FullContact is a privacy-safe Identity Resolution company building trust between people and brands

FullContact

fullcontact

is a fully-connected contact platform for professionals and enterprises who need to master their contacts and provides a 360 degree insights into the people who matter most to them. FullContact’s cross-platform suite of Apps and APIs enhance contacts with insights, while keeping them organized, synchronized, up to date, and safe. FullContact management interviewed , CEO at to know more. Kevin William David Bart Lorang FullContact Hi Bart, so tell us about FullContact? FullContact is an open Customer 360 Insights Platform, delivering the insights and information which empower businesses to be awesome with the people who matter most to them. By providing the broadest and most accurate data, integrated smoothly and securely via a cross-platform suite of easy-to-use apps and APIs, FullContact enables companies to enrich and enhance their understanding of their existing customers, and helps them identify, find and make meaningful connections with future prospects. We are currently working on a series of new APIs and integrations for both the platform and apps side of our business which will continue to improve the quality of our data and the ease of our delivery. Tell me more about the problem you are trying to solve? We believe the notion of B2B and B2C communication silos is dead, is the essence of what matters in long lasting, relationship-centric customer experiences. Despite the fact that available it is increasingly siloed across multiple SaaS point solutions, making it nearly impossible to stitch all customer data together to form a true Customer 360 view. FullContact’s patented open identity graph, helps solve this issue. Human-to-Human Customer data is expanding, What’s unique about what you are building & why do you think companies should use FullContact? There are three major areas that set FullContact apart and gives our customers the confidence to work with us: Updated over 30 million times a day, our patented open identity graph provides the most accurate and recent data about people, companies and relationships. Our data is fueled by unique data crowdsourcing through first party apps, our extended network of data partners and strong Data Science / Human-in-the-Loop capabilities. Data Quality: Our open platform allows builders to bridge identity silos through easily accessible APIs that integrate seamlessly with the services they already use. Ease of Integration: : We employ world-class security and privacy controls and practices because trust is of the utmost importance to us. We’re SOC2, PCI, Cloud Security Alliance and U.S.-EU/Swiss Privacy Shield compliant. Highest Security Who uses FullContact? Can you tell us a bit about the different customer segments using FullContact? We have an ecosystem of over 17K customers spanning many verticals and ranging from bootstrapped startups to global enterprises. Our focus is on serving builders, innovators, and tech-savvy product and data teams. How are your customers using FullContact? Could you share a few different use cases? FullContact customers use our apps and APIs in many different ways. Our apps provide teams and professionals with a powerful contact-syncing and management enabling them to build deeper relationships through insights into their contacts. Our suite of APIs offer identity resolution, data enrichment, and email verification. tool Our Identity Resolution unifies a customer’s fragmented information into one complete identity allowing for seamless communication. Through data enrichment, we append contacts with social, demographic, psychographic, affinity and interest data to help our customers segment and personalize their experiences. Our email verification validates email addresses to eliminate hard bounces, reduce spam complaints and minimize fraud. Due to the breadth of our offering, customers use FullContact in a wide variety of . Most commonly we are used to cleanse and append contact records, segment and personalize marketing messages, enhance the value of the apps that customers are building, and to provide meaningful context to conversations with their own customers. use cases Have there been unique use cases for FullContact that you hadn’t thought of or expected? We have an information technology company that uses our APIs to identify eyewitnesses through their posts on social networks as well as for fraud prevention. Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success? In our sales and marketing efforts we use insights generated by our platform to create highly personalized campaigns — and we’re not afraid to be creative to get a prospect’s attention! For instance, we’ve worn wingbandits at early conferences (see picture below) and we’ve even been known to leave Star Wars aficionados a voicemail in our best Darth Vader impersonation! Also, our employees benefits program, especially our Paid PAID vacation policy has always provided FullContact with a lot of national and international coverage and has helped attract excellent talent to the company. What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them? We made a bunch of technical architecture mistakes. We used . We used . We used Git and Solr as a data store. We tried using as a transactional data store. Eventually, we had to go back to proven, reliably technology — like , , . MongoDB Grails HBase MySQL Cassandra ElasticSearch This was incredibly painful, and took us nearly a year to re-factor on the back-end. What have been some of the most interesting integrations you’ve added? Are there any that have been particularly impactful for you? Zendesk Zapier (beta) PieSync iOS/Android MS Exchange Gmail/Google Contacts , , and are table stakes for what we do. However, systems like Zapier and PieSync open up a world of opportunities for our users to move their data between a host of cloud based software systems that hold contacts. Google Microsoft Apple Finally, What are the top products that you depend to run the company & how do you use them? — our cloud infrastructure, the backbone of our business Amazon Web Services — (with the FullContact Insights app, of course) — to provide exceptional customer support Zendesk — for email emails, as well as docs, sheets and slides. G Suite — For building our blog and website. WordPress — as our preferred ESP. SendGrid — as our primary CRM. Salesforce Originally published at siftery.com .

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Foundry’s Brad Feld #Connect17 Interview (6/8) A Venture Capitalist can provide a lot more than just $$$ David Smooke: Where’s the most common area that you’re working with your investments? Where do people find the most value outside the money, in working with you? : I’m a product guy. I tend to be pretty engaged in product and product strategy. As the investor, and finance guy I tend to be very involved in any financing or merger acquisition, sale activity. Brad Feld David Smooke: Yeah. Brad Feld: At a lot of companies I’m an investor, and buy lots of other companies so there’s plenty of that action. David Smooke: Is there any product detail at that you’re especially proud of your contributions? FullContact Brad Feld: I would say … When I describe my involvement in product, it’s not at a code level, it’s product at a product definition level. I think one of . It’s popular amongst people that know about it. the hidden gems of that FullContact has built is the chrome plugin I find it to be just this magical little piece of software. That’s essentially an add on to what’s going on, but it dramatically enhances your experience within Gmail. It’s almost a perfect instantiation of the kind of data that FullContact has available to it. Sort of in your face. That’s one that I’m really proud of. The other is the continuous API layer, and the evolution of the API layer. And the view of how to think about what we’re doing, and making that a full 360 view of your customer. Essentially, the 360 view of a contact available via an API, empowering that across every consumer and business application that exists. That part of the vision, which drives, I find particularly compelling. Bart David Smooke: Yeah, I was talking to one of the product managers here. We were talking about possibly doing a Hacker Noon Hackathon with FullContact. Brad Feld: That’d be awesome. David Smooke: Yeah, it seems like pushing the API, and get a lot more companies to build on it, it seems like a pretty high priority for the company. It’s already a substantial company, but how could it take a leap? Brad Feld: That’s our primary growth. David Smooke: Yeah. Brad Feld: Yeah, that’s a primary growth factor. If you look at other companies, an easy one to point at in our portfolio that we’re investors in that’s analogous is . The growth and acceleration of SendGriding that contents, and building off the API. At Twilio, which I’m not a direct investor in, but I’m an indirect investor in through some venture funds as well as that’s an investor in it. Same kind of thing. SendGrid Techstars David Smooke: Yeah. Brad Feld: Understanding of the power of this grew at the API layer, that everybody whose building any sort of application can benefit from, leverage, and the power that the company can build from there. Read The Rest of Foundry’s Brad Feld #Connect17 Interview Writer / Publisher Relations on Medium Who’s a Venture Capitalist’s Customer? The Venture Capitalist’s Writing Process The Venture Capitalist at His Investment’s First Conference How Brad Feld Realized He Was a Venture Capitalist What Venture Capitalists Can Bring to Product Development The Nearly 30 Year Quest To Solve The Business Address Book Problem How Venture Capitalists Market Their Stories

What Venture Capitalists Can Bring to Product Development

Foundry’s Brad Feld #Connect17 Interview (4/8) What’s it like for to see his investments maturing to this stage? Brad Feld David Smooke: Whenever you come to an event like this … So you’re an investor in the company, is it like going to a kid’s graduation? Brad Feld: Not agraduation, but it is emotionally rewarding. David Smooke: Yeah? Brad Feld: Yeah. David Smooke: Progress Report? Brad Feld: It’s like going to a PTA meeting. The thing that’s so awesome is, being at something like this with FullContact where their now 250 employees, and you’re having your first annual customer conference or user conference, or Connect, whatever they’re in. David Smooke: Yeah. Brad Feld: I don’t even know how they’re framing it. But you’re having your first conference, with another 300 people who are interested in what you’re doing. I remember when they were a small number of people in our tiny room with a very big idea. That’s just pretty awesome. David Smooke: Yeah. Brad Feld: It feels great. Read The Rest of Foundry’s Brad Feld #Connect17 Interview Writer / Publisher Relations on Medium Who’s a Venture Capitalist’s Customer? The Venture Capitalist’s Writing Process The Venture Capitalist at His Investment’s First Conference How Brad Feld Realized He Was a Venture Capitalist What Venture Capitalists Can Bring to Product Development The Nearly 30 Year Quest To Solve The Business Address Book Problem How Venture Capitalists Market Their Stories and Opinions

The Venture Capitalist at His Investment’s First Conference

What if I told you that the Metaverse already exists, that there is a vibrant oasis filled with hundreds of thousands of people who spend endless hours hopping across digital worlds, hanging out, drinking, falling asleep, and even falling in love together? Would you believe me? I spent the past three weeks traversing through the dark but promising cybernetic world of . This is not the first time I've spent long stints here, but this time I had a mission. To find out what it is about this massively successful “Metaverse” that has gotten so much interest from users but none whatsoever from the media. VR Chat It almost seemed like news outlets have gotten so much attention for criticizing the idea of a that any hint of its potential success might threaten their already well-positioned narrative of ridicule, and thus they deny its existence altogether. VR future To get the full experience, I strapped into all the VR gear I could muster. ✅ Oculus Quest Pro with touch pro controllers, check. ✅ Bhaptics 40 full contact vest, check. ✅ KatWalkVR Omnidirectional Treadmill , check. Source: Upload VR During these sessions, I would start my day by choosing or sometimes even building my Avatar of the day. VR Chats' meme-filled selection of characters is not for the faint of heart--an arsenal of beings that screams nothing but 4chan, ready for you to embody. If that doesn’t quench your thirst for possession, you can build your own avatars easily with the VRChat SDK using Blender. Source: VRChat There are no limitations, no default humanoid shape to confine to; you can truly be whatever you want. As soon as you plug in, there are hundreds if not thousands of worlds to explore, worlds filled with real people and activities that range from a simple scene from your favorite anime to lounge to full-flight simulators replicating the most thrilling scene in Top Gun Maverick. You can enter bars where people are drunk in real life, and you can go to strip clubs with pixel nudists or even experiment with being a furry for the first time with no judgment. Source: VRChat Source: VRChat The community, the events, and the sheer number of people and content put to shame. It demonstrates that dictating art style with an iron fist and micro-managing creativity is not what a healthy virtual world needs. Yes, there are dark places in every unmoderated part of the internet, and VRChat is no different, but looking numbers results, we can conclude that perhaps a corporation like Meta who have to worry about their public image over the utility of their product probably isn’t going to be the one who brings the Metaverse to the endzone. Meta’s Horizon World Source: VRChat Source: VRChat VRChat also delivers on the freedom that Decentraland and Sandbox promised but have yet to deliver, all without the need to sell a single piece of virtual land. It became a place where veterans suffering from PTSD could process their trauma in safety and where people could explore their sexualities anonymously without being shunned or sent to correction camps. A place where game shows are co-hosted by your favorite muppets with participants skinned in characters that frequently top the comment sections of subreddit threads. VRChat encompasses all the absurdity and obscurity of the internet, manifesting them into virtual worlds that anyone can surf through with custom avatars. There is no pressure to one-up each other by wearing virtual T-shirts or having a bigger plot of land. Everybody simply exists together. Source: VRChat Source: VRChat It is in these three weeks that I realized the business models of decentralized virtual worlds have to change. The toxic cycle of artificial scarcity and FOMO needs to end in order for true adoption to take place. While VRChat has proven the demand for a digital oasis free from corporate meddling, more importantly, it has also demonstrated that there are indeed enough users in the industry to support the idea of a Metaverse. For all the leaders in , this is an opportunity to not only learn but also take the next step toward building a better future. Web3

