chee chew

More than $4 trillion in equity compensation (RSU, ISO, ESPP etc) remains unmanaged for employees. Founded by veterans in this field, Grantd helps financial advisors transform this complex, often-overlooked benefit into actionable tax-informed strategies for clients and new business opportunities for advisories. We’re excited to see our strategic partners share this vision and place their trust in the team.

8

When Elena Verna and Whitney Menarcheck announced the first SheBuilds on Lovable buildathon back in September, I was immediately drawn to their mission. Nearly half of the builders at my in-person vibe coding events in Seattle are women (far more than you typically see at tech events), so I've seen first-hand the impact of creating an empowering, accessible community. Next Sunday (March 8), We Build With AI is supporting the SheBuilds movement with a free build session at Foundations in Capitol Hill from 10am–2pm for International Women's Day. To help you go from idea to working product, we'll have an all-star group of mentors that include SheBuilds alumni, professional software developers, and vibe coding experts like Sujata Sridharan, Vrinda Bhatia, Shilpa Shastri, Sarah V., Craig Campbell, Maricar Helmer, and me. On top of that, attendees will receive free Lovable, Claude API, and Stripe credits to help them build and launch their product! All women and allies are invited to register at luma.com/seashebuilds Excited to see what Seattle builds on Sunday!

81

14 Comments

U.S. energy demand is surging — don’t get left behind. New gas projects and large industrial loads are reshaping power markets at breakneck speed. In this high-stakes landscape, timely and accurate data is essential. Halcyon’s Data Products, powered by a regularly updated authoritative data catalog of 4.5+ million documents from all 50 public utility commissions, ensure you always have the latest energy market intelligence. Download this guide to see how AI can help power sector stakeholders find new growth opportunities first.

6

Ask AI how OpenClaw can automate workflows in your business, then send me a message and I'll get that all setup for you. Setting up an agentic system can be tricky. Northstar AI Labs has been deep in the weeds, developing AI solutions. If you have heard of AI automation, but you don't want to DIY, a hassle free installation is just 1 message away.

1

This is an important article written by Rick Turoczy. It’s hard enough starting a company in Oregon. The legislature just made it even less desirable.

4

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the scale of the problem, but every action matters. Even if we can help one person— one child, one senior, one vulnerable person— it’s worth it! Forage is partnering with Zip Co to give eligible EBT recipients no-fee prepaid cards and short-term installment options, helping families keep access to groceries in-store and online during the SNAP funding freeze. Additionally,  food pantries currently provide one meal for every nine that SNAP covers. They’re the next lifeline for millions and will soon be under unprecedented pressure to fill the gap! I’m donating to my local food bank and hope you’ll consider doing the same: https://lnkd.in/gXvaaiZv.

23

3 Comments

I thought this was a good and very reasonable talk by Eleanor Millman on how to prioritize projects for a platform engineering team: https://lnkd.in/gaYtUHRH A few insights I took from it: - Unlike product features which can be more directly tied to revenue, platform engineering work is a couple steps removed. But that doesn't mean it's unimportant! Far from it, platform engineering projects can make everyone at the company more efficient, able to produce higher quality software, etc. - While "urgency" is always going to be a factor, you don't want to just be putting out fires, you want be able to prioritize work which is "high impact" ... even if that impact isn't felt immediately. - Good rule of thumb: prioritize "highest impact for lowest effort". - The talk has some ideas on what factors to choose for impact, and how to blend them. For instance "speed of development" is one factor, "cloud cost optimization" might be another. The weighting of different impact factors can change over time, depending on the needs of the business. I would say that a lot of companies don't have much methodology here but I can really see the value in codifying it. You can always change the methodology or the weighting if it's spitting out results that don't pass the smell test or you really feel it is leading the company astray. Clarity can give the org more freedom to put resources behind projects that would otherwise never be taken on. When things are unclear, prioritization still happens implicitly, but the decisions tend to be a lot more random and fear-based and the org is worse off as a result.

15

3 Comments

The reality is that every engineer is becoming a tech lead with a crew of agents. In that world, the primary job shifts from writing code to coordinating work: tasks, context, handoffs, and verification. That likely calls for a new kind of UI, one that feels closer to Kanban, Jira, or Asana than a traditional IDE. We don’t know yet if Intent is the final winning approach, but I’m excited we’re shipping a research preview instead of standing still. PS: What’s one small, recurring pain in your daily workflow? Drop it in the comments. If it’s a good fit, I’ll build a prototype with Intent and share what we learn.

7

I wrote a long form piece on individual agency and team dynamics in startups. I've been thinking a lot about this, and I think its an important sea change. https://lnkd.in/gsCiPCM6 Preview: I think the abilities that models develop along different vectors - as measured through various benchmarks - interact in non-linear ways that aren't always obvious. For example, if a model excels at coding but struggles with long context windows, it's going to have a very difficult time understanding a large codebase or a problem that's connected to many conceptual areas within your codebase. If it's bad at tool use, it's going to have a difficult time utilizing semantic search to make the intuitive leaps - or what we think of as intuitive leaps - that humans make to go find specific concepts within the codebase. This matters for making sure you're being DRY, not reinventing concepts that are already solved elsewhere, following standards in your own codebase, and so on. Hat tip to Anthropic's research around interpretability [16] - I think it's extremely important for the industry to understand why and how emergent behavior is happening. Think of where we were a year ago compared to now. It's no longer single one-shot chat interface style editing, but rather very extended multi-shot, think-time compute-driven, rule-building, sub-agentic processes. The tooling in software development has gotten so much more advanced than almost any other field, and these tools are building up this massive ability to amplify your own impact. These high-context individuals who may have previously gone down a fairly narrowing track to scale their effectiveness across an organization now have to measure their opportunity cost in a different way. They need to look at evolving new structures around themselves to uninhibit their throughput so the organization can take advantage of how much these individuals can produce in a short amount of time.

