It is an unconventional story even for the Bay Area. Sheltr was founded in November 2018, with a seed round in May and the acquisition by Hippo Insurance closing by end of October. In just a year the company went from 0 to serving thousands of people, non-trivial revenue and…

I love the story that in 1850s gold prospectors abandoned so many ships in the harbor in San Francisco that the city had no better use of ships than to sink them for landfill. The heist for gold was so high that as soon as gold miners arrived at the…

Congrats to everyone, who made the Uber the phenomena it became! IPO is a strange milestone, but it will make the company stronger, as it gets more transparency and better access to credit. Also, congrats to many, who got more financially independent after taking a chance on a startup years ago! I haven’t been around for too long but wanted to thank Paul Holden, Ryan McKillen and Jordan Bonnet, who’ve taken a chance on an immigrant with a passion for Android as a platform. I am proud of adding some folks back in Vilnius, Lithuania to Uber Engineering team. Kudos to Oliver Nicholas and Curtis Chambers, who took the chance on hiring talent in Eastern Europe.

The last autumn my team grew from 5 to 11 engineers. In order to onboard new engineers effectively, I wrote down my values, expectations, and process, so that I could use it as a first meeting script. Given it worked quite well, I decided to share it wider. The script…

In late 2017 in San Francisco, it felt like Uber had already lost against Lyft. My pool rides were lonely, cars started to smell bad and ETAs were getting longer. During Christmas holidays I spent some time thinking about the next few years for Uber. …

At Instacart, Solve for the Customer is our first and most important value. Recently we took a month to improve the accessibility of our Android app and serve a wider range of customers. Navigation & Focus Shopping for groceries involves doing quite a few searches, browsing stores and “virtual aisles” as well as…

Selecting a good default saves user time and mental effort. In e-commerce, payment information, billing and shipping address are mandatory and filling them up during checkout or sign-up is annoying for the consumer and results in conversion drop-offs. Naturally, whenever there is an opportunity to improve this experience, Instacart is…

Hong Kong is nothing you had expected. They drive on the left, commute in two level busses, use British plugs. You were flying to Asia, but landed in London. Hong Kong knows how to party. Go out for one drink, come back at 5 am. In Hong Kong parties are…

Income inequality has become a heated topic: Paul Graham wrote Refragmentation and Economic Inequality, Mark Suster joined. However, it felt that none of the VCs dug deep enough to the root of the issue or came up with anything really helpful to understand inequality well. ForeignAffairs in their Jan/Feb issue…