Why Web3 Needs Its Own VRChat

So let’s start! Tell us a bit about yourself. For example, name, profession, and personal interests. Hi! I am Miki Szeles from Hungary, Budapest. I am a father, husband, and soon-to-be happy dog owner. Being an agileish creativeish technicalish writer I am an agileish creativeish technicalish writer. I am working with a team of 40 agileish creativeish thinkingish imaginary friends to ensure we provide the best immersive experience for you. Being a software developer and test automation engineer I am a software developer with more than 15 years of professional experience, during which I led the dev team for 8 years and the test team for 1 year. Currently, I am working at one of the world’s best companies It is not just strong technically, but it is a human-centered company that cares about people. DMG MORI HEITEC Digital Kft. I work as a Senior Software Engineer in Test (SDET). I use Selenide for E2E testing, Karate DSL for API testing, and Gatling for performance testing. Since I started to use Karate for API testing and the Selenide framework for E2E testing, I would never use any other framework as they are superior to the other frameworks. If you are interested in the whys, just read my blog or ! drop me a message on LinkedIn Being an open-source contributor In the last half-year, I became obsessed with open source. I have created multiple projects on with which you can jumpstart your test automation project using Selenium, Selenide, Appium, Protractor (soon to be discontinued), Karate DSL, and RestAssured. my GitHub Most of them are based on ’s excellent video courses, and the Karate is from . Rahul Shetty Artem Bondar’s Udemy course From all my open source projects, I am most proud of the , with which you can generate all the relevant selectors for the most popular E2E frameworks (Selenide, Selenium, Playwright, Cypress, Squish, and TestCafe) in the form of complete copy-pastable lines of code with a single click on the web element. Selenideium Element Inspector Chrome Extension 161 testers are using this tool from all around the world by now, and based on my experience, I can assume all of them can save approximately 1 hour per day thanks to Selenideium Element Inspector. I have even started the Selenideium Element Inspector Bounty Hunting Reward Program. You can earn coffees via for contributions like submitting a bug fix, feature, refactor, or improvement request. You can also get coffee for implementing any of them and even posting about the Selenideium Element Inspector itself. buymeacoffe.com You can download it from the Chrome Web Store. ! Just click here to check it in the store Being open-source I am a crazy person, so on the 1st of April, I , and as I am doing it on Github, I also open-sourced my thinking process, my writing process, and my art creation process thanks to the commit history. Be warned you will not find the usual commit messages there. 😊 open-sourced my whole life This is my legacy to my son Levi, my family, my friends, and everyone interested in the case the time comes or a tram goes through me. Being an agileish superhero with the abilities of super thinking, super learning, and super memorization I am an agileish superhero with superpowers of super thinking, learning, and memorization. During the last three decades of my life, I have experimented with almost all the memorization, learning, productivity, and time management techniques. By now, I have incorporated almost all of them into my life; which one I use always depends on the specific task. I have started a and also to show people how they can exponentially improve their memory, their learning, and everything else they are doing day by day by becoming an agileish superhero. Facebook Group called Agileish Superheroes my Youtube channel I share my experiences with memorization techniques like memory palaces, peg lists, associations, language learning, super learning, and speed reading by applying these techniques in real-time on various tasks. Being a photographer I am also a professional photographer with 8 years of experience specializing in event photography. I deliver quality images in any situation, even from shallow light environments. I am postprocessing all my pictures to make sure you really get quality content. I am communicating your message via my photos, and I am almost invisible so that I won’t disturb the event, and I always have a huge smile on my face. You can check my work on and . I am incredibly proud of my and . Facebook Instagram water droplet Lindy Hop dance photographs Interesting! What was your latest Hackernoon Top story about? My latest . A beautiful friendship started when I got to know Selenide 4 months ago. Hackernoon top story was about Selenide Since then, I have helped another team in our company transition from Selenium to Selenide and created the together with , the developer of Selenide, in which we have connected 114 test automation engineers from all around the world. Selenide User Group on LinkedIn Andrei Solnstev Do you usually write on similar topics? If not, what do you usually write about? Yes, I do. It is essential to promote test automation engineering as most developers consider it inferior to software development which is entirely false as it is software development at its best. Most full-stack developers work with 2 frameworks. One frontend framework like Angular and one backend framework like Spring. I call myself a full-stack test automation engineer as I work with 3 frameworks: - E2E testing automation framework Selenide - API testing automation framework Karate DSL - Performance testing framework Gatling In addition to that: I touch the frontend code to add missing IDs, so I do not have to bother the developers with that. I will soon take part in developer code reviews to have a better understanding of the system, which enables me to write better tests. So that is why I call myself a full-stack test automation engineer. Clean code and maintainability are equally crucial for both production and test codes. I have multiple articles about testing, which I will repost soon here on Hackernoon: Selecting a Load And Performance Testing Framework - Gatling vs. Grafana k6 How Google Tests Software - What can we learn from Google? - A book extract By Miki Szeles To Test, or Not to Test, That is Not The Question Reloaded - AKA Why You Should Replace Your Automated Tests With Manual Tests I am also writing about: : Start writing now! Seriously! Writing : Would You Freak Out If You Could Talk To Dead People? - Miki Szeles's Report on Reinforce AI Conference Conferences, data science and AI : A Brief Introduction To The Hungarian Language 😊 The Hungarian language : The Mystery Of The Supposedly Red ❤ Emoji AKA The Story Of How I Became A Software Developer Detective To Debug The Internet. How I became a detective to debug the internet : The Mystery Of The Small But Cute Refrigerator On The 3rd Floor - My First 3 Months At DMG MORI HEITEC Digital Kft. Refrigerator : Why You Always Have To Close Your Article With A Call To Action AKA A Brief Introduction To Hashnode Widgets By Miki Szeles Marketing : How To Customize Your LinkedIn URL in 6 Easy Steps AKA How To Boost Your LinkedIn SEO AKA Lifehacks By Miki Szeles Lifehacks : How can you find a job in one round of interviews? AKA Perfectish Matchish Partnerish Opportunityish From Developerishish AKA The Great Refactoring. (IT) Recruiting : How You Can Become An Agileish Super Learner AKA How You Can Become A Super Thinker AKA The Proof Of Concept (POC) Super learning : Personal stories The Story of How I Became a Pet Owner : How depression ruled my life for three decades AKA How Szilvia Kiss, my RED EQ trainer, exiled depression and anxiety from my life in one minute Depression and Anxiety Great! What is your usual writing routine like (if you have one?) I started technical writing two and a half months ago. I followed Ann Hadley’s advice to write the first ugly draft in the past month. As soon as you have something, you can iterate on that and make it better with each iteration. By now, my writing style has completely changed for two reasons. The first is that I started to work with an imaginary agileish creativeish technicalish writing team. Thanks to them, I can examine any problem/question from 40 different viewpoints, so basically, my writing is usually going the following way: I bring a topic, and then I start to talk with my team, and even I do not even know what the outcome of the writing will be. The previously mentioned To Test, or Not to Test, That is Not The Question Reloaded - AKA Why You Should Replace Your Automated Tests With Manual Tests is an excellent example. In the past, I had several iterations after writing an article. It took weeks to publish. I have collected feedback from colleagues and friends in multiple cycles as I was not confident enough. By now, I have become an agile learner and writer too. I have a retro after each paragraph or after a few paragraphs. I collect what went well, what went wrong, and what I will do better in the next section (s). Introducing agile in my everyday learning process completely changed my life. Thanks to the short feedback cycle, I am exponentially improving in whatever I do. I highly advise giving it a try. So now, I am only doing 3 iterations of writing, then I publish, and then comes the following article, which is also an iteration. During the first iteration, I write. During the second iteration, I do the following: Correct all spelling mistakes thanks to the suggestions of Grammarly, so I can publish articles with almost 0 errors (almost, as sometimes I decide to leave an error there intentionally). Highlight the essential parts in bold in case it is a long article so readers can easily decide whether this article is for them or not. Finish the unfinished topics which remained there due to my constantly ongoing associations. The third iteration is consulting with Good Old Mother Grammarly Premium, which nowadays provides 500+ suggested changes to my longer articles to make my writing more varied and easily digestible. I even wrote an article with the title How to write an article just about almost anything, but up till now, I have not published it. if you are interested. You can check the draft here Being a writer in tech can be a challenge. It’s not often our main role, but an addition to another one. What is the biggest challenge you have when it comes to writing? I do not see writing as a challenge. For me, it is a source of joy, motivation, and inspiration. Writing is not my primary role, but I plan to become a freelancer. Not because I would have a problem with software development, but because I want a better balance between family time, writing and software development. My biggest challenge is to keep the attention of my readers. Nowadays, I tend to write long articles with 15+ minutes of reading time, but I also have a 42-minute long piece. We live in the short attention era in which people have little time to digest a tremendous amount of information, so they rarely spend 10+ minutes reading a single article. Despite this, I am still trying to keep the attention of my readers. Here are my all-time stats (2,5 months) : I do consider 48 seconds of session duration a good result. If we do the math: 19000 x (1 - 0,8633) x 48 / 60 / 60 = 34.63 hours of read time. It is okayish. Okayish, as I usually put 1-20 hours into one article, which means up till now, I have written my articles much longer than they were read. Still, thanks to referencing my related writing very often and also submitting my articles to search engines, my already posted papers will produce more reading minutes overtime. My reasoning behind the long article is that I’m not particularly eager to split up belonging topics into smaller chunks as I want to give the possibility to read them at once. It is like the HBO vs. Netflix approach. HBO releases its series one by one, and Netflix releases a whole season at once. I love experimenting, so thanks to this interview and a discussion with my team manager , I came up with another idea: Ákos Piltmann I will make my upcoming articles a series, releasing them either the HBO way or the Netflix way. Either post them within a few minutes or wait one day before posting the next piece of the series. I will try both approaches. My second most significant challenge is to decide whether to put more effort into a draft to make it an article that I can publish or write a new one as I continuously have new ideas. What is the next thing you hope to achieve in your career? Let me quote my expert’s MitDepends’ words: It depends. It depends on the field. Software development: I am developing an open-source brainwave to text application using an EEG device in my free time. This is the main focus at the moment. Test automation: I am transitioning to an expert who helps teams introduce test automation or improve their current testing processes. Learning: I am learning speed reading and PhotoReading, so if I could incorporate those techniques into my everyday life, I could become a super learner. Experience sharing: I am doing public learning, so I share everything that I learn and amplify my thoughts so people can see how effective these techniques are and that everybody can learn these techniques. My goal is to help as many people as I can. Wow, that’s admirable. Now, something more casual: What is your guilty pleasure of choice? To quote one of my favorite cartoon characters Gombó Artúr: chocolates: round, square, long, short, spherical, flat, dense, holey, packed, naked, whole, half-eaten, sweet, bitter, tubular, hazelnut, milk, liqueur, yesteryear, this year and every other kind of chocolates made anywhere in the world. Do you have a non-tech-related hobby? If yes, what is it? I am playing go. I had been playing go around 10 years ago for a while. I was 12 kyu at that time. Now I am trying to apply my agileish super learning techniques to advance in go. Mostly I play against AI, the app called Crazy Stone, as I can have a very short feedback cycle thanks to the immediate answer of the computer. I just beat the 5 kyu AI the first time today, but I am aware that it is entirely different to play against human players. I sometimes even play against myself, trying different tactics like being aggressive and defensive. This method is similar to how AI plays against itself to improve. Soon I will upload all my go games to my , and I will also share Mikaru’s advice on playing go. open sourced life repository Mikaru is the go expert on our team, he is a huge fan of anime and obsessed with ghosts, and he talks to imaginary friends just like me. I am also playing online on KGS with the username mszeles. So in case you are playing go, then do not hesitate to contact me, it would be fun to play together. What can the Hacker Noon community expect to read from you next? I will post soon my writing mentioned above, “To Test, or Not to Test, That is Not The Question Reloaded - AKA Why You Should Replace Your Automated Tests With Manual Tests,” as it contains many controversial topics, which are the perfect opportunities to start conversations. My teammate Nester will start his series regarding testing. Nester is the son of NoSEO and the twin brother of Neveloper. These people are THE EXPERTS. They are the worst experts in the world, to be honest. Thanks to this, they are invaluable as you have to do the exact opposite of what they are suggesting. Or not. Thanks for taking the time to join our “Meet the writer” series. It was a pleasure. Do you have any closing words? Yes, I do. I attended a 2-day long charismatic speaker course a few years ago, which was a life-transforming experience. Without that, I would not be here today. Imre Bolya, the tutor, taught me many things regarding public speaking. Thanks to him, I realized there is a deeply buried storyteller in me. Nowadays, it is coming out more and more often. Imi asked me a question on the last day, which inspired me to continuously think during the previous years. I was thinking about it sometimes less, sometimes more, but it was with me, and it will be with me till I die. That is the question with which I close this article: What would you say if the whole world listen to you for 5 minutes?

