Jake Leichtling

The newest issue of The Pragmatic Engineer found a surprise uptick in eng hiring in the typically slow summer season - I'm curious to see how the macro environment impacts this uptick as we head into the fall, but I remain hopeful. I asked Gemini to give me the tldr of the article to share with my team (sorry, Gergely Orosz) and found it missed one of the most interesting pieces of the article. Gemini's highlights - Unexpected surge: Tech recruitment has seen an unusual spike in June and July, contrary to typical trends. Increased demand: Startups, especially AI-focused ones, are driving the hiring uptick. Global phenomenon: This trend isn't just limited to the US; Europe is also experiencing increased recruitment activity. Reasons for hiring: Companies are backfilling positions, investing in growth due to improved financials, and responding to increased VC funding. Challenges remain: While the job market is improving, finding qualified candidates and offering competitive compensation remains difficult for many companies. What I found most interesting - The nature of the backfills: the article finds that a lot of new headcount are actually backfills of folks that were "over-slashed" during rounds of layoffs. Not entirely surprising with the "trim the fat" and "rebuild lean" mentality, but interesting nonetheless. Either way, the uptick is encouraging (and don't always rely on Gemini's tldrs). #hiring #startups #VCbacked #softwareengineering

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The Stoke Space team in Seattle has built a rocket company faster than many people can build software. Morgan Beller breaks down how this is helping them capture a huge opportunity: https://lnkd.in/gc5jv2-c 

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We are thrilled to announce the close of Billables AI's $3.9m seed round, with participation from a leading group of VCs and AI expert investors in Silicon Valley. While this is a great milestone, what’s even more exciting is what this funding helps us accomplish. “How will you use this investment?”, you ask? Let me break it down with a handy lil’ acronym - C.R.E.A.M. (😉): Cultivating more advancements in AI including more personalization to make your billable reports yours. Releasing more integrations to help firms streamline their workflows. Enhancing our user-first, design-driven experience to deliver the most beautiful timesheets you ever did see. Adding more productivity features including reporting and budgeting tools. Maximizing our presence in market. If I’ve already been annoying you to date, just you wait (and apologies in advance). --------------- Thank you to our investors at Wing Venture Capital, f7 Ventures, SignalFire, Alumni Ventures, Darkmode Ventures, our partner law firms… and of course, The Wu-Tang Clan.

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~40% of Frec’s customers are engineers working in tech, many of whom expect frequent and large capital gains. They also prefer to self-manage their money, which makes Frec an ideal platform. Meet Evan: an engineering leader who upgraded from investing in ETFs to direct indexing. Direct indexing appealed to Evan because it offers comparable returns to his ETFs while saving him money on advisory and ETF fees. “ETFs are true and tested, and giving folks a different way of investing in the market while saving more money is really appealing.” He’s used many other robo-advisors and other fintech tools, but “Frec seems to maximize tax loss harvesting opportunities better than any other product that I’ve used.” He also likes Frec's transparent fee structure.  “I feel like with a lot of other companies, that’s muddled in with the cost of investments,” he told us, “and you don’t really know how much you’re paying or how much you’re not saving as a result. I think Frec does a really good job of laying all of that out and giving you a true understanding of the cost of these investment products.” Read more about his Frec journey here ⬇

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AI memory is fundamental for conversational AI and AI agents. It is critical for building personalized experiences and improving reasoning. Check out Letta’s course to understand how to use AI memory to enhance the customization and quality of your AI app.

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Great AI agent-based conversations at Neon's dinner yesterday. Paving the way for a world full of agents means re-thinking some core infrastructure layers: - Neon is actively exploring new use cases to better support agents. Database per tenant to spin up a DB in milliseconds opens up new possibilities. - We're pushing hard on knowledge graphs to better constrain where and what we should investigate in production systems. - Daniel M. @ Anon is solving identity for agents. - Agent-to-agent communication will be a thing, like we have APIs today. Can our SRE agent co-ordinate with your PM agent to get things done?

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👩‍🚀 Fellow Tech People, we're exploring moving away from our custom API/websocket LLM interfacing at LEAGUES in favor of ELL. 🤔 The potential for streamlined API interactions, simplified prompt management, and reusable functions is really appealing. That said, I’m reaching out to the community: has anyone implemented ELL in production yet? I'm curious if ELL is the way to go for long-term scalability and maintenance reduction when interacting with LLMs. And what about Langchain—why choose one over the other? I'd love to hear your experiences and thoughts! #LEAGUES #ELL #Langchain #AI #TechInnovation