17

3 Comments

Love it or hate it, being in the SF Bay Area is still one of the biggest hacks for First Builders to discover huge opportunities before anyone else. But what can you do if you’re not here? Cecilia for example moved here in 2001 and instantly joined Yahoo after feeling the palpable energy around early internet. And it’s been nonstop ever since as she later joined Amazon, Cruise, Replit, and her own breakout company GC AI. She credits a lot to the emerging tech density and optimism in the Bay Area. But she also mentions additional ways people can identify these opportunities early on: - Follow intuition around big waves - Follow your envy - Never lose curiosity - Watch the teen hackers - Talk to peers early and often (builds long term networks/insights)

21

3 Comments

A helpful takeaway from my conversation with Josh Sorenson: development teams should be thinking about how to empower more people to prototype. The prototype can be rough, the point is momentum. Then the dev team can translate it into planning documents and rebuild the solution properly from scratch.

4

The circles of Control, Influence, and Concern Early in our careers, we’re often told to “own the outcome.” As we grow, that ownership broadens beyond code or systems — it extends into people, mechanisms, and culture. Stephen Covey’s Circles of Control, Influence, and Concern provide a simple but powerful framework for reflection — one that we all live through daily. Circle of Control This is what you can directly act upon — your code, design quality, and decisions. It’s where you move fast because you don’t need permission to do what’s right for the system. For me, this means writing tenets, defining metrics, reviewing designs, and raising the bar on engineering standards. Circle of Influence This is where leadership without authority matters. You can’t force a change here — but you can shape it. Influence is built through clarity, trust, and data. When you help another org simplify a design, mentor an SDE into a stronger reviewer, or align leaders on shutting down a misaligned project — you’re operating here. Your success depends not on hierarchy, but on how consistently you demonstrate judgment, objectivity, and customer obsession. Circle of Concern This includes everything you care about but can’t control — like organizational priorities, macro-level business shifts, or leadership changes. The key here is emotional discipline. Those who spend energy worrying about concerns they can’t act on end up drained. Those who channel that energy back into influence — writing a clear doc, proposing a mechanism, or building alignment — create impact. Success isn’t about controlling everything; it’s about knowing where to invest your judgment, where to build trust, and where to let go. How do you decide which circle your current challenge belongs to?

34

In this presentation, Colin cogently articulates the rationale for choosing Components over Containers and why Agentic Systems provide a catalyst for that paradigm shift (especially from around the 19 minute mark).

2

If you’re interested in how CodePath is building the first AI-native generation of engineers, and what it really takes to expand economic mobility at scale, this Blue Meridian Partners feature covers it well. I shared some of my personal background, then we dove into - our approach to leveraging technology - rethinking higher ed partnerships - and designing support systems that meet students where they are and take them where they need to be. Check it out here https://lnkd.in/g9Fm3utn and let me know your thoughts!

54

1 Comment

Too often, we treat software engineering like factory work, rigid, process-driven, optimized to the decimal. But the best teams I've worked with operate more like artists. In my new Fast Company piece, I argue that creativity, improvisation, and passion aren't "nice to have", but essential to building great software. The future belongs to teams that can ship and make magic. Read more: https://lnkd.in/gTqTCSse #softwareengineering #leadership #creativity #fastcompany

17

We signed a new customer yesterday that heavily uses Stripe for billing and has some complex multi-entity and multi-currency challenges. They tried to develop an integration with a couple other accounting solutions and while doing so, asked Claude Code what other systems they should consider. Claude suggested they explore SoftLedger and by the time we got on our first call, he already had a pretty good integration specification. So he got access to his account yesterday. This morning, this is the message received by our customer success team: "This is unbelievable. I would estimate I am 60-70% of the way through what I need to do. Brought in 23,000 journal entries overnight." Something has changed in the buying journey for companies seeking an integrated accounting solution and I love it. Accounting technology should be an API driven solution that conforms to a companies processes. Tools like Claude Code enable companies to build bespoke integrations for their internal processes like never before.

52

13 Comments

What if launching a custom lending automations and products took days, not months? We're building that. timveroAI just passed its first real test - 2 features implemented, tested, and documented in <10 min. And this is the first overview:

25

Three lessons from a second-time founder Husayn Kassai built and led Onfido for 10 years. These are the three lessons he's applying to ollo. 1. Product-market fit is about solving burning problems, not building perfect products. If you're working on something customers desperately need, they'll be patient while you figure out execution. Your first product doesn't need polish, it needs to solve a problem urgent enough that customers tolerate rough edges while you improve. Be scientific about validating this. 2. Hiring determines everything Your ability to bring in people who complement each other and fit your mission is the biggest determinant of success. 3. Trust your gut, especially when you think you've outgrown it. You have three signals as a founder: your head (rational), your heart (emotional), and your gut (instinct). Tech founders have a habit of preferring rationality and ignoring the other two. How your team feels matters. How customers feel about your product matters. And your gut matters most five or ten years in when you’re hiring experienced execs from big companies and think you can finally stop paying attention. Trust the pattern recognition you've built.

52

2 Comments