'I Open-Sourced My Thinking Process': Meet HackerNoon Writer & Test Automation Engineer Miki Szeles

Last week, we have launched a brand new user interface for our Google Chrome extension: While for some users this could look like a simple “fancy new design”, there is a huge amount of work behind it, so in this article, I would like to highlight what are the most important changes, and what it is coming next. Table of Contents 1. What are the most important improvements? New emails and phone views A new way of managing default and assigned projects Quick access to important metadata Detailed bulk action results 2. What is coming next? Detect previously added contacts automatically Access to the full profile from the extension 3. Try our new Google Chrome Extension today What are the most important improvements? The extension has been completely rewritten from scratch, tested by our team, and tested privately on beta for several weeks before launching, . it was a huge challenge to launch a new UI to 80,000 Chrome Extension users who are already used to our previous interface So here are some of the most important improvements we have been working on: New emails and phone views You have probably seen in our web application that now we try to identify what is the most important information for you, classifying, validating, and sorting the data so you can see the most important email first. This is also true for phone numbers, which are now shown sorted by your preferences (if you prefer to see mobile or company phone numbers first), and they are also showing to which company belongs to, if any. A new way of managing default and assigned projects In our previous version, one of the most frequent complaints was that selecting and creating projects did no scale when you have dozens if not hundreds of projects. So we have implemented our new project selector which supports managing hundreds of projects without any issues, with infinite pagination, quick search, colors, etc. Managing hundreds of projects is now a lot easier Quick access to important metadata We are slowly introducing more widgets for quickly accessing metadata, so you have more visibility into what has been happening with one contact directly from the result list. Looking at notes directly from the contact list Detailed bulk action results Finished a bulk action, and no idea what happened? Now after a job finished, you can see how many contacts are new, how many were part of your account, how many were out of your network, etc. What is coming next? This is just the beginning of a great new phase, we plan to introduce some features in the following weeks that will completely change the way you work: Detect previously added contacts automatically We will start detecting contacts that are part of your account before you click on “Add”, so you can quickly access all the metadata (emails, projects, notes, etc) and decide if updating the contact is necessary or not. Access to the full profile from the extension , soon you will be able to access the full contact information and metadata directly from the extension, without having to open the web dashboard. This is probably one of the most important features we are going to launch this year A huge step on making your life easier, giving you access to all the information you need, and making sure you have the whole context when navigating in LinkedIn. Try our new Google Chrome Extension today Haven’t used our Chrome Extension recently? Install it from the Google Chrome store , and if you have any suggestions, you can always submit a new feature request . In SalesQL we are committed to launching fixes, improvements, and features every week (take a look at our ) to keep up with all the suggestions and support requests we receive every day. changelog Have a productive week! Previously published at https://salesql.com/blog/introducing-a-new-ui-for-our-google-chrome-extension

Things You Need To Know About Our Redesigned Google Chrome Extension

Python for Data Science: How to Scrape Website Data via the Internet's Top 300 APIs

was officially founded in May 2018, but we had to come a long way before finding our value as a company. Today, we'd like to share our road with you, so you can . Arengu get inspired and learn from our story How we built our startup — From our initial idea to what we are today . With this tool, you can build any kind of signup form, but you can also build server-side logic to finish it off without code. Arengu is now a low-code SaaS meant to improve everyone's signups But in its origins, . In a market full of already consolidated form builders, we thought we could find a niche for us, just by doing it better! our startup was born as a form builder called RocketForms We now consider this our first fail as a startup. The market was full of consolidated businesses (such as Typeform, Jotform or Wuffo, among many others). As people asked we realized our competitors were offering great features, and our startup didn’t offer a competitive advantage in this market. — one step closer to what Arengu is now. what our differentiating factor was, This is where we executed our first iteration Our first iterations By this point, we decided to take RocketForms one step further and . Instead of just builder forms, you could to improve the way you ask for your users’ data. By using external providers (such as Clearbit, FullContact, or LinkedIn) our users could get more data without specifically asking for it in their forms. This idea would lead to , yet to iterate it to a smart form builder add data enrichment actions shorter forms with less fields richer submissions with more valuable data. This looked like a good idea, but in reality it was a good and late idea. By then, Clearbit announced they were launching Clearbit forms, an approach to forms with data enrichment. Of course, Clearbit started from an enormous database, which made things difficult for us. Now, this is what we remember as our second fail. Becoming Arengu — A path to be the brain of a signup form Signup forms are everywhere and . Behind a basic registration form, there is usually , including verification processes, authentication systems or even after-submission tasks. they look way simpler than they are complex server-side logic How about Building a signup form takes a lot of developing tasks. That’s why we decided that — to build forms with personalized logic, without coding. building all the necessary flows for a form, without coding skills? Arengu should be the brain behind your signup forms a tool both for marketers and developers so far consisted of connecting so forms can be complemented and rounded off with other actions, such as verifying users’ email, sending OTPs, signing up users to a database, and so on and so forth. Our latest iteration our forms to third-party providers via API, This development turned Arengu into a instead of one-way flows. low-code builder that allows two-way flows, Thanks to this, you can now use Arengu to and to the responses coming from the server. modify the form’s functioning according to your own personalized logic A look at the future As for today, Arengu aims to be the brain behind every signup form. A tool both for marketers and developers, to help you escalate your signup processes. Forms’ presence in our day-a-day lives is undeniable and their functioning affects directly on conversion rates and revenue for zillions of businesses. On the one hand, everyone wants users to complete their signups with as fewer clicks as possible, so the process is frictionless and improves the conversion rates. But on the other hand, a signup process that’s too smooth and fast may lead to unqualified users or even fraud. is key for every online business and personalizing the forms and the logic behind them is a powerful tool to get the perfect signup form for your business. Finding a balance between these two approaches The truth is there is a long way for signup processes to get better, and , regardless of your skills. That’s the now! Arengu’s mission is to serve as a tool for that purpose differentiating factor or knowing more? Take a look at our or ! Interested in trying Arengu out launching page on Product Hunt try Arengu for free

