Ti Point Tork

Joining a startup? Read this.

January 22, 2019 – 7:34 pm
Here's a braindump of some things I've learned over the years. Caveat lector: my experiences inform this, and they aren't representative of all the possibilities, etc. Ignore this if you want; I've been meaning to write some notes for Kiwis or Aussies who are joining startups for the first time, and someone just became my excuse. Maturity Startups are very immature organisations, unlike a corporate or university -- I always describe it as "there's more work to do than there are people to do it". So there's huge opportunity to do stuff you wouldn't ordinarily do, which is great. There's also a lot less support, which can be unnerving. There's nothing preventing you from working super-long hours and burning out, and only your coworkers to notice (HR is almost non-existent in very early stage startups). And even compensation is weird ("stock options"?) and can bite you if you're not prepared. Startups have a ...

Posted in Business | No Comments »

The T in CTO doesn’t stand for Talk

August 28, 2018 – 9:53 pm
Looks like NZ will get a CTO real soon now. It's hard to avoid the word "debacle" in describing how it came about: a false start at making an appointment, a whiff of impropriety in the appointments process that resulted in a Ministerial demotion .... This is a shame because there are very real reasons that NZ should be increasing its IT heft in Government. There’s the potential to do a lot of good at the intersection of IT and government: preventing blowouts, giving informed advice to the civil service, and being a trusted advisor to politicians. Other countries are tackling these problems, with and without a person whose job title is CTO. Preventing blowouts: in the government version of "adding a person to a late project only makes it later", the risk of IT project failure rises with every dollar budgeted. The last government had Treasury monitoring progress of important ...

Posted in Gov 2.0, New Zealand, politics | No Comments »

Proposed Changes to NZ’s R&D Incentives

May 29, 2018 – 12:24 am
There's an open consultation about to end, on the changes MBIE would like to make to NZ's R&D incentives. In particular, they'll phase out the Callaghan Growth Grants and replace them with R&D tax credits. As the FAQ says, There are differences in the definition of eligible expenditure between the Growth Grant and the proposed R&D Tax Incentive (for instance, overseas expenditure on R&D). The proposed R&D Tax Incentive has no R&D intensity threshold, a much higher cap and lower minimum R&D expenditure threshold than the Growth Grant. Some firms may get less money, but others might get more. This policy is very clearly aimed at large and profitable companies. If you're a Fonterra, or a Mainfreight, or a TradeMe, you can receive a discount on the tax you pay on your profits. That's good: we want these companies to increase their spending on R&D. Another 1% spend from them represents ...

Posted in Business, New Zealand, politics, Rant, Technology | No Comments »

Twitter’s Summer Reading List

December 21, 2017 – 10:39 am
I asked my Twitter friends for recommendations of books to read over Christmas. I said that I've already consumed the new Expanse novel and the new Philip Pullman (intended to indicate that I like that style of sf) and I said I like non-fiction if it's interesting and well-written (e.g., Bakewell's book on Montaigne, or Holmes's "Age of Wonder"). Here's what they recommended ... Artemis by Andy Weir (the sequel to The Martian). Recommended by @lancewiggs. New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson. Recommended by @lancewiggs and @stojg. The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu. Recommended by @lancewiggs, @mceoin, and @obra. The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World by Steve Levine. Recommended by @lancewiggs. The Captain Class: The Hidden Force That Creates the World's Greatest Teams by Sam Walker. Recommended by @lancewiggs. Perdido Street Station by China Mieville. Recommended by @MattNippert. Walkaway by Cory Doctorow. Recommended by @mandysinpson. The Way of Kings: Stormlight Archive Book ...

Posted in Personal | No Comments »

On Moving to New Zealand

November 9, 2016 – 6:38 pm
Hello, American friends!  President-Elect Trump has given his speech and begun to redact his campaign website of the obviously illegal and impossible campaign promises, and you look up from your keyboard through an election-defeat hangover and want to move to New Zealand. First of all, consider staying.  America’s problems won’t be solved if all the tolerant and progressive people leave. But that's not an easy choice for everyone.  If you don’t think you’ll be safe, or you're concerned about the effects on your children of growing up in the cloud of President Trump, you might be looking elsewhere. Allow me to suggest New Zealand. New Zealand has a fairly straightforward skilled migrant immigration scheme, where you get points for meeting certain criteria and if you clear a particular number of points then you can move here.  Some of those criteria are around education, language, and health, effectively biasing it against people who don’t speak English, those who aren’t highly-educated, as ...

