The application deadline for applying to Y Combinator is today, October 13th. However, they accept late submissions until the program starts in January. If you’re interested in applying, reach out!

The Application Deadline

Last I wrote in February, I shared that my team got backed by the Y Combinator (YC) accelerator program. YC is a venture capital firm that YC hosts two “batches” of 200+ startups per year. The application deadline for the upcoming batch is today, though they accept late applications (like mine this time last year!)

Get recommended

Getting a recommendation from a YC-backed founder increases your chance of getting accepted. With a 1.4% acceptance rate into the program, I’d highly recommend getting a recommendation from an alumni.

Female founders

From my anecdotal experience, about 10% of Y Combinator founders are female. I’d like to be part of changing that. The picture below does an accurate job depicting the male-to-female ratio.

If you know a female founder in the early stages of starting a company and would like to apply to YC, please have them get in touch with me at danny@buildwithfern.com.

We’re hiring at Fern

Since leaving Amazon/AWS, I co-founded Fern. Fern is an open source developer tool that makes it easier to build REST APIs.

Looking to join an early-stage startup? We’re hiring a frontend engineer and a full-stack engineer to join us.

The Role at a Glance

Compensation: $125,000 - $175,000 per year + equity
Title: Founding Engineer
Location: NYC (in office)
Learn more: buildwithfern.com/careers

Thanks for following my journey,
Danny

Y Combinator’s Standard Deal

In November 2022, my co-founders and I applied to Y Combinator (YC), an accelerator program that backs early-stage startups with a $500,000 investment.

How does the investment work? You give up ~10% of your company for $500,000. The terms of the “Standard Deal” are:

• $125,000 for 7% of your company

• $375,000 at terms you will negotiate with other investors in your next investment round (i.e., an uncapped safe with a Most Favored Nation provision)

Founders don’t accept the YC deal because of the money.
They do it because it increases their odds of success.

36 days to get $500,000

We submitted our application to YC on November 16, 2022. Just 36 days later, we received a wire transfer for $500,000 💸.

The Winter 2023 Batch

YC hosts two 3-month programs — one starting in January and the other in June. We’re in the Winter 2023 (abbreviated to W23) batch with 200+ companies and 500+ founders. On Demo Day, April 5th/6th1, we’ll get in front of 1,500+ investors and media to pitch our companies—a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity!

What support does Y Combinator provide? That’s a topic for a future update 😉.

Thanks for following my journey,
Danny

P.S. Want to request a topic for me to write about next time? Share it here.

It is time for me to conclude this chapter and begin a new one.

As I embark on new adventures, it is time to bid farewell to my role as author of Fact of the Day 1. I am grateful for the opportunity to have shared my writing with you. I look back fondly on the relationships I've formed as my readership has grown from a small group of 10 people in 2018 to an audience of 95,000 today.

Reflecting on the joy I experienced from Fact of the Day 1, I picked five highlights to share with you.

Highlight #1: The original whiteboard at Amazon

It was on the 11th floor of the Amazon Amelia building in South Lake Union. Shout out to the OG readers from Amazon Marketplace.

Highlight #2: Featured in “Bring Your Parents to Work Day”

In September 2019, Amazon welcomed 7,000 parents to the Seattle campus. Attendees got a welcome packet featuring my most popular facts!

Highlight #3: The “April Fools” Viral Fact

I wrote a joke on April 1, 2020 featuring my dog Markley. It was a HIT and went viral, quickly spreading from email list to email list around Amazon. With 1.3M employees, that’s a lot of impressions for Markley! 🐶

Thanks to my brothers—Jacob, Max, and Nate—for helping me workshop the idea!

Highlight #4: One-on-ones with Jeff Wilke

Wilke was the CEO of Worldwide Consumer at Amazon (a business with ~1M employees). In March 2021, we collaborated on writing down lessons he learned at Amazon as he prepared to leave the company.

Highlight #5: Publishing my first book!

Writing a book is fun; I highly recommend it. I’m grateful for having sold 2,000 copies shipped to 30 countries worldwide. The reviews are epic—thanks to everyone who supported me during my January 2021 book launch.

What’s next?

I won’t be sending you new facts. The website and LinkedIn pages will remain available with an archive of the 600 facts I’ve published.