How We Built Arengu — Story and Vision of Our Startup

Jun 06, 201909:42 via status.cloud.google.com/etc ISSUE SUMMARY On Sunday 2 June, 2019, Google Cloud projects running services in multiple US regions experienced elevated packet loss as a result of network congestion for a duration of between 3 hours 19 minutes, and 4 hours 25 minutes. The duration and degree of packet loss varied considerably from region to region and is explained in detail below. Other Google Cloud services which depend on Google's US network were also impacted, as were several non-Cloud Google services which could not fully redirect users to unaffected regions. Customers may have experienced increased latency, intermittent errors, and connectivity loss to instances in us-central1, us-east1, us-east4, us-west2, northamerica-northeast1, and southamerica-east1. Google Cloud instances in us-west1, and all European regions and Asian regions, did not experience regional network congestion. Google Cloud Platform services were affected until mitigation completed for each region, including: Google Compute Engine, App Engine, Cloud Endpoints, Cloud Interconnect, Cloud VPN, Cloud Console, Stackdriver Metrics, Cloud Pub/Sub, Bigquery, regional Cloud Spanner instances, and Cloud Storage regional buckets. G Suite services in these regions were also affected. We apologize to our customers whose services or businesses were impacted during this incident, and we are taking immediate steps to improve the platform’s performance and availability. A detailed assessment of impact is at the end of this report. ROOT CAUSE AND REMEDIATION This was a major outage, both in its scope and duration. As is always the case in such instances, multiple failures combined to amplify the impact. Within any single physical datacenter location, Google's machines are segregated into multiple logical clusters which have their own dedicated cluster management software, providing resilience to failure of any individual cluster manager. Google's network control plane runs under the control of different instances of the same cluster management software; in any single location, again, multiple instances of that cluster management software are used, so that failure of any individual instance has no impact on network capacity. Google's cluster management software plays a significant role in automating datacenter maintenance events, like power infrastructure changes or network augmentation. Google's scale means that maintenance events are globally common, although rare in any single location. Jobs run by the cluster management software are labelled with an indication of how they should behave in the face of such an event: typically jobs are either moved to a machine which is not under maintenance, or stopped and rescheduled after the event. Two normally-benign misconfigurations, and a specific software bug, combined to initiate the outage: firstly, network control plane jobs and their supporting infrastructure in the impacted regions were configured to be stopped in the face of a maintenance event. Secondly, the multiple instances of cluster management software running the network control plane were marked as eligible for inclusion in a particular, relatively rare maintenance event type. Thirdly, the software initiating maintenance events had a specific bug, allowing it to deschedule multiple independent software clusters at once, crucially even if those clusters were in different physical locations. The outage progressed as follows: at 11:45 US/Pacific, the previously-mentioned maintenance event started in a single physical location; the automation software created a list of jobs to deschedule in that physical location, which included the logical clusters running network control jobs. Those logical clusters also included network control jobs in other physical locations. The automation then descheduled each in-scope logical cluster, including the network control jobs and their supporting infrastructure in multiple physical locations. Google's resilience strategy relies on the principle of defense in depth. Specifically, despite the network control infrastructure being designed to be highly resilient, the network is designed to 'fail static' and run for a period of time without the control plane being present as an additional line of defense against failure. The network ran normally for a short period - several minutes - after the control plane had been descheduled. After this period, BGP routing between specific impacted physical locations was withdrawn, resulting in the significant reduction in network capacity observed by our services and users, and the inaccessibility of some Google Cloud regions. End-user impact began to be seen in the period 11:47-11:49 US/Pacific. Google engineers were alerted to the failure two minutes after it began, and rapidly engaged the incident management protocols used for the most significant of production incidents. Debugging the problem was significantly hampered by failure of tools competing over use of the now-congested network. The defense in depth philosophy means we have robust backup plans for handling failure of such tools, but use of these backup plans (including engineers travelling to secure facilities designed to withstand the most catastrophic failures, and a reduction in priority of less critical network traffic classes to reduce congestion) added to the time spent debugging. Furthermore, the scope and scale of the outage, and collateral damage to tooling as a result of network congestion, made it initially difficult to precisely identify impact and communicate accurately with customers. As of 13:01 US/Pacific, the incident had been root-caused, and engineers halted the automation software responsible for the maintenance event. We then set about re-enabling the network control plane and its supporting infrastructure. Additional problems once again extended the recovery time: with all instances of the network control plane descheduled in several locations, configuration data had been lost and needed to be rebuilt and redistributed. Doing this during such a significant network configuration event, for multiple locations, proved to be time-consuming. The new configuration began to roll out at 14:03. In parallel with these efforts, multiple teams within Google applied mitigations specific to their services, directing traffic away from the affected regions to allow continued serving from elsewhere. As the network control plane was rescheduled in each location, and the relevant configuration was recreated and distributed, network capacity began to come back online. Recovery of network capacity started at 15:19, and full service was resumed at 16:10 US/Pacific time. The multiple concurrent failures which contributed to the initiation of the outage, and the prolonged duration, are the focus of a significant post-mortem process at Google which is designed to eliminate not just these specific issues, but the entire class of similar problems. Full details follow in the Prevention and Follow-Up section. PREVENTION AND FOLLOW-UP We have immediately halted the datacenter automation software which deschedules jobs in the face of maintenance events. We will re-enable this software only when we have ensured the appropriate safeguards are in place to avoid descheduling of jobs in multiple physical locations concurrently. Further, we will harden Google's cluster management software such that it rejects such requests regardless of origin, providing an additional layer of defense in depth and eliminating other similar classes of failure. Google's network control plane software and supporting infrastructure will be reconfigured such that it handles datacenter maintenance events correctly, by rejecting maintenance requests of the type implicated in this incident. Furthermore, the network control plane in any single location will be modified to persist its configuration so that the configuration does not need to be rebuilt and redistributed in the event of all jobs being descheduled. This will reduce recovery time by an order of magnitude. Finally, Google's network will be updated to continue in 'fail static' mode for a longer period in the event of loss of the control plane, to allow an adequate window for recovery with no user impact. Google's emergency response tooling and procedures will be reviewed, updated and tested to ensure that they are robust to network failures of this kind, including our tooling for communicating with the customer base. Furthermore, we will extend our continuous disaster recovery testing regime to include this and other similarly catastrophic failures. Our post-mortem process will be thorough and broad, and remains at a relatively early stage. Further action items may be identified as this process progresses. DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF IMPACT Compute Engine Compute Engine instances in us-east4, us-west2, northamerica-northeast1 and southamerica-east1 were inaccessible for the duration of the incident, with recovery times as described above. Instance to instance packet loss for traffic on private IPs and internet traffic: us-east1 up to 33% packet loss from 11:38 to 12:17, up to 8% packet loss from 12:17 to 14:50.us-central1 spike of 9% packet loss immediately after 11:38 and subsiding by 12:05.us-west1 initial spikes up to 20% and 8.6% packet loss to us-east1 and us-central1 respectively, falling below 0.1% by 12:55. us-west1 to European regions saw an initial packet loss of up to 1.9%, with packet loss subsiding by 12:05. us-west1 to Asian regions did not see elevated packet loss. Instances accessing Google services via Google Private Access were largely unaffected. Compute Engine admin operations returned an average of 1.2% errors. App Engine App Engine applications hosted in us-east4, us-west2, northamerica-northeast1 and southamerica-east1 were unavailable for the duration of the disruption. The us-central region saw a 23.2% drop in requests per second (RPS). Requests that reached App Engine executed normally, while requests that did not returned client timeout errors. Cloud Endpoints Requests to Endpoints services during the network incident experienced a spike in error rates up to 4.4% at the start of the incident, decreasing to 0.6% average error rate between 12:50 and 15:40, at 15:40 error rates decreased to less than 0.1%. A separate Endpoints incident was caused by this disruption and its impact extended beyond the resolution time above. From Sunday 2 June, 2019 12:00 until Tuesday 4 June, 2019 11:30, 50% of service configuration push workflows failed. For the duration of the Cloud Endpoints disruption, requests to existing Endpoints services continued to serve based on an existing configuration. Requests to new Endpoints services, created after the disruption start time, failed with 500 errors unless the ESP flag service_control_network_fail_open was enabled, which is disabled by default. Since Tuesday 4 June, 2019 11:30, service configuration pushes have been successful, but may take up to one hour to take effect. As a result, requests to new Endpoints services may return 500 errors for up to 1 hour after the configuration push. We expect to return to the expected sub-minute configuration propagation by Friday 7 June 2019. Customers who are running on platforms other than Google App Engine Flex can work around this by setting the ESP flag service_control_network_fail_open to true. For customers whose backend is running on Google App Engine Flex, there is no mitigation for the delayed config pushes available at this time. Cloud Interconnect Cloud Interconnect reported packet loss ranging from 10% to 100% in affected regions during this incident. Interconnect Attachments in us-east4, us-west2, northamerica-northeast1 and southamerica-east1 reported packet loss ranging from 50% to 100% from 11:45 to 16:10. As part of this packet loss, some BGP sessions also reported going down. During this time, monitoring statistics were inconsistent where the disruption impacted our monitoring as well as Stackdriver monitoring, noted below. As a result we currently estimate that us-east4, us-west2, northamerica-northeast1 and southamerica-east1 sustained heavy packet loss until recovery at approximately 16:10. Further, Interconnect Attachments located in us-west1, us-east1, and us-central1 but connecting from Interconnects located on the east coast (e.g. New York, Washington DC) saw 10-50% packet loss caused by congestion on Google’s backbone in those geographies during this same time frame. Cloud VPN Cloud VPN gateways in us-east4, us-west2, northamerica-northeast1 and southamerica-east1 were unreachable for the duration of the incident. us-central1 VPN endpoints reported 25% packet loss and us-east1 endpoints reported 10% packet loss. VPN gateways in us-east4 recovered at 15:40. VPN gateways in us-west2, northamerica-northeast1 and southamerica-east1 recovered at 16:30. Additional intervention was required in us-west2, northamerica-northeast1 and southamerica-east1 to move the VPN control plane in these regions out of a fail-safe state, designed to protect existing gateways from potentially incorrect changes, caused by the disruption. Cloud Console Cloud Console customers may have seen pages load more slowly, partially or not at all. Impact was more severe for customers who were in the eastern US as the congested links were concentrated between central US and eastern US regions for the duration of the disruption. Stackdriver Monitoring Stackdriver Monitoring experienced a 5-10% drop in requests per second (RPS) for the duration of the event. Login failures to the Stackdriver Monitoring Frontend averaged 8.4% over the duration of the incident. The frontend was also loading with increased latency and encountering a 3.5% error rate when loading data in UI components. Cloud Pub/Sub Cloud Pub/Sub experienced Publish and Subscribe unavailability in the affected regions averaged over the duration of the incident: us-east4 publish requests reported 0.3% error rate and subscribe requests reported a 25% error rate.southamerica-east1 publish requests reported 11% error rate and subscribe requests reported a 36% error rate.northamerica-northeast1 publish requests reported a 6% error rate and subscribe requests reported a 31% error rate.us-west2 did not have a statistically significant change in usage. Additional Subscribe unavailability was experienced in other regions on requests for messages stored in the affected Cloud regions. Analysis shows a 27% global drop in successful publish and subscribe requests during the disruption. There were two periods of global unavailability for Cloud Pub/Sub Admin operations (create/delete topic/subscriptions) . First from 11:50 to 12:05 and finally from 16:05 to 16:25. BigQuery BigQuery saw an average error rate of 0.7% over the duration of the incident. Impact was greatest at the beginning of the incident, between 11:47 and 12:02 where jobs.insert API calls had an error rate of 27%. Streaming Inserts (tabledata.insertAll API calls) had an average error rate of less than 0.01% over the duration of the incident, peaking to 24% briefly between 11:47 and 12:02. Cloud Spanner Cloud Spanner in regions us-east4, us-west2, and northamerica-northeast1 were unavailable during the duration 11:48 to 15:44. We are continuing to investigate reports that multi-region nam3 was affected, as it involves impacted regions. Other regions' availability was not affected. Modest latency increases at the 50th percentile were observed in us-central1 and us-east1 regions for brief periods during the incident window; exact values were dependent on customer workload. Significant latency increases at the 99th percentile were observed: nam-eur-asia1 had 120 ms of additional latency from 13:50 to 15:20.nam3 had greater than 1 second of additional latency from 11:50 to 13:10, from 13:10 to 16:50 latency was increased by 100 ms.nam6 had an additional 320 ms of latency between 11:50 to 13:10, from 13:10 to 16:50 latency was increased by 130 ms.us-central1 had an additional 80 ms of latency between 11:50 to 13:10, from 13:10 to 16:50 latency was increased by 10 ms.us-east1 had an additional 2 seconds of latency between 11:50 to 13:10, from 13:10 to 15:50 latency was increased by 250 ms.us-west1 had an additional 20 ms of latency between 11:50 to 14:10. Cloud Storage Cloud Storage average error rates for bucket locations during the incident are as follows. This data is the best available approximation of the error rate available at the time of publishing: us-west2 96.2%southamerica-east1 79.3%us-east4 62.4%northamerica-northeast1 43.4%us 3.5%us-east1 1.7%us-west1 1.2%us-central1 0.7% G Suite The impact on G Suite users was different from and generally lower than the impact on Google Cloud users due to differences in architecture and provisioning of these services. Please see the G Suite Status Dashboard (https://www.google.com/appsstatus) for details on affected G Suite services. SLA CREDITS If you believe your paid application experienced an SLA violation as a result of this incident, please populate the SLA credit request: https://support.google.com/cloud/contact/cloud_platform_sla A full list of all Google Cloud Platform Service Level Agreements can be found at https://cloud.google.com/terms/sla/. For G Suite, please request an SLA credit through one of the Support channels: https://support.google.com/a/answer/104721 G Suite Service Level Agreement can be found at https://gsuite.google.com/intl/en/terms/sla.html

Why Many Google Services Were Down for 3 hours 19 minutes, 4 hours and 25 minutes

