Disqus - Latest Comments for sachmonkey

Re: How to Design Your Customer Validation to Maximize Product/Market Fit | Sachin Rekhi

Sachin Rekhi — Wed, 13 Jan 2016 13:48:42 -0000

In the specific phase of the customer validation you mentioned, the goal is to assess whether the value proposition, or value promise, resonates with the customer independent of how the specific solution is implemented.

So for example, let's say you are validating a music discovery service, you might have a value proposition of "This app helps you find music you'll love". So just put that on a slide and get the customer's reaction. The goal is to assess how valuable is an app that could deliver on that value proposition to the customer. A good response from a customer would be "that sounds great, but it would really depend on how good the recommendations were and how it went about discovering the music." So you've validated that if you can deliver on the value proposition, it will be helpful. This is important because you may ultimately realize that you don't have a great solution yet, but the value proposition is solid, so you just need to keep iterating on the solution, but not change the value proposition.

Re: My Financial Stack as a Millennial | Sachin Rekhi

Sachin Rekhi — Wed, 09 Dec 2015 02:04:26 -0000

Wealthfront offers more sophisticated tax loss harvesting at the stock level instead of at the ETF level, generating far more opportunities for harvesting losses, which creates even more tax savings at the end of the year when I file my taxes. Besides that feature, I found the two very comparable and both great choices.

Re: My Financial Stack as a Millennial | Sachin Rekhi

Sachin Rekhi — Mon, 24 Aug 2015 14:36:39 -0000

Frank - Great question. I split because Vanguard target retirement date funds have lower fees and retirement accounts don't benefit from tax loss harvesting. But my taxable accounts can leverage tax loss harvesting and that makes up for the additional fees Wealthfront charges. It's overall a small optimization so may not be worth splitting for most.

You are correct that if you attempt to split your assets across two robo-advisors that are both performing tax loss harvesting, you could undo the benefits by causing wash sales to occur between the two sets of accounts. While each account will certainly avoid wash sales in their own account, without having access to your other account, they can't know whether they are causing wash sales separately. You could also cause this to happen if you are invested in Vanguard in popular index ETFs that services like Wealthfront use, which could also result in wash sales.

It doesn't apply in my case though because my investment in Vanguard is in their target retirement date fund, a single managed fund. While within the fund they are executing significant trades of various index ETFS, since I only own the single managed fund, I cannot personally be subject to wash sales that may occur as the result of investments within the managed fund as I don't own the underlying ETFs directly.

Re: My Financial Stack as a Millennial | Sachin Rekhi

Sachin Rekhi — Mon, 10 Aug 2015 14:31:10 -0000

Lots of folks have mentioned to me that they use Charles Schwab's online bank for their primary checking account and love it. They do refund ATM fees like you mention compared to Capital One 360, which is great. Though one disadvantage is the Schwab's interest rates are incredibly low compared to Capital One 360, so if you keep any substantial cash in checking or savings, then you won't be getting really any return on it from Schwab.

Re: How I Determined My Health KPIs by Analyzing the Leading Causes of Death | Sachin Rekhi

Sachin Rekhi — Mon, 10 Aug 2015 14:28:33 -0000

Great callout Subraya, I've also read that similarly the waist-to-hip ratio is a great way to determine your overall health risk.

Re: My Financial Stack as a Millennial | Sachin Rekhi

Sachin Rekhi — Thu, 06 Aug 2015 14:47:25 -0000

Great suggestions on Citibank DoubleCash as well as Ally. Thanks for sharing!

Re: How I Determined My Health KPIs by Analyzing the Leading Causes of Death | Sachin Rekhi

Sachin Rekhi — Mon, 03 Aug 2015 22:30:11 -0000

Great additional suggestions! Thanks for sharing.

Re: My Financial Stack as a Millennial | Sachin Rekhi

Sachin Rekhi — Mon, 03 Aug 2015 19:32:45 -0000

It's certainly a consideration and I wouldn't give my financial credentials to just any service, but Mint, Personal Capital, and now BillGuard have earned my trust given there strong privacy policies and security reputations. No one is completely secure from a breach, the recent LastPass breach being a compelling example, but I have ultimately decided the value they provide is worth it compared to completely opting out.

Re: My Financial Stack as a Millennial | Sachin Rekhi

Sachin Rekhi — Fri, 31 Jul 2015 18:20:19 -0000

Haven't found a great tracker for these types of investments, though Personal Capital does allow you to put the value of your home, car, and custom items into it's wealth tracker so that you can have a comprehensive view of full dollar value across your portfolio. But it doesn't do anything special for tracking things like employee equity, private investments, etc. and you need to manually keep these custom items up-to-date.

Re: My Financial Stack as a Millennial | Sachin Rekhi

Sachin Rekhi — Thu, 30 Jul 2015 10:30:30 -0000

Thanks for the recommendation! Will check it out. Someone else suggested checking out BillGuard as well.

Re: My Financial Stack as a Millennial | Sachin Rekhi

Sachin Rekhi — Wed, 29 Jul 2015 21:59:22 -0000

Haha, yes, no bitcoin account yet, but who knows!

Re: A Practitioner's Guide to Net Promoter Score (NPS) | Sachin Rekhi

Sachin Rekhi — Mon, 22 Jun 2015 17:44:28 -0000

Great callout on the regional differences.

Re: How I use Mint, Personal Capital, and Wealthfront to Manage my Finances | Sachin Rekhi

Sachin Rekhi — Sun, 06 Apr 2014 21:35:12 -0000

I did notice a diff awhile back and it turned out Mint had stopped syncing a few of my accounts and even when I tried to re-sync them, it still experienced issues. I ended up finding Personal Capital to be more reliable for regular syncs.