In the coming weeks, I’ll send another note sharing details about my next adventure! (Hint: it’s entrepreneurial.)

Thank you for supporting my passion project,
Danny

Thank You’s

• Jennifer: for being the creative artist behind the scenes. Your whiteboard art touched the lives of tens of thousands of people!

• Dave: for giving me the freedom to do this “daily fact on a whiteboard” thing in our office. And for encouraging me to just do it.

• Todd: for encouraging me to continue my passion project of Fact of the Day 1 even as our work in Project Kuiper intensified. Your book recommendations will make me a bookworm for a very long time.

• Mom: for instilling integrity as a foundational component of my self-image from a young age. Dad: for picking Mom as a life partner.

• Katie: for being my proofreader, confidant, and biggest supporter. I look forward to saying “I do” come June!

Want to have your product or job featured to 80,000 readers?  Get in touch.

Source: Liz Fosslien
Published: September 2022

A Really Hard Thing

• How it feels right now [overwhelming]

• How it will feel in a few months [manageable]

• How it will feel in a few years [carrying on]

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Source: Paul Coelho and Image Values
Published: June 2022

Focus on your audience’s interests

“Don’t waste your time with explanations. People only want to hear what they want to hear.” - Paul Coelho

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Source: The Amazon Way (page 2)
Published: June 2021

Two truths about customer service

Early on at Amazon, Bezos internalized two truths about customer service:

1. When a company makes a customer happy, she won’t tell a friend or two; she’ll tell many, many more. 

2. The best customer service is no customer service—because the best experience happens when the customer never has to ask for help at all.

Companies can invest in the following:

• Customer-obsessed policies (e.g. Proactive shipping refund for a missed delivery date.)

• Self-service resolution paths (e.g. Report a missing item from your order.)

• Online documentation (e.g. FAQs and how-to guides)

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Source: TrueUp
Published: December 2022

Gender Diversity by Tech Company

Ranking: 1
Company: Netflix
% of women in tech roles: 37%

Ranking: 2
Company: Shopify
% of women in tech roles: 33%

Ranking: 3
Company: Airbnb
% of women in tech roles: 32%

Ranking: 4
Company: PayPal
% of women in tech roles: 27%

Ranking: 4
Company: Intuit
% of women in tech roles: 27%

Ranking: 4
Company: Salesforce
% of women in tech roles: 27%

Ranking: 7
Company: Adobe
% of women in tech roles: 26%

Ranking: 8
Company: Google
% of women in tech roles: 26%

Ranking: 9
Company: Meta
% of women in tech roles: 25%

Ranking: 10
Company: Microsoft
% of women in tech roles: 24%

Note: Reporting on diversity in tech roles is optional. Amazon and Tesla are two companies that don’t report this breakout.

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Source: The Washington Post
Published: November 2022

Remote jobs are in demand, but positions are drying up

30% of Americans are still working from home, according to LendingTree. Regarding one key group — employees between the ages of 25 to 39 — the number of those working from home is 40%.

According to LinkedIn data, 50% of job applications are for 15% of remote jobs.

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Want to have your product or job featured to 80,000 readers?  Get in touch.

Source: Dave Glick
Published: October 2022

4 Mechanisms at Amazon

Single Threaded leader: a person who is focused on one and only one task and drives that full time. (Note: this is different from a single point of contact, who may have many other things going on.)

Bar Raisers: An experienced interviewer who is "anointed" to facilitate and participate in interviews outside of their direct team to "keep the bar high."

Two Pizza Teams: Teams that have a defined focus/scope and who can be fed with two pizzas, minimizing communication overhead.

Six Pagers: the process of communicating through narrative rather than slides. (Note: Six-pagers were implemented in 2005 at $8.5 billion in revenue.)

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Source: Paul Taylor
Published: May 2022

The Case Against Collaboration

Learnings from MIT research about the limits of collaboration on creativity:

• Brainstorming sessions "reduced creativity" because they lead to incremental modifications rather than radical and potentially superior solutions.

• "A meta-analytic review of over 800 teams indicated that individuals are more likely to generate a higher number of original ideas when they don’t interact with others." 

• Collaboration is best used to solve complex problems that require diverse expert opinions.

