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12 articlesLean Analytics: Key Metrics for Evaluating Startups
Data is crucial for startups. The book "Lean Analytics" offers many insights for entrepreneurs on assessing the metrics of business success. By effectively choosing the right metrics, entrepreneurs can explore unknown business territories more efficiently.
From Uber Layoffs: To Build Wheels or Not?
Between 2014 and 2018, Uber built several "wheels," such as the service discovery tool Hyperbahn, the task queue Cherami, the MySQL-based NoSQL Schemaless, the resource scheduler Peloton, and the service deployment platform uDeploy, among others. Now, with layoffs affecting even engineering teams and stock prices falling below 15-year valuations, were these "wheels" a success or a failure? Should startups hire people to build wheels, or should they adopt existing solutions?
Charles Handy: The Second Curve
When you know where to go, it is often too late; if you always stick to the original path, you will miss the road to the future.
Ten Reasons to Fail at Growth
Facebook's VP of Growth once discussed with Mark why they succeeded. The answer isn't that they are exceptionally smart or experienced, but rather that they work incredibly hard and execute effectively. Compared to execution, growth is optional. Everyone understands the reasoning; the difference lies in whether people can execute quickly. Execution is challenging, and there are ten reasons why growth execution fails.
The Four Fits Model for a $100 Million Business
For Hubspot's freemium and fully automated (touchless) software business, how can one achieve the highest growth in the least amount of time while being VC-backed? Brian Balfour's answer is the Four Fits Model: the four factors of product, market, channel, and model are interlinked and must work together.
Designing Human-Centric Internationalization (i18n) Engineering Solutions
Most products from Silicon Valley companies target the global market, and internationalization is a strategic key for multinational companies venturing into this market. The i18n engineering solution we designed primarily addresses three major issues in the development process of websites and mobile apps: 1. Language, 2. Time and Time Zones, 3. Numbers and Currency. Like all software system development, there is no silver bullet for internationalization; great works are crafted through diligent foundational work.
Designing a Load Balancer
Internet services often need to handle traffic from around the world, but a single server can only serve a limited number of requests at the same time. Therefore, we typically have a server cluster to collectively manage this traffic. The question arises: how can we evenly distribute this traffic across different servers?
The World Is Not Flat — The Economist Special Report: Global Supply Chains
Technology and politics are two forces that influence supply chains. In the context of global industrialization driven by technological change, developed countries provide technology while developing countries offer cheap labor. Companies consider two main points when transforming their supply chains: the risks associated with reducing supply chain costs and the increased availability of products and services due to global trade.
Lyft's Marketing Automation Platform Symphony
How can advertising campaigns achieve higher returns with less money and fewer people? Lyft's answer is automation, which includes an LTV prediction module, a budget allocation module, and a delivery module. When people are freed from tedious delivery tasks and can focus on understanding users, channels, and the messages they need to convey to their audience, they can achieve better campaign results.
Why Side Projects Should Be Stupid
The design lead at Spotify, with decades of experience in side projects, believes that successful side projects must be "stupid" to explore boldly and interestingly. Don't let complex issues like scaling, funding, and competitive analysis slow you down. Doing things is more important than learning.
How to write solid code?
Empathy plays the most important role in writing solid code. Besides, you need to choose a sustainable architecture to decrease human resource costs in total as the project scales. Then, adopt patterns and best practices; avoid anti-patterns. Finally, refactor if necessary.
Metrics for Measuring a Product
There are many metrics to measure the quality of a product: the number of active users, profit, transaction volume, retention rate, and more. To ensure better product development, it is essential to focus on the following metrics: improve retention rate, as high retention means high valuation; assess weekly growth rate, maintaining its level will lead to exponential growth; prioritize iteration speed. When it comes to metrics, we must approach them correctly.
About Tian Pan
I'm Tian Pan, an engineer-founder focused on agentic engineering — building autonomous AI systems and scaling engineering teams. I write practical guides on system design, technical leadership, and shipping with AI agents. Previously an early engineer at Uber, Brex, and IoTeX.
