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brennanm

228 karma · joined November 30, 2011

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brennanm··on Open-sourcing AudioCraft: Generative AI for audio
This makes no sense.

How is pressing a key on a piano different from pressing a key on an electronic piano?

brennanm··on Launch HN: Hypercontext (YC S21) – Meeting notes, actions, and OKRs in one app
Not company wide, but definitely paying and a great relationship with folks at Netflix.
brennanm··on Launch HN: Hypercontext (YC S21) – Meeting notes, actions, and OKRs in one app
They’re giving feedback on the experience. Nothing was broken, just confusing.

Using HN for feedback is pretty core to YC’s value for batch companies and has been going on for quite some time

brennanm··on Launch HN: Hypercontext (YC S21) – Meeting notes, actions, and OKRs in one app
We have a small team starter plan that's $5 total for your first 5 users.

Also, we'll only charge you for additional users if you a) invite them and b) they sign in and become active.

So definitely can stay at $5/m and use it as a personal tool for as long as you want to. It's on the product to convince you your life can be significantly easier through inviting people, not me

brennanm··on Launch HN: Hypercontext (YC S21) – Meeting notes, actions, and OKRs in one app
Noah! Thanks for commenting.

Re - ML on feedback: Customers/users haven't taken us there, yet, anyways.

Would love to jam more, if you're open to it? brennan at hypercontext.com?

brennanm··on Launch HN: Hypercontext (YC S21) – Meeting notes, actions, and OKRs in one app
It's volume pricing for users above that threashold, if that makes sense.

So, the first 100 users are $5.60/u/m or $560/m, if annual (to keep numbers consistent).

101 users would be $564/m as only the 101st user would be $4/m on the annual plan.

We stole this model from jira.

brennanm··on Launch HN: Hypercontext (YC S21) – Meeting notes, actions, and OKRs in one app
All good man. Enjoy google docs
brennanm··on Launch HN: Hypercontext (YC S21) – Meeting notes, actions, and OKRs in one app
Amazing. Would love as much feedback as you can muster if you want to send it my way: brennan @ hypercontext.com
brennanm··on Launch HN: Hypercontext (YC S21) – Meeting notes, actions, and OKRs in one app
You're doing gods works here. Thanks so much. Please do ask for a reset when you get the chance and/or email me directly brennan at hypercontext.com would love more feedback like this
brennanm··on Launch HN: Hypercontext (YC S21) – Meeting notes, actions, and OKRs in one app
Spotted - Yeah we rebranded from Soapbox about 30 days ago.

https://hypercontext.com/blog/news/soapbox-rebrand-hypercont...

brennanm··on Launch HN: Hypercontext (YC S21) – Meeting notes, actions, and OKRs in one app
I 100% hear you here. Meetings are inherently pretty viral, so stopping the multiplayer is actually quite hard. We've had to manage it in app fairly deliberately as user growth can happen too quickly and customers can get frustrated.

The main value for experienced managers is a) the ability to offload the mental energy of remembering to bring something up in a meeting, b) the sheer volume of direct reports that need to becared for, and for organizers c) some of the best practice busy work that accumulates value over time (eg: sending notes after the meeting). Actually have quite a few CEOs who have adopted

My only nit is we don't want to mediate a human interaction in app. Instead we want to encourage human interaction by removing as much of the the non-human interaction as we can.

brennanm··on Launch HN: Hypercontext (YC S21) – Meeting notes, actions, and OKRs in one app
Don't let us discourage you. There is room for multiple companies in any space worth building a startup in.

Happy to build this space with you, together. Competition is good for customers and ultimately that's who I'm serving.

Email me brennan at hypercontext.com and I'd be happy to collaborate.

brennanm··on Launch HN: Hypercontext (YC S21) – Meeting notes, actions, and OKRs in one app
Job Specs: - Manage 10 people - Code fixes in between meetings - Learn new technical concepts after hours - Management books/podcasts while you sleep - Nobel prize on PTO

Views on "stop coding" have been changing. https://randsinrepose.com/archives/technicality/

brennanm··on Launch HN: Hypercontext (YC S21) – Meeting notes, actions, and OKRs in one app
For the folks who don't want to click-> "[Peter Principle] observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to their 'maximum level of incompetence': employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another."

---

I agree. However, the average new manager goes 10yrs into their role before they get _any_ training. So I'm not sure if they're at fault here or if they've been setup to fail.

