Veale Snyder Fellowship

What is it?

The Veale Snyder Fellowship is a 1 year entrepreneurship fellowship program at Case Western. It's a two part program directed by Michael Goldberg and Stacey Lotz, where in the fall semester there's a 1 credit course taught by Jose Dias Salazar and a trip to San Francisco to meet various companies in SF and Silicone Valley, along with many Case alum, VCs, and entrepreneurs, and then in spring a 3 credit course and international trip to the Czech Republic.

Why me?

If you read my blog, you probably already know that I'm a very technical person. I'm interested in software, computers, webdev/fullstack, devtools, devops/linux/nix, and a plethora of other techy things. I love reading about shiny new typescript frameworks, and how fixed points work in nix. What am I doing in an entrepreneurship program?

In my application, I stated this well and succinctly,

Over the years, I've arrived at an ultimate interest in entrepreneurial webdev. I love the interconnectedness and accessibility: how it enables rapid contrivance of genuinely useful applications. I have always found realizing my own project ideas to not just be the best way for me to learn, but also to be most satisfying and fun. My favorite thing in this world is learning things that I want to learn, because I want to learn them. I see impatience as a virtue, a quest for speed and efficiency that naturally harmonizes with my field of interest. In the end, I feel pretty strongly that, eventually, entrepreneurship will be a big part of my future vocational journey.

This is pretty consistent with my current thoughts on why I'm here now. The only realization I've had since is how my area of focus has shifted more specifically for creating things to solve the problems that I myself face, which there's hints of in my previous thoughts -- I'm most interested in using fullstack technologies that I love using to alleviate developer experience (devx) friction. I want to make the world (for developers) a better place, so they can make the world (in general) one.

San Francisco Trek

One of the hallmarks of this program is a trip to the bay area between the 20th to the afternoon of the 22nd of October (2024). It's a very packed two days, where we get to experience entrepreneurship in SF/the valley. It was a really, really fantastic, eye opening experience -- I got to meet so many people and see so many different company cultures and philosophies in such a short time span.

The other fellows in the fellowship -- Salma, Alvisa, Ariella, Apeksha, Sreya, Vinlaw, Kaleb, Adam, RV, Alessandro, and Vidyut were amazing to be around for the trip! One of the coolest parts of the fellowship is how we stick around with the same group of people and all get to know each other. It was a really cool coincidence that most of us are CS people with technical interests; I've managed to sneak in some talk of flutter and system design with Allesandro, or system design, graph generation, and AWS lambdas with Vidyut!

Many other fellows have already posted really great reflections with awesome comprehensive overviews of everything that we did during the trip, so I want to focus on my takeaways, but I'll keep it sequential. This is my first (but definitely not my last) non-technical blog!

The trip

Sunday was more about experiencing SF. We rode in Waymo self-driving cars, which was an incredible experience. There was a lot of talk about self driving cars across almost all the companies we visited; it's a trend that seems very well accepted. It seems like, for companies with the resources, there's a pretty big pressure, perhaps out of expectation, that they invest in "trends" that could be the future.

Companies

Fountain

Visiting Fountain

On Monday, we started out by heading over to Fountain, a software company for recruiting and optimizing hourly wage employee retention. We spoke with Sean Behr about his entrepreneurial philosophies.

We'd already met Sean virtually during our first class. I'd say his unique takes were that:

• Speed is key. The faster you get a product out the door, the faster you can know to kill it (or accelerate it).
• Adapting is necessary. The product isn't going to be a masterpiece unless you meld it into one.

Entering his office, it was amazing to see how many people had migrated to work remotely. Honestly, it was a bit sad to see -- I'm a big proponent of pair programming and collaborative workflows, but it seems like it's a dying desire. Sean seemed to agree in the importance of in person collaboration (and cost of lack thereof).

This time, there was a bit more focus on company culture, and company/system dynamics.

