Chris Polk

My weekend side project is done! I wanted to gain some experience working with leaderboards and recharts so I made a simple reaction time game for the kids. Now, I just need some data to populate the leaderboards. It's set to last no more than 60s per game and allows you to track several metrics over time at the /stats page. It requires you to sign up to track - but does not require email verification so feel free to use a fake email. Hope you all enjoy it! xtremereaction.lol P.S. I'm posting this as I am rushing off to handle dinner and soccer practice. If it breaks, I'll try to fix it tonight after the kids go to bed. 😅

@DannPetty Is framer working well with localizations?

Clients with the biggest budgets always ask me for custom builds or Webflow builds. Only designers have ever asked me about Framer. Local businesses and friends and family always ask for Squarespace and that’s it. Never been asked about Wix. Every price point is different.

I asked a couple people in a position to know what percentage of top Democrats privately think Biden should drop out of the race, and their answers were 75% and 80%. I don't see how any campaign recovers from that.

An unbelievable amount of talent is tied up in go-nowhere startups that had strong initial raises and are entering their third+ year without traction. Founder time, employee time, VC time all being consumed when they should just close it down now and go do better things.

@engineering_bae Yeah, visions die when people leave unfortunately.

Becoming an early startup employee has become a hard thing to rationalize recently. My whole life career has been in startups outside of two corporate situations. Watching your equity as the 1st and 2nd employee disappear sucks while knowing others cashed out before you.

On Equity and Startup Employees This is not a post about how I've shipped my 1,000,000th Shopify order or how my conversation rate is 7.28% and I'm now on yacht because thats what you do right?! While I celebrate all I and the teams I've worked with have accomplished at different stops in my career, learning yesterday for the fourth time in my career that my equity is now nearly worthless is heart wrenching to say the least. Nobody talks about the ugly side of equity and how stacked the odds are against positive outcomes for employees even if the company is successful. We often draw a direct line between “successful startup” and “everyone’s rich!!!” but the line isn’t as straight. I empathize with what founders go through with their sets of challenges and problems as well, all valid, but for the moment I'm going to focus on mine as a startup employee. As I now sit back and reflect on 13 years of helping build startups, I’m going to be honest and vulnerable for a second with some raw thoughts in the hope that others may take away something positive. In this moment the first thought that comes to mind is how startup employees including myself often work as hard as possible, work late nights, selflessly putting companies first at the expense of my sleep, health, relationships with friends and most importantly family. Last week on a call with a friend I joked tragically that my Carta was a graveyard of great visions, hopes and dreams! I’d always been told “what you put in is what you get out” and today I sit back and look at all that I put in, from launching of successful products, scaling supply chains, shipping products to more than 5000+ doors, working on 100+ SKUs intimately, countless trips to China (~25+), helping hire and interview hundreds of people, and the list goes on but today I would be lying if I said it feels like I have something clear cut to show for it. I know it’s not true but it in moments like this it can certainly can feel like it. Of course, I now have more experience and all that comes with time, but when you lose out an opportunity on life changing outcomes, the emotions make it hard to focus on the wins. “Take risks now, they will pay off in the long run” I would tell my younger self, and in moments like this my motivation is to ensure I make that reality happen because if I don't that saying wouldn't be true. Except the long run is now my present. I remember the times sitting in conference rooms when a founder was like, “I guess the only option is someone has to go to China tonight” and that someone was me and I had no issues doing it. Like clockwork, 1 am, 14 hour Cathay Pacific flight to Hong Kong. Land at 5 am. 2 hour van to Shenzhen, sometimes Dongguan. 20+ hour trip door to door. Shower, have breakfast and head to the factory. Repeat 25, maybe 30 times. Only to realize the “launch date” requiring me to fly out on a whim was often based on feels 😉 I remember having to be the adult in the room at times, going to lengths to ensure the value of my equity remained intact. Getting out of bed and rushing into the office at 3 am to help with the messy situations alcohol often creates when mixed with young teams. This time after a holiday party just weeks after I was looked at like I had two horns by leadership for saying “not every event should be centered around drinking and alcohol”. Today I think about how employees give it their all without realizing that while their hard work is in-fact increasing their probability for a positive outcome, given the obstacles employees face in exercising their options and other factors, they are effectively disproportionately increasing that probability for investors and founders first. Today I’m going to think about how I made amazing friends along the way to help take the edge off. As an eternal optimist I know this is not the only way to look at it, but today I’m allowed to. Tomorrow? We build ⚒️ 🫡

@ghoshal Did you listen to Harlem shake at all during this 3 hour period?

I worked like this for like 15 minutes as a joke; then 3 hours in I ended up crushing so much work that this is my new office now.

@mirmanwar Thanks for sharing, I’m definitely feeling the same as well about it.

Thanks for making the future feel better about toxic boards and people @sama . AI is great too.

@Polywork Where did all of the highlights go?

We love seeing your Polywork personal websites! 👀😍 Explore some of our recent favorites in 🧵

@thatguybg There’s a fourth. They’re called visionary leeches.

three kinds of founders: - mercenaries - here for the $$$ (love b2b SaaS and bootstrapping) - visionaries - here to change the world (love consumer and deep tech) - tinkerers - here by accident (a fun project turned into something unexpectedly big)

@excid3 just heard from a friend about the bootcamp. Love it.

@kylebragger Ah gotcha, yeah I’ve definitely run into caching issues as well and having to make sure all of your turbo frames are uniquely named otherwise really weird things have happened where fragments of html get regurgitated into the wrong frame

@chpolk it was just turbo frames, and it ended up being that Rails was caching the response from the endpoint being loaded into the TF; ended up "fixing" it by changing the response and mime type and mashing refresh a few times.

@Jason Mermaidin’

What is this elegant style of surfing I keep seeing the ladies doing called? It’s mesmerizing! twitter.com/InnovationHack…

I’m giving away 5 copies of my Hotwire+Tailwind course for free. The winners will be picked at random, to anyone who retweets this tweet. What even is it and why do I want it? 🧵 1/6

@fijikg #strengthinnumbers

I know two people that saw game 1 of 2016, right @chpolk

Such a great Warriors comeback. I’m down for a knicks and warriors final.

@deliprao Agreed

It has been one year since I moved to NY from SF, and I’m not gonna lie — NY is an extremely depressing and lonely place for a builder, even if you are working in the hottest area of AI, LMs, and whatnot. I miss working in San Francisco.