startup

Avoid Your Own Blind Spot

I met Dan Rasmuson, the up-and-coming young CTO of Labelbox through First Round Fast Track, a 90-day program that matches tech veterans with First Round-backed founders and execs for 1–1 mentorship.

During our first meeting in the Mission District, Dan’s first question was “How do I avoid my own blind spot?”. To be honest, this surprised me because I very much expected Dan to ask for guidance related to product growth, adoption and hiring talents — things that I have been asked very frequently.

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Purposeful Design for User Permission

I love mobile design because it’s full of constraints. Those constraints force us to think carefully about how and when we present information to the user, and what questions we ask, leading the user to hopefully make the selection we want.

At Chop, we went through three design iterations with a few user testings in between, before we released the first version in October. The consumer mobile app is much less forgiving compared to web apps that often have very iterative processes. This is also the first mobile design and development experience for me, and I was very keen on delivering the experience that I would want as a user.

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Why Chop

I wished more places offered the Starbucks commerce experience, and I marveled at how e-commerce and the cloud had transformed the way we did almost everything. From shopping to traveling, the internet eliminated single points of failure, and streamlined clunky processes. But there was one place where it still fell short: retail.

We are all carrying around pocket supercomputers that are more powerful than the servers that used to run e-commerce sites. Why then, can’t we use our phones to have an Amazon-like experience at our favorite cafés or stores, without waiting?

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