• Culture
  • Culture is largely immutable. It is also in part a function of company success. Extreme success fosters positive culture. So, CEOs steer for economic success to drive culture.
• Adaptability
  • There's discrete categories of success, and it's really, really hard to traverse up the latter. You need to be able to adapt to climb in the long term. But, sometimes it's just not possible to adapt fast enough, and you can't win.
• Organization
  • Clarity is very important. Every piece of data could be important, any abstraction on the raw datapoints is lossy.
  • Having some sort of project management is really important. Set goals are good.
• Market Research
  • Connecting with clients and asking about their needs is the best way to improve. Directly mentioning the product induces bias, so sometimes it's best to ask surrounding questions.

I really like Sean's focus on efficiency. I think his thoughts on culture are very valid, but that "good" culture doesn't require vast success, just that the success is a way to induce culture. This is also why it's so critical to choose an awesome co-founder and founding team to establish a good culture from the start.

Sean believes that some traits are critical for a successful culture. I think he's right, but I also feel these traits are in flux with the state of the company.

He honors speed and responsibility, and I think these are really really important early on, but less so as the company evolves. By reducing responsibility and honoring exploration, larger companies we visited like Google and NVIDIA have been able to accomplish insane things.

Finally, there seemed to be an emphasis on identification and explicitness, on the "tangibility" of goals, values, ideas, and pretty much everything he values and talked about. Writing things down is really, really important. It makes them real.

NVIDIA

Nvidia "Fireside chat"

HQ Tour

Nvidia was an entirely different experience than Fountain. Walking into their headquarters was like walking into an airport. You could tell that if you were to talk to anyone, they'd have a really interesting story to tell, but everyone seemed to be laser focused on their own chunks of work.

Sabrina Trans gave us a great tour of the facility -- it was massive; the outdoor area and open spaces were really, really nice.

We got a brief presentation about their products, which seemed a bit abstract to me. What it did show me though is that their demographic is a much wider net than I would have anticipated: they design tooling for a substantial audience -- yes, software engineers, but also datacenter designers, car companies, and many others.

What was most important was the "fireside" chat afterwards; an open Q&A.

We met with Kevin Kranzusch, one of the first employees at NVIDIA, Nick Triantos, VP of software, and Sarah Yurick, a recent case grad now working on NeMo, and a few others.

Some key points from NVIDIA:

• Their culture has not really changed over time. They really value intellectual honesty. I remember back to when I was starting my first batch at Recurse Center, their introduction stresses the importance of being "kind" instead of "nice," a similar idea: being honest and upfront over obscurative and always reinforcing.
• Being well rounded is important. Kevin talked about how Nvidia hasn't really had major "Pivot"s, but that they do have to adapt. Something unique about a company their size is that they can invest in R&D in speculative fields to try to keep ahead of competition.
• The best types of industries to go into are the ones with "insatiable" desire. Easier said than done.

Their actual work seemed to be very sharded. Different people we spoke to would work on totally different things, and not know much about what others were working on. I think that, while they value ideas, it seems like just by how their company flows, this "segmentation" may make it hard to contribute substantially as any given employee.

On the other hand, they seem to treat their employees really well. They talked about how there's a lot of respect for ideas and asking for help, which is always good to hear. Because of the specificity of what employees work on, it also seems to be the case that everyone is really interested in what they're working on. They are for sure solving some revolutionary technical problems.

Rivian

Rivian Presentation

Between Nvidia and Google, we visited Rivian, another totally different experience.

At Rivian we got a presentation on the EV industry, what the sorts of products they work on are, and an overview of the challenges they are facing and how they want to grow in the future.

I found a few things neat about Rivian

• The idea that you sell an "experience" with the car. This sort of "buying into an experience" idea is something I've come across a lot over recent years. I don't totally buy the value that turning conventional goods into "experiences" adds. But I understand the idea.
• Their CI/CD process sounded very technically interesting. They're automatically pushing software updates to cars, so they have to have a pretty complex testing setup, and they talked about how they have stripped down hardware specifically for testing. I wish I could've asked more questions about their integration testing.
• It's helpful to break down problems into specific concrete steps you can take to solve them.

I wish we had more time to chat, but we were crunched on time since they had a relatively long technical presentation. I think that the most valuable insights have come from the loose conversations we've had during the trip.

