Jaren Glover @jarenglover - Tumblr Blog

metrics rule everything around me

I earned my fair share of gray hairs being an early member of the #ops team at Robinhood. I had the unique privilege of scaling compute and improving observability while Robinhood shipped great products—Crypto, Gold, Options, and many more. Product success drove data scale. The volume of metrics flowing from Nginx, Kafka, and AWS hosts began to compound. The resulting cost curves and ownership requirements became untenable for a lean infrastructure team.

We had some early success with HBase (h/t Aravind) and Prometheus (h/t JZ), but we hit a wall once storage needed to be distributed and durable without sacrificing latency. Prometheus had just started efforts to enable a new backend storage engine, which led me down the path of researching distributed time-series databases—Thanos, Cortex, and M3DB.

Around this time, I met Sarah Guo for lunch. There was a ton of yapping about code and culture that eventually concluded with a suggestion to chat with a company Jerry was spending time with.

This led to a wide-ranging conversation with Martin Mao. He possessed a refreshing clarity about the specific pain, problem, and market opportunity. Martin was joined by Rob, the creator of M3DB and former tech lead for the M3 platform at Uber. Together, they were a set of leaders who understood systems, scale, and the commercial impact of executing properly. Rob and Martin were astute. They could have taken their expertise with M3DB and offered it as a standalone storage solution to the masses. Instead, they leveraged their expertise to attack the broader observability market.

My interpretation of their thesis: The world would see more internet-scale businesses viewing metrics as mission-critical, but refusing to accept unbounded cost and ownership burdens.

The Chronosphere team was right. Nikesh Arora agreed, too - concluding the acquisition of Chronosphere for $3.35B.

In a future increasingly driven by AI applications, I am excited about their partnership. I was fortunate to partner with them in 2019, so it brings me joy to watch the people who joined the mission thrive - Kirsten, Raskin, Sidney, Brandon, and Charles. Lastly to Rob and Martin, who formed like Voltron: I am very grateful to have aligned with the company early. When a great founding team, new technology, and a fertile market intersect – David can challenge the throne of Goliath.

Metronome

This week, the Metronome team officially joined Stripe to start their second chapter. They built a compelling product suite for customers, and now the team gets to continue slaying dragons in the GenAI usage-driven world.

The Metronome partnership fits into one of my favorite investment mental models: David vs Goliath. I believe incumbents' thrones are at risk when the environment is fertile enough. In Metronome’s case: a) a nuanced technical “why now” unlocked by production-grade real-time processing with Kafka b) Zuora’s low NPS c) the market evolution from seat-based to API-based pricing. I vividly remember my first meeting with Kevin and Scott. They had mentioned to Elad that they were looking for an engineering perspective at the table.

I went to meet the team for coffee in January 2020 at South Park Cafe (RIP), where Kevin provided some context, then Scott took out his notebook, and we had this amazing back-and-forth conversation about the data infrastructure options and tradeoffs. It was challenging, but fun—the kind of conversation that tells you someone is serious about building the right foundation. They wanted to make sound technical decisions that would give them product latitude.

I was lucky to partner with the team at the Seed and Series A, and that partnership enabled us to source and close multiple engineering hires. It brings me so much joy to see them thrive professionally and personally.

Thanks, Team Metronome – Casey, Pancake, Fego, Suyog, Korede, Daniel, Erica, and everyone else who built this brick by brick.

Jaren M. Glover

No Cheat Codes

I could feel it in the air.

The nervousness from liquidating my newly built retirement to fund a move. The weight of imposter syndrome. The optimism fueled by dreams and naïveté.

Ten years ago—the first Monday of 2016—was my first full day in the Bay Area.

How did a quirky middle child from North Louisiana make it to Palo Alto?

You know, I can still recall the intoxicating feeling of a sunrise warming my skin on a Saturday morning, after working all night, trying to break into the Bay Area.

I had no priors, no social capital. Just a supportive partner, a dollar, and a dream – after retooling my skills from 10,000 hours in my Cincinnati apartment.