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Source: Werner Vogels
Published: November 2022

Distributed Computing Manifesto

In 1998 Amazon’s business grew 300% year over year to $610 million of revenue. 

Anticipating future growth, senior engineers at the company wrote a 6-page narrative describing how Amazon’s architecture would need a radical overhaul to support 10x the order volume.

The change? A monolithic system architecture (called Obidos) to a service-oriented architecture. Amazon would separate the presentation layer, the business logic, and the data.

“The concepts in this document shaped what we see in microservices and event driven architectures.” - Werner Vogels

Bonus: The concept for "two-pizza teams" came from this architectural change. Amazon broke down the organization into small, autonomous teams focus on a specific service that powered the Amazon bookstore.

Are you hiring tech talent? Do you offer an awesome product? Contact our team to feature in this newsletter.

Jeff Bezos on acquiring Ring

From: Dave Limp
Sent: Friday, December 15, 2017 7:28 AM
To: Jeff Bezos
Cc: Peter Krawiec; Nick Komorous; Jeff Helbling; Douglas Booms
Subject: Ring update

Jeff,

I want to provide you with an update on Ring. Corp Dev and our legal team have been in regular contact with Ring over the past few weeks and… [read the full fact for the rest of the story!]

From: Jeff Bezos
To: Dave Limp
2.5 hours later

I'd buy it right now.

From: Dave Limp
Sent: Friday, December 15, 2017 7:28 AM
To: Jeff Bezos
Cc: Peter Krawiec; Nick Komorous; Jeff Helbling; Douglas Booms
Subject: Ring update

Jeff,

I want to provide you with an update on Ring. Corp Dev and our legal team have been in regular contact with Ring over the past few weeks and just learned that Ring has resolved its lawsuit with ADT. The two companies have reached a binding settlement that gives Ring the perpetual rights to use the Zonoff Z1 Platform, which means that Ring can use the Zonoff team to continue working on the Protect alarm system. [REDACTED]

We also have an update on Ring's financial performance. For the months of September and October, the company [REDACTED] Ring ended October with [REDACTED] paying subscribers, [REDACTED] households, [REDACTED] total users and [REDACTED] active devices. Ring has yet to close its books for November, but estimates that revenue will come in [REDACTED] above plan ([REDACTED]) but that EBITDA will be below budget. The company's topline outperformance and bottom line underperformance is largely attributable to increased marketing and QVC promotions, which is a lower margin channel.

Since we last discussed with you, Ring has been moving forward with its Series E round and now plans to raise a total of [REDACTED] in new capital at a pre-money valuation of [REDACTED]. The company is going to close the first [REDACTED] of the round tomorrow, with the remaining [REDACTED] closing sometime in the next few weeks. All of the Series E shares would be entitled to a [REDACTED] return if there is an acquisition within 18 months, thereby making an acquisition more expensive for non-Series E investors during that timeframe.

In light of these recent developments we are considering a few options including: 1) Move swiftly to put in an acquisition offer before the second Series E closing, 2) Participate in the Series E round as a way to stay close, 3) Do nothing and keep a close eye on them over the next year.

I am going to try to pull my team together early next week to form a more definitive recommendation as some of the folks don't have conviction yet. Let me know if you would like to be in the room for any of that debate?

Dave-

From: Jeff Bezos
Sent: Friday, December 15, 2017 9:52 AM

I'd buy it right now.

From: Jeff Bezos
Sent: Friday, December 15, 2017 10:18 AM

Maybe we should do the whole [REDACTED] of the first series E (the one that closes tomorrow) so we don't make the acquisition too expensive for ourselves.

From: Jeff Bezos
Sent: Friday, December 15, 2017 10:35 AM

We could immediately offer improved terms on tomorrow's hundred million. For example, only a [REDACTED] times preference instead of the [REDACTED].

From: Jeff Bezos
Sent: Friday, December 15, 2017 1:36 PM

To be clear, my view here is that we're buying market position – not technology. And that market position and momentum is very valuable.

Are you hiring tech talent? Do you offer an awesome product? Contact our team to feature in this newsletter.

Want to have your product or job featured to 80,000 readers?  Get in touch.

