Top Secret #17: Incumbent Ripouts, Mars Terraforming, and Anticipating Objections

This week, we talk about what we did in May, our newest features, the history of vanilla, great writing, and a new chatbot from our friends at Ion Design.

May was a crazy month for us. Wow.

A few things that happened, just to recap:

1. We announced our seed financing from investors including Y Combinator and Y Combinator founders Jessica Livingston and Paul Graham.

2. We publicly launched Tesseral, including here on Hacker News.

3. We had Dillon Nys join the team.

4. We launched a ton of new features, including webhooks, managed API keys, and a best-in-class RBAC system. We totally redesigned our web app. We shipped some subtle quality of life features for customers, like improvements to our user invitations feature, Login with GitHub, and making Organization config optional during sign-up.

5. We had a huge month for customer growth, including a bunch of head-to-heads (or ripouts) of closed-source incumbents.

So what’s next? We’re dropping another huge feature this month. We’re improving a bunch of details that our customers have flagged. Stay tuned 🙂

What We’re Reading

• The case for Mars terraforming research: a surprisingly even-handed and technically defensible exploration of what Mars terraforming could look like – definitely worth a read.

• What Poland’s new hard-right president means for Europe: if you’re interested in geopolitics, you probably should pay attention to Poland. The populist, right-wing opposition squeaked out a vanishingly slight victory in Poland’s recent presidential election.

• Cops in Germany claim they’ve ID’d the mysterious Trickbot ransomware kingpin: yeah, so turns out this “Stern” guy is, predictably, already well-known as a criminal. He’s reportedly much wealthier than I would have expected, allegedly having accumulated several hundreds of millions of dollars in cryptocurrency.

• Bond Capital – Trends: I’m not normally one for VC thinkpieces. But at minimum, VCs are definitely reading this, and it’s worth being acquainted with what venture investors are thinking about if you’re a founder.

• The bittersweet beginnings of vanilla: a fascinatingly human portrait of economic history. Worth a read if you have a few minutes.

Nerd Corner^TM

I’ve been thinking a bit recently about how to improve my writing. I haven’t written that much over the past few years, and so I’ve been looking back at some of the better work I did in college, mostly in upper level philosophy courses, to think about where I can find improvement.

I’m reminded of a particularly useful rhetorical technique I try to use frequently these days: anticipating objections and making concessions.

If you wish to make some claim, simply hammering the reader with supporting evidence doesn’t help as much as you’d think. In most cases, it’s true both that (1) your argument isn’t flawless and (2) that the reader is skeptical. We’re usually better off to acknowledge and critique the counterargument with an even hand.

An old article from Peter Horban at Simon Fraser University explains this well:

Anticipate objections. If your position is worth arguing for, there are going to be reasons which have led some people to reject it. Such reasons will amount to criticisms of your stand. A good way to demonstrate the strength of your position is to consider one or two of the best of these objections and show how they can be overcome. This amounts to rejecting the grounds for rejecting your case, and is analogous to stealing your enemies' ammunition before they have a chance to fire it at you. The trick here is to anticipate the kinds of objections that your critics would actually raise against you if you did not disarm them first. The other challenge is to come to grips with the criticisms you have cited. You must argue that these criticisms miss the mark as far as your case is concerned, or that they are in some sense ill-conceived despite their plausibility. It takes considerable practice and exposure to philosophical writing to develop this engaging style of argumentation, but it is worth it.

There are a few other great articles about how to do this well:

1. Making concessions

2. Acknowledging objections

Other Cool Stuff

• BetterDisplay: an open source tool that will let you take full control of your Mac’s display – think brightness upscaling and picture-in-picture displays

• Scrubbler: kind of a neat tool for learning piano. I saw this on Twitter – someone (as it turned out, a software developer) made it entirely with AI coding tools.

• Ion Design: our friends at Ion shipped something pretty damn cool. I couldn’t stop playing with it. It’s a chatbot that writes code for you, integrated with GitHub, with a bit of a no-code visual editor layered on top.

From The Archives

• (2007): Cell phones in schools: a national survey

• (2007): America’s image in the world: findings from the Pew Global Attitudes Project

• (2011): Facebook’s newest challenger: Google Plus

• (2013): How Wordpress thrives with a 100% remote workforce

• (2013): Zoom raises $6M series A, launches version 1.0 of its radically different virtual conferencing tool.

• (2018): Remembering the most absurd way we listened to music

Thanks,

Ned