Articles on Startups

Share Powerful Stories to Shift the Culture Around You

A few months ago, I passed my three-year anniversary of working at Quip. It’s the longest I’ve worked at any company, and my experience here has also differed significantly from other startups I’ve worked at. Many of us are either already in leadership roles, or we’re starting to wonder what our personal path toward leadership might look like. And part of leadership – whether you’re a senior engineer, tech lead,... (more)

How a Small Team Iterated Rapidly by Running Up to 12 User Tests Per Week

“Movie time!” My team and I huddled on the couches to watch the latest batch of movies — videos really — of users testing out our product. For several weeks during the most recent product redesign at Quip, we ran tests on UserTesting — a virtual user testing lab that lets you get videos of real people sharing their thoughts as they test out your product. Watching these user videos... (more)

What I Learned from Quip on How to Build a Product on 8 Different Platforms with Only 13 Engineers

How do you build a great product that impacts the lives of millions of people with just a small engineering team? That’s a question I’ve often thought long and hard about during my years at Quora and, more recently, at Quip. I joined Quora when the team consisted of only 12 people and Quip when it had just 13. Both startups have ambitious missions. Quora aims to share and grow... (more)

The Hidden Costs That Engineers Ignore

“It’ll only take me a few hours to implement the feature,” we sometimes say. But after finishing, we find that every few weeks, we’re either fixing a bug with the feature, explaining it to another engineer, or helping answer a question from customer support about how it works. The total investment of time to maintain the feature far exceeds the initial few hours of development. One of the hardest lessons... (more)

What Qualities Make a Good Startup Engineer?

Not every good engineer makes a good startup engineer. Some of the most promising candidates that I’ve interviewed in the past six years across three startups (Ooyala, Quora, and now Quip) would bring 5+ years of experience from a top engineering company like Google, only to do poorly during our interview processes. Usually, the candidate wasn’t a bad engineer; in fact, he might have even excelled at his current job.... (more)

What Makes A Good Engineering Culture

One of my favorite interview questions that I ask engineering candidates is to tell me about one thing they liked and one thing they disliked about the engineering culture at their previous company. I’ve interviewed over 500 people – many of them from top tech companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, Palantir, and Dropbox – and over time, this interview question has given me a sense of what good engineers look... (more)

How to Build a Good Onboarding Process for New Hires at a Startup

This blog post is based on a recent answer I wrote on Quora. “Sink or swim.” They weren’t the most encouraging words that Sean, Ooyala’s CTO and ex-Google co-founder, could have said to me as I was ramping up, but they did set the tone for my onboarding experience at the company and for my first foray into the startup world. No life preserver was coming – the expectation was... (more)

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“Edmond managed to distill his decade of engineering experience into crystal-clear best practices.”

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“I wish I had this manual to give my engineers when I was a VP of Engineering at Twitter. This summarizes and presents everything I used to tell my team.”

— Raffi Krikorian, Engineering Director at Uber

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“A comprehensive tour of our industry's collective wisdom written with clarity.”

— Jack Heart, Engineering Manager at Asana

“Edmond managed to distill his decade of engineering experience into crystal-clear best practices.”

— Daniel Peng, Senior Staff Engineer at Google

“I wish I had this manual to give my engineers when I was a VP of Engineering at Twitter. This summarizes and presents everything I used to tell my team.”

— Raffi Krikorian, Engineering Director at Uber

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