TL;DR Script parses Pastebin email:password dumps and collects information about each email address. It supports Google, Trumail, Pipl, FullContact and HaveIBeenPwned. Moreover, it allows you to send an informational mail to person about his leaked password. At the end every information is stored in Elasticsearch for further exploration. Tool here → https://github.com/woj-ciech/pepe DISCLAMER No one was hurt during the research and no accounts have been compromised. Accessing any account that doesn’t belong to you is a crime. Introduction Pastebin gives great OSINT opportunity, you can find there really valuable, from intelligence point of view, material. First to mention are doxing i.e. personal identification information of specific individual — physical address, social media accounts, relatives, etc (if contains SSN and more private info — it’s called fullz). Example of email:password dump A lot of malware configuration are hosted on Pastebin as well as malwares indeed. Bad actor can upload base64 encoded file or scrip,t and then retrieve it, decode and execute on victim’s machine. Monitoring it in real time gives big playground for OSINT hunters and researchers. Another type of „pastes” are dumps, which are credentials in different format from variety of sources. The accounts may come from freshly compromised database or previous old hacks. Among mentioned, Pastebin „offers” connection strings, API tokens, compromised Netflix & Spotify accounts, onion sites and much more. Post Exploitation Pastebin Emails Do you remember all sites that you have ever registered? And every password? Even at times when you weren’t using password manager? If someone wants to know where name comes from — https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/6l21ma/name_of_perry_the_platypus_from_phineas_and_ferb/ These sites, if existed, still have your information like email and password. One of the first test to join one of the forum on Darknet was to successfully execute sql injection on random site, and as a proof of hack candidate send database details. After that, he puts whole database on Pastebin, including plain text credentials (because why not). If your account is there would you be safe? The most important thing is, whether or not you reused your password on any other service. That’s how credential stuffing works. A lot of dumps are posted on daily basis, with thousand of credentials. Pepe.py parses these dumps in order to get information about other possible accounts associated with particular email address. It’s worth to mention that your search can be more precisely, pepe.py supports white and black lists. Black list makes that emails contained common domains like „gmail.com”,”yahoo.com” or”hotmail.com” won’t be checked. However, with white list approach, it will look only for the given domains like „protonmail.com”, „tutanota.com” or „bundestag.de” Google Google module gives links where it finds appearances of the email address, by that you can find more and more dumps, because email may appear in multiple leaks. It can also lead to forum posts or Facebook groups where stolen credentials are traded. Additionally, you can determine if email address is in public domain or private/corporate. That’s bad if someone would use this same email and password for private and work related accounts. Google results for specific email HaveIBeenPwned Have I been Pwned gives you access to all the breaches that email address occurred in, it’s another lead that might point to potential account compromise. If your account or whole vendor database has been compromised, you should change your password as soon as possible. If not, having your email address and password, it’s possible to try this same password on other services. Pipl & FullContact Pipl and FullContact modules are really like knowledge base about people. You can retrieve information like social media profiles, name, address (or country at least), job and more. It’s perfect tool to filter the results, the most valuable accounts are for example: Twitter accounts that have more than 100 followers or CEO/Director position appears in job’s description. You can connect it with black/white list method. Mass scan of accounts with FullContact module Trumail & Sending info Last stage allows you to verify email address, whether it’s deliverable or not and inform the person about possible leak. First thing you can achieve with Trumail and second by choosing „I” in interactive mode and send him/her email. Example of informational email about potential leak Hunting for a big fish A lot was said about hack/leak? of private information of German's politicians but still I haven’t seen any statement about how the guy got access or what method was used. The graphical theme of every published leak — ascii art, mirrors to Pastebin-like services and content which came from personal social media accounts might suggest credential stuffing attack. Pastebin constantly tries to remove and react to every report and take down the paste but still there is some time to scrape it. In Pepe you can choose between two methods, interactive and non-interactive. In non-interactive you need to pick modules and wait for the output in console or Elasticsearch. Moreover, it’s possible to setup a push notification if specific criteria will be met, for example mentioned Director position on LinkedIn. Example of potential “Big fish” Interactive mode allows to decide which module will run for which email address. You can review whole dump this way and find potential „big fish”. Also here, every information is saved to Elasticsearch. FullContact results presented in Kibana When it’s possible to associate any high profile member with his password then also his pattern revealed.Is it something easy to remember like “zaq12wsx”? Something personal like spouse’s name? If someone knows the pattern, he can easily gather more evidence to figure out possible new password. Setting up blacklist and excluding common email providers will give more chances to find high profile person with customized private domain. At the end you can inform person about potential leak. Message can be customize in config file. Conclusion — password problem As an advice for red-teamers, some of the password for LinkedIn breach are still sort of valid. I saw case when one change from „W!inter2017” to „Spr!ng2019”, leads to domain compromise. Some old patterns never change. Protip#2 If you come across account which uses name of his child as a password, you can check for other „artifacts” like other kids’ names. It’s pretty common to have password that actually means something for someone. It’s like a cat and mouse game between password and hacker. It might be child’s name, favorite soap opera actor or chess player. People usually are not aware about consequences of simplicity of passwords they have. When you figure out someone’s password, is it still #OSINT or #hacking? That’s everything, remember to follow Troy Hunt to check for data breaches, use password manager together with 2FA and you will be fine. In addition, there is no point in publishing more posts here, so most probably this blog will not be updated. Thanks for every view and follow! Hovewer, If you need any help or want to cooperate in any way, drop me dm on twitter @ the_wojciech

Advanced credential stuffing with PEPE

Malta-based ICO regulation In November, Malta passed a 63-page regulation detailing the requirements for issuing virtual financial assets, better known as cryptocurrencies, cryptoassets or tokens. While many in the crypto community welcome this change as the beginning of the end of the “Wild West” stage, it has both benefits and downsides to issuers of new tokens. When it comes to ICO whitepaper writing, it’s new territory. Is the Malta regulation crypto-friendly? As one of the first jurisdictions to pass clear and detailed requirements around ICOs, including details on ICO whitepapers, Malta has attracted a tremendous amount of attention as a crypto-friendly jurisdiction. On the one hand, clarity in regulation provides a level of protection and assurance for founders and investors. Just knowing what is and isn’t acceptable allows companies a level of certainty when establishing themselves. It’s impossible to know if you are going to run amiss of the law if you don’t know what the law is. As of November, the “Virtual Financial Assets Act, 2018” gives issuers of “virtual financial assets” the assurance of having a guideline to follow. Yet, the Malta regulations are so extensive and specific, it’s hard to consider them crypto-friendly. As the experts on ICO and STO whitepaper writing, we’ll focus this article specifically on the aspects of ICO whitepapers within that law, and go through what we’ve seen. Before there were whitepapers, by the way, there were “business plans”, executive summaries, and slide decks. In other words, the world of investing in startups has always had documentation that goes along with it. The Malta regulation, to the best of our knowledge, is the first attempt at defining what should be in a business plan presented to private investors. While stock market regulations have always been clear on what needs to be in an investor prospectus, for speculative investments in emerging technologies, there has never been such a specification. Business plans and slide decks are varied in their content because businesses need flexibility to live. Market conditions and customer demands change. Technology changes. Most investors in early stage startups will tell you that they don’t believe any of the financial projections. Early-stage investing is risky and requires a founding team with agility and creativity. For that reason, a highly detailed business plan (ICO or STO whitepaper) can be too restrictive to allow the business breathing room for change with the market. Already, we are seeing the closing of blockchain startups which can’t deliver, or who found the market doesn’t need what they promised. Because they don’t have the ability to “pivot” like a regular startup, they simply have to close the doors and return what’s left to the token holders. Perhaps this is a good thing. If you aren’t able to deliver, you should return whatever money you have left. In the past, that would require both the founders and the investors to agree on that step. Today, if you have a foundation, and you are authorized by law only to follow the letter of your whitepaper, there really is no other choice. How long will my whitepaper be? First of all, there’s the issue of length. Based on the current regulation, it’s unlikely that any compliant whitepaper will be able to cover all the items in less than 60 pages. In other words, your whitepaper length just doubled. Is that good for investors? I’m not sure. So far, our experience with long ICO whitepapers is that they include a fair amount of meaningless technical jargon (more on that later in this article). The good: no more Satoshi For investors, the good news is that the Malta regulations mandate that the issuers of the ICO need to be know people and provide their full contact information. In other words, if you claim your name is Satoshi Nakomoto, you have to prove it before you can issue a regulated whitepaper. For the cyberpunk revolutionary types, this isn’t great news, but let’s just say that the Satoshis of the world were never looking for legitimacy from the government in the first place. For the rest of us, in particular people who are looking for a real return on investment, this is good news. The act goes even further, making sure that every board member is also identified, and requiring a financial history of the founders. The law also requires disclosure of legal proceedings that might affect the standing of the issuers of the ICO. All of this is good news, and if the whitepaper does comply with the law, this significantly simplifies the amount of researchers will need to do before investing in an ICO. Caveat on the “good” part. For blockchain startups in areas such as privacy, security, freedom of speech and other areas that have reason to fear government intervention, this is not good news. Identifying and tracking of people has become one of the biggest issues of this century, particularly in totalitarian style governments and dictatorships. For blockchain startups looking to create a more free world, the Maltese requirement of identification is distinctly crypto-unfriendly. The weird: Be honest. One of the strangest parts of the Malta Virtual Financial Assets Act is a basic decency clause in article 9, basically stating that the issuer of financial assets should be honest, skillful, careful, manage conflicts, and have in place the appropriate administrative and security arrangements. Yes. Ok, we understand. You shouldn’t go into business unless you are competent and know how to run a business. At the same time, it just strikes us as odd that this would be the law. How are you going to enforce this? People are incompetent all the time and they think they have the right administrative procedures in place, but I’ve seen very few startups that actually do have the right people, operations, and security structures in place. In fact, you might be hard-pressed to find the parliamentarian or government worker with the qualifications to identify business acumen, competency or proper procedure. So, in theory, nice. In fact, not enforceable. It gets weirder: you’re liable but not really In a further attempt to say that dishonesty would be punished, the act goes on to state that the issuer is liable for damages based on any misinformation in the whitepaper, or if the information in the whitepaper contradicts other information in the whitepaper. Unless you had good reason to believe it was true. Or if you included a warning that includes key information (it’s not clear what “key information means”) about investing in this type of asset. So, don’t worry. Even though it says you are liable, all you need to do is believe it yourself or issue a warning and you are off the hook. Again, nice try, but not likely to create any level of enforcement. It is truly incredible what lawmakers can pass, isn’t it? The basics: they stay basic The Malta regulation provides clear directives regarding the ICO whitepaper writing required. The basics haven’t changed. A whitepaper, as defined in the law, is pretty much a business plan. You have to state what the business is about clearly, not omit anything of substance unless it would harm your company, and you need to write a summary. To comply with Maltese law the ICO whitepaper writing should be in English, and you can translate to any other language you like. The technical details are the sticky part To create a Malta-compliant ICO whitepaper becomes a serious undertaking when you dive into the details, 38 of them, to be precise. The regulation addresses the minutiae of the technical requirements in a way that reflects just how much regulators truly understand technology startups. In order to be compliant the whitepaper needs to delve into the protocol and platform, describe the project’s scalability and sustainability, technological risks, functionality of the tokens, interoperability, consensus algorithm, incentivization model, details of the smartcontracts, smartcontract protocols, and auditing mechanisms. The details of the AML and KYC are also required. While this seems like an admirable attempt to get a real sense of the technology being developed, the problem lies in the fact that developing new technology requires flexibility. The blockchain space is still in early stages, and while some areas are well-established, others are still being explored. For example, in the area of AML and KYC, there are off-the-shelf and SaaS platforms to perform those basic functions. It doesn’t make sense to develop your own KYC, because if you use these platforms, they’ll keep you protected. In the same way, you can use off-the-shelf token issuance platforms with built-in smartcontract auditing. On the other extreme, consensus mechanisms, particularly in the area of governance, are still in the emergent stages. Proof-of-work is on its way out and proof-of-stake mechanisms are still being improved. The longer it gets, the stranger the tale The Malta regulation requires a high level of detail on the technology, including the blockchain technology, security mechanisms, etc. Is this something that either investors or government officials can understand well enough to regulate? As writers in the tech world for cumulatively over a century, we’ve been flatly unimpressed by many of extensive technical sections we’ve read in recent ICO whitepapers and STO whitepapers. (Some of the technology sections are fantastic, but the majority are not.) One of our observations is that companies that have absolutely no reason to develop proprietary blockchains are saying that they will do so, expounding on the reasons why their blockchain is necessary. These whitepapers utilize terminology which may have been interesting 3 years ago, but today is common knowledge. These technical sections tend to lack imagination and generally point to the fact that their CTO probably isn’t qualified. In fact, recently I had inquiries from companies that asked us to help find them a blockchain engineer to write these sections. Does this mean they are scammers? Sometimes. More frequently it means they are legitimate startup people with a business idea that makes sense but they don’t need blockchain. They are just using the blockchain terminology and the ICO in order to raise money. They are inflating the technology section around blockchain because that’s what investors want to hear. At least, that’s what they tell me investors want to hear. In short, the technology section requirement isn’t likely to help anyone make better investments, but it will inflate your whitepaper, take you longer to write, and cost more. In conclusion In conclusion, we are neutral about the Malta regulation. From our business perspective, it’s good for service providers but not so good for founders. Theoretically, once there is a standardized process, it should be cheaper and faster to issue a Security Token Offering (STO) or a Initial Coin Offering (ICO), but in fact, we are seeing just the opposite. Most of the companies we’ve been working with lately are finding the process harrowing and the legal fees even higher than before. Similarly, for us as ICO whitepaper writers there will be more opportunities, and the whitepapers are longer. In other words, the whitepapers will cost more. Is more better? We doubt it. Business will go on as usual, regardless of the level of detail of your business plan, STO whitepaper or ICO whitepaper. Having a great whitepaper isn’t the same as having a good business, and having a good business isn’t the same as being good at raising capital. The best thing we can say about the regulation is that it creates a greater barrier to entry for ICO and STO fundraising. Unfortunately, that’s also the worst thing we can say about it.

Is the Malta ICO regulation crypto-friendly?

