Karl Yang

I hate running it's awesome

Fri, 14 Jun 2024 00:55:48 +0000

I’m not sure why I keep trying to get into running. It’s never worked out for me. I was promised guilt-free eating, health benefits, a smug sense of moral superiority, and a runner’s high. I eat more but that’s about it.

Eyes over instruments

Tue, 28 May 2024 22:06:50 +0000

In scuba training, one of the things they teach you is how to do is underwater navigation. This is generally harder than walking along the beach, because you have limited vision (especially at night), most sand looks pretty much the same, and you're primarily and rightfully focused on not breathing water. You learn how to hold a compass and flashlight steady, count your kicks, and adjust swim angle to account for current.

Work with Karl

Tue, 28 May 2024 14:29:33 -0700

What I can help you do

I'm a startup generalist across product, growth/GTM, and ops process improvement. I have specific expertise in internationalization and launching new markets, payments, HR software, and lending, but get up to speed very quickly on new domains.

If you need help optimizing your team’s performance, deciding where/what to build next, or effectively communicating your product and vision to customers, please reach out at karlhyang@gmail.com.

Process

I like to start with an introductory call so you can tell me about your goals, and we can scope what I'll be doing for you, the expected timeline, and how you want to engage with me.

Surviving the traffic cop role

Fri, 22 Dec 2023 11:17:49 -0800

New Yorker cartoon caption: Surfing the web? These days, I prefer to just wallow.

Every SaaS company at scale, and usually every product, eventually gets a slack channel where people shout a product question into the void because they don’t know who to ask directly. This happens when the company is big enough that people don’t actually know who all the other people are, or what their roles are.

Additional wisdom i wish i'd known earlier

Fri, 13 Oct 2023 14:16:23 -0700

I read and enjoyed Kevin Kelly's book, "Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier" last night. Words per dollar ratio is very high, but useful words per word ratio is also very high. I tried writing a few of my own. I'll be adding to this list over time...

When trying to comfort someone, focus on their needs rather than your own desire to be seen as comforting.

some weird tricks for working faster

Tue, 22 Aug 2023 21:40:45 -0700

The basic theory here is that, most of the time, dependencies slow you down. There are ways to ac/decelerate the process that are problem-agnostic. Usually, you are communicating back and forth with other people until you have reached some form of mutually acceptable agreement, and there are ways to do that faster.

A lot of these tactics get 0.01% of the project done a few hours or days faster, but they really add up. Taking hours off of each sub-chunk of the core dependency of a giant project can make the whole thing go way faster.

last night, 370 days ago

Sun, 21 Aug 2022 21:55:00 -0700

They don't tell you what pulling the plug on someone is actually like, probably for a good reason. On TV, it seems like turning off the TV. It’s not.

If you're an ignorance-is-bliss type, you should stop reading now.

In my particular case, it starts with a 3am talk from the attending physician, who softly explains that my mom is very unlikely to get better. We might be prolonging her suffering. I can barely hear what he's saying, and the words take a few minutes to sink in.

weird stuff

Sat, 18 Jun 2022 22:00:00 -0700

“In a memorable, extemporaneous work of performance art in the middle of the HR department’s open-plan workspace, he had explained that work of a routine, predictable nature could and should be embodied in computer programs. If that proved too difficult, it should be outsourced to humans far away. If it was somehow too sensitive or complicated for outsourcing, then “you people” (meaning the employees of the HR department) needed to slice it and dice it into tasks that could be summed up in job descriptions and advertised on the open employment market. Floating above all of that, however, in a realm that was out of the scope of “you people,” was “weird stuff.” It was important that the company have people to work on “weird stuff.”

agency

Thu, 26 Aug 2021 22:20:00 -0700

There are few real rules¹ in the game of life. And there are no admins.

