Davide Rovera
2K posts
Davide Rovera
@darovera
Entr. Lecturer | Manager @Esade eWorks https://t.co/2pvUMa3MvY - Passionate about startups, technology and human connections. Investing in African Ventures
Earth Katılım Şubat 2010
1.7K Takip Edilen684 Takipçiler
I shared this study and some of the reactions are so typical:
"the findings contradict my lived experience, hence it is bad science"
"the findings confirm my lived experience, this is obvious, hence not science"
"the study makes simplifying assumptions, hence not science"
Giulio Mattioli@giulio_mattioli
Very interesting new study finding that *even in large European cities*, in most places it is easier to access opportunities by car than by public transport arxiv.org/pdf/2604.01019 The exceptions are Paris, Zurich and the innermost parts of Milan and Barcelona
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@garrytan @msuster Come to the corporate-events.esade.edu/90661515119613… instead! Small, curated group. 0-BS. Great Gelato 😉
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I don't think anyone should attend Web Summit
britton winterrose@Winterrose
hey @WebSummit I’m not interested in attending any summit featuring this speaker
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Davide Rovera retweetledi
The most future-proof job: Entrepreneurship shopify.com/news/future-pr… via @Shopify
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@paulg have you tried good quality lemons? basic supermarket lemons are way closer in taste to the average lime you find in europe compared to e.g. Amalfi Lemons.
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No one in our family can tell lemons from limes with their eyes closed. We all thought we could, but no one could.
I bet all bartenders know this.
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Davide Rovera retweetledi
Introducing: OpenGranola 🔥
I built an open source meeting copilot for macOS.
It transcribes both sides of your call on-device, searches your own notes in real time, and hands you talking points right when the conversation needs them. No audio leaves your Mac.
Point it at a folder of markdown files, pick any LLM through OpenRouter (Claude, GPT-4o, Gemini, Llama), and it just works. It's invisible to screen share too — nobody knows you have it.
The whole thing is open source.
Link below
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“It is literally cheaper to build the thing and see if it works than to have a 30 minute planning meeting about whether you should build it.”
Todd Saunders@toddsaunders
The token cost to build a production feature is now lower than the meeting cost to discuss building that feature. Let me rephrase. It is literally cheaper to build the thing and see if it works than to have a 30 minute planning meeting about whether you should build it. It’s wild when you think about it. This completely inverts how you should run a software organization. The planning layer becomes the bottleneck because the building layer is essentially free. The cost of code has dropped to essentially 0. The rational response is to eliminate planning for anything that can be tested empirically. Don’t debate whether a feature will work. Just build it in 2 hours, measure it with a group of customers, and then decide to kill or keep it. I saw a startup operating this way and their build velocity is up 20x. Decision quality is up because every decision is informed by a real prototype, not a slide deck and an expensive meeting. We went from “move fast and break things” to “move fast and build everything.” The planning industrial complex is dead. Thank god.
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Davide Rovera retweetledi
AI: It's all about ideas and execution is a commodity
Market: Capybara simulator
justin waldron@jtwald
Capybara Simulator launched 6 hours ago on play.fun It already has over 2,700 players Dev made thousands of dollars AI gaming has arrived, and it’s cuter than expected
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Davide Rovera retweetledi
@GiacomoGorini @EdoTwitt_ Ma poi…creasse un problema a loro 🤷♂️
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@darovera @EdoTwitt_ Sta gente sembra mia nonna che si lamentava di Internet
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@GiacomoGorini @EdoTwitt_ Same in Spagna, Francia…e anche Italia
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Davide Rovera retweetledi
Remote work forces a written culture.
A written culture means the AI can engage with your culture and act on it.
Nan Yu@thenanyu
@can In 2026 if you don’t write things down, constantly, then the AI doesn’t know about it putting you at a structural disadvantage
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Davide Rovera retweetledi
Davide Rovera retweetledi
The most important division between companies is between those who make things they themselves admire, and those who regard their customers as fools, and cynically give them what they want. Companies sometimes shift from the former to the latter, but never in the other direction.
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Davide Rovera retweetledi
Last September I announced mandatory return-to-office.
Five days a week.
I called it a "culture-first initiative."
Culture means presence.
Presence means badge swipes.
Badge swipes mean metrics.
Metrics mean I can prove something to the board.
I don't know what.
But I can prove it.