The memories are faint, but I recall the weather being clean and the office feeling focused yet inviting. Someone was ripsticking across the office – did I find my tribe?

The Robinhood interview a few months prior concluded with a knowledge-wielding Vlad answering my questions with unassuming but formidable energy. Then finally, a long walk with Baiju, whose charm could enchant an inland taipan. The first day wasn’t climactic. It was word gumbo: “SaltStack,” “Phabricator,” and “IPsec VPNs.”

The trade was obvious. The upside was asymmetric: build a high-quality trading product, acquire transferable open-source skills (Django/Python), and absorb the palpable design sauce.

If I was wrong? I still got relocated to the Bay and proved I was a live player. Worst case, my Palo Alto brother Zuck would still be hiring.

I tend to think about life in decade increments. This first decade gave me clarity, confidence, and community—a firm foundation to keep compounding into the next one.

There were mistakes, missed opportunities, and mayhem.

I was raw, and the irritant of life formed me like a pearl.

It is poetic that I am drafting this from Palo Alto, not far from where I started the adventure.

Let’s build the next decade together - brick x brick. In health, wisdom, and faith in the unknown Jaren M. Glover

It is very rare to find a leader with high product standards who can transition from a Figma file to NACHA files to the latest KYC best practices. That’s just a light Monday morning before her coffee for Amanda Peyton.

Today Amanda is publicly announcing her vision for Pool with Alex Konrad.

Pool: When you need to do financial tasks with N people.

What would innovation on the traditional checking account account look like? What experiences or workflows could you unlock if N people could seamlessly engage with a single pool of capital? There would need to be a layer of software abstractions that solve for general ledger actions, but also for regulatory and fraud nuances.

Coordinating money is a combination of art and skill. It becomes even more difficult when you want a buttery-smooth experience that requires fundability, trackability, spendability, and controls from a single pool of capital.

Enter Pool: Pool is for people who have ongoing financial relationships. These relationships require money to move around with trust built via transparency, accountability, and auditability.

I had the privilege of partnering with Pool at the earliest stages and I’m excited to see their continued growth. You can read more about the announcement here. Jaren M. Glover

On a brisk day in October 2022, I went on a walk with a friend to talk about life and early stage investing, and it ended with us watching ducks together. I explained how my non-traditional background—being from the south, working on a shop floor, and driving GE's migration to the public cloud— influenced my perspective on investing in code, capital, and culture. She soon introduced me to Wiley Jones.

Wiley is a world class engineer who had entrepreneurial exposure via Sprite Robotic (acquired by Apple), Verkada, and Athelas. His earned insight was forged over years thanks to time spent as a hardware engineer on both sides of the supply chain. He uses that experience and empathy as the north star for building Odonata Doss.

Wiley asked Arnav Misra, Bay Area local legend who was a co-conspirator at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, to join as his co-founder. Arnav was familiar with building systems of record, selling to enterprises, and scaling under pressure thanks to time at Siteline, Rubrik, and Uber.

I came to the ERP market with a bit of empathy and an inside view. I spent half a decade at GE Aviation, where we used both Oracle and SAP, and worked within the supply chain as IT manager in Batesville, MS. My time in Mississippi needs a 30 for 30 documentary - a story for another day.

I was lucky to partner with the Doss team pre-product at the seed stage and become one of their core investors of record.

There is something magical about a team having clarity on day zero, great partnership, and meeting customers where they are while helping them dream bigger. In the last two years, Doss devised a novel ERP architecture designed for both humans and LLMs. Under the hood, the platform is entirely composable. It’s a loosely connected collection of databases, cloud services, and workflows.

We live in a world where COVID exposes the fragility of every single supply chain. As a result, supply chain technology was forcefully propelled into the future. There's now more technology on the shop floor/warehouse/factory, an acceptance of the cloud, and the curiosity of AI.

Doss announced their $18M Series A today to unlock the agility of the global supply chain. We are excited to welcome Tomasz Tunguz and Andy Triedman of Theory Ventures to the journey.