People get this confused in part because we spend 12+ years trained by an education system designed to produce assembly line workers. We are led to believe there’s only one answer, and someone else figured it out. We were told as children that we could be whatever we wanted to be. Then in the next breath we had to ask for the teacher’s permission to urinate.

tools for less thought

Mon, 07 Jun 2021 22:11:00 -0700

If you’re reading this, you probably overthink more than you underthink. In writing this, I’m probably overthinking. Overthinking about underthinking is an appropriate amount of headassery for me…

Behaviors serve some sort of purpose, they just might not be the purpose we tell ourselves. For me, overthinking serves a few purposes:

Procrastination. Overthinking is just like endlessly reorganizing your desk. For me, there’s twoish drivers of procrastination:
1. I don’t actually want to do the thing but am unwilling to admit it.
2. Preventing emotional pain. If I actually do the thing, I might fail. If I strategize enough, I can simultaneously increase the chances of success (narrator: not true) while also delaying a true evaluation of whether I’ll succeed.
Cleverness and/or perfectionism. If I just do the obvious thing¹ what’s the point of deploying the Super Elite Special SWAT Team member? Wouldn’t it be great if I could anticipate every objection and have a slide that mitigates each²? If I get this perfect, nobody can criticize me. I’ve also worked for enough ex-consultants who sold packaged pearls of wisdom for a living, and have absorbed some of their neuroses.
Labeling the unknown is comforting. It usually doesn’t actually change the outcome, since most of the time what happens is fairly obvious. This might be a sub-form of procrastination.

There’s hundreds of productivity and note-taking apps out there that encourage overthinking. The personal-SaaS-industrial-complex would like you to think that for $9.99 a month this can be solved. The truth is most tools can only help you do what you already wanted to do, marginally faster or better.

bad bagels and internet-scale feedback

Wed, 07 Apr 2021 22:07:00 -0700

Imagine you’re sitting at a bar with your friends.¹ You say something the table thinks is wrong (e.g., “West Coast bagels are better than New York’s”²). You will get (potentially vigorous) feedback from some people, maybe reconsider your opinion, and move on.

If you say something similar on the Internet, you risk a tidal wave of complete strangers throwing FEEDBACK at you for days (and intermittently for years!)³.

commenting vs. making

Fri, 19 Feb 2021 22:30:00 -0800

The biggest change in my professional maturity came when I became Actually Responsible for things. Not in the sense of “if there’s a mix of dashes and em-dashes in this powerpoint deck someone will get mad”, which characterized my early career, but “if someone doesn’t fix this problem soon, we’ll get to go looking for new jobs”.

I gained a lot of appreciation for people who make things, and lost a lot of tolerance for people who only pontificate.¹ I found myself especially frustrated with my past self, whose default was to complain and/or comment, then wonder why things didn’t magically get better.²

Books

Mon, 04 Jan 2021 12:07:28 -0800

Organized annually. Bolded books are recommends. Otherwise unordered. Does not include abandoned books, so I suppose anything listed is a light recommend.

2020

Nonfiction

Masters of Doom by David Kushner
Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre by Keith Johnstone
One From Many by Dee Hock
The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew by Lee Kuan Yew
Barbarian Days by William Finnegan
The Art of the Good Life by Rolf Dobelli
From Third World to First: 1965-2000 by Lee Kuan Yew
(reread) Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
Softwar by Matthew Symonds
The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama
How Asia Works by Joe Studwell
Eleven Rings by Phil Jackson
Malcolm X by Manning Marable
The Man Who Solved the Market by Gregory Zuckerman
The Ride of a Lifetime by Robert Iger
Invested: Changing Forever the Way Americans Invest by Charles Schwab
Inspired by Marty Cagan
Range by David Epstein
Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams by Tom DeMarco
Indonesia, Etc. Exploring the Improbable Nation by Elizabeth Pisani
The Paypal Wars by Eric Jackson

Fiction

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
The Ghost in the Shell by Masamune Shirow
Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson
Redshirts by John Scalzi
The Last Emperox by John Scalzi
The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman
(reread) The Wheel of Time series (skipped 11 and 12) by Robert Jordan and finished by Brandon Sanderson
(reread) The Old Kingdom Chronicles by Garth Nix
The Calculating Stars series by Mary Robinette Kowal
Dagger and the Coin series by Daniel Abraham
Children of Time series by Adrian Tchaikovsky
(reread) His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
Bobiverse series (1st til most recent) by Dennis Taylor

2019

Note from Jan 2021: I suspect this list is incomplete. Maybe someday I'll dig and investigate.

things i learned in 2020

Thu, 31 Dec 2020 22:27:00 -0800

twitter

above ~2k followers you can have a short discussion about pretty much anything
you can DM or reply to anyone, but be ok with being ignored
letting your audience train your content negatively affects quality
I generally learn more from accounts with fewer followers
it took 28 years for someone to unironically call me “Satan” on the internet
sometimes people are looking for a fight and you just happened to be around, don’t take it personally
real face + alt > anon
tech twitter has more ads than youtube
mute notifications from people who you don’t follow or who don’t follow you
many things that feel obvious to you are not to most people; conversely many things that feel insightful are not to most people
most of what you read on the internet is by insane people
calling out grifts is usually neither effective nor helpful
people beef and troll for clout

productivity/work

Lists

Wed, 30 Dec 2020 14:43:16 -0800

This is a list of lists discovered on the Internet that I found useful, enjoyable or inspirational. Please give me more.