The announcement went out on a Tuesday.
I sent it from my home office.
In Aspen.
I have an exemption.
"Strategic leaders require location flexibility to maintain global perspective."
I wrote that policy.
HR approved it.
HR approves everything I write.
By Wednesday, 340 employees had updated their LinkedIn status to "Open to Work."
I called it "natural attrition."
Natural attrition means they quit before I had to pay severance.
Very natural.
We lost 47 engineers in the first month.
I told the board it was "alignment correction."
The people who left weren't aligned.
With coming to an office.
That I also don't come to.
But that's different.
I'm strategic.
The office costs $4.2 million per year.
Empty, it was a write-off.
Now it's a "collaboration hub."
I measured collaboration.
Average daily Zoom calls from the office: 7.4 per employee.
They commute 45 minutes.
To take calls they could take from home.
But now they're "present."
Presence is culture.
I've never been more certain of anything.
A senior engineer asked why we couldn't stay remote.
She had metrics.
Productivity was up 23% during remote work.
I said, "Productivity isn't everything."
She asked what else mattered.
I said, "Serendipitous collisions."
She asked how we measure serendipitous collisions.
I said, "You can't. That's what makes them serendipitous."
She stopped asking questions.
Then she stopped showing up.
Then LinkedIn said she's at a company that's "remote-first."
Good luck with that.
They'll learn.
We installed badge tracking software.
It cost $380,000.
It tells me exactly when people arrive.
And when they leave.
And how long they spend in each zone.
I check it every morning.
From home.
The data is fascinating.
Average arrival time: 9:47 AM.
Average departure time: 4:12 PM.
I sent a Slack message.
"Core hours are 9 to 6."
Arrival times shifted to 9:02 AM.
Departure times shifted to 6:01 PM.
Productivity did not change.
But the metrics look better.
Metrics are culture.
We have a "hybrid" option now.
Three days in office.
Mandatory Monday. Mandatory Wednesday. Mandatory Friday.
That's called "hybrid."
Because Tuesday and Thursday are optional.
But there are "anchor meetings" on Tuesday and Thursday.
Attendance is "strongly encouraged."
"Strongly encouraged" means mandatory without the liability.
I learned that from legal.
The head of product asked if he could work from home when his wife had surgery.
I said, "Of course. Family comes first."
Then I said, "But let's revisit your Q4 performance targets."
He came to the office.
His wife understood.
I assume.
I didn't ask.
That's personal.
The CFO asked about ROI on the RTO policy.
I showed him the badge data.
"Presence is up 340%."
He asked if revenue was up.
I said, "Revenue is a lagging indicator."
He asked what the leading indicator was.
I said, "Badge swipes."
He nodded.
The lease renews next year.
Seven more years.
$29 million committed.
We needed bodies in the building.
Now we have bodies.
Fewer than before.
But present.
Morale is down.
Glassdoor says we're "hostile to work-life balance."
I told HR to respond.
They wrote, "We're a high-performance culture that values in-person collaboration."
That's corporate for "the review is accurate."
But it sounds like a rebuttal.
The CEO asked if RTO was working.
I said, "Absolutely."
He asked for evidence.
I showed him a photo of the office.
Full desks. Glowing monitors. Bodies in chairs.
He smiled.
"This is what culture looks like."
It looked like a stock photo.
Because I got it from a stock photo website.
The real office has 40% occupancy on a good day.
But he doesn't know that.
He's also remote.
We're both strategic.
Next quarter I'm proposing a "collaboration bonus."
$2,000 for anyone with 95% badge-in compliance.
The bonus costs less than the turnover.
And it shifts the narrative.
We're not forcing people to come in.
We're "incentivizing presence."
Incentivizing means paying people to do something they don't want to do.
It's different from mandating.
Legally.
The employees who stayed are "loyal."
Loyalty means they have mortgages.
And kids in school districts.
And RSUs that haven't vested.
They're not loyal.
They're trapped.
But on paper, it looks like loyalty.
And paper is what the board sees.
I've been doing this for 22 years.
I know what culture looks like.
It looks like butts in seats.
Butts in seats mean control.
Control means management.
Management means me.
RTO isn't about productivity.
It never was.
It's about seeing people.
So I know they exist.
So I know they're working.
So I know I'm in charge.
That's culture.
As long as the badge swipes go up and to the right.
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@mattcassinelli Interesting. Do you have any video about your worflow?