Posted in New Zealand, politics | No Comments »

“Outcome is a function of process”

October 30, 2016 – 10:21 am
I was just catching up on Tim Kong's excellent blog, when I read this great quote from Dan Carter: "One thing we talk about over and over with this current All Blacks side is about never focusing on the outcome. We view the outcome as a function of following our processes. That might sound a little dry to some, but looking back at every major loss we've had over the years, they mostly started with us thinking too far ahead of the game." I like that quote a lot.  There's a lot you can find in it: You can't do success.  Instead, you can only run, pass, tackle, communicate ... all of which can contribute to success. Even in a game with as many different plays, player matchups, imbalances, and opportunities as rugby, the winners are winners because they have s system that generates wins. The team's playbook must necessarily be flexible, because it will be used ...

Posted in Business, Technology | No Comments »

Startups and failure

October 25, 2016 – 10:26 am
(Wynyard Group, an NZ tech high-growth company [or, perhaps, not-so-high growth] just entered voluntary administration. On Twitter, a friend was adamant bad luck had nothing to do with it. Instead of a tweetstorm, here's my response in a vintage retro format known as "a blog post") You can always look back at every failure and assign one or more causes, because SOMETHING always kills the startup.  And someone is always responsible for the fatal decisions. That’s “pilot error” for startups. But hindsight is far easier than foresight. Everybody does the best they can with the info and skills they have.  Everyone operates with imperfect knowledge and incomplete control. Everyone. Investors, board, executive, and rank and file all act with imperfect information. They don’t have a choice. The pattern-matching we hate in VCs is just a reaction to the fog of the market. “Maybe past performance will predict future success?” The hardest part of bringing something ...

Posted in Business, New Zealand, Technology | No Comments »

Job Titles

October 4, 2016 – 10:18 am
Job titles don't matter, because it's the work that counts.  But job titles matter because they get you meetings with partners, interviews for next jobs, etc.  They send signals that can be useful so, conversely, life can be harder if you're sending the wrong signal. There's an implicit hierarchy in American job titles.  Kiwis have a different implicit hierarchy ("Managing Director", etc.) but this post is about the American hierarchy.  For the companies I work with, it is more important to signal to American companies than to signal to a Kiwi establishment.  The hierarchy is a rough norm: there is variation in it between companies, but the basic shape holds. It is: CEO CxO VP Director Manager an individual contributor who might be an "agent" or "operator" or so on. (Big companies will have Senior and Junior VP, Director, Manager gradations as well) There's one big trap in nomenclature here: "Manager" implies "has an area that they oversee" which may ...

Posted in New Zealand | No Comments »

Lesson: Moats and Flywheels

April 30, 2016 – 10:18 pm
It's bloody hard to build something new into the world.  Don't let anyone tell you it's easy: there's a lot of unfunded and unrecognised work that you have to do before you can get to the point where fame and/or fortune arrive.  And once you've finished the painful birth of your new service or product into the world, maybe even defining an entirely new product category or unserviced market segment, dozens of unimaginative parasites will appear from nowhere and try to eat your lunch. Hapara had this: we have a track record of beautiful firsts.  First Education solution for Google Apps, first device management for Chromebooks.  And, sure enough, as soon as we'd proven that Google Apps could be improved for educators, Google popped up and entered the space with Classroom.  Dozens of companies sprung up to help educators manage Chromebooks.  I like to think that the Hapara team do it better ...

Posted in Business, Technology | No Comments »

NZ Herald’s “News” Is Shit and Lazy

April 12, 2016 – 2:58 pm
tl;dr: Today's NZ Herald drove me to this analysis/rant.  I'm giving the damn thing up and will get my news from other sites, Radio New Zealand and NewsHub.  You should too. I can't imagine how disheartening it is to work as a journalist in New Zealand.  Almost as disheartening as it is to be a news consumer in New Zealand. The newspapers are shit.  I include Stuff, owned by Fairfax, in this as Stuff has become indistinguishable from the NZ Herald—they race to cover each other's stories and make sure nobody sees a different set of "news" when they visit the other's pages.  There are two rays of hope, though: Radio New Zealand and NewsHub.  I'd never have picked it, but TV3's NewsHub seems to cover more actual news than newspapers (or, perhaps, features Real News more prominently than Rugby Player In Celebrity Vajazzling Tragedy And What Does It Mean For Your House Prices stories). What do ...

Posted in New Zealand, Rant | 1 Comment »