Notes on Software, Startups, & Teams
Anant Jain
Hi! I'm Anant. đź‘‹
I write about building startups and engineering teams.
I lead engineering for Coinbase Business, where we're enabling startups and small businesses to integrate stablecoins into their financial operations, unlocking instant global payments, and much more. Prior to Coinbase, I led the engineering groups building Brex's Travel, Bill Pay, Procurement, Vendors, and Banking products.
Before Brex, I co-founded two startups: Compose Labs and EagerPanda. At Compose Labs, we built tools to automatically generate videos from text articles (acquired by Brex) and EagerPanda was a publishing platform with a realtime, multiplayer editor with version controls — think Google Docs + Medium + GitHub.
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Latest
Tech & Startups
One Tool to Rule Them All
Platform Teams Won't Die. They'll Just Stop Looking Like Platform Teams.
Should Everyone Do Everything Now?
Zero to One at Larger Companies
Managing for Abundance, not Scarcity
Let Your AI Sleep
AI Coding Tools (May 2025)
Designers who PM
Startups are poker, not chess
Security and Compliance for Enterprise Sales
Roadmapping for Startups
Recruiting at Seed/Series A stage startups
Engineering career framework for Seed/Series A stage startups
Measuring your performance as a startup CTO (Seed/Series A stage)
Productivity Tips
Managing risk in software projects
12 takeaways from my first year as an Engineering Manager
Leverage vs. Decoupling
LeadDev Live 2021 Notes
The CommonLounge Logo
Collaboration startups
Free Startup Ideas
There is no such thing as computer-generated “art”
The Intuition behind Adversarial Attacks on Neural Networks
Breaking neural networks with adversarial attacks
Get the basics right: how to design your site’s navigation, search, and homepage
16 UX Design tools from the Sprint Process
UX Design for Developers
The well-kept secret behind great UX: Usability Testing
A Beginner’s Guide to Rapid Prototyping
Human Experience Design
Types of communications
Fitness
Paper Reviews
Optimizing Space Amplification in RocksDB
Ethereum Whitepaper
In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm (Raft)
The Byzantine Generals Problem
Still All on One Server: Perforce at Scale
The Tail at Scale
Large-Scale Automated Refactoring Using ClangMR
CRDTs: The Hard Parts
Keeping CALM: When Distributed Consistency Is Easy
Availability in Globally Distributed Storage Systems
Design patterns for container-based distributed systems
Hints for Computer System Design
Harvest, Yield, and Scalable Tolerant Systems
Source Code Rejuvenation is not Refactoring
CAP Twelve Years Later: How the “Rules” Have Changed
Language Models are Few-Shot Learners (GPT-3)
Out of the Tar Pit
How to Read a Paper
Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key-value Store
Large-scale cluster management at Google with Borg
Mesos: A Platform for Fine-Grained Resource Sharing in the Data Center
How to Lead a Technical Reading Group
No Silver Bullet
Big Ball of Mud
Immutability Changes Everything
Dapper: a Large-Scale Distributed Systems Tracing Infrastructure
Spanner: Google’s Globally-Distributed Database
Chubby: Lock Service for Loosely-coupled Distributed Systems
Paxos Made Simple
Omega: flexible, scalable schedulers for large compute clusters
Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data
BeyondCorp: Design to Deployment at Google
The Google File System
MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters
Kafka: a Distributed Messaging System for Log Processing
Borg, Omega, and Kubernetes
Book Lists
A Reading Map for Your 20s
Books read and listened to in 2025
Books read and listened to in 2024
Books read and listened to in 2023
Books read and listened to in 2022
Books read and listened to in 2021
Books read and listened to in 2020
Books read and listened to in 2019
Books read and listened to in 2018
Books read and listened to in 2017
Books read and listened to in 2016
Books read and listened to in 2015
Books read in 2014 and 2013
Book Reviews
Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building
Resilient Management
Coders at Work
Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency
The Making of a Manager
The Three Signs of a Miserable Job
Masters of Doom
The Pragmatic Programmer
The Passionate Programmer
The First 90 Days
The War of Art
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
The Manager's Path
The New One Minute Manager
The Mom Test
Decisive
The Great CEO Within
Fortune's Formula
Skin in The Game
Never Split the Difference
Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days
Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success
Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World
It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy At Work
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
When Breath Becomes Air
The Bed of Procrustes
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
Lean in: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead
Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day
Bad Blood: Secret and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
Algorithms to Live By
Writing to Learn
The Hard Thing About Hard Things
Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder
Measure What Matters
Show Your Work
Steal Like an Artist
10% Happier
On Writing Well
Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike
How Will You Measure Your Life?
Outliers: The Story of Success
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
Principles: Life and Work
Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
Deep Work
So Good They Can’t Ignore You
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Rocket Surgery Made Easy
Don’t Make Me Think
The Power of Habit
The Power of Moments
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
Contagious: Why Things Catch On
The Selfish Gene
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
Stumbling on Happiness
Thinking, Fast and Slow
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
The Design of Everyday Things
Managing Oneself