Part 1: Measure Twice, Cut Once

This post was first published on The Craft, Faire’s technical blog. It is the first in our multi-part series on accelerating decision-making using A/B Testing.

Like many hypergrowth startups, Faire uses experimentation to quickly iterate on our product and make better decisions. However, unlike many of our peers that serve…

The Experimenting Society

I just read The Experimenting Society, an essay by Donald T Campbell, the Social Scientist known for coining the term “evolutionary epistemology” and developing a selectionist theory of human creativity. In it, he lays out what a future society devoted to science, reason and truth through intellectual humility might look…

I recently read Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity by Kim Scott as part of leadership training that we are doing at Faire. I’m not normally a fan of recently-written business books but I was really impressed by Radical Candor. The advice is highly relevant to…

I recently read Hacking Growth by Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown. I highlighted and took notes on points that I found helpful and questions that I asked myself. If you work on or with a growth team I recommend reading the book for practical advice and ideas.

Introduction

• How much drop…

Believe it or not, the point of this blog post is not about investing. Or Monkeys for that matter. If you’re ok with that, please read on.

I spent the first five years of my career in quantitative finance writing algorithms to predict stock prices. Much of that time was…

I have noticed that when I bring up the topic of “metrics” in Silicon Valley people seem to either love me or hate me. Tracking and possibly acting on some measure that you believe captures an important dimension of your business or product is a productivity panacea for some and…

This post was coauthored with Allen Sirolly and is the first post in our two-part series on arrival rate bias correction in A/B Testing. We are very grateful to our Wealthfront Data Science colleague, Hsiu-Chi Lin, for his invaluable input. Part 2 may be found here.

Like many technology companies…

We all know the advice given by Prudentius that “patience is a virtue”. As a boy, I heard this aphorism with alarming regularity in the form of admonition from my mother. As an adult, I learned to appreciate the value of forbearance as I invested in my future through education…