You can read more: Doss's announcement + Alex Konrad’s coverage

Early stage investing is full of serendipity. Thanks to Alana Goyal for introducing me to Wiley after our jam session with the ducks.

brick x brick

Software Engineering Daily

more code, capital, and culture with Jeff at Software Engineer Daily ...

we discussed observability, distributed systems, why “time” is hard, and the tooling used to scaled Robinhood the last 5 years.

listen here. tweet here.

take care.

My Name Is My Name

Earlier this year, I created my first podcast artifact with Andy Qin on Business Logic. It was recorded in February.

It feels like this was a millennium ago now. To say, a lot has transpired since then would be an understatement.

During the podcast, I discussed my origin story then transition into the below topics:

Distributed systems and event streaming

Crafting a narrative around your career

How engineers are using startups to align incentives

Many more nuanced topics

Apple Podcasts YouTube Google Podcasts

Thanks for listening.

for the record

I was up early tweeting with Andrew who started his morning with a take on the lack of business wisdom from some books.

He was nice enough to share a larger list with us. The must reads from his list are Venture Deals, Bill Gurley’s blogs, and Creativity Inc.

I decided to quickly put together my list.

This list will be a living organism and therefore evolve overtime.

Let’s call it a starter kit for the inputs in how I execute code, capital, and culture as a strategy.

Moats:

Measuring the Moat by Michael Mauboussin

The Four Sources of Alpha by Michael Mauboussin

Risk:

The Case for Risk - Rebekah Cox

Risk, Risk Revisited, Risk Revisited Again - Howard Marks

Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk

Venture

Creative Capital (the primary sources are amazing)

eBoys by Randall Stross

Oral History on Don Valentine, Arthur Rock, and Gordon Moore,

Watch “Something Ventured“

Bill Gurley’s Oral History on Pando Daily and Gigaom interview

Michael Dearing on Capitalism, Creativity, and Creative Destruction

VC by Tom Nicholas where they discuss Slater’s Mill, Risk Captial, and California non compete (only first few chapters)

Read from the book of David Swensen .... but don’t practice it because we are not Yale nor David

Chris Douvos Has Three Youtube Videos from the LPs perspective

Venture Deals followed by Fred Wilson’s Blogs

Elad Gil: circa 2010-2015s posts on the Markets and Tactical Early Years

Mike Maples on Seed Investing via Village Global Podcast

Mitch Lasky’s OG blog on e-sports, gaming, etc (via wayback machine)

When Mary Meeker writes ... you read.

Talent

Talent is the Best Asset class by Graham Duncan

Thinking

The Playing Field by Graham Duncan

Revisionist History - Malcom Gladwell

Charlie Munger on Incentives

Increasing Returns by Brian Arthur

Bio / History

A Short History of Financial Euphoria

WBEZ’s Making Oprah

Watch or Read The Ascent of Money

How Sean Combs broker label deal with Clive Davis or the deal with Diageo

How Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine via The Defiant Ones

In Da Queue

Fortune’s Formula

The Partnership by Charles Ellis

Disney War

The End of Theory

Building Atlanta

Ole Peter’s Ergodicity Economics work

The Three C’s: Code

There is something efficient and impactful in having a succinct way to introduce yourself to a stranger. I recently converged on the following way to introduce myself, I call it the Triple C’s.

It goes something like this:

My name is Jaren Glover. I am an early engineer at Robinhood who cares about three things: Code, Capital, and Culture. This means if you want to talk about complex systems like distributed systems, finance instruments like term sheets, or musical masterpieces like DMX’s first two albums. I am your guy.

The above sounds like a lovely Venn diagram that concisely exemplifies my quirks and obsessions interests.

Today we will focus on Code and the respective journey to the exposure.

This I hope will help people better understand my unique perspective and the lens in which I process information.

In mid-2013, I decided that I wanted to relocate to Silicon Valley, but had a cold start problem. I didn’t have the skills, the “pedigree,” or the network. Luckily for me I am a default optimist, relentlessly ensuring that I don’t become a victim in this imperfect society

I had found myself at 25 interacting with leadership that had hit their Peter Principle despite having a relatively successful career at General Electric. So in 2014 while in a career cross roads, I attended a conference titled Strange Loop in St. Louis.