I'm sure most workers would be considered incompetent if they were put into roles where they had no experience or training.

Just takes a lot of trail and error to learn.

brennanm··on Launch HN: Hypercontext (YC S21) – Meeting notes, actions, and OKRs in one app
We launched the goals library Sept last year and it's been growing slowly ever since. Still more to do on it (and other large/free/helpful resources like our template library https://hypercontext.com/agenda-templates)

Most of the initial goals were contributed by our network so it was built pretty quickly.

brennanm··on Launch HN: Hypercontext (YC S21) – Meeting notes, actions, and OKRs in one app
In my head, Hera is more of a merge of something like apple reminders and apple notes. More of a single-player experience for productivity.

Superpowered has a bunch of similar concepts - however their launch claims that meeting events won't be the focus forever. Moving to github and slack soon. So we'll see.

There are a couple others in the batch that will be launching soon that are loosely competitive.

I think it's part of a broader recognition that people who "live out of their calendars" weren't having an easy 2020.

For what it's worth, we think meetings are the means to the end not the end, not the end itself.

brennanm··on Launch HN: Hypercontext (YC S21) – Meeting notes, actions, and OKRs in one app
Yup - definitely have been competitive with them for a while now. Great for innovation in the space for sure.

They're a bit more "sell to HR" focused and we're more "biuld for the end user" focused - eg: They don't have goals but do have workplace analytics

brennanm··on Launch HN: Hypercontext (YC S21) – Meeting notes, actions, and OKRs in one app
We've looked at that and found it's been more beneficial for folks to use one or two of our canned conversation starters to uncover something they wouldn't have otherwise talked about.

Definitely something I think about though.

brennanm··on Launch HN: Hypercontext (YC S21) – Meeting notes, actions, and OKRs in one app
We've disguising a career change as a promotion since 0 BC
brennanm··on Show HN: OKR Example Directory – Incl. Roles Like DevOps, VP Eng, etc.
Absolutely. We're working on adding more and more!
brennanm··on Show HN: OKR Example Directory – Incl. Roles Like DevOps, VP Eng, etc.
Direct link if you want to skip straight to engineering examples: https://soapboxhq.com/goal-examples/engineering

The examples are actually in our app (Soapbox) but we decided to surface them publicly as a resource for anyone to use whenever they do goals.

Hoping it's valuable for inspiration

brennanm··on Keeping the team accountable with a daily scrum meeting agenda
Curious to hear if people's daily scrum is changing dramatically with everyone being WFH?
brennanm··on RACI matrix: What, how, why
Often see startups use this between product/engineering/cs/sales/marketing in maybe b2b saas companies.
brennanm··on A crisis. Not a remote movement
Personally, I'm getting sick of listicles of remote tips.
brennanm··on 2 in 5 Canadians quit their jobs because of bad bosses
100% agree with this. Built our startup around this concept. Most managers have no idea how to be "good" and receive no training... largely stumbling through using trial and error on their direct reports.
brennanm··on Show HN: Our Meeting Assistant Powered by AI
Hi All,

Excited to share the launch of our ai-powered bot. Our slack-bot does all the things you'd expect a bot to do (help setup meetings, add agenda items, etc)...

BUT what we're launching is additional intelligence (conversational insights and analytics) with a completely rewritten user-experience.

Happy to answer questions here or on Producthunt! (https://www.producthunt.com/posts/ai-meeting-assistant-by-so...)

brennanm··on 8 Engineers share candid feedback about 1-on-1s
Anyone else have pet-peeves about 1:1s?
brennanm··on 8 Engineers Share Candid Feedback about 1:1 Meetings
Author here! Happy to share more about what I learned in the interviews.
brennanm··on Ask HN: Going from Developer to Manager. What should I know or learn?
Couple recommendations that are popular with people who've been managing for a while:

- Managing Humans by Michael Lopp

- The Managers Path by Camille Fournier

- Radical Candor by Kim Scott

I think the netflix culture deck is also helpful: https://igormroz.com/documents/netflix_culture.pdf

And if you want to peak at how other managers manage check this out: https://hackernoon.com/12-manager-readmes-from-silicon-valle...

Or check out this podcast on the topic: https://anchor.fm/soapbox/episodes/6-Melissa-and-Johnathan-N...

brennanm··on A $10k Startup Retreat (Behind-The-scenes and Tell-All)
Thanks!
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