I'm still really curious how it's possible Rivian is able to maintain such low (negative) profit margins and operate at such a high loss, it seems like a dangerous recipe that surely must be intentional. It's an interesting stance on the side of the value of speed. The auto industry is definitely very capital intensive, and I feel like that fact can induce inefficiency.

Google

Google discussion

At first, I expected Google to share some resemblance with NVDIA. It's a massive company, with a ton of employees, and a ton of projects, too. They're both leaders in their industries.

But Google's really, really, different.

Just as we walked in to Google, the aesthetic was extremely eccentric, with unique architecture and bright Google colors.

We met with Gopi Kallayil, chief business strategist and AI evangelist, and TT Ramgopal, head of android relations.

I was particularly excited to talk to TT about Android, but we were really crammed for time and I decided it best not to get bogged down in a super technical discussion. I'll have to reach out on linked in to begin the discussion on android devtools! My big takeaway from what TT had to say was how rampant competition is at all levels, even at the scales of Google; the importance of looking into the future to predict the battles of the future.

Gopi had a really great personality, and the passion you could feel he had was really incredible. He talked about Google AI, and how vast/general its potential may be. What's unique about Google is how broad their impact is, because of how massive their audience is. I think that's pretty cool.

What Gopi said that I more personally resonate with, and I've now been much more conscious of is battling the tendency to complete other people's sentences. Not necessarily cutting people off, but overcoming the inclination to "autocomplete" people's train of thought, and then losing attention of the actual things they're communicating. To be honest, I definitely feel I sometimes tend to do this, and I think that being aware of it and more deeply listening is great general advice.

I think one of the unique things about Google is how empowering the culture is. This is something that I've really never sensed to the degree I did at Google, and is probably why I know so many Recursers who were also ex-Googlers. It seems like Google encourages employees to ideate and explore beyond their specific area of work. There's some tangible ways that they mentioned they do this.

I fear working at "mega" companies because I'm worried that I'll be trapped into doing work that I have little control over, and that my impact will be necessarily small in scope of the work that the company does, but Google seems to truly care about what areas you are interested in, so you can focus your energy on what matters.

Y-Combinator

Discussion

Space tour

On Tuesday, we visited Y Combinator and got to hear from Pete Koomen about his journey.

Pete was one of the original founders of optimizely, an A/B testing platform designed to be easy to use even for non developers to set up tests.

This is in a similar arena to the sorts of things I'm interested in, and I found it really interesting to hear about his journey. He was also inspired to start the company out of frustration with problems that he'd experienced as an engineer.

What's cool about his role at YC is that he gets to experience working with a lot of different start ups all at once.

Some themes were

• What makes a good founder. Being very resourceful, learning things quickly, and never making the same mistake twice.
• Running towards risk. Finding hard problems and solving them. This isn't necessarily required for success, but it seems to enable much vaster success.
• Try to find customers as early as possible. Sean at Fountain also noted this, and I definitely see the value.

I agreed with most of what he had to say. There's a pattern I've seen throughout the trip on how heavily to fund ventures. There seems to not be a clear cut answer -- some people, perhaps particularly YC, feel that it's important for there to be an aspect of scarcity; by not having huge amounts of funding you use what you have much more efficiently. On the other hand, companies like Rivian take a totally opposite approach, and raise substantial amounts of money to try to grow very quickly. My thought is that you can put a price on speed, but sometimes it's not a price worth paying.

Giant

John @ Giant

Finally, we met with John Kobs. At most of the places that we visited, we would give brief 2 minute introductions about ourselves, but with John, he told us to "talk about our most recent failure."

I found this meaningful, because it got us to think about why we failed and how we could prevent it from happening again. Being conscientious about it seemed key. I recalled how a few weeks ago I feel I did poorly in a Go debugging interview because I entered it with the wrong mindset and didn't fully analyze the situation: they wanted to see how I understood the adjacent concept to the thing I was debugging, but I was laser focused on getting the test to pass.

He went on to lead an extremely insightful Q&A.