I left the conference mesmerized and hypothesized that maybe my way into the far away land of Silicon Valley would be via managing complex systems at scale for Google or Facebook Series A startups. Fast forward to Q4 2015, I found myself in an interview with Robinhood and started soon after our meeting. I was onboarded to the firm’s complex systems by our award winning Data Team.

I was quickly presented with the ownership of stabilizing our critical data pipeline which was built with Elasticsearch, Kafka, and Zookeeper. This request was presented at a time where my knowledge of these systems at production scale was nonexistent. However, when a fertile environment intercepts with a naive relentless human with a high slope sometimes magic happens and the execution follows.

My intellectual flywheel had initiated.

The end result was me scaling most of Robinhood’s distributed systems to support the customer growth from 100K users to 10 Million. These systems included Kafka, Zookeeper, Consul, Elasticsearch and a few other systems I forgot in my journey. The lessons learned were the inputs for my SRECon and Kafka Summit presentation.

The cloud is a fickle place where the sky is never blue and grass is never green. Therefore, these open source systems fail in every increasing number of ways. Nonetheless, our end users still demand low latency, seamless failover, and expanding storage requirements.

What a time to be alive and scaling complex systems, tools and organizations.

The experiences of the last four years have allow me to develop a unique point of view that’s been quite palpable.

Finally, I end the year completely energized by what I am reading and seeing in the world of “Code”. I am super inspired by the the engineer/product leaders leaving their safe haven of big tech to productize their systems to delight a broader set of customers at scale.

I look forward in hearing from you in 2020. More Life

Foundations

The below quote really captures the pillars of my career belief system. This reflection and thinking is the foundation in which I developed my thesis on why I should leave my apartment in Ohio and head west.

... innovation, risk-taking, and an unwavering belief in human potential -- in human form.

Spencer E. Ante on Georges Doriot

I recall thinking to myself: “This is why my ancestors, friends, and family members left the south during the great migration.

I was in pursuit of an opportunity to bet on myself, gain leverage, and a method to extract value.

The city never sleeps

Last week, I was in New York City for the first time in roughly 5 years. It is amazing how NYC has great transportation and buildings taller than 4 stories. The city exudes a certain high level of focus and grit. I trekked to Brooklyn from Palo Alto to speak at SRECon. I presented a talked titled “Tackling Kafka, with a Small Team”. The most interesting part about the trip was the people, both engineers and founders. This post with focus on the latter. I mentioned to my mentor “Where are the NYC Angels”? Those founders and early employees who benefited from the recent NYC liquidity. Why aren't they writing angel checks? You can't walk into a San Francisco Philz coffee in the Mission district and not see 3 angels. A healthy angel ecosystem is important to keeping the NY tech scene thriving. They clearly have great institutional firms. It's a shame, because I met with some great founders while in the city that never sleeps. Honestly, my plan was to execute on my presentation and meet some modern friends. It turned out some of my modern friends were founders too. They were the type of founder that I admire. Founders who have acquired unique nuance insights in their respective spaces. Consequently, they left me reflective on the problem space and inspired by their fervor. I try once every ~1.5 months to interject myself into new places with people who push me outside my vacuum. This really challenges my mental cadence and doubles as a refresher. It often helps me regain clarity on the importance of striving for higher standards and focus. A succinct reminder that I didn't relocate to the Bay from Louisiana for second place. Where they do that at? Stay low and keep firing ...

the great good luck

"The best position is for people to think you are crazy.. that's the great good luck" - B. Diller

"None of this is mine ... I wanted to be a principle" - B. Diller

In the above video Barry describes a great dialogue between Barry Diller and Rupert Murdoch.

#luck #barry diller

Customer Obsession

I’ve spent the past few months focused on scaling our systems. In an effort to re-focus on the customer, I’ve attended product sessions driven by our user research team. Ironically, the day prior I had an illuminating conversation with an engineer at Bird, who shared her framework for maintaining customer focus.

