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Products are an art form.

As with any art, the world of products includes creators, patrons, fans, business people, and investors. Product Hunt is a place where those different people connect to build and discuss products.

Products are different from other art forms in that they are measured not only through the lens of design and beauty–but also through utility. From software to books to couches to toiletry–we all have products that have improved our lives so much that we feel a deep sense of connection and hope for that product and the people behind it.

Ryan Hoover is the founder of Product Hunt, a product I have found tremendous value and satisfaction from over the years. He is also a host of Product Hunt Radio, a weekly podcast with the people creating and exploring the future.

Ryan joins the show to discuss products, the process of creating something useful, and his investing strategy. Ryan runs the Weekend Fund, an early stage investment fund.

The post Products with Ryan Hoover appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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Haseeb Qureshi is an entrepreneur and investor. As a teenager, Haseeb played poker professionally through the online poker bubble. His path from poker to software entrepreneurship has been explored in previous episodes.

In 2007, Haseeb and I met at an online poker table. As we battled each other for thousands of dollars, Haseeb and I realized we shared an affinity for obnoxious screen names, obnoxious online avatars, and the city of Austin, Texas. We were both living in the city, and met each other in the real world.

In our earliest days, Haseeb and I were not friends. It was a strange time–we were disembodied minds, drifting on the Internet, attached mostly to the fluctuating balances of our Full Tilt Poker and Pokerstars accounts. This was not a time for friendship–it was a time for ruthless, modern competition.

Throughout the history of poker, alliances have always been fickle. And online, backstabbing and deception was an art that had been barely explored. Any true friendship was a missed opportunity to exploit a competitor.

The duplicity of the online poker world knew no limits, and our sheltered, posh existence of teenagers with great parents, food on the table every evening, and no reason to worry became shattered by the daily tumult of complete financial instability.

Online poker was in a bubble. In the early days of a bubble, success comes easy. You have to be a fool to fail. When a bubble pops, the ocean washes back to the sea, and we see who is left without any clothing.

The poker bust wiped me out. Not just financially, but emotionally. In a month, I lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and I lost my identity. After doing nothing but playing poker for years, what was I left with? What durable skills had I developed? What friends did I have to turn to? What was my ideology? What was my vision for my own future?

As I plummeted into despair, Haseeb rose like a meteor through the world of heads up poker, thriving on the rise in popularity of pot limit Omaha, a game whose theoretical complexity suited Haseeb better than the rudimentary game of no limit hold’em. The bigger the stacks, the bigger the decision trees, and the bigger the decision trees, the more edge Haseeb had over his opponents.

As a professional poker player, regardless of whether you succeed or fail, the banality of what you are actually doing eventually catches up to you. The best players are able to put an athletic framing to the game. Yes, you are competing on a zero sum basis, with a 52 card deck that was invented last century. Yes, your innovation is measured in the smallest increment of invention. But in some ways, that is the beauty of the game. We don’t need a revolution in the game of basketball, because to appreciate the dynamic of basketball is to appreciate the dynamic of humans. And the same can be said of poker.

Unfortunately, the successful online poker player must eventually have their own reality shattered. Because to be a successful poker player, you must be rigorous and critical. You will eventually be forced to step back and say: “what is this thing I’m doing every day? How have I become hooked to a screen? I don’t know how that screen works. What are these numbers? Are they fabricated? How do they control my emotions so thoroughly? Who is running this thing?”

Haseeb grew tired of poker. He wrote a book about the game to memorialize his thoughts, then abandoned it. He studied philosophy and literature, searching for something new in the historical musings of humanity. He traveled Europe, working as a farmer to reconnect with the physical world. He discovered the Effective Altruism movement.

Finding no solace in his poker spoils, Haseeb gave away most of his money and started from scratch. As he rebuilt himself, he found software engineering and charted a path to San Francisco, where we reconnected.

In this episode, Haseeb joins me for a discussion of software, philosophy, poker, and the nature of bubbles. Indeed, Haseeb and I have now lived through four major bubbles: dot coms, poker, the 2008 financial crisis, and the crypto bubble. Throughout these bubbles, the mediums change but never does the message: human beings are deeply irrational, tribalistic, and emotional.

The post Bubbles with Haseeb Qureshi appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Upcoming events:

A Conversation with Haseeb Qureshi at Cloudflare on April 3, 2019

FindCollabs Hackathon at App Academy on April 6, 2019

Chris Yeh is an entrepreneur, investor, and author. He co-wrote Blitzscaling with LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman.  