Part of Pearmill’s Facebook Advertising Playbook In order to understand why we use certain strategies for Facebook Advertising — we think it’s important for a brief lesson on how the Facebook marketing engine works. Facebook Pricing and Pacing Dynamics The lovely people at Facebook have explaining how their system works but we’d like you to remember two simple rules that define their ecosystem: already done a great job Each impression (when an ad unit is shown to a user) is priced based on how many other advertisers are currently bidding on each specific user / audience. Facebook uses a discounted pacing algorithm, which means they’ll attempt to give you the users within the audience that will be the cheapest (i.e. are the least sought after) as much as possible. Because of these two dynamics, it then follows that the more you spend (and the larger the size of the people who you’d like to reach), the more expensive any campaign gets as you’ll be competing with more advertisers (#1) and you’ll slowly run out of the cheapest users within your audience (#2). As a marketer, your job is to go to battle against all the other marketers in the ecosystem to win against those market dynamics. Through a rigorous process and approach (at least as of 2018), this is still possible. The good news is that you don’t have to be the best copywriter, graphic designer, videographer, or even statistician to be a great Facebook Advertiser — you just have to be systematic, follow the data, and continuously double-down on whatever is working. Audience Selection In general, you should attempt to have a diverse audience strategy. This means you should: Go after multiple general audiences (i.e. if you’re going after millennials, attempt to go after specific segments of them) Find different ways of targeting the same audience (e.g. if you’re targeting teachers, target people who job titles of “teacher” in one campaign and in another campaign target people who have interests in teachers’ associations. Why? Because when you have diversity of audience — you’re doing as much as you can to take advantage of Facebook’s discounted pacing, and finding more specific ways of targeting your audience (usually) helps with conversion rates since you can provide more optimized creative for each segment. With that said, there are a few methods to use when it comes to coming up with targeting options: Segmented Targeting This is the most broad to target audiences. You should attempt to target your audiences based on interests they might have, behaviors they share, and/or their demographics. (e.g. age, location, etc.) Broad targeting solves for the fact that you’ll just have more people in the bucket, which means there are potentially lots of cheap users for Facebook to target for you. However, it also means that unless you’re selling Pepsi — there will likely be a lot of false positives. You’ll want to use “selective” creative (which we’ll describe more ) to filter folks out and other audience targeting options (described below) to help with this problem. in future series With all that said, consider the following when you’re creating audiences: — who are your competitors? Target people who are following them. Competition — target followers of other products that your users are potentially using or buying. Popular Market Products — target specific job titles, employers or industries that fall within the users/buyers of your product. Employment — target interests directly related to your product. Interests — use this to target the specific part of the market that you believe has the highest likelihood to buy your products (i.e. if you’re selling luxury goods, you should go after more affluent areas) Income levels Custom Audiences If you already have an existing set of potential users and customers (i.e. if you’ve had a newsletter) then you can use them on Facebook to create an audience. Facebook attempts to match emails, phone numbers, names, and addresses to their dataset and lets you target those who were matched. If you have such a list, this is likely the easiest way to get started and get easy wins. The main issue with this approach is that if you don’t have a substantially big list (the minimum is 100 on Facebook, but anything below 500 is rarely useful) then the upside is rather small. If you do have a large list, then we even recommend segmenting the list with any internal data you may have (or enrich it using tools like FullContact) and targeting each segment separately with relevant content. For example, you may want to segment your list based on activity, recency, or any other factor you think is relevant. Note that you can use custom audiences in Lookalike audiences described below as well. Lookalike Audiences Facebook gives marketers the ability to create audiences that look like other audiences (i.e. in their behaviors, interests, etc.) — which can be a great tool. We end up using Lookalike audiences almost as soon as we have some success with other campaigns, or if we have access to custom audiences. You can create Lookalike audiences based off: that have been fired before (i.e. Purchases, Add to Carts, Achievement Unlocked) App Events or Pixel Events — based on any internal lists / data you have. Custom audiences Consider the following when creating lookalikes: — we’ve rarely had success beyond 1–2% lookalikes. Keep it simple here (unless you’re spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, in which case we really hope you know what you’re doing by now) Percentile — if you’re scaling up your spend (or just have 10s of conversions per day), then we recommend limiting your lookalike window to the last 7, 14, 30 day increments (when based on App/Pixel events) Timeframe — you can narrow down your audience bu only targeting people who are interested in “X” within the lookalike to be even more specific. This usually helps increase the quality of users that come through the audience. Layer Audiences Retargeting You can retarget users who have engaged with your ads in some way, have been on your website and/or app, or are existing customers of your’s. You should retarget in scenarios where you’d like the user to take a specific action (usually the next step in your funnel, or a repeat purchase of some kind). Sometimes it makes more sense to think about your advertising strategy in multiple steps: — campaigns that make your potential user aware of your product / service. You just want them to take some simple action here (watch a video, like a post, etc.) Awareness — now that you have a set of users that are aware of your service, you’d want them to start engaging with you through a more complex action (e.g. signing up for a newsletter, downloading an e-book, getting into a trial) Engagement — with an engaged audience, you’d like to have them make the final action you’d like them to take (e.g. sign up) Purchase / Conversion For simple products or low-priced products, you can actually merge #2 and #3 when it comes to retargeting. But for complex products (like high-priced SAAS products), it may be worth using a more comprehensive strategy. For the first step of this multi-step funnel approach, you can use all the audience ideas above. However, for the second two steps you can target people based on: — retarget users who have done something that constitutes as “awareness” (e.g. read an article, landed on a specific landing page, etc.) App/Pixel Events — retarget users who have engaged with one of your awareness ads (e.g. commented, liked, shared, watched, etc.) Engaged with an Ad — you can use custom audiences whom you believe to be past step #1 already (or whom you’d like to have repeat an action) Custom Audiences Structure & Learning It’s important to keep track of audiences that have worked, ones you’ve already saturated (which we’ll explain in more detail later on), and ones that you’d like to test out. So we recommend the following: — either on Facebook and/or in a spreadsheet, keep track of all the audiences you’d like to test out each month. This helps existing and new members of your team learn about what you’ve done faster, and also take over the account easily if you need them to. Audience Lists — outside of what you know about your users, you can use Facebook’s Audience Insights Tool to get event more data about them after you get some conversions. Use it to come up with other sub-segments of your audience you think you should be testing. Generate Ideas Thank you for reading our audience selection mini-guide (in our series ). If you’ve landed here and would like to get the rest of the series, (or below). Facebook Advertising series please subscribe here