Customer ... Customer.... CUSTOMER

One of my favorite pastimes is reading Uncle Jeff’s shareholder letters. The below excerpt is about customer obsession and the crowd that forms around those seeking instant gratification.

Seek instant gratification – or the elusive promise of it – and chances are you’ll find a crowd there ahead of you. Long-term orientation interacts well with customer obsession. If we can identify a customer need and if we can further develop conviction that that need is meaningful and durable, our approach permits us to work patiently for multiple years to deliver a solution. “Working backwards” from customer needs can be contrasted with a “skills-forward” approach where existing skills and competencies are used to drive business opportunities. The skills-forward approach says, “We are really good at X. What else can we do with X?” That’s a useful and rewarding business approach. However, if used exclusively, the company employing it will never be driven to develop fresh skills. Eventually the existing skills will become outmoded. Working backwards from customer needs often demands that we acquire new competencies and exercise new muscles, never mind how uncomfortable and awkward-feeling those first steps might be. - Uncle Jeff B

The “awkward-feelings” for me is often imposter syndrome. It is clear to me a mental gymnastics exercise is required to drive forward progress.

Follow me now and listen to your customers needs and “handle your biz and don’t be cryin’ and suffering” ...

I got a story to tell

“Good Judgment Comes with Experience, But Experience Comes from Bad Judgment”

A young Terrance Thornton once gave some great career advice in “I blow my own dice before I toss em.” That is to say, you can't control the deck nor the dealer, but you're still responsible for the impact, intent, and execution of every card played in your career. It's a game where it's so easy to play victim.

In my decade of working, I've often re-learned two lessons more times than I care to admit. I've found myself working hard on stupid projects that were not the most important. Secondly, not communicating my value correctly when I've actually worked on the utmost imperative venture. Let's break these two lessons down like a four and a half. There is so much white noise that generates faux tailwinds that lead people to think they've actually created value. The reality is there is so little time, but so many Asana tasks. Yes, everything “could” be important, but not everything is critical to the creation of value for your customer. Consequently, if everything is important then nothing is important. The power of discernment becomes critical when you are triaging your daily, weekly, and yearly tasks. To be more specific, don't find yourself working hard on tasks that are not high-order bit. If you are JJ Redick Lebron James, you should be deploying your energy on the most high leverage task for your team, equity company, and consumer. I am not convinced today that the squeaky wheel gets the promotion grease. However, It's fair to say a closed mouth doesn't get fed anything. I've learned it's not what you say, but how you qualify and quantify it. Also as a company grows it becomes even more important to be more explicit vs inferring or thinking the arc will bend towards justice. I've been known to try and communicate my value or impact by saying “I've been working hard scrapping my knees” to scale, fix, resolve <insert board member emailable> issue. However, if I objectively reflect on how I was spending my energy, it was either in the wrong place or simply my communication didn't resonate. However, things were as lucid as a 90-inch Zenith when I spoke about how my efforts impacted the consumers and empowered a step function in growth. Treat your freedom career like Andy Dufresne did and “swim up shit's creek and come up clean”.

Wesley's Theory

via GIPHY

I'm finally able to pull my head up from the raging waters of scaling a high growth company. The past 12 months have been a great forcing function on my loose opinions and hypotheses. I will share a few of them over the next couple of posts.

Pardon me as I channel my inner Duckworth:

What happens when raw intelligence isn't enough? It's cool to know the right answer, but the major key is having a cadence of execution. One can't mentor or teach someone the obsessive daily traits it takes to do or build something of significance. The geolocation of becoming the best version of yourself is often in a room filled with discomfort and urgency.

After the threshold of intellect, I find myself trying to decipher new associates not on their y-intercept, but instead on their slope. How fast can they learn a new concept and execute with right quality for the time?

This reminds me of this tweet I once read. "Relentlessness doesn’t just appear sua sponte"

A self-sustaining ecosystem

I re-watch this interview of Troy Carter a handful of times each year. Mr. Carter tells a rich story about the power of enterprise and ownership. Kenny Gamble, of Philadelphia International Records fame, understood the power of a platform. The platform in question wasn't crafted by him or your favorite internet company. This one was a music platform built by Spotify radio stations and Columbia Records. .

