How many tech startups in 2019 could be built with Airtable and Zapier alone? Spoiler: a lot.

Sure, you may need one or two others. Or you may prefer any of the great alternatives. (Hi Quip, IFTTT, Transposit!) Regardless, these kinds of prosumer, automation-friendly tools are truly great now, especially for building service oriented products. You can ship MVPs on them that comfortably serve your first 10k+ users, and likely more, with little to no actual code. That’s stunning.

Early cloud computing was a big shift that dramatically reduced the cost of bootstrapping a tech application. App stores on phones were another. This may be the third. Add in the largest pool of available capital ever, and there’s never been a better time to start a tech company.

(Having said that, founding a startup is still brutal, unforgiving, and all-consuming. That way lie dragons, as always. Entrepreneur beware.)

Classic computer engineering maxim. It’s held true for at least the last 35-40 years, across network, disk, memory, CPU. Patterson’s 2004 article is a classic. It’s had a deep impact on me; I still think about it regularly.

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—
Of cabbages—and kings—
And why the sea is boiling hot—
And whether pigs have wings.”

- Lewis Carroll, Through The Looking Glass

Credit card companies charge merchant fees of 1.5-3%. They transfer much of that directly to card holders as 1-4% cash back. Merchants generally charge the same prices for credit card vs cash. The result seems to be a small but universal penalty on people who pay with cash. 😢

shoot a sparrow with a cannon
fistfight with the Pentagon
seal an envelope with an ocean
boil an egg with a nuclear bomb

Technology is amazing! It’s solved almost all of the problems that it caused in the first place.

– Unknown