Morgan Chen

ok so. morgan chen. Scaffold is the company Devon and I started -- developer data plumbing, basically. customers create a workspace, connect their data sources, keep them synced, then use the data through our APIs and connectors. mission apartment, kibo shedding on everything. idk, useful to say it plainly once. 2 years in, still tabs not spaces, still doing blue bottle if i'm out early enough. jamie's on evening shifts again this month so the apartment's been weirdly quiet.

Q1 all-hands first thing. Need the spine pretty plain: Feb B round if it comes together, Q3 is the real push, and don't get weird on hiring before that. probably say we shipped a lot in Q4 without pretending it felt clean. Devon and I should tighten the numbers slide before 11.

Back from all-hands. Team seemed fine. Need to follow up on the support rotation doc and get the hiring req cleaned up this week. Also want the Q4 ship list tightened a bit -- a couple things sounded fuzzier out loud than they looked in the deck.

Scrub this week's calendar for 5 min buffers between meetings.

first day back was... fine, actually. not bad. office felt weirdly normal by like 10:30 and then suddenly it was 6. jamie's home late again so i'm eating leftover curry with kibo staring at me like i personally wronged him

Kibo is fully cinnamon-roll'd on the far end of the couch and won't even look at me. got home, said his name, one ear twitch. that's it. very tuesday.

out on the Embarcadero. cold enough my hands were useless for the first 10 min. super clear though, bay looked fake. head's a little less noisy now. grabbing Blue Bottle on the way back

ok so i'm gonna try 16:8 again this month. aspirationally. saying that while holding a Blue Bottle cortado at 9:30 is maybe not the cleanest start but whatever

jan is already so wet. like every sidewalk in the Mission is doing that fake-dry thing where it looks fine and then your socks are done. Blue Bottle line was all damp coats this morning

Find me 20 with Priya tomorrow to look at the onboarding flow mocks.

second Blue Bottle cortado. tiny cup, somehow still feels like a bad idea at 2:30. trying not to turn the rest of the afternoon into one long Slack refresh

Acme dashboard dragged again when I pulled it up just now. Loaded eventually, nothing on fire, but it was slow enough to notice. Leaving it for the moment.

ok so deck spine is still mushy. i don't think lead with growth by itself works unless it's very specific -- net new ARR + expansion in the same frame, otherwise it reads like top-of-funnel vanity and every Series B person has seen that movie. retention probably has to do more work than i'm comfortable with. not logo-retention only, the cohort revenue shape plus who actually expanded after the first ugly 90 days. unit econ i keep flipping on... CAC payback is fine but not sexy, gross margin is strong but for dev tools people discount it if they think services is hiding in there. maybe the real order is retention, then efficient growth, then why the market is bigger than our current wedge. Devon will hate if i bury growth on slide 6 lol but i'm leaning that way -- reason we can defend is the business is actually getting sturdier, not just faster.

office espresso machine is like 85% there lol. it makes a very convincing sound and then gives you a latte that's somehow both hot and not hot. temp thing is definitely off. still drank it

Priya's stuff landed really well in review. not making a whole thing of it but she's on a tear a little. the onboarding mocks were clean and people got it fast, which is not automatic around here lol

Set a reminder for 7 tomorrow -- review Priya's design spec before standup.

kibo's fully passed out on the couch with one paw straight up like he got dropped there by a forklift. apartment's really quiet. jamie's on evening shift again so it's just me and the dishwasher doing its thing

Kibo got one mystery sidewalk snack in before i could react. classic little goblin. seems totally fine, just extremely pleased with himself

Acme slipped again. Don't send a note yet -- just log it internally and keep the thread tight. Dashboard was still dragging this morning when I pulled it up. It did load, so not making it a thing today, but I want dates and who said what in one place.

