Matt Turck

I think startups are increasingly becoming part of the corporate playbook. We’ve seen tons of large companies transition from having mostly surface-level conversations with startups to taking action right after their initial meeting with startups and getting to pilots quickly or providing really candid, valuable feedback even if they don’t move forward.

In interviews, I’m most impressed with candidates who can help me learn something new or offer a different perspective. If all of our team members thought the same way, we would glean little value from our conversations…

…ompelling apps: Facebook had its core socializing features and the iPhone had a number of key apps. Decentralized platforms, by contrast, often launch half-baked and without clear use cases. As a result, they need to go through two phases of product-market fit: 1) product-market fit between the platform and the developers/entrepreneurs who will finish the platform and build out the ecosystem, and 2) product-market fit between the platform/ecosystem and end users. This two-stage process is what causes many people — including sophisticated technologists — to consistently underestimate the potential of decentralized platforms.

(All data points shown here are pulled from Indeed.com)

In the major tech hubs, data engineers are significantly more in-demand then data scientists (which has been called the “sexiest job of the 21st century”). There’s something big happening here…

Across all three of the above trends, we see a shift in tech companies becoming data companies. Uber, Airbnb, Facebook (one of the top three employers of data engineers), Jawbone, Spotify — these…

Surprising people when they initially discover I’m a programmer

Nowadays, the fact that I’m terrified of being pulled over (thankfully, I don’t own a car, but I still rent one on occasion), and sometimes feel out of place simply walking down the street makes me feel like an intruder in my own home.