is training for Lemire at Sporttechie - clothes that add to energy/effort
• Wearables and exertion data anecdotes - including Nate Burleson being told to leave field by Browns' trainer
• Was feeling good so decided to stay, despite wearable saying otherwise - tore his hamstring, retired
• Combine differences - getting into more of the details in sports for how much analytics there really is
• Sports apparel for positional tracking and now more information about wearables
• Machine only to "techstile" and smart apparel - work with others
• Rebecca Kaden, Managing Partner at USV (USV webinar for SimulMedia 2/27/20)
• Incumbent advertising with Google and Facebook - audience has been aggregated extensively
• Suddenly had increasing parts of the global audience in two places
• Imperfect markets become perfect as you get closer to saturation of a market
• Starting to lose market with younger audience as it becomes fragmented
• Companies could before, over last 10 years, could mine for performance
• How can cos use the channels to grab the TV mantle - creating brands to enable mental/emotional shortcuts for recognition
• Facebook or other things try to sell that the brand awareness is in a click-through, but it's more a longstanding form
• Build high-quality, easy-to-use and the companies looking to scale will scale with you
• Slack, Zoom, Expensify, Twilio, Cloudflare, Stripe, etc…
• Split out CAC to steady and experimental - permission to experiment in different channels
• Kill them quickly for what works or not - open to try many things
• What's a good influencer CAC and value (blended, potentially)
• Modern Fertility startup - work with many influencers as authentic/emotional, telling stories
• Influencers were buying off of other influencers - then having them talk about their story
• Knowing your funnel and not will determine your marketing channels/spends
• How do you build trust? (D2C question) - any beautiful design won't build trust day one
• Very clear on what your brand value is to give to consumer - 1 core promise
• Nothing more valuable than loud customers willing to evangelize for you
• Finding channels - hypothesis for success needs to be clear initially
• Bandwidth - as you spend increasingly, you should see the same or better results
• Scaling doesn't work, then
• Unit economics need to work, LTV as tough to figure out early on
• What's Up With All These FinTech Acquisitions, SEC Rules (a16z 16 Minutes News, 2/28/20)
• Anish Acharya and Scott Kupor on Credit Karma's acquisition by Intuit and VISA acquiring Plaid
• Best companies own distributions instead of products
• Products aren't sophisticated, but the reach is wild - CK with 100mln members
• eTrade in wealth management couldn't have been easy for Morgan Stanley
• Intuit owns the point of transaction for filing taxes but not durable with customer
• No ongoing conversation or re-engagement of services/products - bought frequency of engagement
• Morgan Stanley/Etrade to get access of portfolio of consumers - buying/selling stocks
• Wealthy today on way to retirement, also Amshare Works (co's with vested/unvested equity)
• Pre-wealth management and exposure to next gen wealthy folks
• Markets mature with tech innovation (engineers has leverage), product innovation (tech commoditized) and marketing then BD innovations
• In the most mature phase now - need to reach new generation of consumers, fintech startups are at the right scale
• No single one app to rule them all - bespoke - company can have old-world money folder (vs button)
• Best companies own distribution and product, having one great won't be sufficient without other
• Competitive edge changes over time - macro and micro
• Company builders should build best product in front of customers and make sure it's durable
• SEC and cryptocurrency matters - main issue is to clear the underwriter concept and when they're deemed as such
• Telegram sold as an investment contract to investors - "grams" as in the future and you'll have a portion of that
• If you buy the investment contract for "grams", you are effectively an underwriter - cannot sell currently
• Rule 144 (buying private securities holding them for a period of time, you can sell them currently)
• This type of transaction occurs daily in venture - buy privately, follow rules, you have availability to sell later
• Very important policy issue is to have a reasoned discussion with the SEC - downstream discussions