After 9 months of sabbatical, Danielle started a new role at GitLab this week as GM of Meltano. It will come as a surprise to exactly no one who knows her that she’s found a way to combine her love for data and experience with technical tools to build an open source product to unify data workflow tooling into a single seamless pipeline. For an idea of the kind of engineering work companies currently must do to solve this problem, check out “Managing Uber’s Data Workflows at Scale” on the Uber Engineering blog.
The company is fully remote, and Danielle is hiring for a UI/UX designer with experience building data-rich software interfaces. Her new email is danielle@gitlab.com
From the Operators
If you’re formalizing HR in your company, Jenny Terry of Buffer shares how they’re Continuing to Improve on Pay: Our Latest Changes to the Salary Formula and How Much it Costs. For juicy details on the actual salary numbers, consult Buffer’s Salary Calculator.
Justin Kan of Atrium has noticed his happiness improved beyond what he thought was possible. He’s realized life isn’t just a hedonic treadmill where happiness always has to reset back to zero each time. The lessons he learned to get there are in Feeling Good: Justin’s Program.
Kelly Knickerbocker of Pitchbook put out a great list of 27 black founders and investors to watch in 2019. I hope each of them is prepared for lots of inbound from investors and LPs! We’re especially thrilled to see XFactor portfolio founder Monique Woodard of Court Buddy on the list.
From the Investors
Kevin Hale of Y Combinator sketches out How Investors Think About Ideas. An absolute must read for startup newbies and veterans alike, this video (6:17) provides a clear way to grasp how investors gauge viability, market size, and whether its possible for a startup to eventually be worth $1B.
Nathan Benaich of Point Nine Capital goes deep on 6 impactful applications of AI to the life sciences. For example, I didn’t know some of the same work behind AlphaGo is being applied to protetin folding. If you’re like me 6 months ago and wondering why does this even matter, check out this primer.
Harry Stebbings of Stride.VC tweeted that Founder NPS is the most important metric for VCs. He points out the importance of valuing the founder’s time, and I think sooner or later smart VCs realize that showing up to meetings on time is a huge differentiator, since their customer knows that every unproductive hour that goes by they’re running out of oxygen.
And Now For Something a Little Different
Haruki Murakami describes the wonderful feeling of utter conviction, as read by Matt Malloy, in On Seeing The 100% Perfect Girl One April Morning