Techniques to build relevant Audiences for Facebook Advertising

Have you ever thought about working at a startup? This mini series will give you a few useful tips to help you make this leap. In this part, you will learn about one underrated skill and why it is important. You will also learn one simple tip to make work at a startup easier. Finally, you will learn about moving fast, fixing things, DIY mindset and listening to audio on 2x. Let’s begin. Table of Contents: Focus on soft skills, learn to communicate Communication, relationships and work Communication as a key to information Just ask No stupid questions Move fast and don’t break things Speed kills Move fast and … fix things Don’t talk about issues, solve them Learn on the go Adopt the DIY mindset, and become a learner Closing thoughts on work at a startup Work at a Startup — How to Survive in a Rocket Ship . part 1 Focus on soft skills, learn to communicate Are you afraid that you may not know enough about the programming language you are about to use? Or, are you afraid that you don’t know how to use some tool your teammates are using? If so, then stop. And, stop immediately. Worrying about topics such as these, or some similar, will never help you with anything. You will only put yourself under bigger stress than you probably already are. What’s more, there are another two reasons why should not worry about topics such as these. First, all these topics that may be stressing you out are learnable. You can learn whatever you don’t know at this moment, and you need to know it. Second, no one expects you to know every piece of information on a given topic. Sure, there will be some prerequisites for knowledge and skills given by job position and description. One simple example. Senior developer will need to know a different amount of knowledge, and have more experience, than junior. So, you should meet at least some average level of what your teammates and your employer expect. However, if you have this area covered, there is no real reason to worry. So, chill out a bit. Remember the first reason we discussed. You can learn whatever is necessary. Communication, relationships and work If there is one thing you should think about, again not worry about, it is communication. This is one of the so-called . This soft skill is important for two reasons, at least. First, when you start at a new job, and it doesn’t have to be work at a startup, one of your goals should be building with your new teammates. You will work with these people and meet them every day. soft skills relationships Well, unless you found some job that allows for remote work. However, even in that case, you will probably meet at least some of your teammates via chats, calls and hangouts. You will almost always be in a contact with someone, probably. And, the best way to make these moments more pleasant, enjoyable, useful and fun? Yes, by building solid relationships with people you will work with. The better these relationships, between you and your teammates, will be the more you will probably like your work. This is important especially in the beginning, to start in a way you will feel welcomed, respected and liked. Any accidental misunderstanding or being too shy or closed can lead to poor relationships. The result? Workplace where you don’t feel welcomed, happy and where you don’t want to work anymore. Communication as a key to information The second reason why you should work on your communication skills first? This skill will make a lot of things much easier in the beginning. What can you do when you find out you don’t know something you need to know? You can learn it. How do you know you are about to learn the right thing to learn? And, how do you know that the approach you chose is the most effective , and that it fits your needs? The answer on both these questions is that you don’t. You don’t know if what you are about to learn is the right thing to learn. And, you can’t be absolutely certain about the approach you chose. Unless, yes. Unless you ask one of your teammates or employer. This is all what it takes to solve both these problems. First, to find out exactly what you have to learn. Second, to choose the best approach to learn that thing. It is all about your ability to communicate with your teammates. It starts with specifying what you know at this point, and where you may have some weaknesses or gaps. Then, it continues by asking for what you exactly you need to know, and how can you learn it in the smallest amount of time. When you communicate clearly and without any misunderstandings, you will learn what’s necessary much faster. Just ask It would be great if communication was all it takes. Unfortunately, this is not the case. There is something more you will have to do. Communication is just a skill and it will not work unless you start asking. You may be more inclined to introversion. Maybe you are shy. Or, you just like to listen and you don’t like to talk too much. However, you will have to act against these traits, leave your comfort zone, and just ask. Remember that your neither your employer nor your teammates can see into your mind. They can’t your thoughts, at least not at the current moment and with the best precision. Neuroscience is making incredible advances every day and we are learning a lot about how human brain works. However, we are still not at the point where we can say exactly what someone is thinking about just by watching his brain signals and patterns. This means following. First, ask your teammates, and your employer, what should you learn first to do your job better and to become full-fledged part of the team. Or, to what weaknesses should you pay attention to. Your teammates will tell you as much as they can to help you get familiar with everything. However, there is still that, probably short-term, issue with reading your mind and your thoughts. Your teammates don’t know if those information are sufficient. So, when you are in doubt, be willing to ask. Don’t settle with uncertainty or a vague understanding. It is always better to ask, even multiple times, to get full understanding and remove any uncertainty. Second, if you think that there is something you should learn to do your job better, ask if your assumption is correct, and what is the thing you should learn. No stupid questions This is the one thing everyone should understand and remember. There is no such a thing as a stupid question. Asking questions is a way to get smarter. So, forget about what others may think about you or your question because that doesn’t matter. Let’s say you have to ask the same question more than once because it is hard for you to fully grasp everything. You may look stupid for five minutes for some of your teammates, maybe. So, what? Isn’t it better to ask and look stupid for five or ten minutes and become smarter? Or, is it better to stay silent, lack the understanding and remain stupid for the rest of your life? You will probably agree that learning is definitely worth the possibility of looking foolish. So, if you are in doubt, ask. If you are curious, ask. Asking questions will help you learn what’s necessary, become a full-fledged part of the team and do a better work. Move fast and don’t break things How many times have you heard, read or saw the “move fast and break things” saying. Since you are want to work at startup, chances are that you have. The same if you are interested in the startup world in general. This saying of moving fast and breaking was probably popularized the most by Facebook. And, it is so popular it even became a mantra for many startup companies and entrepreneurs. What if it is wrong? Speed kills I definitely agree with the first part. It is important to move fast, especially if we talk about a startup. In this case, there is the . When you are the first at something, you are automatically a leader. Unfortunately for you, there is also the second-mover mover advantage also called fast follower advantage. When you create something new any startup coming after you can copy you. first-mover advantage The second mover doesn’t have to invent and research everything from scratch. That startup can take your solution, improve it a little bit and then sell it as its own product. This happens quite often in Asia. There is one originator, not necessarily from China, and what follows are dozens of copycats. Trying to compete with these second movers on price is a nonsense. It is a battle the originator can’t win. There is always a way to lower the price. It is, therefore, important for the originator to compete on a different level, the level of innovation. Originator has to move fast and start improving his idea when it hits the market. Well, it is better to start improving before that moment. This is something you must understand if you want to work at a startup. Time is precious. There are probably dozens of other startups trying to do the same or a similar thing. You have to move fast. Move fast and … fix things What about the other side of the equation, breaking things? What is the problem here? The problem lies in semantics. It is the meaning of the second part what matters. Breaking things says absolutely nothing about what is next. It only says you are trying to take thing X and find a way to break it, find some flaw in it. This is the main goal. What are you supposed to do next? Who knows, probably find something else to break. Breaking things for the sake of it is a nonsense. No, let me rephrase it. It is almost like a vandalism. How else should we call an activity its only goal is causing damage or destruction? What is a better version? Fix things. Move fast and fix things. Or, a bit longer, move fast, break things and fix them. This suggests that the breakdown itself is not the main goal. Instead, it suggests that the main goal is fixing and preventing the breakdown. This is the mantra worth remembering and then following. And, it doesn’t matter where do you want to work. Whether it is a startup, big established company or just anything else. You will do a much better work and become a more helpful to your teammates. Moving fast is necessary. Get used to it and work that way. Then, look for issues by trying to break things and, most importantly, fix them. Remember, you are helping your teammates to build a startup, not break it. Don’t talk about issues, solve them There are two types of people (no jokes about binary please). The first type of people will find an issue and tell you about it. The second type of people will find an issue, solve it and then tell you about it as well as present the solution. What type, do you think, brings more value to the team and the startup? Yes, it is the second one. Saying that there is some issue will not solve it. It is necessary to do the hard, and funny, part. Learn on the go It is easy to say find an issue and fix it. Solving the issue can be a completely different story. Meaning, what if you don’t have the know-how or the skills? This is one of those things you must get used to if you want to work at a startup. There is often no other option than learning on the go. Trying to fix something when you have no idea how it works? This may be hard to hear for some people. However, this is common in many startups. Why is it that people often learn so much when they join a startup? No, it is not because they have more time to read. They have usually less time for reading. Is it because they can attend conferences and meetups? Well, this might be true. However, they could do this before they joined a startup as well. The reason why they’ve learned so much is that they switched from passive watching or reading to doing. The most effective for us humans to learn is by doing, by trying and failing and succeeding. Think about how a child learns to walk. She doesn’t read books about it. Well, she doesn’t know how to read so this is probably more applicable to learning to swim or ride a bike. How do you learn these skills the best? It is by doing. You sit on the bike and try to ride it. You fail a couple of times but, you get better with time. What happens when you apply the same approach to learning a programming language, framework or tool? Your learning speed will increase. It may not happen in the beginning. There might be some parts that will require more time and effort. However, you will soon gain a lot of knowledge and your skills will start to take shape. This will happen much faster than if you decided to read a book instead. Adopt the DIY mindset, and become a learner Conclusion? One, adopt the DYI, “do-it-yourself”, mindset. When you find an issue, don’t just talk about it. Ask your teammates if you can help them fix it. Or, don’t ask. Get your hands dirty and try to fix right away. You will learn what you need as you go. Your teammates are very likely to appreciate this approach. In the end, you are working for a startup. You move fast, break things and then fix them. Second, forget books. Books are very inefficient tools for learning. You can learn a lot by doing in a time it takes to read a single chapter, or even the introduction. Even if you do want to use some additional learning prop, I suggest either watch a video tutorial or listening to audio version (such as an audiobook), both at 2x speed or higher. I usually listen to audio on 2.2–2.8x and somewhere around 2.0–2.4x for video. With video, there are sometimes problems with slow buffering and freezing on higher speeds. The player can’t keep up and audio can become out of sync with video. This happens usually at 2.5x and higher. These speeds may sound crazy. They are not. Some people go higher. It takes some time to get used to it. So, increase the speed slowly and have patience. One interesting side-effect. People will start to talk too slowly. So, when you find an issue, solve it. Then, talk about it and show your solution. Adopt the DIY mindset and learn as you go. Remember that learning itself is just another skill, a skill you can learn, train and master. Where to start? First, we discussed some very useful learning frameworks in the first part, the section, the DiSSS and CaFE. Read this section again and learn how to use these frameworks. Become a learner Second, there is a great course on Coursera called by Barbara Oakley. This is one of the most recommended courses on Coursera not only on learning, but in general. The best part? It is absolutely free, and with subtitles in dozens of languages. So, start learning. There is also a based on this course, but you know have effective books are. Well, except audiobooks on 2x and higher. Learning How to Learn book Closing thoughts on work at a startup When you decide to join a startup you are often entering a different world. This world lives faster, it is more chaotic and embraces rather the edges than the middle. Some people find it hard to cope with this. If you are nervous, that’s okay. Just be yourself and don’t let anything change you. You don’t have to force yourself to go to startup parties if you don’t want to. Team building is important, but not at your expense. Work at a startup is an incredible opportunity. You will have a chance to meet and work with interesting and sometimes quite unusual people. It can broaden your perspective about how startups work, and the world in general. You will also have opportunity to learn new things, a lot new things. Embrace it and learn as much as you can. This will make you a valuable part of any team. Finally, be yourself and have fun. Do you have any questions, recommendations, thoughts, advice or tip you would like to share with other readers of this blog, and me? Great! Please share it in a comment. Or, if you want to keep things more “private”, feel free to contact me on or send me a . I would love to hear from you. twitter mail . Did you like this article? Please subscribe Are you on social media? Let’s connect! You can find me on and . Twitter Dribbble Originally published at Alex Devero Bog .

Work at a Startup — How to Survive in a Rocket Ship Pt.2

Disclosure: , the API for scalable feeds, has previously sponsored Hacker Noon. Stream Today, we’re going to catch up with their CEO, Thierry Schellenbach about what advice he shares with other technical founders. For previous sections of this interview, please visit: “How Stream Started Building News Feeds” “What to Learn From Facebook’s News Feed Struggles, and Who Will Power the News Feed of the Future?” “Market By Building on Your API” “Comparing the Amsterdam and Boulder Startup Scenes” David : Is there any advice that you want to pass on about how you think technical startup founders should approach their business differently, or more of your own philosophy in that area? What are some of the advantages of being a technical founder? : If you’re a founder and you’re technical, the biggest advantage you have is that you can build a prototype and use it to gather market feedback. This idea has been talked about in books such as the . Thierry Schellenbach Lean Startup If you’re able to actually build things yourself, gathering relevant feedback on your idea and on your market is much easier. I’d encourage people who are thinking about starting a company to master either the development side or the design side of things. These are very useful skills early on in a startup. Are there any common mistakes you see technical founders make? The biggest one is probably marketing. Many technical founders don’t realize that the marketing aspect of a business is often a bigger challenge than the underlying tech. Even if you’re building something complex like a new database or piece of cloud infrastructure, finding a cost-effective way to reach potential customers is difficult. As a technical founder, it is important to develop a basic understanding of marketing. For Stream, our approach to worked very well. Another great read is , which discusses the basics of marketing — we keep a copy of that one in our office. creative developer marketing Traction That’s a good point. Marketing can be difficult to get right. Where there any other resources you used to improve your skills as a founder? I studied business in school and started programming as a teenager. Most of the things you learn while getting a business degree are actually aimed at larger companies rather than startups. One amazing resource I found regarding fundraising was Brad Feld’s . It’s a great book for learning about how fundraising terms are structured. Venture Deals Over the past few years, the resources available online for learning about startups have also greatly improved. YC’s is a great for startup tips for founders. I also enjoy reading Paul Graham’s and ’ blog. Startup Class essays Alex Iskolds Yeah, Alex’s blog is a great resource. What about areas that you struggled with? At your first startup, you were the CTO — any areas that you found difficult to learn in your role as a CEO of Stream? Honestly, I’m not great at taking sales calls. I did the first 200–300 sales calls myself and it was quite a challenge — but I did get better over time. While it was difficult, I believe it is very important for early stage founders to be able to develop those sales skills. Those sales calls were, and continue to be, essential for product and pricing feedback. For other founders, I would advise continuing to take part in sales calls, instead of delegating those tasks, until you find your product market fit. writes a good blog post about this in “ ”. Jud Valeski hiring your first sales guy While sales calls are hard, the nice thing about doing them is that customers love talking to the founder. You have a real advantage in that regard. Just be open and ask for their feedback. You’ll often learn more in one sales call than you would after hours of reviewing analytics data. Another thing that helped is adopting a clear sales workflow with tools like (disclosure, their CTO/Founder is an early investor in Stream) and . Hubspot Dharmesh Fullcontact Stream participated in Techstars NYC, how did this help you grow as a founder? Our experience with Techstars was pretty amazing. who runs the Techstars NYC program is highly technical. He actually founded a company called GetGlue where they spend a ton of time building their feed technology. So, we’re really lucky to have an investor/advisor on our team that fully understands the product and business. It’s been 3 years since Stream participated in Techstars NYC and Alex is still actively helping us out. It’s a great program. Alex Iskold Another great thing about Techstars was their help with fundraising. They taught us a ton about how to raise funding and subsequently helped out with the network and introductions to get our foot in the door.

Simple Advice for a Technical Founder

So you say you want to be a Product Manager …?

New graduate? Jump on board one of these high flying companies Graduating students hungry to dive into the (aka ) often struggle to select the right, specific opportunity to start their career. startup community StartUpLand Each spring, I provide a comprehensive list of exciting, growing, hiring startups–both private or recently public–that are worthy of consideration as places to start or continue a career in StartupLand. The criteria for being on the list is subjective but is a mix of fundraising (typically > $10m in the most recent round), scale (typically > 50 employees), momentum (typically growing revenue or users > 50%) and hiring (typically > 10 open reqs, including a number of entry level positions that would be a fit for recent college or business school graduates). Before we get into the companies themselves, I suggest checking out my posts and , where I give some more detailed advice on how to select the right company for you and position yourself to secure a job. Getting Your First Startup Job Are You Suited For A StartUp? Once you have reviewed this framework for deciding what you’re looking for, this post will give you to research and approach. a list of over 500 companies As usual, the list is compiled and organized based on location since I believe in selecting a geography to plug in to (and contribute to) a community and ecosystem. I received fantastic input from angels, entrepreneurs, lawyers and VCs across the world, helping me pressure test and compile this list (note: Flybridge portfolio companies are in blue). I recognize that the list contains no companies from India or China. I hope to cover those geographies in the future but just didn’t feel I had good enough intelligence at this time. I’d also point folks to Stanford’s Andy Rachleff’s , which he publishes each fall with a similar theme (albeit more Silicon Valley focused). terrific list I’m sure I made many mistakes and omissions, which are all my own. Feedback welcome! East Coast West Coast International Other Startup Hubs Bitpay, Ionic Security, Kabbage, MailChimp ATL: AvantCredit, , BucketFeet, Civis Analytics, Dough, Fooda, Groupon, Iris Mobile, Kapow, Narrative Sciences, , Raise.com, ShopRunner, Shiftgig, SpotHero, SproutSocial, Tastyworks, Uptake CHI: bloXroute Precognitive FullContact, Ibotta, LogRhythm, Rally, SendGrid, Sympoz, TeamSnap, VictorOps, Webroot, CO: Welltok 2U, Cvent, Optoro, Sonatype, Vox Media, WeddingWire DC: Apptio, Avalara, Avvo, ExtraHop, Julep, Juno, Koru, OfferUp, Outreach, Peach, Porch, Pro, Redfin, Rover.com SEA: Bamboo HR, Canopy Tax, Domo, Health Catalyst, HireVue, InsideSales, Instructure, Lucid Software, Observe Point, Pluralsight, Qualtrics, Solution Reach, Workfront UT: That’s it! Special thanks to all those who provided me with anonymous input as well as my colleague, , who did most of the heavy lifting to help me in compiling this list. Caroline Constable