Logged a note from a customer call just now: they want SSO sooner than later. Flagged it to Jake so it doesn't get buried in the pile.

devon sent an HN thread at 1:07am lol. just skimmed it with coffee. pretty good actually but also maybe we get him one of those parental control apps that makes your laptop useless after midnight

Chase the December 2022 AWS invoice. Not in my inbox yet.

friday finally. pretty quiet by the end. ordering dumplings and calling it. jamie's stuck at ucsf again so it's me + kibo doing the very glamorous thing where i eat on the couch and he audits every bite

kibo is doing that thing where he acts deeply betrayed by the drizzle and then refuses to come back in. mission is basically wet concrete + coffee smell rn. jamie's still out, apt is dead quiet

Remind me at 5:30 to grab the Trader Joe's order before 6.

only did 3. was gonna push to 6 and my legs were like lol no. embarcadero looked nice at least. counts

2 years is basically here. weird to be this close and still feel like we're just getting the shape of it. q4 shipped, deck will make it look cleaner than it felt. i keep thinking this year is either where scaffold clicks in a bigger way or we learn something expensive. maybe both lol. mission's quiet. jamie's on shift, kibo keeps doing laps from kitchen to couch like he has a job.

Week's basically deck first, then the two customer calls without letting those blow up the whole middle of the day. Need an hour with Devon on hiring too -- mostly scope check, not opening five reqs because we had one decent week. probably Blue Bottle and straight into slides.

Keep coming back to the same thing on the 2 eng hires. If we open reqs now, great candidates are actually on market right now and I'd rather not be cute about timing. But I also don't want to cram 2 new people into a 12-person team, miss on onboarding, then be explaining burn in every raise convo for the next 6 months. Seeing Devon this afternoon. Leaning we map the exact headcount line first -- what changes at 14 that doesn't at 12, and what can wait till post-raise if the round drags.

office is weirdly dead. rain's got half the team at home and the only sound in here is the espresso machine doing its little dying-goose thing every 20 min. kind of nice tbh

Stop sending calendar invites with no title. Put an actual descriptive title on every one -- "sync" / blank doesn't cut it. I need to know what I'm opening from the notification.

Kibo got to the building door, looked at the rain, and just stopped. full refusal. had to carry 22 lb of offended dog half a block before he'd even consider peeing. Mission sidewalks are gross rn

Wrapped the day. Two calls landed fine, nothing weird. Devon's still on the road so a bunch of the between-meeting stuff stayed async; worked well enough. I'm home now, Kibo pacing around because dinner is apparently late.

Tuesday is customer call at 10, then i need 90 min with the deck before Devon and i look at it again. leaning Blue Bottle between those if the Mission one isn't slammed. don't let me get pulled into random internal stuff before noon.

Book 90 w Devon tomorrow. Reserve a room with a screen and put deck v0 up before we walk in.

working lunch so the IF thing lasted until... noon lol. customer wanted to keep going and i was hungry, not gonna make it a moral event. ate the sandwich. was fine

slack has a 40-message thread right now on the espresso machine and at least half of it is grind size discourse. i walked by, it made a huge confident cafe noise, then produced something that tasted like warm admin overhead. still drank it btw

Just got off with the billing team at the customer. Mostly good -- integration's working, a couple minor annoyances but nothing on fire. Logged one ask for invoice-level webhook retries so failed events can be replayed without support touching it.

Big Devon block today. Need the B-round story to stop wobbling -- not opening on growth unless it's net new ARR and really clean. Book 90 w screen, deck v0 up before we sit down. Blue Bottle first, then notes.

yeah. post-Devon i think we finally have the spine. not "growth" in the abstract -- net new ARR, expansion, and payback all in one line so the unit econ is carrying its weight instead of hiding in an appendix. if we open with pipeline or logo count we deserve to get dinged. also batched the first investor intros instead of doing the random 1-off thing. cleaner. a few are just temperature-check calls but that's fine. still need the chart choices to not look like we reverse-engineered them for the story. NRR stays, but only if we pair it with burn multiple or CAC payback so it doesn't turn into a brag slide. leaning fewer slides, more direct numbers. low-key energized tbh. feels less wobbly now