Marius

how do you turn this on

[Marius @mediumhype]

@levelsio Sunlight: blackout curtains that extend to the sides of open windows, good enough for me…
Barking dogs… no fix for this I guess

[Marius @mediumhype]

@levelsio Get an apt that opens to an atrium, as long as you’re not in the loudest part of the city, it’s isolated enough for me to leave window open.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

A parasite that has been eating people for 3,500 years is about to be wiped off the planet. It infected 3.5 million people in 1986. Last year, it infected 10. And I have not seen it make a single front page.

It is called Guinea worm. You drink contaminated water from a pond in a poor village. A year later, a worm up to three feet long starts coming out of your leg through a burning blister. There is no pill that stops it and no surgery that works. You wrap the worm around a stick and pull it out slowly, over days or weeks, inch by inch. If you rush, the worm breaks inside you and causes a fresh infection.

Guinea worm is ancient. Preserved worms have been pulled out of Egyptian mummies from around 1000 BCE. The Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian medical scroll from 1550 BCE, describes pulling the worm out with a stick. For three and a half thousand years, that was the best humans could do.

Then in 1986, public health workers decided to kill the parasite off. They had no vaccine and no drug. What they had was cheap cloth water filters and a small army of volunteers willing to walk from village to village for decades.

The plan was simple. Give everyone who drinks from a pond a cloth filter to strain out the tiny water fleas that spread the parasite. Then send volunteers walking house to house, year after year, teaching people how to use the filters and keeping anyone with an emerging worm out of the water.

It worked. From 3.5 million cases a year to 10. Four were in Chad, four in Ethiopia, two in South Sudan. The other four countries where the worm used to be common, Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and Mali, had zero human cases for the second year in a row. The World Health Organization has already certified 200 countries as Guinea worm free. Six are left.

The last hurdle is dogs. Cameroon had 445 infected animals last year and Chad had 147, so a lot of the remaining work is on animals, not humans. Strays get leashed, and crews treat ponds to kill any remaining worms. The campaign keeps watching until the number hits zero.

When Guinea worm hits zero, it becomes the second human disease ever erased from the planet. The first was smallpox. It will also be the first parasite humans have ever wiped out, and the first disease ever ended without a single dose of medicine. Volunteers walked village to village with cloth filters for 40 years. Now a plague from the age of the pharaohs is about to be gone.

[Marius @mediumhype]

@steipete

[Marius @mediumhype]

@skytopjf #1 Product of the Week

[Marius @mediumhype]

@levelsio Same, incredible progress

[Marius @mediumhype]

Fostering a healthy work environment @claudeai

[Marius @mediumhype]

@hlovo_ Can someone do the AI thing and turn this into blockbuster visuals?

[Marius @mediumhype]

Hubspot is great but if I have to click away one more walkthrough...

[Marius @mediumhype]

@alx Europeans seeing this

[Marius @mediumhype]

@thedimitri Maybe their life doesn’t need fixing, they’re bookmarking just in case it ever does

[Marius @mediumhype]

@uncledoomer I also love this one, which is essentially a temporal cross section

[Marius @mediumhype]

@ScottAdamsSays @joelpollak Maybe this sounds silly, but when I was young, Dilbert taught me so much about personality types, which infinitely helped me avoid a lot of bad career decisions down the line.

[Marius @mediumhype]

@thekitze

[Marius @mediumhype]

@gbrl_dick "a beer? $5. a coffee? somehow also $5. a bus ticket — you guessed it. one strawberry? $5"

[Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin @jasonlk]

A VP mis-hire is always tough. A VP Sales mis-hire can set you back a year in sales. A VP Marketing mis-hire can lead you down massive time and money ratholes that don’t get you any more customers.

But, I'm 100% sure that the worst mis-hire is CTO / VP Engineering.  By far. Because it becomes the death of innovation.

I've seen this fact pattern or some variant thereof so many times:

* Founder CEO + CTO
* CTO gets start-up to $5m, $10m, $20m but just "can't scale"
* VP of Engineering or CTO from Big Tech Company hired
* Everyone chooses the Nice Candidate
* The Nice Candidate never codes, never learns the code base, never gets the magic
* The Nice Candidate hires a bunch of engineers under them that aren't great and never know the customers or the why

At first, things seem better. Things are more organized under The Nice VP of Engineering. There are a lot more discussions. Fewer erratic changes. Releases are smoother.

And ... innovation just ends. This VP of Eng / CTO never knows the magic, the why, or the how. And the competition pulls ahead.

And even worse, the founding CTO often either leaves or disengages. And the magic is lost.

Even at Adobe Sign / EchoSign, my last start-up, my co-founder and CTO is still at Adobe. Why? Because they know even at $200m+ ARR they still need him. He wrote all the original code base, and the original magic. They don't need him for everything. But when they need him -- they really need him. Even today.

👔 I have a rule: never hire a CTO that wears a suit (or tie).

It's always a sign they are selling up, rather than being a hacker. You need a hacker at the head of engineering. Maybe forever.

🔟 / 🔟 And whatever you do, when the time comes to hire an outside VP Eng / CTO, try to make sure you and your co-founder both are 100% aligned they are a 10/10. An epic hacker and engineer, not just a manager.

Managers are a dime a dozen today. And they can't win in engineering in a world that is more competitive than ever.

When I see this happening, I fight. I fight to help the founders see it. I go down with the fight.

Because when you hire a VP Eng / CTO that isn't a 10, it's the day your start-up starts to die.

The other VPs, if you make a mis-hire, you can recover. But 2 years of no more innovation? I don't know if most of us can fight our way back from that.

[Marius @mediumhype]

Guess I'm switching to @bunjavascript ?

[Marius @mediumhype]

@compliantvc @katya_fuen No joke: was at a company once, they had union reps come with a ruler and protractor to measure how far and at which angle the desks were from the sun glare coming through the window.

Workers there had to rearrange the desks from how they liked it to union rules.

[Marius @mediumhype]

@jasonlk Hard to port the SF Bay intensity anywhere else, I don’t know if they put smth in the coffee, but it’s smth else