[Edit: apologies for the wall of text. A lot of pent up emotion around Creo.]
Best place I ever worked.
This was “the Creo Philosophy”:
Our priority is to provide unique and sustainable value to our customers.
1. All decisions must be based on sound economics.
2. Key decisions are made in consensus, with full team agreement to accept and implement the decision.
3. We believe that people are most effective when self-managed.
4. Compensation is based on contribution, gauged largely by an annual peer review.
5. All employees share the wealth created by their hard work and innovation.
Creo was extremely proud of how “flat” the organization was but my primary take-away from there as an ex-employee is actually how important management is.
First and foremost, management created a shared vision of the future. Not silly posters to laugh at but a real shared mission. It was exciting and motivating. Every Creoite knew how the world would be changed when we were successful. Decisions could be distributed because it was obvious which outcomes were aligned with the companies goals. Trying to push outcomes not aligned with the goals was hard ( as it should be ).
Second, there was a strong framework for how decisions were made and how to identify good decisions from bad ones. Economic thinking and consensus were two important principles that you were expected to follow unless you could demonstrate very good reasons not to.
Third, management provided a great deal of mentorship, both through direct education and through calling re-enforcing the primacy of the principles. One of the reason Creo could be so “flat” is because everybody knew how the executives would behave if they were in the room and they could insist that others act accordingly. It was easy to assume executive sponsorship without having to resort to politics. “We do not tolerate politics” was an important mantra through the best parts of the company history.
Most importantly, I got to experience the everyday effectiveness of the organization under three different CEO’s: Ken Spencer, Amos Michelson, and Mark Dance. The “culture” was only as good as the man at the helm.
At Creo, we made the claim all the time that we basically did not have hierarchal management. It was true we did not always have “supervisors” but we had the best management I have ever worked for.
As said above, Creo stopped working when it acquired a rival that had more employees than it had. The politics exploded. The effectiveness disappeared. Financial performance followed. The company was sold to avoid a shareholder revolt. A sad end for a spectacular organization.
The original Creo employees stuck to the principles. Well, except management. Hierarchical authority was suddenly more important. Decisions did not have to make economic sense. What mattered was who was doing the deciding. Consensus stopped being a requirement. Speaking truth to power stopped being a path to better decisions and started becoming a career mistake. Executive sponsorship became real and aligning with people in position became the most important criteria for individual success. Empire building replaced shared vision. The lack of alignment between making the company successful and being successful as an employee completely broke. The company failed.
Managers and employees looked at Creo folks and their “philosophy” like naive children. Sure “the philosophy” worked well enough for Creo to beat them to begin with but, once merged, the acquired were right. Creo was idealistic and naive. But this was not inevitable.
Why did Creo fail? Did “the philosophy” not scale as the final CEO I think believed? I do not think so. I see it purely as a failure of management.
The final CEO provided little vision. Other than a focus on the bottom line, there was no insistence on economic decision making ( eg. instead of breaking up meetings because they had too many people in them - too expensive - he held meetings with dozens of people in them ). Instead of coming down on politics and insisting on consensus, executive authority became sacred. In fact, the term “consensus” became most often used when an executive used it as an excuse for their own lack of leadership by claiming the team should have to solve its own problems.
If strong management had provided the leadership, the mentorship, the vision, and support for the culture ( most importantly the principles of good vs bad decision making ), Creo would still be with us. If I was lucky, I would still be working there.
Creo ruined me in a way. I have never been able to accept why things cannot be as good anywhere else. Such simple ideas. So dramatically effective. Unfortunately, good management ( executive level ) is an absolute requirement. Even hundreds or thousands of well trained employees was not enough to make these principles work without strong management behind them. Management matters.
I got to experience some amazing leadership for a while. All I can do is try to emulate those role models as best I can. And everywhere I go, I try to make economic thinking an important part of how decisions get made.
I'm a huge fan of spaced repetition and Anki. I strongly believe that most people's professional lives would be improved by using it. There is a huge amount of information that falls into the zone of it's needed often enough that not knowing it is a pain, but it's not needed often enough that you would "naturally" remember it.
I've yet to find anything else that only takes 10 to 20 minutes a day that has a higher ROI. The amount of "compounding interest" it gives over time is incredible.
Learning to write good cards is skill that takes time and practice. The article from Andy Matuschak [0] is a great guide to learn how to write good cards.
