Start-ups

Any company that makes data-driven decisions needs to have easy access to comprehensive views of their application's data. Average order value (AOV), customer lifetime value (CLV), cart abandonment rates, etc. are all crucial to understanding where to focus development efforts to maximize the...

I was the 3rd engineer when I started at thredUP. Scrum consisted of two co-founders and two engineers. We all did full-stack development, design work, CS tickets, bugs, QA, and maintained the servers. We weren't qualified to do most of that, but our resources were so limited that we were...

To build something great, you need to have the drive to do it right and the opportunity available to make it happen. Most companies hire internally for a position like 'Lead Mobile' so your only hope is to join a team, put a couple years in to prove yourself, and eventually you might be promoted....

Employee equity has always been a nebulous topic for me. Every time I thought I understood how it worked, I would read or hear something that made me question my understanding. Thank goodness people like Fred Wilson exist. He is a venture capitalist, blogger, and a budding professor. The video I...

When I started working at thredUP a little over a year ago, I was the 5th full-time, non-founder employee. During that year, the user base has grown over 15x and there's now 22 people working at thredUP including the founders. We've been moving fast and there's been a lot to learn in the process....

Until recently, I was under the impression that my obsessive use of checklists was just a way for me to ensure nothing slipped through the cracks. Then something entirely changed my outlook on checklists. In mid April, Jack Dorsey tweeted he was giving out copies of The Checklist Manifesto to...

When you work at a start-up, you're not given a bulleted feature spec. document detailing every design detail, each UI interaction a user will experience, or how every page of a feature is supposed to flow. Although it can vary, you're usually given three things: what the feature is, why we are...

When you're creating a new feature or adding functionality to your web app, you typically don't have time to dive into the minutia of every aspect of how the feature will look, behave, and function. Obviously you can indulge yourself into that level of detail, but it is typically the most time...

This post is more so a running inner dialogue as I have not completely figured out how to successfully throttle my efforts to achieve maximum output without ever reaching the burn-out phase.

When you first start at a job, everything is exciting and you're able to work your ass off to get near the...

I'll start this post off with some irony. I felt inspired to write this post...about 3 months ago. I was at the airport waiting for a delayed flight and wanted to make good use of my unanticipated downtime. It's only fitting that I'll be finishing this post 3 months later at the same airport...

The following was written by Mark Suster (original post found here) regarding new hires and start-ups:

Join our company if you think you’ll learn from being here.  I think you will.

Join if you think your career will progress because you’ll be given more responsibilities than elsewhere and...

thredUP operates in 2-week sprints. This means that every two weeks teams are either transitioning to or already working on their next project. Personally, I love this project management methodology and would urge other teams/companies to look into this strategy for a variety of reasons. Since I...