Stephen Hebson

Co-founder/CTO at Nelo. Previously: software engineering manager at Uber.

[Stephen Hebson @stephenhebson]

In 2017, Uber renamed The War Room to The Peace Room in the interregnum between Travis and Dara.

[Ryan Petersen @typesfast]

I hope the (ex) employee who got upset at me for naming a conference room after Christopher Columbus back in 2017 is enjoying the federal holiday today.

[Stephen Hebson @stephenhebson]

@hkarthik Commute time is one of the strongest predictors of satisfaction in life and work.

Yes, suck it up. But get roommates. Don’t spend your best years commuting.

[Stephen Hebson @stephenhebson]

@GergelyOrosz FWIW, we migrated from PagerDuty to Datadog's alternative about 18 months ago and are happy with it (but only makes sense if you already use DD for observability)

[Stephen Hebson @stephenhebson]

@GergelyOrosz Pagerduty is an example of pretty much every failure mode of non-founder-led companies:
- Overly focused on quarterly earnings
- No investment in product expansion and no vision for how they could leverage their brand and market position as the market changed

[Stephen Hebson @stephenhebson]

@hkarthik I think some of it is that big companies forgot Metcalfe's Law - have heard of a lot of teams using token spend leaderboards to drive adoption, the consequence of which should be obvious.

[Stephen Hebson @stephenhebson]

@hkarthik The return on AI spend has been obvious for us internally and has scaled to pretty big numbers both in total and at an individual level. It's wild to me that that these companies aren't seeing it.

[Stephen Hebson @stephenhebson]

@GergelyOrosz Had this been priced at $100/share instead of $33, Figma could have either raised three times as much money or taken on a third of the dilution.

Yes, they were willing sellers at $33 (and this was a very good outcome!) but I think it's fair to say this was mispriced.

[Stephen Hebson @stephenhebson]

@GergelyOrosz Claude Code is a counter example. Really easy for a single engineer to spend $500+ per month with Claude Code but it provides so much leverage and is such a good UX that it is obviously worth it. The problem with Devin is not the price.

[Stephen Hebson @stephenhebson]

@abarrallen @Nelo And the Slack-first UX potentially opens up workflows like "designer requests the AI make a change to this component, AI puts up a PR, designer reviews the preview deploy, and engineer just reviews the code at the end." Would do a lot to empower non-engineers.

[Stephen Hebson @stephenhebson]

@abarrallen @Nelo But I think there will ultimately be a place for both approaches. The idea of tossing items in the backlog to an agent that can bang its head against it in the background and then put up a PR is super appealing.

[Stephen Hebson @stephenhebson]

@pitdesi @TheMint_vc Congrats on the (temporary) move! It's not longterm solution, but you're welcome to grab a desk or a conference room in our Tribeca office whenever you need until you find your permanent space.

[Stephen Hebson @stephenhebson]

@TheJakeSchmidt Ehhh idk. It's definitely possible to overcorrect, but I think a lack of constraints is more likely to produce crappy (overengineered) systems.

[Stephen Hebson @stephenhebson]

In 2023, Nelo grew 2.5x and had our first profitable quarter.

The secret to our success is our small, incredibly strong team. Highest talent density in the world.

Hiring for product and credit risk - DMs are open!
https://t.co/rZmC5t0B5d

[Stephen Hebson @stephenhebson]

@shreyas Nelo (https://t.co/fQxgcQ9Vq5) is hiring a senior PM in either NYC or CDMX. Consumer fintech or marketplace experience preferred but not required. DM me to apply.

[Stephen Hebson @stephenhebson]

@GergelyOrosz @Johnie Fraud is like water. It will find the path of least resistance.

[Stephen Hebson @stephenhebson]

@maiab The one that drives me crazy is incrementality -> incrementally. Incrementality is unambiguously a word!

[Stephen Hebson @stephenhebson]

@abrgrBuilds One could even say that this type of contrarian has these two required properties.

[Stephen Hebson @stephenhebson]

100%. If you're a serious employer, fly candidates to your HQ. If you're a serious candidate, get on the plane.

If you won't pay to fly a candidate, or won't get on the plane, stop wasting time.

[Keith Rabois @rabois]

I don’t understand candidates who want a new role who schedule Zoom interviews when they could meet IRL instead.

[Stephen Hebson @stephenhebson]

@hkarthik Savvy folks considering private cos have always done their own valuation exercise. Lots of growth stage companies have more than grown into their valuations, but most have not. To evaluate an offer, you need revenue, gross profit and ebitda to separate wheat from chaff.