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AI was all the rage at 🍃 MongoDB.local NYC 2024 yesterday. Congrats to Dev Ittycheria Sahir Azam Lars Herrmann Michael C. Dylan Sarachek and the Mongo team on the myriad of launches. My 2 takeaways👇 1️⃣ Enterprises are excited about AI, but are still early in exploring high-impact production use cases Most companies still find themselves in the experimentation phase, working through proofs of concept, hampered by unfamiliar technologies that don't work well together. 2️⃣ Data-focused Platforms like Mongo are seizing the opportunity to close this exploration gap through programs like MongoDB's AI Applications Program (MAAP) MAAP gives customers the blueprints and reference architectures to easily understand how to build AI applications. We also take on the heavy lifting of integrating MongoDB's developer data platform with leading AI partners like Anthropic Cohere Fireworks AI LangChain Nomic AI Anyscale Credal.ai Together AI The new AI Infrastructure stack is being formed and the AI application stack is next. This is exciting - enterprises are looking to build modern applications and looking for the right stack and toolkit to get AI applications to market faster – a major opportunity ahead 🚀

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Do you live in Seattle? Are you interested in Seattle's crime reports? Seattle makes its reported crime data publicly available on the city's website. The only problem is the dataset from 2008 to the present is 1.1M rows. That's a lot of data for the average person to manage and analyze. They can't simply open it in Excel because it's too big. To help, we've imported the entire dataset into a Row Zero spreadsheet and analyzed a number of different trends. If you want to take a look for yourself, you can open the data in Row Zero (for free) and drill down into your neighborhood to look at specific types of crimes. https://lnkd.in/gNcTqAwW Below are some noteworthy examples. Keep in mind that the Seattle city population decreased slightly during the pandemic and has since recovered, up about 5% from pre-pandemic levels. So small increases in crime would be expected due to population growth. - Total reported Seattle crime has decreased compared to pre-pandemic with notable drops in 2023 and 2024, even as the population has increased. Reported cases in 2022: 75.044k, 2023: 70.179k, 2024: 62.152k YTD. - Homicides are up significantly over the last 5 years. The last 5 years are the 5 worst years in the data, with reported homicides up more than 75% in the last 5 years. - Motor Vehicle Theft has nearly doubled since pre-pandemic with 2023 seeing a sharp spike in Seattle car theft. - Drug Offenses are up significantly in 2024, possibly reflecting stricter enforcement. However, they are still well below pre-pandemic numbers. - Despite national media reports of increased shoplifting, reported shoplifting crimes continue to be well below pre-pandemic levels, down more than 20% vs pre-pandemic. - Top 5 Worst Seattle Neighborhoods for Car Break-ins QUEEN ANNE (50% more car break-ins than any other neighborhood) DOWNTOWN COMMERCIAL UNIVERSITY SLU/CASCADE ROOSEVELT/RAVENNA Row Zero #Excel #spreadsheets #dataanalysis #seattle

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Outcome-Based Pricing, AgentOS, and User Simulators: 3 takeaways from Sequoia Capital's Pat Grady & Ravi Gupta's chat with Sierra's co-founder Clay Bavor 🧠 1. Outcome-Based Pricing for High-Value AI Tasks: Charge based on the value delivered, not just usage 💰 2. AgentsOS: A powerful concept for coordinating and managing multiple AI agents 🤖 3. User Simulators: Testing AI agents with simulated users to accelerate user alignment and build a moat 🤯 User simulators could be a game-changer, providing a massive dataset of simulated customer behavior to train and refine AI agents. This could lead to a powerful "simulated customer data flywheel," offering a unique competitive advantage. What are your thoughts on these AI agent trends? 🤔 #AI #Agents #Sequoia #Sierra #Innovation #TechTrends Link to the original interview: https://lnkd.in/eK6MG6wx

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Congrats to the team at Rockset on their acquisition by OpenAI! 🚀 We’re excited to see how their tech and expertise will boost OpenAI’s real-time capabilities. Unfortunately, this means the Rockset commercial product will be discontinued. If you're a Rockset customer looking for alternatives, we'd love to help you. Seamlessly migrate your Rockset data to Imply Polaris, a fully managed, cloud-native analytics database built from #ApacheDruid. 🧙🏼‍♂️ https://lnkd.in/ejQqPbw2 #Rockset #OpenAI #ChatGPT #AI #LLM #realtimeanalytics #streamingdata #Apache

