Internal Documentation

Earth Overshoot Week...

August 2, 2024 (Review of Week EOY-22)

I don’t know if these milestone dates (see also nuclear war clock, women’s pay parity day, etc.) have any practical impact, but it is a sobering thought nonetheless.

On a different and more hopeful note: I’m continuing to think about recruiting. While I realize it’s WAY to early to start patting ourselves on the back, I’m really proud of the conversation we were able to have last horizontal meeting and encourage all of you to re-read the notes. I think the process we went through is yet another visible testament to the culture we’re building, and maybe we should make the material available to candidates (without the comment attribution)?

Metrics

  • Unique Buildings: 5,444 ←- as of 8/1

  • Annual Run Rate: $1.3M ←- no change

  • Monthly net burn: $53k ←- as of June close; July close in the works

  • 2024 Transaction fees to date: $6,257.34 ←- another $140 arrived last week

  • Outstanding invoices as of today: $111,115.27

Last Week’s Highlights

  • Congrats on Release 72! Per François, the user-visible improvements include bug fixes and some CPC-requested changes, and there are a bunch of below-the-water-line items progressing toward partial electrification, GP, and national.

  • Construction contract signed for our pilot LL97 bid! 🎉 This first one gifted us a lot of lessons as well as our first earned revenue from a contractor!

  • Political speech discussion felt to me like another example of how we can have more freedom by doubling down on our community guidelines. The fact that I could just feed the meeting transcript into Claude and have it generate a policy document speaks to the quality of the discussion, IMHO. Please review the draft Political Speech policy.

  • Women of Color Collective in Sustainability 5-year anniversary event, which Martine joined me for, was a particular personal highlight. Here are some photos!

Did I miss any highlights? Pls share in comments below.

My Watchlist

  • Generic Project: Another week and another room in the bag, and closing in on T-1 week?

  • Tech Recruiting: We’ll all need to pitch in as we head toward hiring. Slack channel is #ops_diverse-talent.

  • Cash. Mid-year re-forecast of the budget still pending. We need a comb-through of why we are spending more than budgeted on consultants, scheduled for this coming week (Erika Parkins)

  • Dev pipeline: Still so much to do after GP. The overwhelming feeling on thinking about the H2 pipeline seems to be that it’s too much. We’ll have to do more to prioritize.

  • Partnerships: Many, many conversations: Accelerator, GGRF. None of them are (thankfully) very demanding at the moment.

  • Onboarding: Incremental improvements to tooling and process. Will need more! Looking to Martine and Kate for their inputs on process improvement.

  • Metrics: Not actively working out new metrics, but something to keep on the board.

  • Don’t be a series of small businesses: ~Marc and I are shopping for some founder coaching to make sure we’re staying on a venture-scale path~. We put this on the back burner. We don’t have time to engage right now.

On Deck for This Week

  • For me, Seed Round Prep. There are a number of things I need to wrap up in the next 2 weeks. Marc and I are also having lunch with a top lead prospect.

  • Revenue team’s first retro is on Tuesday. Kudos to Robin for lending process expertise!

  • Erika’s 360 work plan meeting is also Tuesday

  • Meeting to review software role descriptions by the dev team

  • Various other external communication things that Marc and I will need to coordinate with various folks including Jessica and Jason: AC bill, NESEA magazine submission, CPC conference submission

And here’s what’s on my radar screen - what am I forgetting?

Please Leave Feedback

Big thanks to the folks who dropped a note last week! 🎉 🤝

Please note your reaction to this update below. It helps me to know what is resonating, what is unclear, etc. Thanks!

  • What are your highlights / lowlights?

  • Did I miss a highlight? Did I miss something that should be on my watchlist? Something else you want to react to?

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Jeff Luna Yay for Release 72!GP side, Trying to get the team to update the estimation, and move the needle for visibility if we need to. Rooms 2 and 3 is showing wrapped up Aug 4- however, it looks like it hasn’t been merged to staging yet, I asked for guidance and feedback, because maybe I’m if I’m just not seeing it right. Unforseen complications happen, we just need the project roadmap to reflect that so we get benchmarking on how long, and how much effort do we need for a feature to get to testing. I don’t want to be in a situation where there are a mountain of stuff to test, and I become the bottleneck, because I did not forsee it, or have not asked for feedback enough- so that’s why I keep I’m being noisy with the followups- if it’s a distracting thing, let me know otherwise- It’s just Jeff being Jeffing.I’m so excited about our seed round and the posibilities for our team to expand more!, I’m wondering, will there also be budget on upskilling portals such as coursera, codecademy etc when we get it?
Jason I feel like the horizontal practices and discussions have been blossoming lately! This is great to experience, especially before we get to another round of hiring. And I’m very excited about the first construction contract getting signed–that’s a big step! I’m similarly worried about the dev pipeline ahead of us. We have a meeting next Wednesday (2pm ET) to discuss the UI needs specifically, and I think that will help with prioritization.
Kate Jones I haven’t used Claude to produce anything yet but you are really selling me on it, Bomee. Also, the photos from the WOCCIS event are so so good!
François Huet So much great stuff going on! I’ll add to the list the addition of Dave to the team as a part-time application developer, a very welcome help for what is going to be an intense H2, and a good sign that our tech onboarding is smoother than it used to be (but not yet smooth enough).
Naina I’ve been really enjoying the bigger group discussions recently. Especially my first perm staff discussion about political speech - it’s so great for my first proper job to be at a company that takes such an employee forward view on things like this rather than just having one person decide what’s right or not.