The biggest takeaways:

• Learning from mistakes. Never making the same mistake twice seems like a generally good piece of advice.
• Recognizing bottlenecks, but transitioning carefull. He created what became Apartments List. He talked about how he saw how being an aggregator of aggregators was a bottleneck to scale, and how they needed to pivot to work with brokers themselves. This pivot initially was extremely painful, beyond expectation.
• Being open. This is something that came up at Google too. Instead of being overly prescriptive, listening to others and thinking through things without the underlying assumption that there's nothing left to figure out or learn.

Chats

There were two networking events during the trip. There, there were a bunch of Case alums and people affiliated with Case.

During the second event, I got to speak to Donald Knuth himself; the creator of Tex and writer of 30+ books, including The Art Of Computer Programming. The chat reminded me a bit of some interviews with Linux Turvals that I watched a few years back. There's the debate between whether the right way to delve into CS is top down or bottom up; whether to start with high level languages and the ergonomics of abstraction, or to jump into registers, boolean algebra, and C. I personally don't think that it's a one size fits all topic, but Donald talked about how he think's its imperative that you learn how things work, and how abstractions can quickly become very dangerous. I think there's value to that train of thought. By the time I got to ask him about his thoughts on typst, a Tex competitor, it was clear what his opinion would be -- its ergonomics are a dangerous disguise. But I think it's fine for the application. Another really important topic was writing -- we both agree that it's really important to write about what you do and think. This includes non technical writing, like this post!

In the second networking session of the trip, I got to chat with Stephen Hahn. We had some great technical conversation, and he talked about how he'd avoided tool related start ups (probably my most specific interest). When I asked why, it was pretty straightforward: it's hard to sell tools. Big companies will often release them for free and crush you, or it is just technically difficult to provide them in a way that requires payment. My interest is in bridging fullstack with developer tooling, and he seemed to agree that the idea of web based tooling is an interesting new category that may enable tooling related startups that may previously not have been possible.

I had a ton of other really great chats, and I'll try to post some more reflections here over the next few days.

Reflections

Throughout the trip, I really felt the value of time. Being able to pack questions into such short sessions, and make meaningful connections with the execs and engineers that we met, seemed almost impossible. Time in general seems like one of the biggest limiting factors, and in general I tend to agree with Sean in how vital efficiency is.

One important insight was how it's important to be able to adapt to and embrace change rapidly. Speed is imperative, but sometimes overpriced. Efficiency is important too. There's a lingering question of how important it is to balance speed and quality, and being careful not to over complicate things (something I, and other engineers are particularly vulnerable to), is something I want to be more attentive to.

"Good" culture seems like it can make or break a company, but it can often be largely immutable. Some companies value efficiency, some intellectual honesty, some curiosity, etc. I really liked the culture Google was targeting in particular; even in such a large company, they care that you contribute to specific things you care about. The power of "passion" for your work is massive.

Also, being open-minded and carefully considering others' ideas is always important. Specifically, deeply considering everyone's ideas, and, in the context of startups, close contact with clients. I found Sean Behr's thoughts on the danger of data abstraction inspiring -- charts and summaries can mask critical insights; anecdotes are often most valuable.

The trip also placed a huge emphasis on the power of networking. I think sometimes networking takes on too formal a connotation -- but really, it's all about meeting and then staying in touch with an ever increasing amount of awesome, interesting people. I've always found that the most powerful "network" links are bidirectional, and in that way it's like making friends.

Michael Goldberg is a big proponent of LinkedIn as a powerful networking tool, and it's absolutely true that I'll be able to stay in touch with a lot of the people that I met over the trip there. It's a really great tool. But I think there's a pretty significant personal aspect that's lost. It's an amazing tool to connect with and organize a network. But I think that LinkedIn is, perhaps reasonably so, somewhat superficial. It feels a bit out of place to post a real, thoughtful digest of things like this trip, in the form of a LinkedIn post, because of the context that it's placed in. Hopefully my insights here are useful and interesting. I'd love to chat further if you have any additional comments or thoughts! Email me at wolf@404wolf.com, or 212/767/9653.

I cannot thank CWRU Veale Institute for Entrepreneurship, Michael Goldberg, Stacey Lotz, and many others enough for making this opportunity possible! I've learned a ton, met so many interesting people, and have got to further connect with the other fellows!