Blitzscaling is a strategy for growing a company that has found product market fit. Blitzscaling prioritizes speed over efficiency, arguing that fast growth is necessary to achieve “first scaler advantage.” When a company is the first to scale successfully within a large market, that company gains access to a wealth of market opportunities that are not available to companies which are not at scale.

Examples of successful Blitzscalers include Airbnb, LinkedIn, Amazon, and Facebook. In the hypergrowth phases of these companies, there were deliberate strategic tradeoffs that caused the company to suffer in the short term in exchange for the chance at market dominance in the long term.

Blitzscaling is a broad strategic concept which manifests differently in different companies.

When Airbnb was in its early stages of growth in 2011, the company was faced with the existential threat of a European competitor called Wimdu. Wimdu offered to sell to Airbnb, but this would have required the merger of two companies with distinctly different cultures. Instead, Airbnb chose to raise more money and rapidly expand into Europe.

In contrast, Google’s rapid path to becoming a dominant information service involved acquisitions that we now see as key Google products, including Android, Google Maps, and Google Earth.

Through numerous examples in recent business history, Blitzscaling explores the fundamental tradeoff between speed and efficiency, usually biasing speed as the preferable element. But Blitzscaling does not work for every company.

In the food delivery sector, many companies who tried to blitzscale ended up going out of business because they had lowered their prices too much in order to try to earn customer loyalty. By lowering their prices too much, food delivery startups built businesses with fundamentally bad unit economics and a fickle customer base.

In other cases, aggressive blitzscaling can work for a short period of time, but can cause a company’s culture to suffer in ways that are very hard to repair. Blitzscaling can also cause problems in a core software product. Growing too quickly can cause a product to have a bloated user interface. If the backend infrastructure layer expands too quickly, sensitive data could be left exposed due to a lack of proper software security policies.

Chris Yeh joins the show to talk about the strategy of Blitzscaling and his wide-ranging career. Chris studied creative writing and product design at Stanford before joining DE Shaw, the famous quantitative hedge fund. Later, he became an investor and worked in several leadership roles in software companies.

His wide range of experiences make Chris an excellent author and conversationalist. We explored the ideas of both Blitzscaling and his previous book The Alliance, which lays out a modern vision for the dynamic between employers and employees. We also talked about investing, Dungeons and Dragons, and podcasting.

The post Blitzscaling with Chris Yeh appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Advertising fraud occurs when a brand pays for an advertisement online and that advertisement is shown to an automated bot account that has been created to view ads. Advertising fraud is rampant on the Internet. It’s not possible to know how much money is lost to ad fraud, but the costs are in the billions of dollars.

Praneet Sharma and Shailin Dhar are the founders of Method Media Intelligence, a company that builds solutions around improving advertising quality. In previous shows, Praneet and Shailin have described the online advertising ecosystem in detail. They have told stories of bot farms, replay attacks, and adtech companies.

In today’s episode, Praneet and Shailin return to the show to discuss how advertising fraud is getting worse–not better. Praneet and Shailin worked with BuzzFeed reporter Craig Silverman, who was a previous guest on the show to talk about his remarkable findings about mobile advertising fraud, which accounts for hundreds of millions of dollars in theft every year.

The post Ad Fraud Engineering with Praneet Sharma and Shailin Dhar appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

The Internet has transformed humanity.

The Internet is the result of a long series of innovations from military, academia, business, and the open source community. In his book, How The Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone, Brian McCullough tells the story of the last 25 years of Internet development through the lens of companies like ebay, Amazon, Google, and Apple.

Whereas other books have focused on the trajectory of these individual companies, Brian explains how innovations in one company often lead to success in another. Without the lessons from Napster, we might not have Spotify. Without the trust model pioneered by ebay, we would not have marketplaces like Airbnb.

Brian is also the host of The Internet History Podcast and the Techmeme Ride Home podcast. In The Internet History Podcast, Brian interviews entrepreneurs and engineers who were firsthand witnesses to the developments that led to our modern Internet, including early employees at Amazon, Tesla, and TheGlobe.com. In his other podcast, the Techmeme Ride Home, Brian gives a daily overview of the day’s Internet news.

Through his podcasts about the Internet’s past and present, Brian has also accumulated an intuition about the future. He joins the show to discuss his book, the art of podcasting, and the historical lessons of technology.

The post Internet History (and Future) with Brian McCullough appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Advertising fraud steals billions of dollars every year.

BuzzFeed reporter Craig Silverman reports on advertising fraud and its impact on the Internet. In one investigation, Craig uncovered a mobile advertising fraud scheme in which four people stole millions of dollars (perhaps as much as $75 million or even $750 million) by serving advertisements to automated users on mobile apps.