"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn." (White, The Once and Future King)
Not exactly a lifehack but I swapped out the plastic casters on my desk chair with a set of polyurethane wheels. Even many high end office chairs come with low quality casters. Replacing them with a nice polyurethane set makes those hundreds of small shifts in body weight we do in the chair each day unnoticeable. And when you need to move more than that, it's completely effortless. No dragging at all.
The frequentist approach states (in simple terms), the observations I have made will help me predict future outcomes, because they are a good measure of the inherent probabilities inherent in what I'm observing.
The bayesian approach says the data is fixed, and the probabilities might change.
Imagine I am watching a game and I am betting in play. I am offered odds of 1.9 (decimal odds) that they will convert the third down they are about to try and convert into a first down.
The frequentist approach says given the implied odds of past behaviour is 1.88 (we can convert percentages into decimal odds by dividing 100 by the percentage, so 100/53 = 1.88), and I am being offered 1.9, I should bet! Kelly says I should bet 0.78% of my bankroll, as I have an edge here.
Now, does that make sense to you? 30/56 is what happened in the past, and we're using that as an indicator as to what to do next. Would you take that bet?
The problem with this approach, I think, is that frequentist approaches whilst practical assume there is an underlying probability we can uncover by measuring it.
The Bayesian approach (in simple terms), says we can't be that precise, and the probabilities change over time based on the context. This makes more intuitive sense: the probabilities in poker are fixed and calculable, it seems to me they are much less so in NFL games.
In the Bayesian approach, we broadly need to think of a probability distribution and understand our confidence interval, and we use priors and observations to help us calculate both.
Doing some maths we might say the chance of the Patriots getting the third down conversion is with 95% confidence the chance of between 51.5% and 54.5%.
Well, now the 1.9 on offer isn't quite so sweet - it's within the confidence interval, albeit off to the edge.
Getting to that distribution and narrowing your confidence interval (it would be great if we could say it was 52.8% to 52.9%, for example), and then figuring out how to use Kelly accordingly, is relatively state of the art.
Doing this in the NFL might be tricky because the data sizes are relatively small - the confidence intervals might be too broad. Also, the frequentist approach is provenly useful in some situations: Bill Benter is richer than either of us, and I don't believe he ever used bayesian statistics.
People often think of gamblers as slightly grimy/shady characters with a gold chain and a wad of bills in their hand. That might happen, but all the ones I speak to spend their weekends reading PhD theses from maths and finance departments where people have been trying to figure out this stuff. I hope this answer gives you a flavour.
> Problem statement: the Levenshtein distance is a string metric for measuring the difference between two sequences
Another variant is "I have a bunch of words (a dictionary) and one query word, and want to find all words from the dictionary that are close to the query word".
This leads to another interesting class of problems, because you can do clever things where you precompute search structures (e.g. Levenshtein automata [0], [1]) from the dictionary. The similarity queries then run (much) faster. In production, performance matters.
We recently merged a PR like that into Gensim [2].
This gave a ~1,500x speed-up compared to naively comparing all pairwise strings with Levenshtein distance. A difference between the training step running for months (=unusable) and minutes.
For people interested in this area, I highly recommend When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. It is a very powerful and well written memoir of a neurosurgeon who battles with lung cancer.
Having dealt with RSI and having worked at home for a long time, my list of tips that helped the most. Ordered for importance to me personally rather than cost or other factors:
* Sit stand desk. Not just for standing: lets you adjust height while seated to ideal level
* Placing keyboard/monitor at proper ergonomic heights to one another. This implies arranging keyboard height then having a separate monitor raised up, not a laptop
* Armaid and theracane. Two wonderful and cheap self care tools for tight muscles. Armaid works the arms, theracane all over but I use it for trapezius
* Handshoe mouse. By far the most comfortable and ergonomic mouse I ever used. Once I got this my remaining troubles vanished
* Trigger point massage. Works out small trigger points and knots that can cause referred pain
* Good physio, especially one trained in muscle activation technique (MAT)
* Herman Miller chair. This seems to help, but basically any chair you are comfortable in is the key point.
DO NOT just work through the pain. It compounds and takes much longer to fix. If you address pain while it’s small and set up right, it is easy to deal with.
I lost months (years?) of productivity to RSI. Take it seriously. Doing great now fortunately.
Get a Zojirushi brand bread maker, buy your grains off Amazon, and bake your own bread. It's really the only way in the Americas...