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They're all fairly specific – in terms of "writing" apps, Bear is for notes, Craft is for documents, Ulysses is for blog posts, Slugline is for video scripts, MindNode is for brainstorming, Agenda is for date-based notes (I use it to track stories).
Reeder is ingest, Instapaper is longform, GoodLinks is a tagged archive and also great widgets/Shortcuts support.
Structured is daily routines, Fantastical is work
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MindNode Next
Structured
Fantastical
Craft
Tripsy
Bear
Agenda
Ulysses
Slugline
Ferrite
Timery
Reeder
Instapaper
GoodLinks
TV Forecast
Basic Apple Guy@BasicAppleGuy
Wiped my iPad Pro clean. What should I install?
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@darovera Only a post about the genesis of the account
x.com/Rainmaker1973/…
Massimo@Rainmaker1973
Tweets from space Today, on the 10th anniversary of the beginning of my continous activity on this account, I'll write something about the genesis of @Rainmaker1973. Being projector operator and somewhat a support in the management of the movie theater in my town, I opened this account for that activity in August 2010. For a long time it hosted the movies being featured and news about cinema. At the end of 2013 I basically stopped updating it because it was clear customers were not checking the tweets and for about a year the account was basically shut down. If you go back to those years with an advanced search, you can still find some comments of mine and replies to Hollywood stars since I have deleted the previous posts. The real genesis of this account is placed in the month of November in 2014, when I was suddenly struck by a news headline. An Italian astronaut was going to travel to space. I don't know precisely why, but I took Twitter as a tool to get info about that launch, and found the astronaut was actually been posting a log and frequent updates. The astronaut was @AstroSamantha and I watched her launch live. After that liftoff, I never lost an update and I found out there was a lot of Italian people so enthusiastic about the mission and some days after, I also discovered many other people from around the world were too. Those users were so enthusiastic and so curious that their questions were so numerous and often unanswered. Since I was passionate about astronomy and astronautics even before that, I had some knowledge about space missions that I had previously got and used in Usenet groups, blogs, forums and especially a remote telescopes site I used for a couple of years. I decided that I would reply to those users with the info I had and I was discovering in that same moment. In some weeks I found out users did appreciate this and began following me, so that the account was gradually getting audience. People at the time was so enthusiastic about space missions and astronauts tweeting from space that were literally competing for getting one those as an addressee. Another competition that was very lit at the time was guessing the places astronauts posted in their tweets. Soon many of us became experts in geography and lots of people began claiming they could immediately get if one picture was taken over the Amazon river or the Nile or Mt Fuji. This slowly became normal, astronauts on the International Space Station gradually saw their social popularity decrease, pictures from space became an almost normal daily event and nowadays there's basically few people following them while in orbit with the same enthusiasm. But in that precise moment in time, getting a tweet from space was really seen as a precious event. So I'm not gonna lie, when I got the tweet in the picture below I felt I was flying in space at 28,800 km/h too. I began dreaming of being up there, I imagined to be in the ISS modules, in the Cupola at night, while watching the Earth below. Well, at night was a concept I could only imagine, because on the ISS nights last about 90 minutes exactly as the day. Long story short, I went on replying and replying and when Sam's mission was over I followed other astronauts and got other tweets from space. I won a contest Scott Kelly put on during his Year in Space mission in 2016 and got a picture signed by him, on physical paper that I still keep in my home office. I also won a context created by ESA with astronaut Tim Peake (buff.ly/3sC0zaL) and received a patch which flew in space. It's on the same wall behind me while I write. When at the end of 2016 missions began losing the social appeal they used to have in the previous years, I started sharing general space contents, then astronomy, then I added weather and meteorology, since I also was a historic passionate about the matter. And then about physics and science and the account grew. In the meantime, in 2017, the disease that would change my life began to become a perpetual problem and I gradually found out that posting and posting was giving me the power of making those negative thoughts much lighter. This remained true, it's still true today. The dreams of those nights spent in space with my imagination still linger on and they're somewhat an engine for my current activity here. I hope you will follow me to continue this journey of personal discovery and mutual growth.
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Subscriptions became a crucial help to this account.
11 years ago in these days, I started posting non-stop, every single day: no Christmas, no bank holidays. Many posts even came from a hospital's bed.
If you happened to like some posts in these years, consider subscribing ⬇️
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