Impressive things accomplished by small teams by Steve Pulec

Internal memos by Sriram Krisnan

Things you're allowed to do by Milan Cvitkovic

Open Questions by Gwern

Slow by Michael Nielsen

Long-lived institutions by Mwiya

Patrick Collison has several. My favorites are:

I'd love to add other lists. If you have any ideas, please reach out.

the job status cycle

Wed, 21 Oct 2020 22:24:00 -0700

https://twitter.com/zebulgar/status/1318655303185989639?s=20

If you work in tech, you may have noticed a confusing process where, every few years, there’s a new type of person whose title/JD has some permutation of “product”, “associate”, “general”, “strategy”, “business”, “operations”, “finance”, “manager”, and the symbol “&”.

Their role is to “lead key business priorities”, “unlock new growth”, “drive alignment on strategy”, “help the organization scale”, “launch new markets”, and possibly “make sure the smoothies arrive on time”. They describe themselves as “special forces” and “general-purpose athletes”, though they’ve likely never touched a gun and generally aren’t very athletic.

Early Days

Mon, 12 Oct 2020 22:05:40 +0000

I'm interested in both fiction and nonfiction about the early days in acts of creation. Before everything seemed inevitable, or the project died forgotten.

Nonfiction:

Books

Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston

Podcasts

The War Room Podcast

Fiction:

Halt and Catch Fire on AMC
The Bear (restaurant) on FX
Silicon Valley on HBO - this is more of a comedy ofc

Novels

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Breaking Up the Internet

Sat, 08 Aug 2020 18:21:00 +0000

Disclosure: I work at and hold equity in a company that benefits from this framing.

This was originally published on Substack, August 8th

The fragmentation of the internet is continuing. Top of mind for most Americans is the possible nationalization of TikTok. The Trump administration is also saber-rattling with a “Clean Network". This behavior is dangerous for the future of American companies. We are losing the moral high ground on open markets, and fewer markets will be open to American companies. Fragmentation will accelerate.

How to kill a project

Sun, 17 May 2020 20:30:50 +0000

I lied a little with the title. This piece is about some of the ways projects can get killed, and is meant to show you techniques so that you can defend against them. But, it’s more fun to write from the perspective of some corporate supervillain who’s using wrestling moves on our poor, innocent protagonist.

As they grow, companies naturally develop immune systems as a part of their risk management and risk reduction practices. Most of your opposition isn’t malicious… it’s just emergent behavior from a system designed to restrict the rank and file to legible, approved sets of activities and thinking. There’s a reason why “internal startups” fail.

Career advice for employees at struggling companies

Wed, 22 Apr 2020 18:35:00 -0700

This piece was originally shared on Substack on April 22, 2020

Most career advice on the internet is from people who had some sort of meteoric success. Why read advice from someone who’s had a mediocre career? But there’s massive sampling bias. All this advice will try to draw grand, sweeping narratives and also typically fails to sufficiently factor in luck.

Most content is also produced by VCs for founders, which is two layers of incentive structures away from regular working stiffs. I've spent a lot of hours with friends and and colleagues examining what we would’ve told our past selves. Below is a quick distillation of wisdom if:

What's next in the personal loan market

Sun, 05 Jan 2020 06:02:39 +0000

This is a bit of a change of pace from my previous posts. It does not signal a new direction. My first draft of this was written over two years ago and my 'conclusion' (in the next post, sorry!) still hasn't happened, so maybe I'm wrong... I'll mostly be picking on LendingClub ("LC") here since they have the most public data.

The personal loan market has blown up in the last ten years. 20.2M Americans have unsecured personal loans as of 3Q19 with $156B in outstanding balances, thanks in large part to QE, LendingClub, and Prosper.

