Category: Building a business
-
SHSAT Buddy in 2025: What We Built, What We Learned, and What’s Next
2025 was a great first step for SHSAT Buddy. The goal wasn’t just to ship an app — it was to understand whether modern tooling, AI-generated content, and thoughtful UX could meaningfully help students preparing for one of the most high-stakes, under-resourced middle school exams in the country. Here’s how the year unfolded. What We…
-
Saving an old, but favorite, vision statement
I’m rebuilding my LinkedIn profile to reflect what’s next. I want to build businesses, and not just products. Not just any business, but a business that helps small businesses thrive in a world where corporations have a huge head start, and just keep getting further ahead. To tell that story on LinkedIn requires rebuilding my…
-
Winning startups develop their process muscles from the beginning
Startup mythology tells us to avoid process at all cost. It’s bureaucratic. It’s a big company control mechanism. It stops the only advantage that startups have – speed. The mythology is wrong. Every business needs to build 3 simple processes into their DNA from the very beginning: Define the next set of milestones for the…
-
PM Hygiene: Push (everyone’s) bias out of your product regularly
Stop me fellow Product Manager if you’ve never heard some version of this line – Well, I’d never do {BEHAVIOR}, and so our customers would never do {BEHAVIOR}, and therefore this is the wrong decision Expectancy Bias is one of the key biases that Product Managers must fight in themselves, and break down in any…
-
What’s old is new again – CES Edition
I think I finally understand the moral of the story of Rip Van Winkle. Except instead of finding the answer in a beautiful corner of upstate New York, my revelation came in the Las Vegas Convention Center. You see, had you attended CES about 10 years ago, and then found yourself a corner of the…
-
I build rocket ships
I’ve decided to refresh how people see me across various networks. One of those is LinkedIn where my summary is the one I wrote as a college student… which is now almost 10 years old. Here’s a cross-posting of the new, updated summary. I’ll post the old one tomorrow for posterity sake. I build rocket…
-
Moving faster than the documentation
I’ve decided to hop back into the game, and build a new app. I’m not announcing what it is yet because it’s no where near ready, but I really like the idea. I’ve also decided to be really trendy, and use the latest in software development tools. This kills many birds with one stone: Challenge…
-
Focusing on appreciation
We’re an extremely email happy culture at TokBox. We have automated emails, out of office emails, working from home emails, and then just a bunch of emails about getting things done. As I’ve been drowning in email lately, I started to notice a pattern that I really don’t like. In an effort to move through…
-
Learning to let go
I always tell people that I have 3 babies: Amelia Luka OpenTok And all three have had an amazing year. They’ve gone from needing epic hand holding to having a village around them that makes them better than I could alone. At work, the hardest part has been learning to trust that others can love…
-
6 years later
I started at TokBox six years ago today. It’s been an amazing journey to say the least. I interviewed with 20 companies my 5th year of college. I got a ton of first round interviews because I’d worked my ass off to build a killer internship resume. I just couldn’t close the door though on…