Source: Internal Tech Emails
Published: November 2022

Jeff Bezos on acquiring Ring

From: Dave Limp
Sent: Friday, December 15, 2017 7:28 AM
To: Jeff Bezos
Cc: Peter Krawiec; Nick Komorous; Jeff Helbling; Douglas Booms
Subject: Ring update

Jeff,

I want to provide you with an update on Ring. Corp Dev and our legal team have been in regular contact with Ring over the past few weeks and… [read the full fact for the rest of the story!]

From: Jeff Bezos
To: Dave Limp
2.5 hours later

I'd buy it right now.

From: Dave Limp
Sent: Friday, December 15, 2017 7:28 AM
To: Jeff Bezos
Cc: Peter Krawiec; Nick Komorous; Jeff Helbling; Douglas Booms
Subject: Ring update

Jeff,

I want to provide you with an update on Ring. Corp Dev and our legal team have been in regular contact with Ring over the past few weeks and just learned that Ring has resolved its lawsuit with ADT. The two companies have reached a binding settlement that gives Ring the perpetual rights to use the Zonoff Z1 Platform, which means that Ring can use the Zonoff team to continue working on the Protect alarm system. [REDACTED]

We also have an update on Ring's financial performance. For the months of September and October, the company [REDACTED] Ring ended October with [REDACTED] paying subscribers, [REDACTED] households, [REDACTED] total users and [REDACTED] active devices. Ring has yet to close its books for November, but estimates that revenue will come in [REDACTED] above plan ([REDACTED]) but that EBITDA will be below budget. The company's topline outperformance and bottom line underperformance is largely attributable to increased marketing and QVC promotions, which is a lower margin channel.

Since we last discussed with you, Ring has been moving forward with its Series E round and now plans to raise a total of [REDACTED] in new capital at a pre-money valuation of [REDACTED]. The company is going to close the first [REDACTED] of the round tomorrow, with the remaining [REDACTED] closing sometime in the next few weeks. All of the Series E shares would be entitled to a [REDACTED] return if there is an acquisition within 18 months, thereby making an acquisition more expensive for non-Series E investors during that timeframe.

In light of these recent developments we are considering a few options including: 1) Move swiftly to put in an acquisition offer before the second Series E closing, 2) Participate in the Series E round as a way to stay close, 3) Do nothing and keep a close eye on them over the next year.

I am going to try to pull my team together early next week to form a more definitive recommendation as some of the folks don't have conviction yet. Let me know if you would like to be in the room for any of that debate?

Dave-

From: Jeff Bezos
Sent: Friday, December 15, 2017 9:52 AM

I'd buy it right now.

From: Jeff Bezos
Sent: Friday, December 15, 2017 10:18 AM

Maybe we should do the whole [REDACTED] of the first series E (the one that closes tomorrow) so we don't make the acquisition too expensive for ourselves.

From: Jeff Bezos
Sent: Friday, December 15, 2017 10:35 AM

We could immediately offer improved terms on tomorrow's hundred million. For example, only a [REDACTED] times preference instead of the [REDACTED].

From: Jeff Bezos
Sent: Friday, December 15, 2017 1:36 PM

To be clear, my view here is that we're buying market position – not technology. And that market position and momentum is very valuable.

Are you hiring tech talent? Do you offer an awesome product? Contact our team to feature in this newsletter.

Want to have your product or job featured to 80,000 readers?  Get in touch.

Source: Scarlet Ink
Published: November 2022

Software Engineering Behaviors by Level

Junior engineer:
Take this design, and implement it.

Mid-level engineer:
Vague requirements? Design, and implement them.

Senior engineer:
A problem? Break it down, and get it solved.

Principal engineer:
In your org, choose the most critical goal, and identify how to make progress.

“It's always valuable to look at the next level and see if you're exhibiting those behaviors.” - Dave Anderson, Former Amazon Tech Director

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Source: 2011 Shareholder Letter
Published: April 2012

Amazon’s Self-Service Platforms

In Jeff Bezos’s 2011 shareholder letter, he writes:

“The most radical and transformative of inventions are often those that empower others to unleash their creativity—to pursue their dreams.”

Amazon Web Services: pay-as-you-go services that radically transform capital expense into a variable cost. AWS is self-service: you don’t need to negotiate a contract or engage with a salesperson—you can just read the online documentation and get started.

Fulfillment by Amazon: an easy-to-use console (Seller Central) or—for the more technically inclined—a set of APIs so that you can use the Amazon fulfillment center network like a giant computer peripheral.

