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12 articlesWhy Startups Need to Innovate?
All successful companies are different: each successful company gains a monopoly in a field by solving a specific problem. All failed companies are the same: they did not escape market competition. If a startup merely imitates the products and services of industry leaders without innovation and targets the same market, people will not buy into it.
What is the Market?
The definition of a high-tech market: existing and potential users; who have a demand for a certain type of product or service; and these individuals reference each other when deciding on the products to purchase. Mutual referencing is the key to market success.
What is the Chasm in the Technology Adoption Lifecycle?
High-tech companies often introduce disruptive innovations. The user growth of these products follows an S-curve. Developing a high-tech market means smoothly transitioning this cycle from left to right, breaking through one user group at a time. Leveraging the momentum of the left-side user group makes it easier to market products to the right-side user group. Observing the technology adoption lifecycle reveals two chasms and one gap.
How to Design Robust and Predictable APIs with Idempotency?
Why are APIs unreliable? Networks can fail, and servers can fail. Three principles to solve this problem: the client uses "retry" to ensure state consistency; the retry requests must include an idempotent unique ID; retries must be responsible, such as following an exponential backoff algorithm, because we do not want a large number of clients to retry simultaneously.
How to Build a Scalable Web Service?
How to build a scalable web service? One word: Split. The AKF Scale Cube tells us the three dimensions of "splitting": horizontal scaling; business splitting; data partitioning.
Why Career Mentors Cannot Help You Get Promoted?
Research shows that women have more career mentors than men, yet they get promoted less. Career mentors cannot help you get promoted, but career sponsors can. A sponsor should be your: career investor and beneficiary; direct influencer of promotions; resource sharer; amplifier.
What are the use cases for key-value caching?
The essence of Key Value Cache is to reduce data access latency. Common strategies for cache design include read-through/write-through and cache aside. The specific strategy should be chosen based on your business needs.
Simon Sinek: How Great Leaders Inspire Action? The Golden Circle
People don't care about what you do; they care about why you do it. Simon Sinek introduced a Golden Circle that starts from the inside out: Why? How? What? Unfortunately, mediocre leaders typically think from the outside in.
Bullshit Detector
Compared to deliberate deception, the cost of being exposed after bullshit is lower. The bullshit detector is a hypothetical psychological anti-deception mechanism. The key to countering bullshit lies in recognizing the asymmetry of risk; if the other party has no stakes but advocates for something, they profit when successful, but only you suffer losses when it fails, then they are bullshitting you.
Managerial Leverage
The introduction of managerial leverage is aimed at high output. Leverage should be applied in management activities such as gathering information, providing information, decision-making, nudging, and leading by example. In summary, improve time management skills, reduce interruptions; focus on activities that create positive leverage to increase leverage ratios.
Nigel Marsh: How to Make Work-Life Balance Work
Work often fundamentally conflicts with family life. If you don't set limits and design your life, companies and governments will drain you. Balance should occasionally be within your reach. Life is diverse; seizing the right moment can yield significant returns from small investments.
Energy-level Playbook
There are four levels of energy: zombie, robot, human and rock star. Zombies had better not work or do little chore work. Robots do preset work. Humans do exploratory work. Rock stars can do anything and the best job for them is creative jobs.
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.
