Ryo Chiba

How we Grew Topic, a Retrospective

I tell the story of how Nik and I grew the second company to 250 customers and 7-digit ARR. The failed initial product, the pivot, the traction, the growth, and the eventual acquisition.

What is a company culture?

Company culture remains an elusive concept. How can we make it better without knowing what it even is?

Here I take an academic framework for measuring company culture and apply it to our own company.

(I’m most proud of the interactive scatterplots in this post which show what our employee’s thought about our culture, and where they wanted it to be in the future.)

Tough Times Don’t Last But Tough Startups Do

I founded a company that bootstrapped to a team of 40 over the course of 7 years, but it wasn’t all happy fun times. When revenue started to plateau, we had to make cuts. This is how it played out.

Sidenote: this article was featured on the Wall Street Journal.

Using Selenium and ECS to Create Reliable Rendering on Signage Systems

Okay, so this article isn’t actually popular, but I’m putting it here because it describes a project that was a lot of fun for me.

It’s a hack/workaround that I designed to make our modern web-based social media visualizations work with old-school (think Win 98) digital signage systems.