Top Secret #14: Webhooks, Saccades, and The Fried Chicken Renaissance
This week, we talk about life after launch, our early webhooks rollout, programmable mischief, and saccadic eye movement.
It’s been a big week for us! In case you missed it, we publicly launched (and rebranded as) Tesseral. We simultaneously announced our seed financing from investors including Y Combinator, Jessica Livingston, and Paul Graham.
We heard a bunch of really encouraging inbound feedback, e.g.: “hey, cool company, this is solving a critical pain point,” “definitely something we’ll be implementing in the near future,” and “when I saw this I literally went ‘I can't wait to not use [redacted competitor].”
And late last week, we hosted a small gathering at our office to mark the launch. It was great to catch up with friends, investors, and customers, and celebrate a big milestone.
What’s next? We’re shipping a ton of product day after day. Late last week, we shipped an early version of webhooks. We have some huge features and quality-of-life improvements on the way. They just require some testing before we can roll them out.
We’ve also grown the engineering team with some really exceptional talent – more on this soon!
For those that have flagged gaps in our documentation, thank you; please hang in there while we polish things up. Drop us a line directly if you get stuck.
What We’re Reading
AppLovin shares pop on earnings beat as it sells mobile gaming business: what a monstrous run for AppLovin. Over the last year, AppLovin stock has quadrupled in value. The company now trades at around $120B in market cap. AppLovin generated more than $800M in operating cash flow over the last quarter, and it’s still growing 40% year-over-year. Wall Street loves AppLovin’s divesture from its mobile gaming business. This is a true adtech juggernaut now. How is this company not talked about more?
Legacy player PegaSystems has a booming SaaS business: Pega has been around since 1983. When I see Pega, I mostly think of their janky old proprietary Java frameworks still in use at old school companies that make my head hurt. But something’s going on over there. Revenue is up more than 40% year-over-year. More excitingly, the subscription license business has tripled year over year – from $63M in the quarter ended March 31, 2024 to $187M in the quarter ended March 31, 2025. Something’s going very right over there. Are they just riding a big AI wave in BPM?
Spat between Harley Davidson and shareholders escalates: Harley Davidson’s leadership is under siege from investors. Jared Dourdeville of H Partners resigned from H-D’s board with a scathing letter last month, calling out the company’s disastrous underperformance – and its coincident embrace of work-from-home. H Partners has been pushing to remove three board members – and its outgoing CEO ahead of schedule. Notably, dealerships have backed H Partners against H-D leadership.
The Tech Guys Are Fighting. Literally. “The tech industry’s newfound devotion to martial arts is one facet of a broader cultural shift that has upended U.S. politics. Many of these tech founders turned fighters are chasing a testosterone-heavy ideal of masculinity.” I, as a tech founder, was not aware of this development.
How Fast Is Too Fast to See? Study Reveals Your Visual Speed Limit: cool to see saccades in the news! I first learned to code in high school while writing graphics programs for a computational neuroscience lab that was experimenting with saccadic variance as diagnostic criteria for brain injury. Saccades are rapid, darting movements that our eyes make. We use a bunch of these sharp movements to reorient our gaze – we don’t actually move our eyes very smoothly. It turns out that some people have faster saccades than others, meaning they experience less motion blur than the rest of us.
Slate Auto crosses 100,000 refundable reservations in two weeks: if you missed the preliminary announcements for Slate, you should check this out. A lot of people – like me – are excited about this. Slate has designed a radically simple, low-cost vehicle. They’ve eliminated everything but the essentials; for instance, there’s no infotainment. If you want the extras, you’re on the hook to customize your vehicle. I’m excited by this. It’s a really exciting take on an industry that has felt kind of stagnant for a long time (aside from early Teslas and self-driving).
LockBit Ransomware Admin Panel Hacked, Leaks Reveal Inside Details: someone managed to breach LockBit, writing “Don’t do crime, crime is bad xoxo from Prague” on one of their websites. There was also some useful data that got leaked. Authorities seem to think this is infighting in the crime world.
The golden age of the fried chicken sandwich: Americans are consuming fewer burgers while consuming way more fried chicken sandwiches. That’s upending the conventional wisdom of fast food restaurants. To me, it’s mostly interesting how tastes change over time. I’m reminded of the relative growth of iced vs. hot coffee.
Nerd CornerTM
Our friends at RunReveal gifted us a programmable macro keyboard last week. While I’m really grateful for the gift, this has resulted in some tomfoolery. My cofounder Ulysse has been mapping keyboard macros to simple – albeit annoying – scripts.
Consider these examples:
$ say -v Zarvox “file a ticket”$ echo 'ned is a loser' | sayA quick, basically unrelated bonus – run this:
$ curl parrot.liveOther Cool Stuff
Emoji translate: turn English text into emojis. The project is open source.
Can’t Unsee is a game that tests your knowledge of interface design and attention to detail. Don’t ask me how I did.
Old'aVista is an online platform cataloguing the ‘old Internet.’
From The Archives
(1974): Computer programming as an art
(2004): Harvard Crimson: Hundreds register for new Facebook website
(2010): Show HN: Quora
(2015): Australia's oldest man knit sweaters for tiny, injured penguins
Thanks,
Ned