Gamble and Huff built a multifaceted business, and then captured value in the ecosystem via publishing, masters, and recoding studios.

However, Troy in the interview admits he didn't learn from his sage elders and concedes; “We didn't own anything.”

In the brave new world of streaming, musical artists understand the long term value of their intellectual property. We now live in a world where a classic album can spin out royalties for decades. If you need convincing just listen to 2 Chains or SZA (via Iovine) talk about deploying leverage. There is a great Irv Gotti interview where he informs us non-music executives that contracts are meant to be re-negotiated when the leverage and clout increases. This is why the best founders get the smallest dilution. Their cost of capital is the lowest. <fire emoji>

Tidal is a steaming service that I gladly pay monthly to consume imaginative on demand content. They are uniquely positioned to acquire the highest quality authentic content at scale. Yes, Larry Jackson and Jimmy Iovine Eddy Cue can do what Tidal can't do ... lure the unfathomable Aubrey Graham with a 8 figured wire transfer. Nonetheless, Tidal has positioned itself amongst the upper echelon artists that are cutting their teeth on the edge of culture. These very same artists are also compelled to provide Tidal with first look content. Culture creates this magical forcing function that separates creators with and without staying power.

Yet, I'm left speechless on why in the world they would they allow for their content to be released to Youtube's streaming platform. Tidal's only competitive advantage (albeit limited) as a company is being the tastemaker’s choice content distributor. Why would a content provider build their platform on another competing content provider? These are questions that need answers. This is why Skillshare or Ellen isn't building their content on top of Youtube.

They are diluting their platform advantages at a rate that their last investor will never recoup.

Can someone give Tidal's current CEO a copy of Ben Thompson's Aggregation Theory or an oral history of Reed Hastings most recent company? Actually, maybe I as the writer am wrong by implying Tidal or any streaming service is a platform? The best definition of a platform I've read is from William Henry Gates

A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform.

leverage

Is this thing still on? I guess Yahoo Oath is stilling paying Tumblr's server invoices. How kind of them! I am drafting this note at some hotel's bar in Los Angeles. I just came back from a walk from the local mall to get another, *DJ Khaled voice*, smoothie. Yes, I am a sucker for a delicious smoothie and introspective walks. While in the mall I walked into the Amazon store, first timer here, and found myself reading this article by Hollywood Reporter.

The article discusses a concept I meditate reflects a lot about ... leverage. How do I create leverage and increase it over time? I've noticed how conversations tones are different when the cloud of leverage or perceived leverage is in the room.

Pompeo had plenty of leverage. Grey's has been drawing nearly 12 million viewers 300-plus episodes in, making it ABC's No. 2 drama, behind only fall 2017 entry The Good Doctor.

Then Aunty Shonda dropped a major key.

Decide what you think you're worth and then ask for what you think you're worth. Nobody's just going to give it to you.

This reminds me of a GQ article I re-read or share quarterly. This article’s backdrop is Lebron and Nike allegedly signed billion dollar contract if all provisions are met. In the article Maverick Carter is asked:

So my question is, how much of what I make for somebody else should I get? If I make someone else $100, how much should I take home? Thirty? Forty?

Maverick responded.

There is no algorithm. There's simply this: You never get what you deserve, you only get what you negotiate. So if you can negotiate for $99 after making someone $100—that's what you're worth.

Now with Meredith new found understanding of the unit economics, thanks to CAA, of the television business, she went to the biggest bawse, Rhimes, and said:

I need to be incentivized. I need to feel empowered and to feel ownership of this show.

If I didn't know better, I would have thought Pompeo was listening to Nipsey Hussle's The Marathon. Now Pompeo’s contract is like 91 Dan Marino. Therefore as I stroll into the new year, I am asking myself to review what leverage, if any at all, I generated last year and create a Popovich game plan to increase my leverage this year. p.s. I was actually looking for a physical copy of this article which was great read the first time around.

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