mwetzler's comments

I don't think it's realistic to strive for an environment where bias does not exist at all. Biases are implicit, part of human nature, and built into our subconsciousness. What makes me feel more comfortable is a place where people _admit_ their biases, where leaders say and act like they want the team to be more inclusive, and we all at least _try_ to make a more diverse workplace.

An inclusive work place also points out and immediately acts when teammates do things that are NOT inclusive e.g. racist or sexist jokes. That's a way of showing that you care about your teammates and their work environment.

Are you staying in SF?

We love you Firebase! Your company and culture are an inspiration to all and your platform in particular is a role model to other cloud database companies. Best wishes from me personally and your many fans at Keen IO.

Data Scientist here. Can confirm, most dashboards are shitty. Usually you don't need a dashboard, you need a human who knows how to analyze data to get useful information out of it. A dashboard is not an end goal, an informed decision is.

It's called a "stacked area chart" and you can make them with something as simple as keynote, excel, google charts, etc.

I just made our cohort graph yesterday in keynote, based on data exported from Stripe.

The input for the graph is a very simple table. One row for each cohort (or colored bar in the graph), and one column for each month in your timeline. In the cells you simply put the amount of revenue you earned from customers in each cohort in that month.

Ah yes, we are in an awkward zone with some docs on our site in Sphinx and others on Github. We love that developers can PR our docs on Github, and we agree that Stripe's docs are the BEST. At some point we will tackle a doc revamp that puts us in that direction. The personalized code samples & easy library switching features of Stripe docs are a dream.

Sounds cool (and right up our alley)! Reach me at michelle at keen.io!

Wow, thanks for the kind words! I'm blushing over here. I wrote a big portion of our docs and would love to know which parts could be fleshed out more (I can think of a few areas but I'm curious what you think).

Eli's description is spot-on! I work at Keen IO and I'd be happy to talk through your integration and help determine if we're a good fit. Data modeling sessions are my speciality and I'd be happy to do one over the phone or in person if you're in SF!

Misogyny is pretty ubiquitous in the current state of the world. Most people get away with it under the "that's just the way boys are" blanket of protection you just mentioned.

It's unfortunate that it takes a case like this for people to question if slutshaming is accetable behavior.

It's very brave of her to file the lawsuit. Whatever shitparade the other founders and dealing with, I'm sure hers is ten times worse.

The piece starts out by very nicely warning us about the THREE HUGE OUTLIERS but then, surprisingly, doesn't take them out of the remaining analysis. (Well, they sort of do in the "founders that didn't win" part).

Would be useful & interesting to see the bulleted stats list in the first paragraph with averages & medians (with and without the 3 big successes).

I don't think the big takeaway is about how women should act/think.

Part of me is nodding in agreement, but another part is wondering 1) am I (unfairly?) biased against the author due to the story from Horvath and 2) is this another example of a woman being criticised for having a voice? Are we unfairly expecting her to be polite, not powerful and proud? Her husband's post was very proud and he didn't get the same criticism, though I think he did a slightly better job apologizing and focusing his message.

Not criticizing. Just sharing my own mixed feelings.

I agree - the common methods for measuring net promoter (surveys) seem to put a burden on the customers.

I think twitter could potentially be pretty effective if you combine the number of mentions with a sentiment score. But then, it's pretty easy to increase twitter engagement using various tools.

I'm also looking for a good way to measure net promoter, but for another reason -- to quantify it for investors. We hear great customer feedback and get referrals all the time, but don't have a measurement for it. Even though it's true, I'm not sure investors will just believe that "our customers love us!".

Reminds me of Aud which turns your server logs into audio so that you can analyze them the way you listen to a car engine for healthy and unhealthy patterns.

http://dzello.com/blog/2014/01/10/listen-to-your-log-files-w...

PG really only stirs up controversy because he won't admit the fact that we're all biased to some degree. Even women in tech are biased against women in tech. It's natural because pattern matching is natural, and female developers & founders are (currently) rare.

Women _on average_ may very well be better or worse than men in all sorts of ways, but that doesn't mean some of them won't be extraordinary.

We have to be careful about our biases so we don't miss out on the extraordinary ones.

It takes extra work to do this.

For example orchestras (traditionally very male dominated) tried to remove bias from their auditions by having the musicians play behind a curtain. The curtain increased the probability that a woman would advance from preliminary rounds by 50 percent(!).

Bemoaning may be tiresome, but it can also lead to changes that really do make a difference.

I wonder if YC applications are gender neutral (names removed)?

^ Examples of jokes professionals wouldn't tell in the workplace.

Understanding your company's product, marketing, financials, hiring, and business strategy makes you an _incredibly_ valuable employee (though perhaps difficult to describe with a job title).

An employee like that shouldn't be spending much time ordering food and cleaning. Those things can be outsourced to people who can do them at scale for many companies at once, at a much lower rate.

At my startup we've used ZeroCater (Food for events), HomeJoy (Cleaning), TaskRabbit (Odd tasks), Zirtual (Scheduling meetings, booking flights), and Advsor (Accounting & Billing).

We also have a full time remote assistant that does things like coordinating team outings, ordering new tshirts, researching stuff, spreadsheet jocky-ing, etc, etc. They would also order food for us if we didn't have it provided at our co-working space.

I hope this comment was helpful and not condescending. I do some business ops work myself in addition to writing code and consulting. As the longtime only-female, I too had to deal with the assumptions about my role (outside the company, not inside).

All of these tasks are important and need to happen for a company to run successfully, but they don't all need to be done by an "Office Manager" just because that's how it works at some startups.

This related post "Tech companies, stop hiring women to be the Office Mom" describes "empathy work" and how it has almost always been significantly underpaid.

http://qz.com/47154/tech-companies-stop-hiring-women-to-be-t...

I like the reference to the fact that for a large part of history, many women worked completely without pay doing empathy & ops work full time (mothering families and running ops for households and community groups). As a culture maybe we have some residual beliefs about this type of work (and women's time) being basically free/cheap.

This is great, nice job! I work at Keen IO and we're kind of obsessed with smart device event data. Do you think Spark users would be interested in an API to collect & query all their Spark events? For example we have integrations so that any Stripe or Sendgrid user can collect & query their payment/email events. I could imagine a similar integration for Spark events. We also work with smart devices companies. There could be some really interesting partnership opportunities here. Thanks for sharing your post!