1/ Just realized this morning that it was 5 years ago today that I invested in @densityio ... it has truly been such a great career experience for me. Some notes ...

2/ Density is a privacy-first way to monitor how people or objects move around spaces. Today mostly office spaces. Plus warehouses, schools, retail outlets, government buildings
3/ Density is a software company that gives insights to property owners or occupants. To deliver value it required team to also build hardware. That has been a journey. VCs are scared of HW. It’s challenging but gives SW companies such great defensive moats.
4/ many of the great tech companies have used HW to great advantage. Apple, obvi. But Amazon (Fire, Kindle, Alexa/Echo, Ring). Google (Nest, cameras that built Streetview, Home, FitBit). Peloton. Roku. Just a few obvious ones. HW + SW is so powerful.
5/ Team pitched me on infrared devices. We weren’t convinced on accuracy but bet on team: Andrew, Garrett, Rob, Brian & others who I figured would iterate on solution. Plus, I had huge trust in seed investors @jtriest @Jason who voiced for them & @AvidanRoss who didn’t but liked
6/ Quickly they settled on laser and “depth sensing” which gave much more accurate ingress & egress (in / out) which was critical for physical security. Was purchased by who’s who of Silicon Valley: DropBox, Stripe, Amazon, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Facebook & so many others. But ...
7/ HW was expensive and slow to build and inventory costs and Infosec requirements. Watching @GarrettBastable work the supply chain & leverage his experience from working at Apple was awesome. Drove high quality but stripped out costs. Let SW team focus on just SW innovation
8/ Team made important early decision to “Build in America” and put assembly in Syracuse, NY where company was founded & founders came from (HQ now SF but distributed team). We get great talent in Syracuse & don’t churn employees. Plus, none of the move to Miami. Although ... :)
9/ We took off with security and space planning (US gov’t, Marriott, Verizon, Delta, CBRE) but VCs still didn’t “get it.” What were we? Luckily @foundersfund believed in the team. With that raise we hired experienced GTM leadership @asewall @aleksstrub Leanna and 💥 💥 💥
10/ @adambain & @dickc saw traction and made bet before growth investors. I love their model (and them). They don’t take board seat - they act as coach. This was more valuable to us. Helped at critical time. And also helped validate for growth investors
11/ Then what happened next was insane. We launched a radar-based solution. Infrared was great for ingress / egress but radar is perfect for proximity. I think you know where this is heading ...
12/ With laser (counting people in/out) and radar (distance from each other) we thought we had a huge market opportunity. Then Covid happened. Over night all those people who didn’t get it suddenly realized this needs to exist in every office, every warehouse, every university...
13/ Density’s bookings grew > 450% in one quarter. We had more demand than we could serve and had to be selective who our most committed and promising customers were
14/ A ton of VCs kept saying “somebody is going to do this with low cost cameras” Of course companies will try. But we have not only a technically superior solution & lower processing costs but here’s a very important thing that has been @andrewfarah’s true north since day 1 ...
15/ Andrew lives the privacy mission. In a world that is increasingly intrusive we believe there’s a critical role for non-cameras. We don’t think employees & customers want Uighur-like tracking where your your every move if filmed without your consent or knowledge
16/ The company recently raised a huge growth round led by @ilyaf @kleinerperkins who bring a tremendous growth mentality. Plus DTA who brought @AROD ... who truly has amazing corporate relationships and works to help Andrew.
17/ With huge demand, enterprise-grade product, complete exec team, $50+ million in fresh financing - the next five years will be even more exciting. Here’s the thing ...
18/ This story sounds linear. Up-and-to-the-right. It wasn’t. It was years of struggle, execution challenges, VCs doubting - I had to bridge the company once. Exec team took pay cuts without being asked. Their unwavering belief & commitment got them over that hurdle
19/ VC isn’t all fun & amazing as you might imagine on Twitter. It’s hard work. Successes & failures & hard calls. But for those of us who enjoy watching products & markets get created out of nothing - it’s journeys like working with Density that make this job so rewarding

More from Trading

Many of you have seen the famous Westrum Organizational Typology model, so prominently featured in State of DevOps Research, Accelerate, DevOps Handbook, etc.

This model was created Dr. Ron Westrum, a widely-cited sociologist who studied the impact of culture on safety


Thanks to Dr. @nicolefv, I was able to interview him for an upcoming episode of the Idealcast! 🤯

It was a very heady experience, and while preparing to interview him, I was startled to discover how much work he's done in healthcare, aviation, spaceflight, but also innovation.

I've read 4+ of his papers, so I thought I was familiar with his work. (Here's one paper:
https://t.co/7X00O67VgS)

I was startled to learn he has also studied in depth what enables innovation. He wrote a wonderful book "Sidewinder: Creative Missile Development at China Lake"


Dr. Westrum writes about China Lake Research Labs: "its design and structure had one purpose: to foster technical creativity. It did; China Lake operated far outside the normal envelope... Sidewinder & others were "impossible" accomplishments,

I love this book because it describes traits of organizations that routinely create and maintain greatness: US space program (Mercury, Gemini, Apollo), US Naval Reactors, Toyota, Team of Teams, Tesla, the tech giants (Amazon, Google, Netflix, Google)
1/ Feels like a good time to tell the story of how I went from broke to a millionaire to broke again in 2017/18 again...