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Re: meta volatility lately Preaching to the choir but this is a canary in the coal mine for what’s to come with attribution sensitive systems. Some say issues lately are from a Chrome update or maybe an outage, but I think we are just seeing a glimpse into the untethering that could come from ongoing privacy updates. Is it going to be doom and gloom? Probably not - unless you are already struggling. But if you are a performance marketer trying to grow this matters. Take a look at the change logs and you’ll see hundreds of updates accross Chrome, iOS, and Safari consistently over the last few years - and the big blow to cookies is coming. And both companies are committed to progressing towards a tighter future on tracking ongoing which could go as far as further URL tracking restrictions (UTMs, etc). So what are you supposed to do about it? 👉Shift to domain-level tracking accross your acquisition channels. This means storefront proliferation, run at scale accross your primary acquisition channels (ads, influencers, referrals) — wherein your storefronts have unique domains that can’t get screwed by any future privacy changes whatsoever. For ads this means unique URLs that correspond to the ad and manifest into a one-off storefront for that specific ad funnel. Or for affiliate marketing or influencer marketing, this means unique shop URLs for your talent-base. So that they just need to preach their unique link. CreatorCommerce is taking this head on in the world of influencer and affiliate marketing. By providing persistent drop links to your creator base, a brand can permanently maintain a direct pipeline of tracking per affiliate. All a creator needs to do is send traffic to the easy-to-remember link of drops.shop/their-name and traffic will be routed to a co-branded shopping experience with their partner brand. Say goodbye to data leakage from a slipped cookie or UTM or forgotten discount code. If you’re thinking about privacy right now - don’t forget to think beyond just your ads as changes will be touching essentially everywhere.

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A clear articulation of Elon’s clearly stated direction at Tesla re/ working in the presence of one’s teammates in the office, on the factory floor, etc. It’s simply a matter of optimizing productivity, creativity and results, in my experience. That’s doesn’t mean there aren’t workable exceptions for some companies. It’s a choice. His choice is clear. My point? “choose carefully and wisely”. It’s really hard to push on this ime. It’s way harder to have the market put us out of business because someone else slept on the factory floor to drive results and we chose not to. 🙏🏼🇺🇸🚀 https://lnkd.in/gK8Xaven

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Apple’s contact-sharing crackdown Apple almost certainly implemented its contact-access changes in iOS 18 to dismantle these growth schemes. Given the use of a prompt mechanism, it’s tempting to view Apple’s contact-sharing crackdown as redolent of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) privacy policy. But the comparison ends there. ATT served as a drag on the entire digital economy by constraining growth that would have otherwise been re-invested. Apple’s contact-sharing crackdown will simply abate the short-term windfalls that derive from successful implementations of contact harvesting growth tactics.

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I like this idea of "technical taste". It gets into where software engineering is as much creative art as it is science. Four great takeaways (IMHO) for software devs in this era in particular: 1. Aspiring engineers should cultivate a sense of curiosity, experiment with different tools and technologies, and embrace a mindset of continuous learning. 2. AI has the potential to streamline processes and enhance productivity for engineers, but it may also lead to disruptions in traditional software development workflows. 3. Developing technical taste and judgment is essential for making informed decisions about which technologies and approaches to pursue. 4. Collaboration and open-mindedness are key to leveraging the full potential of AI and staying ahead of technological advancements. I also really liked these two quotes from Sam Schillace: 1. "The right time to do something is when you have that feeling in the pit of your stomach that's like, 'oh, this is a great idea and it's going to suck to build because nothing's ready yet.'" 2. "Technical taste is like, 'how well have you consolidated that set of experiences and heuristics into judgment that you can apply accurately when you see new things?'" 3. "It may be the case that very small teams can do very large projects, or like we were talking about before, it may be the case we're just going to get really ambitious about what we try to do with the same size of teams, which is kind of where I would put my money." Great job on continuing to put out great episodes, Brett Berson and team First Round Capital! #ai #engineering #softwaredevelopment

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Big news from WeaveGrid! We are excited to announce that we have raised $28M in strategic funding led by Woven Capital, Toyota's Growth Fund. I came to WeaveGrid three years ago with the goal of building a real ecosystem of OEM partners to create a more efficient grid full of EVs. Today we're taking that one step further in announcing investment from the world's largest automaker, Toyota Motor Corporation. With this strategic round fundraise, I look forward to continuing to scale our solutions across brands, utilities, and geographies, allowing us to support grid resilience and enable widespread EV adoption. Consider the grid… WOVEN 🪡 ⚡ 🚘 Woven Capital 🤝WeaveGrid = #WovenGrid #electricvehicles #ElectricFabric #climatetech #sustainability #energy

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Hiring and working with excellent people is what makes starting a company so fun

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If you’re an early-stage founder, finding out what your customers *really* want so you can build the right product is critical. I’m excited to share some of First Round Capital's PMF Method program with Gagan Biyani on Friday! Gagan has founded 3 companies including Udemy, Sprig, and Maven. We’re hosting this live conversation for product leaders & founders on how to reach PMF. You’ll learn: - How to identify your customers' real problems - How to test demand by selling before building - When to write code vs. build a no-code MVP RSVP to join on June 14th (it’s free): https://bit.ly/3VBAK69

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