The Rocket Ship Startup List: 2018

Turning into a fruitful Solopreneur is an activity of perseverance, persistence, and resourcefulness Possibly you began your own business since you needed adaptable hours, would not like to work for a manager, or needed more control over the work you do. Regardless of how you started, solopreneurs are known for being diligent employees and handymen. Be that as it may, however, they may pick up opportunity in their work, they frequently convey substantial burdens. Business obligations lay on their shoulders alone, thus does the achievement. Solopreneurs do everything independent from anyone else. A small-time band is a CEO, CFO, CIO, CTO, CLO, and an overseer who likewise blends the coffee. Solopreneurs tend to like being in control — responsible for their business, accountable for their lives. “Turning into a fruitful solopreneur is an activity of perseverance, persistence, and resourcefulness. “ Along these lines, in case you’re supposing it’s a great opportunity to begin your own show, here are a few recommendations to get you from here to THERE speedier. 1. Planning is the primary key: Building up a fruitful solopreneur endeavour requires an unmistakable mission and vision. Make a stride back and put some time in an arranging session before you plunge into business. Business visionaries have a tendency to be driven by advancement and a clutter of thoughts, however hopping quick into the attack can be a formula for catastrophe. One of the principal recommendations given to business visionaries beginning a business is: You require a strategy for success. It’s actually that speculators or banks, for the most part, make a request to peruse the business person’s arrangement before going into talks about giving capital. In any case, that is on account of they need to discover whether the business person has altogether thoroughly considered all parts of the wander — as it were, arranged the wander. Same applies to Solopreneurs. * Begin with your BIG objective. * Recognize littler objectives which will contribute towards your BIG objective. * Organize your littler objectives and orchestrate them sensibly on your datebook. * Make every day/week by week significant strides to accomplish each of your little objectives. * You should have the monetary arrangement also like you should have satisfactory levels of trade out your business account, Pay yourself a compensation on a steady timetable, Fund a corporate construct retirement arrange with respect to a general premise, Pay down individual obligation reliably et cetera. 2. Automation- Get rid of boring work As you build up your business, you will go over things you abhor. Making automated frameworks will build your efficiency in light of the fact that your framework will run itself. You likewise will make more opportunity to put resources into your qualities. You can utilize mechanization for online networking posts, bulletins, receipt updates, formats, and then some! Time is dependable at a premium, and you need to utilize it carefully and complete a considerable measure keeping in mind the end goal to be effective. Mechanization can help you be more proficient at getting things done for you. When you can set up a device to get things done for you, you spare time and cash and in addition your mental transmission capacity. says that Sarah Morgan when you have the business blues, ask yourself what you slightest appreciate and how to change that. Here are a couple of such automation tools which we would recommend you to look at without a doubt. * GoToMeeting : Find gatherings at your territory to work together with the individual in your industry. * PandaDoc : Automate your agreement and sign archives * FullcontactForGmail : Provides background points of interest to any individual you reached through your email. * Calendly : plan your arrangements * Infusionsoft : A powerful sales & marketing software integrates with thousands of apps to get you more organized, deliver personalized service and close more sales. * Conspire : Similar to LinkedIn for building associations * Automate : Create super smart marketing, sales or business workflows by connecting your cloud apps. 3. Concentrate on your qualities and outsource the rest. Being a solopreneur doesn’t mean you’ll do everything alone. Despite everything, you’ll work together with accomplices and you’ll have to outsource some of your assignments. You’ll prevail in business due to your qualities, however, nobody is solid in every aspect of the business. For instance, If illustrations aren’t your solid suit, pay another person to the configuration, Consider exchanging administrations with different business visionaries who are solid where you’re powerless et cetera. As the entrepreneur of a , you have various things to do. Time is dependable at a premium, and you need to utilize it admirably and complete a considerable measure with a specific end goal to be effective. Outsourcing can help you be more effective in getting things done for you. solopreneur business 4. Quit being procrastinating, rather be organised, be disciplined. For most solopreneurs, there’s that one thing in your mind that you know you ought to do. You perceive its significance and even understand that it can possibly change your business and significantly advance things. A straightforward approach to user association into your life is to do what needs to be done. Consistently when you wake up, make plans to do no less than one assignment that will advance your business. Doing as such will sort out your reasoning and your needs. It will give you an unmistakable and sound vision for the accomplishment of your business. * Review your objectives regular * Batch assignments * Work at least on one thing each morning that will take your Business forward * pick a couple significant assignments for the day. 5. Work and Improve your Business abilities: You will require various abilities to begin and maintain a business. It is critical to recognise the attitudes you have to create or enhance with the goal that you can prevail in your everyday business operations. Maintaining your own business implies wearing every single diverse sort of caps. Regardless of whether it’s you’re showcasing cap, your business cap, or your general relationship building abilities cap, will need to know how to court deals, and on the opposite side of operations, you are likewise going to need to know how to run an adjusted record and keep on growing your riches. * Financial administration * Communication and transaction abilities. * Leadership * Project administration and arranging * Time administration * Networking aptitudes * Marketing and deals aptitudes. 6. Being Consistent- The ultimate necessity As indicated by Entrepreneur, “Being consistent is the same as being great.” You can’t expect comes about when you just go to the gym centre once every month, isn’t that so? Same goes for your Business. Truth be told, consistency is a standout amongst the most ignored methodologies accessible to drastically expand your adherents and pull in new customers. On the off chance that you can ace it, you will blast to the top. There are a huge number of solopreneurs out there attempting to make their messages listened. The hard truth is that exclusive a little rate really succeed, while the lion’s share loses all sense of direction in the commotion And Inconsistency could be the essential reason. * Consistency takes into account estimation. * Consistency sets up your notoriety. * Consistency keeps up your message. * Consistency makes you significant. 7. These books will make a difference for sure! Read them for sure! Go Solo: How to Quit the Job You Hate and Start a Small Business You Love!: You can break free from your day job, start your side hustle from home, and achieve success as a solopreneur! The One Hour Content Plan: The Solopreneur’s Guide to a Year’s Worth of Blog Post Ideas in 60 Minutes and Creating Content That Hooks and Sells Create a Happy Business: How to Be a Successful SoloPreneur The Solopreneur Life: 42 Solo-Business Owners Speak the Truth on Dreaming Big, Failing Forward, and Calling Your Own Shots The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future If you liked this and want more: How about few claps, 💬 comment on it, and/or follow me 😀 Also, if you would like to read more captivating stuff on the topics of entrepreneurship, , social media, leadership, , innovation and venture capital via my regular posts then please click ‘Follow’ and feel free to connect via , , and . marketing technology SlideShare Twitter Facebook LinkedIn P.S. here are my other . Articles on Medium

Success Mantra for Solopreneurs

How product managers at top companies control releases and accelerate the product lifecycle thebridgesummit.org The Product Manager You are the king or queen of the product. You’re the engineer, the designer, the business mind, the marketer… in fact, you are a little bit of everything. You are the product owner, but more importantly, you are the leader. In his article, Prasad Thammineni (CPO of Choose Energy) outlines the : 9 qualities of a great product manager Understanding the current needs of the product and how it fits with the company’s overall vision. Strategic Thinker — Love what you make, love what you do. Passion for Products — and understand the customer’s wants and needs. Empathizes with the Customer — Gather insights from your customers, learn their pain points and discover opportunities. Interviews Customers — Understands that user experience is paramount for product success. Aspires to Build Great Experiences — Identify the key metrics and track performance, establish baselines to measure success. Keeps Score — Keep things in order, understand what needs to be completed first and what needs to wait. Use customer feedback for prioritization. Ability to Prioritize — Management is a collaborative process, you cannot be dictatorial and expect to inspire your team. Collaborative Leader — Action-oriented, you get things done. Execution — To embody these 9 principles, you’ll typically see PMs use a myriad of tools to organize teams, manage development, QA, and track benchmarks (JIRA, Aha, Mavenlink, and about 10,000 others). Every aspect of effective product management seems to come with its own suite of tools, but two areas are generally lacking: and , which I’ll explore in greater depth. Customer Empathy Customer Feedback (interviews, testing) Customer Empathy As a Product Manager, you must empathize with the needs and wants of your target audience. As (PM at FullContact) writes: Catherine Shyu “The product manager is responsible for knowing the customer like the back of their hand — their frustrations, their daily thoughts, the context in which they use the product, and their needs.” It’s one thing to ask your customers for feedback, to interview them during development, and to have them test your product before it’s launched. It’s another thing to have your customers test your product in a real environment or to provide certain customers with a personalized experience. A key to empathy is the ability and capacity to take action on feedback. As notes, Jennifer Winter “Collaborative and creative empathy doesn’t equal sympathy. The goal of empathy is to support and understand the intent and purposes of others, which in turn will help you obtain insightful feedback.” Genuine Feedback User interviews, in-person testing, assigning tasks, and conducting basic user research are fundamental to developing a successful user experience. However, they each have a common limitation: artificial feedback. When we sit down with a user and ask he or she to do something, we have taken that user out of their natural environment by forcing them to unnaturally provide feedback. The feedback we receive is still valuable, but it’s not purely genuine. comes from testing real users in a real environment without them knowing they are being tested. Imagine being able to test a new feature or experience on 1% of your actual users before launching to the other 99%. Genuine feedback Now, imagine if you could just roll back Feature A completely and then use interviews/testing to figure out why the feature wasn’t being used, and then roll it out again. For example, I could release to 1% of my users. If they never use the feature or only use it once, then that feedback is deafening. Feature A enables this genuine feedback loop. Feature flag driven development Feature Flags and Genuine User Feedback PMs at Google, Facebook, and Amazon have . This allows them to gather user feedback on a feature before it has been fully released. It also helps them be more responsive to feedback without having to leave a “bad feature” out on the market for too long. integrated feature flags into their development cycle Let’s say Facebook wants to release a new timeline feature called . This feature reorders timeline stories in order to increase user engagement. Let’s also assume that has gone through all the rigors of internal testing, user interviews, and whole gamut of proper UX research. Timeline Beta Timeline Beta For launch, Facebook wraps in a feature flag, allowing Facebook to have complete control over who sees the feature. Timeline Beta On day 1, they roll out the feature to 0.5% of Facebook users to see how they like it. On day 2, they see a 20% decline in user engagement for those users who had . Timeline Beta So, on day 3, Facebook rolls back via the feature flag and begins the cycle anew. Timeline Beta Imagine if Facebook released to all of its users without an easy mechanism to revert to the previous version. They could have seen millions in lost revenue, caused a social media uproar, and turned users away. This is the power of feature flag driven development: the ability to take full control over feature releases and test features in a real world environment. Timeline Beta Getting Started With Better Product Management Product managers have enormous responsibility. They must coordinate multiple teams, identify business objectives, manage timelines, and take ultimate responsibility for the success of a release. Luckily, integrating feature flags into a development cycle does not require a complete process transformation or months of retraining. If you’re already practicing continuous delivery, feature flagging can become an integral part of your dev cycle in no time at all. If you’re an agile team, then you can think of feature flagging as a way to iterate safely and intelligently, without the risk of crippling your application or upsetting all of your users. This is what allows product managers at top companies (Facebook, Google, Amazon) to safely manage the product lifecycle and gather genuine user feedback. — Thanks for reading! I love writing for you, so claps and follows are greatly appreciated :)

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