Kindle Direct Publishing: authors can publish a book on their schedule instead of the typical year or more delay in traditional publishing. Authors keep 70% of the selling price instead of the 17.5% they’d get from big publishers.

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Update on November 17th: Bill Price was the first VP of Customer Service at Amazon. The article originally stated that David Jaffe (Bill’s co-author) help this position.

Source: The Amazon Way and The Best Service is No Service
Published: June 2021 and June 2008

Where’s my stuff?

The Problems

• 98% of all customer questions at a retailer like Amazon boil down to, “Where’s my stuff?” 

• Jeff Bezos believes that customers would prefer to solve a problem themselves instead of interacting with a customer service agent.

The Solution
In the early 2000s, Amazon invented a self-service tool called “Where’s my stuff?” that allows a customer to track their order from the fulfillment center to their front door. They can take similar actions that a customer service agent would have taken, but do it on their own time and access it 24/7.

The Impact
“Amazon has enjoyed a 90% reduction in its contacts per order (CPO), meaning it could keep customer care costs flat with a 9x increase in orders (revenue). This was a driver to the company’s profitability beginning in 2002.” - Bill Price, Amazon’s first VP of Customer Service

A screenshot of the current “help with an order” self-service experience.

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Source: Washington Secretary of State
Published: November 2022

Ballots Returned by Age Group

More than 120 million U.S. voters cast ballots in this year’s midterm elections, which closed last week. 

Of the ~5 million voters in the state of Washington (where I live 🙌), here are the ballots returned by age group.

Bonus: curious to read more? Try the 2020 New York Times article, “Why Don’t Young People Vote, and What Can Be Done About It?”

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Want to have your product or job featured to 80,000 readers?  Get in touch.

Source: The Amazon Way (page 21)
Published: June 2021

Own your dependency

At Amazon, one of your primary directives is to identify and tenaciously manage every potential business-derailing dependency you have. It is not okay to fail because of a breakdown of dependencies. 

In a 2003 S-Team meeting, Jeff [Bezos] broke down the process of managing dependencies into three easy steps (while, of course, yelling and wildly gesticulating like a madman): 

1. Whenever possible, take over the dependencies, so you don’t have to rely on someone else.

2. If that is impossible, negotiate and manage unambiguous and clear commitments from others.

3. Create hedges whenever possible. For every dependency, devise a fallback plan—a redundancy in a supply chain, for example.

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Source: The Amazon Way
Published: June 2021

Amazon’s Delivery Promise for pink iPods

Context
In the early 2000s, Amazon ordered 4,000 pink iPods from Apple for Christmas. Customers had already placed orders for them and had delivery promises.

Problem
In mid-November, Apple contacted Amazon and said, “We can’t get you the pink iPods you ordered in time for Christmas. We’re transitioning iPods from a disk drive to a hard drive memory, and we don’t want to make any more using the old technology.”

Solution
Amazon employees went out and bought 4,000 pink iPods at retail stores and brought them to Amazon’s Seattle HQ. Employees hand-sorted them and repackaged them so they could be received at an Amazon fulfillment center and then sent to customers. It killed the profit margin on the iPods, but it enabled Amazon to keep a promise made to a customer.

Learning
While other retailers may have apologized to their customers and canceled their orders, that didn’t adhere to Amazon’s Leadership Principles of customer obsession and earn trust. It would have been easy to just cancel the orders. 

During the following weekly business review (WBR), the team explained to Bezos what they did and why. He nodded approvingly and said, “I hope you’ll get in touch with Apple and try to get our money back from the bastards.” 

Bonus: Ultimately, Apple grudgingly split the cost difference with Amazon. Regardless, it was the right decision for customers.

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Source: Visual Capitalist
Published: November 2022

Gen Z’s Favorite Brands Compared to Older Generations

Compared to Millennials, Gen X, and Boomers, who may not care as much for these 10 brands, Gen Z—currently between 9-25 years old—loves them.

Bonus: Gen Z’s favorite brands overall are #1 YouTube, #2 Google, #3 Netflix, #4 Amazon, and #5 M&Ms.

Are you hiring tech talent? Do you offer an awesome product? Contact our team to feature in this newsletter.