Once you get into the swing of it, you can whittle it down to 10 minutes of preparation in the morning, set it on automatic timer, and have fresh, hot bread waiting for you when you get home from work. Just make sure the yeast is in a pile on top so that it stays dry during the day.
You might have just convinced me to buy a bread machine...
To add a similar answer, only in the past couple of years have I had a nice rice cooker (we have a Zojirushi) that keeps the rice fresh for ~12 hours. It is irreplaceable at this point (My wife is Asian and rice is a part of pretty much every meal.) Best appliance I have ever bought, gets used every. single. day. and have rice ready-to-eat throughout the day.
I realise this might not be what the question has in mind, but we have a bread machine.
Just buying bread might be more 'automatic', but we've been evolving the process and recipe for the last 6+ months, and honestly the bread is now better than any but the best artisan loaves available locally, and hugely cheaper.
To save time, and overcome laziness, we pre-mix 'wet' and 'dry' 'kits' in batches of 6 or 10 loaves at a time, and divide into loaf-sized portions. Wet is water, sugar, honey, oil, salt, etc. Dry is various flours, oats, multigrains, etc.
When it comes time to make bread (usually the night before we want it), it's a simple matter of pouring a wet kit into the machine, sprinkling over a dry kit, some yeast, setting the timer and pressing 'start'.
The kids do that, and do most of the batch prep, which we/they've optimised for teamwork, and for example we've 3d printed scoops in the right measures for the recipe, to speed measurements.
So from my point of view, I almost have 'automatic bread' :)
I'm an engineer turned bus-dev/sales person. I found the transition very difficult and was recommended to sign up for sales coaching. It was excellent advice and I learned a lot about my inherent weaknesses when it comes to selling and how to compensate for them. I wrote a few of my lessons on my blog. A bit dated but perhaps of value to others:
I have led technical due diligence during acquisitions as both the acquirer and the one being acquired more then once. The link you gave is interesting and definitely has some good points. Some suggestions, first, If you went through a 3rd party, e.g. investor, investment bank etc to find/acquire this company ask for their due diligence checklist. If you didn't and are on your own then I'd try and get a few different checklists from others and combine them, for example if your company is backed by a VC, ask them for a checklist or reference to get one.
A few things I didn't see on that list I always look into. There are a ton more things, too much to try and list here.
1. Licensing of components, 3rd party software etc. Abusing license terms is not unheard of in small companies or startups in general and it usually doesn't bite them until they are acquired or raise a big round. Once a vendor thinks there are deeper pockets to pick they may pursue their rights more aggressively, you just need to know.
2. Get copies of the past 12-24 months of invoices from all technology purchases. Your finance team will probably want this too, but you need it to see what they have paid for and might be using or have embedded someplace that the team has just overlooked or forgotten. The time period might differ based on age and size of the company and how often they deploy updates etc. The less the deploy updates the more you should be digging.
3. Goes with #2 but separate, get a list of all technology vendors (including consultants etc) they use (eventually you'll want their account representative information and account details). Use this list to compare to #2 and find discrepancies.
4. Have them demonstrate to you some of the processes, not just tell you and/or document them. For example, if they have prod/staging/dev environments and state they have a way to replicate anonymized data from prod to staging, make them show you, don't just assume it is there and works. Watch a deployment or two if you can, but stay out of their way and just evaluate -- I made a mistake there one time. FWIW: I was on a team that evaluated one company that had amazing documentation and things looked super solid until you actually sat and watched, and then you figured out none of the documentation lined up with the real processes and without certain employees you'd never know the truth and never be able to piece it together.
5. Get a list of employees in the technology team with job descriptions and a rating (or last review etc), e.g. how critical is this person to daily operations, critical IP knowledge, team morale. This isn't about finding people to get rid of, it is you looking for who might have key knowledge that you need to work hard to retain/recruit, or understand and get documentation etc. Also, it is about patterns if you see Joe on team A is involved with everything it might mean he is just super good and been around awhile, or it may be he blocks progress constantly and you need to know.
Technical due diligence is a balance between technology and people, and the people side is super critical. You might find the source code is awesome, product is absolutely stellar, but you find they are violating major license terms of 3rd parties that are owed significant sums of money, or have cause to sue. You may find that the critical people that really know the system already moved on to a new company and left over is the B team and that is a factor on negotiations. Obviously this is all in addition to reading the source, getting presentations on how it all works and comparing the notes etc.
for classical music there was a really cool site I stumbled over years ago called getintoclassical exactly for that purpose, it somehow vanished from the internet, but it still is on archive.org.