Yesterday was brutal for some people...

Losing life-changing money sucks, losing any money sucks...you can chase the market or you can change your strategy.

2/ The original thread is gone but you can read it here.

https://t.co/cLLNs75rB0

tl;dr
- Traded $32k to $1.2m
- Thought I was a genius
- Made poor investments
- Didn't conserve capital
- Peaked at 150 BTC
- Lost nearly all of it

2 weeks from losing my house + no income. Oops.

3/ I am going to assume you are in it for the money rather than the tech. Yeah, you might Tweet about the amazing blockchaining of cross-border payments and oracles yadda yadda...really, you are in it to make money.

If you are really in it for the tech, go and build something.

4/ Okay, so if you want to make money, trading is super hard, you are trading against:
- Better traders than you
- People who can move markets
- Unknown information

And if you are trading with leverage you might blow up your account with the volatility.

5/ If you are not trading, you are investing. Okay, so what are you investing in?

I made the decision that the crypto with the best opportunity of existing in 10 years is #Bitcoin:
- Solves a genuine problem
- The right tech
- A proven track record

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My top 10 tweets of the year

A thread 👇

https://t.co/xj4js6shhy


https://t.co/b81zoW6u1d


https://t.co/1147it02zs


https://t.co/A7XCU5fC2m
A brief analysis and comparison of the CSS for Twitter's PWA vs Twitter's legacy desktop website. The difference is dramatic and I'll touch on some reasons why.

Legacy site *downloads* ~630 KB CSS per theme and writing direction.

6,769 rules
9,252 selectors
16.7k declarations
3,370 unique declarations
44 media queries
36 unique colors
50 unique background colors
46 unique font sizes
39 unique z-indices

https://t.co/qyl4Bt1i5x


PWA *incrementally generates* ~30 KB CSS that handles all themes and writing directions.

735 rules
740 selectors
757 declarations
730 unique declarations
0 media queries
11 unique colors
32 unique background colors
15 unique font sizes
7 unique z-indices

https://t.co/w7oNG5KUkJ


The legacy site's CSS is what happens when hundreds of people directly write CSS over many years. Specificity wars, redundancy, a house of cards that can't be fixed. The result is extremely inefficient and error-prone styling that punishes users and developers.

The PWA's CSS is generated on-demand by a JS framework that manages styles and outputs "atomic CSS". The framework can enforce strict constraints and perform optimisations, which is why the CSS is so much smaller and safer. Style conflicts and unbounded CSS growth are avoided.
क्या आप जानते हैं कि क्या है, पितृ पक्ष में कौवे को खाना देने के पीछे का वैज्ञानिक कारण!

श्राद्ध पक्ष में कौओं का बड़ा ही महत्व है। कहते है कौआ यम का प्रतीक है, यदि आपके हाथों दिया गया भोजन ग्रहण कर ले, तो ऐसा माना जाता है कि पितरों की कृपा आपके ऊपर है और वे आपसे ख़ुश है।


कुछ लोग कहते हैं की व्यक्ति मरकर सबसे पहले कौवे के रूप में जन्म लेता है और उसे खाना खिलाने से वह भोजन पितरों को मिलता है

शायद हम सबने अपने घर के किसी बड़े बुज़ुर्ग, किसी पंडित या ज्योतिषाचार्य से ये सुना होगा। वे अनगिनत किस्से सुनाएंगे, कहेंगे बड़े बुज़ुर्ग कह गए इसीलिए ऐसा करना

शायद ही हमें कोई इसके पीछे का वैज्ञानिक कारण बता सके।

हमारे ऋषि मुनि और पौराणिक काल में रहने वाले लोग मुर्ख नहीं थे! कभी सोचियेगा कौवों को पितृ पक्ष में खिलाई खीर हमारे पूर्वजों तक कैसे पहुंचेगी?

हमारे ऋषि मुनि विद्वान थे, वे जो बात करते या कहते थे उसके पीछे कोई न कोई वैज्ञानिक कारण छुपा होता था।

एक बहुत रोचक तथ्य है पितृ पक्ष, भादो( भाद्रपद) प्रकृति और काक के बीच।

एक बात जो कह सकते कि हम सब ने स्वतः उग आये पीपल या बरगद का पेड़/ पौधा किसी न किसी दीवार, पुरानी

इमारत, पर्वत या अट्टालिकाओं पर ज़रूर देखा होगा। देखा है न?

ज़रा सोचिये पीपल या बरगद की बीज कैसे पहुंचे होंगे वहाँ तक? इनके बीज इतने हल्के भी नहीं होते के हवा उन्हें उड़ाके ले जा सके।