God damn, I'm old. That start up scene used to sound appealing to me but now makes me cringe.
> When I started at Stripe, I asked to delay my start date until after a family vacation, but my manager just told me to start sooner and take time off later (Stripe was just shy of 100 employees and moving incredibly quickly). I now had an artificial deadline of one month to ship my first project.
That’s a reasonably sized red flag. Asking someone to miss a family vacation so they can go after some arbitrary deadline?
Yikes.
My question is how he got anyone from rails core team to review his PR's! Maybe things were different then.
> Everyone I talked to genuinely cared about their job and about me as a person, and everyone was high powered.
Simply walking around the office(s) was incredibly energizing for this reason. Fairly hard contrast with the last year of isolation and working alone! “Figure out what great looks like” is great advice, but I will say it does generate some imposter syndrome that I hadn’t felt before Stripe and YC, for (probably) better or for worse. Capitalizing on these experiences without getting caught up in comparison paralysis is a genuine skill that you seem to have mastered. Congratulations on the funding!
It seems like Zinc is highly profitable. Now that you are running Assembled - is Zinc on autopilot?
I am also curious to know..why you decided to go for VC funding for Assembled when Zinc could help bootstrap it.
For why we took VC funding for Assembled: the full explanation is probably worth its own article. But the short answer is that the space and the opportunity are really big in customer support and the money helps us move much faster.