Open source Pokemon, where new creatures can be contributed by anyone and anyone can add stories and adventures or fork the whole thing and do whatever they want.
Yes! "Pilot recommended financial stack" is definitely at the top of the list of blog posts we want to write because it's just super-nice to get set up on the right stack from day one, rather than having to worry about it when things are more complicated.
The short, spoiler version for now is: Gusto, Chase corp card, Stripe, Expensify, bill.com if you do a lot of invoicing.
(And then the more 101 stuff, like, "Please don't mix business and personal expenses")
Best place I ever worked.
This was “the Creo Philosophy”:
Our priority is to provide unique and sustainable value to our customers.
1. All decisions must be based on sound economics.
2. Key decisions are made in consensus, with full team agreement to accept and implement the decision.
3. We believe that people are most effective when self-managed.
4. Compensation is based on contribution, gauged largely by an annual peer review.
5. All employees share the wealth created by their hard work and innovation.
Creo was extremely proud of how “flat” the organization was but my primary take-away from there as an ex-employee is actually how important management is.
First and foremost, management created a shared vision of the future. Not silly posters to laugh at but a real shared mission. It was exciting and motivating. Every Creoite knew how the world would be changed when we were successful. Decisions could be distributed because it was obvious which outcomes were aligned with the companies goals. Trying to push outcomes not aligned with the goals was hard ( as it should be ).
Second, there was a strong framework for how decisions were made and how to identify good decisions from bad ones. Economic thinking and consensus were two important principles that you were expected to follow unless you could demonstrate very good reasons not to.
Third, management provided a great deal of mentorship, both through direct education and through calling re-enforcing the primacy of the principles. One of the reason Creo could be so “flat” is because everybody knew how the executives would behave if they were in the room and they could insist that others act accordingly. It was easy to assume executive sponsorship without having to resort to politics. “We do not tolerate politics” was an important mantra through the best parts of the company history.
Most importantly, I got to experience the everyday effectiveness of the organization under three different CEO’s: Ken Spencer, Amos Michelson, and Mark Dance. The “culture” was only as good as the man at the helm.
At Creo, we made the claim all the time that we basically did not have hierarchal management. It was true we did not always have “supervisors” but we had the best management I have ever worked for.
As said above, Creo stopped working when it acquired a rival that had more employees than it had. The politics exploded. The effectiveness disappeared. Financial performance followed. The company was sold to avoid a shareholder revolt. A sad end for a spectacular organization.
The original Creo employees stuck to the principles. Well, except management. Hierarchical authority was suddenly more important. Decisions did not have to make economic sense. What mattered was who was doing the deciding. Consensus stopped being a requirement. Speaking truth to power stopped being a path to better decisions and started becoming a career mistake. Executive sponsorship became real and aligning with people in position became the most important criteria for individual success. Empire building replaced shared vision. The lack of alignment between making the company successful and being successful as an employee completely broke. The company failed.
Managers and employees looked at Creo folks and their “philosophy” like naive children. Sure “the philosophy” worked well enough for Creo to beat them to begin with but, once merged, the acquired were right. Creo was idealistic and naive. But this was not inevitable.
Why did Creo fail? Did “the philosophy” not scale as the final CEO I think believed? I do not think so. I see it purely as a failure of management.
The final CEO provided little vision. Other than a focus on the bottom line, there was no insistence on economic decision making ( eg. instead of breaking up meetings because they had too many people in them - too expensive - he held meetings with dozens of people in them ). Instead of coming down on politics and insisting on consensus, executive authority became sacred. In fact, the term “consensus” became most often used when an executive used it as an excuse for their own lack of leadership by claiming the team should have to solve its own problems.
If strong management had provided the leadership, the mentorship, the vision, and support for the culture ( most importantly the principles of good vs bad decision making ), Creo would still be with us. If I was lucky, I would still be working there.
Creo ruined me in a way. I have never been able to accept why things cannot be as good anywhere else. Such simple ideas. So dramatically effective. Unfortunately, good management ( executive level ) is an absolute requirement. Even hundreds or thousands of well trained employees was not enough to make these principles work without strong management behind them. Management matters.
I got to experience some amazing leadership for a while. All I can do is try to emulate those role models as best I can. And everywhere I go, I try to make economic thinking an important part of how decisions get made.
RIP Creo. You left us too soon.