Paige C. Selby

As the sun sets over the bay area, and we had all taken our last Waymo, one thing was crystal clear: 👉 The platform ecosystem is heating up: faster, tighter, and more competitive than ever. The surface area density was super-charged. Every conversation we had? Same undertone: "How do we unlock margin, pricing power, and monetization across my existing PSP stack?" Here’s the uncomfortable truth: 🗣️ Platforms without a Revenue Intelligence Layer will lose to those that have one. Why? 🔥 Embedded finance is now table stakes. 🔥 Margins are shrinking. 🔥 Monetization needs to evolve, fast. Revenew isn’t a dashboard. It’s the Revenue Co-Pilot that helps platforms: 🎯 See what’s leaking. 🎯 Price what’s possible. 🎯 Predict what’s next. The platforms that win? They won’t just be “data-informed.” They’ll be revenue-optimized at every layer. This shift is already happening. CRM changed sales teams. Revenue Intelligence will change platforms. #fintech #platforms #embeddedfinance #stripe #growth #revenuestrategy #payments

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This semester, I’ve been assisting the 5th-grade class at Palo Alto Unified School District (where my daughter is a student) in learning Scratch. Interestingly, several kids have expressed that Scratch doesn’t feel as “cool” as Python, which I taught them last year in 4th grade. Their main complaint? Scratch lacks actual code. While exploring alternatives, I came across an online teaching platform: Go+ Builder. It introduces a variant of the Go programming language, allowing students to drag and drop control flows into an editor window—bridging the gap between block-based and text-based coding in an intuitive way. https://lnkd.in/dBHN27YP If you’re involved in teaching programming to young learners, I’d love to hear your thoughts on similar tools! 🚀

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I talk about this with friends and many tell me I'm wrong, mostly on the timescale. Autonomous Vehicles are scaling now. Waymo is out ahead, but Tesla certainly has the capability and a strategy. With Waymo and Tesla going for the robotaxi market in direct competition, I think we can expect every populated area to have robotaxi options by 2030. With scale comes economies of scale. For ride hailing with a human, cost per mile is $2+. For a personal vehicle, cost per mile is 70 cents. Elon says they have a path to 40 cents. As costs compress, many people will want to remove the hassle of driving from their lives. Families might move to one car, many will choose to rely strictly on AVs. By 2035, it's clear to everyone that AVs are both much safer and much cheaper than owning, maintaining, and manually driving their car. Public safety will become the primary driver for adoption, and governments will likely fund and incentivize the final transition. At this point, there are no new people seeking out or even wanting to get a driver's license. Driving has become more of a hobby for enthusiasts than a necessity for daily life. And with cars no longer needing dedicated storage, home owners will repatriate their garages as living space. I experienced it first hand this week. In 10 years, how we live will be totally transformed by this tech.

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Roblox is launching Creator Rewards, a new program that pays developers not just for in-game spend, but for growing the entire platform. If a creator brings in a new or returning user, or helps keep someone engaged daily, they now share in the value that user generates. It’s a big shift — and one that better aligns incentives between developers and the platform. Huge credit to Jim Meenan and the Creator Success team for leading this work. Full details here: https://lnkd.in/gBkVnq5x Our CPO Manuel Bronstein articulates the broader strategy in this Verge interview: https://lnkd.in/g2fKWDMq

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Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4.5 is coming to Glean this week. In addition to being the leading model for coding, our evals show that the model delivers significant improvements over its predecessor by efficiently solving 10% of previously unanswerable enterprise queries, thanks to optimized parallel tool calling and fewer planning iterations. See more details on our blog: https://lnkd.in/gXUEvGKW

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Waymo quietly tested a two-year vest on L3 offers, and it may point to how companies will reward early-career engineers in the AI era 👇 Waymo’s standard vesting schedule is a 4-year, even vesting grant, but we’ve recently seen Waymo issue equity grants with 2-year even vesting for their entry-level SWEs. Levels.fyi has now logged several Waymo submissions with the same structure, all of which were entry-level SWE grants that vests 50% of its RSUs after year one and the remaining 50% after year two. Recent senior-level Waymo offers still follow the traditional four-year, even split. We can hardly say it’s a definitive policy shift, but there is enough to suggest this is more than a one-off experiment. Compare that to two other players in the ride-sharing and autonomy stack: - Lyft moved to single-year new-hire blocks with annual refreshers. - Uber front-loads 35% of the grant in year one, then 30% / 20% / 15%. Both structures amplify the same signal: perform early, collect equity early. Miss the bar, and refreshers decide your future pay more than the back half of a four-year grant ever would. So why the different vesting schedules for such similar companies? Here’s my personal take: - Uber is the clear ride-hail leader. It keeps a four-year grant to retain staff but front-loads 65 percent in the first two years to spark quick output without heavy dilution. - Lyft is chasing share on both human and autonomous fronts. One-year blocks plus refreshers force engineers to hit a higher bar every 12 months while giving the company room to reprice equity if the turnaround lags. - Waymo is still scaling revenue. Entry-level engineers often leave after two years, so a 50 / 50 two-year vest helps them see real value before they jump and limits long unvested overhang for Alphabet. The competition between these three ride-share companies is just one example of how equity design is now a competitive weapon. Before you sign, consider what the timeline behind your offer reflects and what it says about the company’s confidence in its roadmap. As companies mix up their vesting to incentivize different things, do you think compressed schedules motivate better performance or just faster churn? Would love to hear your thoughts!👇 View one of the Waymo 2-year vesting offers here: https://lnkd.in/gftd4xkP

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