Re: How I use Mint, Personal Capital, and Wealthfront to Manage my Finances | Sachin Rekhi

Sachin Rekhi — Mon, 24 Feb 2014 01:34:49 -0000

Never got a chance to try Lending Club. But still using Wealthfront and have increased my investment in it, so continue to be very happy with the service.

Re: The Most Underrated Product Management Skill: Influence Without Authority | Sachin Rekhi

Sachin Rekhi — Thu, 02 Jan 2014 01:03:57 -0000

Great question Bruno. And something that many founders struggle with in the post acquisition integration process. And unfortunately you hear many more failure stories than success stories here.

One of the things I quickly realized at LinkedIn was that the way to get things done in the organization looked a lot more like my experience at Microsoft than it did like my startup experience. I embraced that and found myself leveraging many of the same techniques that made me successful while I was at Microsoft. While we kept our team running and feeling like a startup with our own development velocity, our own dev languages\tools, our own internal processes, I still spent much of my own time on things like influence without authority, investing in building buy-in and credibility with the executive team, cross-team and cross-company communication, and more.

While many founders reactions are to fight against these additional costs compared to the way things ran in their own startup, I decided the way to be most effective was to embrace it, but shield the rest of my team from it.

Re: What is Product Management? | Sachin Rekhi

Sachin Rekhi — Thu, 02 Jan 2014 00:50:49 -0000

The functional skill set of a product manager will be applicable in both the data storage domain as well as your eventual goal of working on web-based software. While it would certainly be ideal to gain experience directly working on web-based software, I think the PM role in the data storage systems will be valuable and relevant experience nonetheless and could be a great way to ease the career transition.

When I advise folks on switching careers, I advise them ideally not to change all 3 of the dimensions of role, company, and domain, since it makes it much more difficult to find such roles as well as more difficult to succeed in them. So the option you're describing would be a good option for getting into product management.

Re: The Many Ways YouTube Encourages Content Discovery | Sachin Rekhi

Sachin Rekhi — Sun, 22 Sep 2013 21:32:09 -0000

Great question. For un-invested users, watch page recommendations are by far the most impactful. Many such users end up on YouTube when one of their buddies sends them a link to a video. So right after consuming that content a set of related videos exist that can easily draw your attention. We see very similar behavior on LinkedIn since we show "People Also Viewed" recommendations on the right rail of profile and it drives significant profile views.

For invested users like myself, the stream itself is highly relevant to me since it's based on my watch behavior, my followed channels, my liked videos, and more. I simply login and get great recommendations every time and it keeps me constantly coming back.

Re: The Boundless Opportunities in Business Productivity Apps | Sachin Rekhi

Sachin Rekhi — Sun, 15 Sep 2013 11:42:14 -0000

Both of those could definitely be combined in an enterprise directory solution. At both Microsoft and LinkedIn we have internally built enterprise directories to start to address these. But these tools could be so much better if properly invested in. Tying it with a QnA experience is certainly interesting as well.

Re: How To Build Your Audience Well Before Launching Your Product | Sachin Rekhi

Sachin Rekhi — Thu, 05 Sep 2013 00:59:57 -0000

So true. Building an audience is hard work. Your post highlights great tips on this.

Re: How To Build Your Audience Well Before Launching Your Product | Sachin Rekhi

Sachin Rekhi — Wed, 04 Sep 2013 09:44:32 -0000

Definitely 3 additional great posts on the topic. Thanks for pointing them out.

Re: How I use Mint, Personal Capital, and Wealthfront to Manage my Finances | Sachin Rekhi

Sachin Rekhi — Thu, 22 Aug 2013 01:36:07 -0000

Definitely looked at Personal Capital's investment arm. Their fees are considerably higher than Wealthfront's but offer a similar service. The advantage of Personal Capital is you get a real advisor you can talk to. But still found Wealthfront's offering more compelling.

Re: How I use Mint, Personal Capital, and Wealthfront to Manage my Finances | Sachin Rekhi

Sachin Rekhi — Wed, 08 May 2013 01:16:47 -0000

Dhruv,

We actually have just 4 401k / IRA accounts. 2 current 401ks with my and my wife's current employer. And then 2 consolidated rolled over IRAs, one each for my wife and I. But we obviously can't roll over our current 401ks with our current employer.

Personal Capital is certainly an alternative to Microsoft Money, so if you are already using Microsoft Money I can see how you'd get limited additional value out of it.

Re: Lessons Learned from Connected | Sachin Rekhi

Sachin Rekhi — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 22:15:16 -0000

I ended up building it from scratch since I wanted to track referrals at a granular level (specific web pages that you visited from as opposed to high level categories like seo, sem, organic, etc) as well as because I want to track it down to the LTV level (not a simple conversion goal of whether they converted to paid or not, but how much revenue they actually generated before they churned). At the time there was no easy way to get this level of depth with Google Analytics, KISS Metrics, etc.

Re: How I use Mint, Personal Capital, and Wealthfront to Manage my Finances | Sachin Rekhi

Sachin Rekhi — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 00:11:51 -0000

I think you need to start with understanding how you are currently spending your money. So Mint is where I'd start if I had to pick one.

Re: The Art of Decision Making as a Product Manager | Sachin Rekhi

Sachin Rekhi — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 15:22:39 -0000

Scaling team communication is a big challenge that I and I'm sure many other product managers struggle with. Great idea for another post!