My co-founder Ricky wrote about why he switched over to Spotify for podcasts. I initially was reluctant to switch over to Spotify for podcasts because they seemed like an afterthought/second-class media there. There’s also all the usual arguments in favor of keeping things open, but I can see the power of a closed ecosystem being able to improve the experience for both podcast listeners and hosts. With the RSS spec, hosts can at most know how many times their episodes were downloaded, which just isn’t very useful.

The recent addition of mixed music + podcasts playlists to Spotify, including the personalized The Get Up morning show, shows some of the potential of having podcasts side-by-side with music. I’m excited for Spotify to recommend podcasts to me, but I’d also like to know which episodes of specific podcasts my friends love! So we built just that! …

Originally wrote up a couple quick reactions in notes section of my blog, but I realized I had a lot more to say about this topic, so it became a post.

Strava announced yesterday that they’re trying to become a profitable business by focusing on paying subscribers. To that end, they’re making a lot of features that were previously accessible to free users now paid-only. Specifically:

• Overall segment leaderboards (Top 10 view is still free)
• Comparing, filtering and analyzing segment efforts
• Route planning on strava.com, with a huge redesign launching soon!
• Matched Runs: Analyze performance on identical runs over time
• Training Log on Android and strava.com …

Had a great time chatting with my friend Amanda for the weekly Back on My Feet San Francisco live chat about how I got into running, started volunteering with Back on My Feet, and what Running Happy means to me! Can’t embed the video on Medium, but check it out over on Facebook and let me know if you have any questions about getting involved with Back on My Feet or about running!

https://www.facebook.com/BackonMyFeetSanFrancisco/videos/1107845282912448/

Originally published at https://www.davidtran.me on April 18, 2020.

March was… a month. A few things that happened that happened in March:

• On March 7th, I ran the race of my life thus far at Way Too Cool 50K, celebrating an amazing few months of training and surpassing my wildest pre-race goals
• On March 16th, San Francisco became one of the first cities in the US to implement a shelter-in-place order. As of today (April 3rd), almost the entire country is under shelter-in-place, and fingers crossed 🤞, we’re flattening the curve. …

This post specifically talks about running and startups, but I think this ethos applies broadly. It goes without saying that having the choice to do things for “the right reasons” is a privilege. I’m very thankful for my immigrant parents whose “why” was just to give me this choice.

We often ask What?: “What are you training for?” or “What does your startup do?”, but we rarely ask Why?. Obviously, Why?s are much more complex, and this post isn’t going to give you any answers, but hopefully will get you to stop and think about your own Why?s more often. Why? …

See Part 1 of this post for an overview of Strong Opinions, Weakly Held. Here in Part 2, we’ll be looking at examples of how to apply SOWH in poker, basketball and Starcraft.

Poker: The perfect game of imperfect information

Poker presents a perfect microcosm for practicing SOWH. In No-Limit Texas Hold’em, you start with seemingly very little information— just the two cards in front of you. As the hand goes on, you gain more information in the form of the house cards being revealed as well as other players’ actions. Each time it’s your turn, you have a limited set of options: you can check/call, bet/raise, or fold. If every player played with their cards face-up, the game wouldn’t be very interesting. But by hiding your opponents’ cards, we create a perfect scenario to think about how to act based on imperfect information. Even the best players in the world know they won’t be right 100% of the time, nor is that the point of the game. …

Since my co-founder Ricky introduced me to the concept of “strong opinions, weakly held”¹, I’ve been thinking a lot about why this concept seemed to resonate with me and how to deliberately practice it. For brevity’s sake, I’m going to henceforth refer to this concept as SOWH (pronounced SOW as in you reap what you sow).

For many worthwhile endeavors, whether that means figuring what to study in school, what to build first for your startup, or how to find the right partner, you typically start with a very limited set of information. It’s rarely clear at the outset what the best course of action is, or even what the first step should be. In school, we were encouraged to withhold judgment, keep an open mind, and try not to decide on anything until we had gathered enough information. Moreover, in group decision-making settings, when we’re aware that nobody has all of the information, we tend to try to defer to consensus building. However, when the amount of available information is so lacking to the point of feeling debilitating, we often choose to punt the decision—to make a non-decision. We think: why make a choice now when you can make one later with more information? What if we make the wrong choice? Worse yet, what if we make a choice that limits our optionality or completely shuts the door on an opportunity? It is much safer to try to gather information before committing to any course of action. …

I wrote this 18 months ago as a parody inspired by some of The Bold Italic’s Sunil Rajaraman’s posts—This Is Your Life In Silicon Valley Two years Later in particular. Like any good parody, sometimes they ring all too true. I was afraid to post this at the time, but now I’m going back through and hitting publish on as many things as possible 😀

You google, “burnout”. Slowly, like confirmation of an injury or flu symptoms as you read down the WebMD list.

• Chronic fatigue ✅ 💤 ☕
• Insomnia ✅, maybe ✅ ✅ When’s that melatonin supposed to arrive again? …