When the music stops

Sun, 01 Dec 2019 15:39:02 +0000

A few years ago, a friend showed me an incredible email sent to her company_all listserv. It went something like (edited for tone):

Hey, just as a heads up, no big deal, it turns out our whistleblower system wasn’t recording submissions properly, so if you submitted anything in the last couple months, could you please re-submit it?
Everything’s totally fine, btw.

A few weeks later, the CEO was fired for ‘not cooperating with the board’s investigation’. What’s came out in the later lawsuits is that CEO had done all sorts of things - including some self-dealing, gray area stuff, and technically-not-fraud-but-smells-like-fraud for years. The all-star board tolerated it until growth started slowing, and the stock price went into reverse.

A bicycle for the heart

Sat, 07 Sep 2019 09:35:02 +0000

Steve Jobs had a famous analogy: computers are a 'bicycle for the mind'. And true to his vision, we've seen tremendous progress in developing hardware and software that augments the mind - we can remember more, can calculate faster, even make inferences with vast arrays of data that human minds are incapable of holding.

In the process, largely by accident while finding ways to serve better ads, we've managed to use software to enhance our empathy, to grow our social sphere, and to make ourselves better people. But our implementation has been poor.

Everyone's nice in the Valley, until they're not

Thu, 25 Jul 2019 11:14:57 +0000

Dear reader - my first post is an attempt at clarifying thoughts that have been stewing in my head for a while. It is likely representative of what I intend to write about in the future. However, I hope the quality of my thinking and writing goes up; I skewed toward pushing this out. Fail fast, fail often :)

In this piece I attempt to argue that the uniquely high-cooperation culture (“let me know how I can be helpful”) of Bay Area Tech is driven on an ecosystem level, but that might collapse if/when growth slows.

thinking online

Tue, 02 Jul 2019 04:40:37 +0000

2018 Books

Mon, 17 Dec 2018 05:04:22 +0000

Favorites - nonfiction

7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy
Born a Crime
SYSTEMANTICS. THE SYSTEMS BIBLE
The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life
Bad Blood
Boyd: The Fighter Pilot who Changed the Art of War
Between the World and Me
Thinking in Bets
Algorithms to Live By
Poor Charlie's Almanack
How Not To Be Wrong

Others (still liked) - nonfiction

Atomic Habits
Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco
Game Change
High Growth Handbook
Measure What Matters
Only the Paranoid Survive
Principles: Life and Work
Reminisces of a Stock Operator
Sam Walton: Made in America
The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking
The Art of Being Unreasonable
The Inner Game of Tennis
The Smartest Guys in the Room
Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
The House of Morgan
Born Standing Up
The Upside of Stress
Getting it Done: How to Lead When You're Not in Charge

How to Kill Meetings and Demotivate People

Thu, 22 Nov 2018 05:56:03 +0000

I offer this to you in the hopes that it will help you identify and stop unproductive behavior from yourself or from your colleagues.

Back in World War II, the OSS (predecessor to the CIA) created a document called the Simple Sabotage Field Manual for ordinary citizens in occupied territory. The first half focuses on physical sabotage, like putting sand in the gears at a factory. The second, in my opinion, is more interesting.

Reducing analysis paralysis

Thu, 07 Jan 2016 01:09:29 +0000

There’s a beautiful scene in Master of None where Dev (Aziz Ansari) can’t decide where to go for lunch. Even after he decides on tacos, he needs to know who has the best tacos. He whips out two devices and consults Google, Eater and Yelp. He sorts through dozens of lists, eventually settling on a food truck that is the most delicious taco in the city. Even when he’s there, he can’t decide what taco to get – he asks “What are the most popular tacos? Between carnitas and chicken, which do you think customers are enjoying the most – like from their faces?” It turns out the truck was sold out – he took too long in deciding. “What am I supposed to do now?” he complains. “Go eat the world’s second-best taco?” I faced a similar situation when my roommate hosted a movie night a few months ago – we watched the first ten minutes of four different movies, with about five times as many suggestions thrown around, before settling on 22 Jump Street, which almost everyone had seen already. Every movie we looked at was objectively good – between seven smartphones on IMDB, Netflix’s recommendation engine and a laptop, we were bound to get good candidates. We live in an era of endless optimization. Recommendation engines and algorithms and unpaid interns and random people on the internet are constantly churning out ways in which we can have the best. We think endlessly about opportunity cost and are paralyzed by choice – am I getting the best food on the menu? Am I following the right meditation program? Is my boyfriend of the right race to generate the cutest babies? (Not joking, I’ve heard this before.) Am I writing about the best blog topic I can? My favorite: Am I waiting long enough to text my crush back? (The blog is pretty entertaining as well.) There is this aura of complexity that’s created by our endless need to make a well-informed choice, and this aura obscures what our original goals were – to the point where we forget what we started out to do. We spend so much time focused on opportunity cost that we forget about search cost. Over the last three months, I’ve attempted to apply the concept time is money to reduce analysis paralysis in my life. I don’t implement it strictly, but the general concept is as follows: Would I pay someone (me) $10 an hour to make this decision? Conversely, would I be willing to do this for $10 an hour? (BTW if anyone makes an app out of this, I want to be listed as a “technically cofounder”) Would I pay someone $10 to spend an hour on Yelp deciding between taco trucks? Fuck no, that’s like 5 tacos. I’ll go to both :) Would I spend an hour optimizing a Coachella schedule for $10? Absolutely. I do that for fun. It's worked out pretty well so far, but if you have better ideas I would love to hear them. I'd pay $10 to work on better allocating my time!

