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Mike Curtis

Board Member, Zendesk · 1 appearance on the record.

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engineerexecutiveoperatorinvestor@mikecurtis ↗

Mike Curtis served as VP and Head of Engineering at Airbnb from 2013 to 2018, overseeing infrastructure and scaling the team from 40 to over 1,000 engineers. Before Airbnb, he led engineering groups at Facebook and Yahoo, and later became a board member, angel investor, and technology advisor.

8statements → 2claims → 1claims resolved → 4/5average certainty → 2/5average debate potential →

1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 1 not checkable as stated how the 2 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

2 assertions · 3 insights · 3 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 2 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 1 names no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Mike argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Mike Curtis: Airbnb reveals host and guest reviews simultaneously to stop retribution
“So, so one of the things that we did was we changed it so that we have a simultaneous reveal of the reviews. So both the host and the guest have two weeks to write a review, and then they're revealed at the same time.”
Mike Curtis Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 12:44 a16z Podcast | Engineering Intent

How they sound: speaking style how? →

305 words/min while actually speaking · 3.1 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Mike Curtis: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to 2,269 words across 1 episode, but every recording we have of Mike Curtis is the aired feed, and an editor cleaned that audio before release. Some of the hesitation was cut before we ever heard it, so read these as floors: the true rates are at least this high. These are measurements of speaking style, not scores. How it's measured →

Everything Mike Curtis said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight
Mike Curtis: Engineering teams cannot hire their way out of technical debt
“And like you can't hire your way out of that. Every, every person that you hire just ends up becoming less and less productive.”
Mike Curtis Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 24:31 a16z Podcast | Engineering Intent
Insight
Mike Curtis: 10x engineering output stems from alignment, not static ability
“My thinking on that is slightly different in that I think that, you know, people have periods of time where they can be, like, producing X, what their peers might be, and it's that magical moment when they're aligned with the right project, with the right skil…”
Mike Curtis Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 26:09 a16z Podcast | Engineering Intent
Assertion Supported
Mike Curtis: Airbnb reveals host and guest reviews simultaneously to stop retribution
“So, so one of the things that we did was we changed it so that we have a simultaneous reveal of the reviews. So both the host and the guest have two weeks to write a review, and then they're revealed at the same time.”
Mike Curtis Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 12:44 a16z Podcast | Engineering Intent
Disclosure
Airbnb open-sources all internal data pipeline and analysis infrastructure
“We regularly open source our own internal technologies, particularly around data, like everything we do from managing data pipelines to how we do data analysis, we pushed out to open source.”
Mike Curtis Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 19:12 a16z Podcast | Engineering Intent
Disclosure
Mike Curtis: Airbnb holds business leaders accountable for software bugs
“The way we've been thinking about it and the way that we try to do it now is that the business leaders who are responsible for furthering the business also have goals that are associated with bugs, performance, like all the things, like systems science.”
Mike Curtis Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 23:49 a16z Podcast | Engineering Intent
Insight
Mike Curtis: Engineering managers' main duty is enabling peak alignment moments
“This is, like, one of the most core fundamental premises behind engineering management, is, like, understanding the person. What motivates them? What are their skills? What are they trying to develop? That magic moment that I talked about, like, being able to …”
Mike Curtis Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 26:49 a16z Podcast | Engineering Intent
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Mike Curtis: Airbnb tests guest reviews as predictive signals in search matching
“And one of the areas that we're experimenting with now is being able to use the reviews that were given on a place as a predictive signal in the matching model all the way back.”
Mike Curtis Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 1:25 a16z Podcast | Engineering Intent
Disclosure
Mike Curtis: Airbnb explores image embeddings to dynamically re-rank home listings
“Some of the areas that we're exploring now is like, how can we, you know, find other embeddings in those images that can take the unstructured data of the image, turn it into something that can actually be tagged and labeled and then used in that ranking algor…”
Mike Curtis Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 6:16 a16z Podcast | Engineering Intent

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
a16z Podcast | Engineering Intent Jan 2, 2019 8m
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