Data and metrics play a vital role in business. The book Lean Analytics suggests some metrics for start-up founders to assess their success. By choosing the metrics more effectively, the entrepreneur can navigate through the unknown more effectively.

Between 2014 and 2018, Uber built several "wheels," such as the service discovery tool Hyperbahn, the task queue Cherami, the MySQL-based NoSQL Schemaless, the resource scheduler Peloton, and the service deployment platform uDeploy, among others. Now, with layoffs affecting even engineering teams and stock prices falling below 15-year valuations, were these "wheels" a success or a failure? Should startups hire people to build wheels, or should they adopt existing solutions?

When you know where you should go, it is too late to go there; if you always keep your original path, you will miss the road to the future.

When you know where to go, it is often too late; if you always stick to the original path, you will miss the road to the future.

Facebook's VP of Growth once discussed with Mark why they succeeded. The answer isn't that they are exceptionally smart or experienced, but rather that they work incredibly hard and execute effectively. Compared to execution, growth is optional. Everyone understands the reasoning; the difference lies in whether people can execute quickly. Execution is challenging, and there are ten reasons why growth execution fails.

For Hubspot's freemium and fully automated (touchless) software business, how can one achieve the highest growth in the least amount of time while being VC-backed? Brian Balfour's answer is the Four Fits Model: the four factors of product, market, channel, and model are interlinked and must work together.

Most products from Silicon Valley companies target the global market, and internationalization is a strategic key for multinational companies venturing into this market. The i18n engineering solution we designed primarily addresses three major issues in the development process of websites and mobile apps: 1. Language, 2. Time and Time Zones, 3. Numbers and Currency. Like all software system development, there is no silver bullet for internationalization; great works are crafted through diligent foundational work.

Large-scale web services deal with high-volume traffic, but one host could only serve a limited amount of requests. There is usually a server farm to take the traffic altogether. How to route them so that each host could evenly receive the request?

Internet services often need to handle traffic from around the world, but a single server can only serve a limited number of requests at the same time. Therefore, we typically have a server cluster to collectively manage this traffic. The question arises: how can we evenly distribute this traffic across different servers?

Five concurrency models you may want to know: Single-threaded; Multiprocessing and lock-based concurrency; Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP); Actor Model (AM); Software Transactional Memory (STM).