The scheme worked as follows:

This scheme was easy to pull off. It did not require much sophistication in terms of engineering or business skills. If a group of four people can generate tens of millions of dollars, how much ill-gotten capital is being generated by large corporations that are deeply involved in the advertising market?

Craig’s article went viral, and he has followed it up with other pieces about ad networks, fraud investigations by Google, and the potential for mobile apps to be used for large scale surveillance of Americans by the Chinese.

Craig is the most dedicated reporter covering advertising fraud today. His work is invaluable because he is asking difficult questions about the economics of our Internet. As we discuss in the episode, there is currently no effective automated means of detecting a bot from a human on the internet.

We have also discussed this in detail on previous episodes about ad fraud, the advertising industry, advertising analytics, and the techniques of ad fraud.

Ad fraud is not the fault of any one party. It is an emergent result of the way that our Internet is set up. It is as hard to imagine a world without advertising fraud as it is to imagine a world without email spam.

The post Ad Fraud Economics with Craig Silverman appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Podcast listeners usually find out about a new podcast in one of two ways: either a friend recommends that podcast or the Apple podcast charts rank that new podcast highly.

The Apple podcast charts are created using an algorithm that is not public. Many people believe that the chart ranking of a podcast is based on the number of podcast subscribers, the number of podcast downloads, and the reviews that are written about the podcasts on iTunes.

Jack Rhysider is the host of Darknet Diaries, a podcast about the dark and strange elements of the Internet. Darknet Diaries is told in a high quality, narrative audio format. Jack is a security engineer with a deep understanding of technology, and has been blogging for a long time.

As Jack has built a following with his podcast, he has spent more time looking at the iTunes podcast charts. He has seen the rank of Darknet Diaries increase–but he has seen the rank of other podcasts increase much faster. Some of these podcasts have low quality content. The audio quality is poor, the host is unprepared–these are the kinds of podcasts you would listen to once, and never subscribe to.

And yet, numerous podcasts with low quality were somehow able to game the rankings and make it to the top of the charts.

In episode 27 of Darknet Diaries, Jack investigated the phenomenon of fraudulent podcast chart manipulation. It was one of my favorite podcast episodes ever (and this is coming from someone who has listened to a lot of podcasts). The investigation went to several unexpected places, but Jack did solve the riddle of how low quality podcasts climb the iTunes charts.

Jack joins the show to talk about fraudulent–and the broader implications of the fake Internet. Today’s episode is a simple example of how easily Internet platforms can be gamed–for a deeper dive into the fake Internet, listen to our past episodes on advertising fraud, or tomorrow’s episode with ad fraud investigative journalist Craig Silverman, which I am very excited about.

The post Fake Podcast Charts with Jack Rhysider appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Real estate is an asset that is not straightforward to invest in. Real estate can generate excellent returns for investors, but can require much more time and expertise than stocks. Cadre is a company that allows users to invest in real estate more easily and intelligently. Cadre provides users with lots of data about potential investments and enables investments in those opportunities within the platform.

Leonid Movsesyan is the head of engineering at Cadre and joins the show to talk about the problems being solved by the company in areas of product development, infrastructure engineering, hiring, and data science. To build a platform for evaluating real estate investments, Cadre ingests and merges lots of data sets–some public and some private. This gives investors a detailed picture of the value of investments.

Fintech Daily is a new podcast from Software Engineering Daily covering payments, cryptocurrencies, trading, and the intersection of finance and technology. We are looking for volunteer hosts for Fintech Daily, and if you are interested in working with us to conduct interviews, send an email to [email protected]. You can find the podcast on iTunes, Google, and everywhere else, and if you are interested in hosting, don’t hesitate to reach out.

The post Cadre: Automated Investing with Leonid Movsesyan appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Tyler Cowen’s book Stubborn Attachments outlines a framework that individuals can use to make decisions grounded in economic philosophy. In his previous books, Tyler examined recent economic history. Stubborn Attachments gives his perspective for navigating the future.

Tyler is a professor of economics at George Mason University. He is also the host of Conversations with Tyler, a podcast that includes guests such as Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin, Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison, and Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan. Tyler blogs frequently at Marginal Revolution.

Tyler’s previous appearance on Software Engineering Daily centered around his earlier books, including The Complacent Class. In this episode, Tyler describes the philosophy outlined in Stubborn Attachments, then we discuss how his philosophy relates to software engineering, podcasting, and economics.

To find all 900 of our old episodes, including past episodes with writers, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists, check out the Software Engineering Daily app in the iOS and Android app stores. Whether or not you are a software engineer, we have lots of content about technology, business, and culture. In our app, you can also become a paid subscriber and get ad-free episodes–and you can have conversations with other members of the Software Engineering Daily community.

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