Alex Chiou Q&A and Videos

Promotion is one of the most difficult and nuanced topics, so there's no way any course can absolutely cover 100% of all possible scenarios. If you have any questions about , please ask them here! I'm happy to talk about:

• What gaps you may have to get to the next level
• How to create additional scope in your team
• Whether a prospective team you're considering looks good for promotion
• Why you're getting stuck at your current level
• Maintaining that dialog with your manager about promotion

Born in Ohio, raised in Bay Area, went to UCLA, came back to Silicon Valley to work at these places:

• PayPal (2014 - 2015): Got really good at foosball here
• Course Hero (2015 - 2017): First Android engineer/tech lead, engineer #25 or so. Built their Android app from scratch, grew it from 0 to 100k users and the team from myself to 4 devs total. Course Hero is now Learneo and valued at $3.6B
• Meta (2017 - 2021): Built the voice assistant on Portal (🪦) and then went to Instagram Ads and scaled story ads from a $1B business to $5B+. Mentored a whole bunch of engineers from E3 -> E5, had as many 1 on 1s as a manager by the time I left
• Robinhood (2021 - 2022): Revamped settings + profile, worked on Robinhood Spending Card, finally replaced my spaghetti Java skills with spaghetti Kotlin skills
• Taro (2022 - ???): Building random stuff with my buddies and to make engineers' lives better.

Other facts about me:

• I've built
• I own way too many board games
• Currently procrastinating life responsibilities with Genshin Impact, Marvel Snap, and Borderlands 3
• Somehow got ~75,000 people to

I probably shouldn't be doing an AMA when we haven't shipped threaded replies yet, but YOLO 😎

Hi all,

I recently finished the Masterclasses from Alex & Rahul where Alex & Rahul discussed building apps as side projects to put on resumes. Also in , Alex mentioned he monetized his app & got $100 from premium users.

AFAIK, anything above $400 must be put onto tax return. I'm thinking about developing a small side projects & put maybe ads / premium restrictions on some features. If I do this, how do I avoid conflicts of interest with my 9-5 job, especially if the revenue coming in may way surpass $400? I'm working for a large tech company that essentially do everything hence it's hard to find a business area where the company isn't involved in.

I’ve recently been applying to various jobs, just in case of an unexpected layoff (golden parachute). Lately, I’ve been motivated to upskill as a developer. I’ve now reached the two-year mark at my company. After the reorg, I have a new manager, team, and director, and I really like this team. My performance over the past six months has been better than it was with my old team. Recently, Google reached out to me for an interview, but I haven’t really studied data structures and algorithms (DSA) due to work. My performance hasn’t been great, and now I also have a phone interview with Meta.

On the plus side, my company's stock has surged, and we’ve received bonuses, raises, and promotions. In my last 1-on-1 meeting with my manager, he told me I should be more independent and that my performance is great (hinting at a promotion)—fingers crossed. My family and friends are encouraging me to interview with both Meta and Google, but I don’t really want to leave my current company.

Questions for Alex and Rahul which I know were covered in some videos somewhere in snippets, but maybe not all in one question. Taro has amassed a lot of great content in its courses and blogs -- how long did it take to create initial MVP of quiz app before the Taro founders quit their jobs to go and work on Taro full time as a startup entrepreneurs?

• When did the founders pivot?
• How long did it take to create initial content (blogs over the years, lots of videos, powerpoints etc.)?

It's impressive to see the amount of rich content, how long did it take for Rahul and Alex to conceptualize Taro (in its early form, name), what ways did they test the success metrics of various pieces of content for a single feature (video series, single video/blog etc.) - how well did they perform over a given period of time?