practice, practice, practice

Wed, 06 Jan 2016 01:40:00 +0000

I’ve come across some version of this anecdote from the book Art and Fear too many times to count.

The ceramics teacher announced he was dividing his class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right graded solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would weigh the work of the “quantity” group: 50 pounds of pots rated an A, 40 pounds a B, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an A. Well, come grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity! It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

It seems there’s no substitute for making mistakes and then learning from them. I want to share three anecdotes and what I’ve taken from them:

Hand billing

When passing out handbills on the main plaza in college, I attempted to go for percentages instead of absolute numbers. I’d handbill to people who were already making eye contact, who weren’t wearing headphones, who were already carrying other flyers. I had a great hit rate – over 80%, and my ego was nicely cushioned by a low rejection rate, but I didn’t get any better at hand billing.

You don't have to beat yourself.

Fri, 11 Dec 2015 00:06:48 +0000

I read The Silicon Valley Suicides today and identified so strongly with the students that it was difficult to read.

"Luthar constructed a profile of elite American adolescents whose self-worth is tied to their achievements and who see themselves as catastrophically flawed if they don’t meet the highest standards of success. Because a certain kind of success seems well within reach, they feel they have to attain it at all costs—a phenomenon she refers to as “I can, therefore I must.”"

I used to think of life as a marathon – a marathon with a starting line stretching from horizon to horizon, an endless sea of runners that looked exactly like me. Each runner was a different version of myself, a more successful, capable version that didn’t need water at mile 21, or didn’t trip at mile 17, or didn’t get a B+ in his first quarter of AP Chemistry. My eyes fixed on the front-runner, I believed I was at the end of the pack. The lowest branch of a decision tree. The more people told that me I had great potential, the higher the praise, the faster everyone else ran, and the further I fell behind. I thought about giving up altogether. All my choices were oriented around preserving my place in this marathon, around not falling further behind. I was deathly afraid of going backward – it would feel like all of my previous hard work would be erased, that I had failed. When I was thirteen, I was upset that taking AP classes as a freshman required lobbying administration, and more so that I didn’t think to – I felt as though I had been held back, artificially limited, Harrison Bergeron’ed by bureaucrats into mediocrity. I was endowed with the terrible burden of my parents’ gift – they fought and scraped their way across 30.5% of the earth’s surface area so that I could have a successful, achievement-filled life, and I felt this gift was ruined if I took a semester of non-AP physics. My parents are actually quite good, as Asian parents come – although they seem to think that pointing out my pimples is constructive and like my sister’s Dartmouth gear a lot more than my Berkeley gear, they do tell me that all they want is for me to be a happy, contributing member of society. In some ways, this is scarier. Chasing achievements is not by any means easy, but it is defined. Take these classes, say these things during the interviews, improve process by this much. Lately my quarter-life crisis has come from defining my own path; separate from what I interpret from my parents or my peers. I don’t know if I’m getting it right. I’m not always happy and only contribute a little. To continue the metaphor, the marathon is already over. I just have to decide where to eat after. The good news is that we get a lot of tries. Malcolm Gladwell argues that it takes 10,000 hours to master a subject – the next fifty years have 438,000 hours in them. Even with three hours a day (1/8 of my time) to learn new, that’s almost six tries. We don’t have to get it right the first time.