Top Secret #24: Megan Seizes the Means of Newsletter Production (Ned is OOO)
This week, we talk about the joy of making a stressed founder less stressed, croissant density, and cultural models of self. Also, our marketing.
Hey, everyone! Megan here, Tesseral’s head of growth. I’m taking over the newsletter this week while Ned is on a long-overdue vacation. The office is noticeably quieter without the familiar background soundtrack of Celsius cans cracking open and Slack notifications at full volume (WHO DOES THAT?!), but it won’t be for long. He’ll be back next week.
In the meantime, I am proud to report that the team has been hard at work. I’m not an engineer (gasp) so I won’t go too deep into the technical weeds, but last week we refined the Tesseral onboarding flow, continued work on SDKs, improved the user experience both in the console and for end users, and squashed a bunch of bugs. We’re really grateful to folks who’ve given us feedback, it’s made a real difference.
Speaking of feedback: on Friday, Ned and Ulysse spent some time helping a B2B SaaS founder implement Tesseral at our SF office. When the founder first reached out, he was S t r e s s e d with a capital S. An enterprise customer was interested in his company’s product, but he worried about delivering the user management features they needed and those they might ask for down the line. Relieving that burden for him was a reminder of why we’re building Tesseral in the first place. I’m told he left the office looking noticeably less anxious.
NOW A LITTLE ABOUT ME! More about my role at Tesseral, specifically, although I’m happy to expound on my deeply held convictions on the best ice cream flavors (peppermint stick) and best standup comedians (Norm MacDonald) in future editions.
I started my career in politics, turning arcane topics (lemons) into something the general public would care about and understand (lemonade). I’ve represented hardwood distributors, HVAC hardware manufacturers, wholesale supplement suppliers, and various governmental and non-profit organizations.
Still, I think auth software might be the hardest subject I’ve ever had to explain. Auth is complicated. It’s unsexy. And it’s deeply, deeply technical. Those who get it, get it, but those who don’t really don’t.
But, thanks to Ned, Ulysse, and Blake, it’s also been the most fun and fulfilling work of my career. We’re building something real and valuable here: a scalable, open source user management platform for B2B SaaS, with an opinionated take on what great developer experience looks like.
Some days I wonder if people notice. Are we getting it right? Am I getting it right? Then, last week, Ned received a note from a fellow YC founder that made our day.
We’re always grateful for kind words, but more than anything, we want feedback, warts and all. If you’ve tried Tesseral, we always want to hear what worked, what didn’t, and what would make it better. The same is true for our marketing stuff.
Thanks for reading what is probably the longest newsletter topper we've produced to date. We’re just getting started! (I meant with Tesseral, but also with this newsletter).
Moving on…
What We’re Reading
72% of US teens have used AI companions, study finds: I have mixed feelings about this. It was heartening to read, however, that 80% of teens who use these companions report spending more time with real friends than with AI chatbots. Imagine reading that sentence 20 years ago.
Millions Stolen, Death Threats: Should Banks Do More to Fight ‘Pig Butchering’?: This is awful. I’m reminded of a class I took in graduate school about consumer finance policy that essentially re-wired everything I thought I believed. Should working to mitigate these kinds of scams be the bank's responsibility? Honestly, I’m not totally convinced. It seems banks feel similarly: “Bankers argue that they already have their hands full trying to thwart money laundering, terrorist financing and other types of fraud and have put considerable resources into such efforts. They say they can’t be expected to protect their customers from making ill-advised decisions.”
Don’t Throw Your Dictionary Away: A fabulous line from this essay, no notes: Grammarly urges users to “generate text with A.I. prompts,” while Orwell cautions that “ready-made phrases” inevitably “construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you.”
Find New York’s Best Croissants: The Tesseral team has strong opinions about croissants. Our CTO is French and the rest of us just eat a lot of them (donuts, too). Unfortunately, I’m not sure how much I can trust the final list of NYC’s best croissants. The author focuses mostly on croissant ‘taste,’ while not appropriately weighting texture, density, weight, and how comically long the line for the bakery is. Also, most experimental croissants (i.e. deviations from butter, chocolate, and almond) are gross*.
*In my opinion.
Nerd CornerTM
I wrote my graduate thesis about treatment outcomes for women in the U.S. criminal justice system who struggle with substance use disorder, primarily methamphetamine addiction. While writing, I spent a good amount of time reading cross-disciplinary research about mental illness and its intersection with criminal behavior. In 2014, Stanford released a paper based on interview with 60 adults diagnosed with schizophrenia in San Mateo, California; Accra, Ghana; and Chennai, India. The authors discovered that individuals with schizophrenia experience different auditory hallucinations depending on their cultural background. Fascinating.
As the Stanford Report writes:
“The striking difference was that while many of the African and Indian subjects registered predominantly positive experiences with their voices, not one American did. Rather, the U.S. subjects were more likely to report experiences as violent and hateful – and evidence of a sick condition… Moreover, the Americans mostly did not report that they knew who spoke to them and they seemed to have less personal relationships with their voices… Among the Indians in Chennai, more than half (11) heard voices of kin or family members commanding them to do tasks.
“They talk as if elder people advising younger people,” one subject said. That contrasts to the Americans, only two of whom heard family members. Also, the Indians heard fewer threatening voices than the Americans – several heard the voices as playful, as manifesting spirits or magic, and even as entertaining. Finally, not as many of them described the voices in terms of a medical or psychiatric problem, as all of the Americans did.”
The researchers believe this could stem from cultural differences in sense of self, namely that Americans and Europeans see themselves as “individuals motivated by a sense of self identity, whereas outside of the West, people imagine the mind and self interwoven with others and defined through relationships.”
Raises some interesting questions about how our minds process stimuli, stigma, societal expectations, and personal relationships… super cool.
Other Cool Stuff
Here are some neat links for you:
From The Archives
Just one today, a great read:
(2020): How to Think for Yourself
If you liked today’s newsletter, please respond to this note saying so. If you hated it, too, that would be great to know. I will consolidate feedback, synergize key takeaways, and create a deck with proposed next steps for Ned to review upon his return next week.
Have a great rest of your week!
Thanks,
Megan
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