Posts on Kerry Jones - Musings

MatchaMatch: Finding Good Matcha

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0700

I’m particular about matcha. I’ve tried it at dozens of cafes across multiple cities and the quality variance is staggering. Some places use ceremonial-grade matcha whisked properly. Others dump commodity powder into steamed milk and charge $7. The problem is you can’t tell which is which before you order. Google Maps rates businesses, not matcha. A five-star review that says “great vibes, love the ambiance” tells you nothing about what’s in the cup.

RowCraft: Structured Rowing Workouts for the Concept2

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0700

I cycled seriously for about two years. Got into structured training, bought a $2K bike, did a 100-mile race. It was great. But every ride required a production: bib shorts, sunglasses, helmet, checking weather, dealing with traffic. The activation energy kept going up. Eventually I stopped riding and the bike sat in the garage.

Why I Built DealCred: Trust and Fraud in Real Estate

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0700

In 2022, I watched a real estate deal fall apart in the worst way possible. An operator had raised capital from over thirty investors for what looked like a legitimate syndication. It wasn’t. The money was mismanaged, promises were fabricated, and investors were left with nothing. The FBI got involved.

Seven Years of Building StockOptions.io

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0700

In March 2019, I had a simple problem. I’d received stock option grants from a couple of companies and wanted to see what they’d be worth under different vesting schedules and stock price scenarios. The spreadsheet I was using was getting unwieldy. So I spent a weekend building a small web app to replace it.

Building Plexo: Why I'm Aggregating All My Health Data

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0700

My Garmin watch, Eight Sleep mattress, MacroFactor nutrition logs, and Concept2 PM5 rowing data all lived in separate apps that had no idea the others existed. The Garmin knew my resting heart rate was elevated but didn’t know about last night’s four hours of sleep. MacroFactor knew about the caloric deficit but not the brutal VO2max (a measure of aerobic capacity) session that morning. Each app had a piece of the picture. None had the whole thing.

2025 Reading List

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 10:00:00 -0800

Finished this year with 49 books read, and excited to have several more fiction stories I’m looking into. I’ve also discovered I’ve enjoyed reading biographies and will likely read more this year.

I’ve also introduced tier lists to give more insight into how I enjoy books rather than pure ranking.

2024 Reading List

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 10:00:00 -0800

Every year I keep thinking I won’t beat the previous year’s record (as I intentionally don’t keep track throughout the year). In addition, this year I did some very long fiction books. The Stormlight Archive series By Brandon Sanderson averages 45-55 hours per book, and I read 4 of them. That said, I still beat my previous record of 46 books with my new personal-best of 51 books.

2023 Reading List

Wed, 31 Jan 2024 23:23:25 -0800

Finally got around to writing my reading update for 2023. Last year I set a new record for myself with 45 books and quite frankly didn’t expect to best that record anytime soon… but here I am with 46 books finished. With some a narrow margin it seems like I just barely pushed myself over the finish line, but the truth of the matter is I wasn’t tracking at all. I knew I was “reading a lot”, but didn’t really care about the count.

2022 Reading List

Sun, 08 Jan 2023 23:23:25 -0800

I read 45 books this year. This blew away my previous record of 26 from a couple of years ago, and I absolutely loved (almost) every minute of it.

Some people have asked me how I read so much (while still maintaining the rest of life). The primary reason is that I listen to most of these books, so “reading” is actually a bit of a misnomer. I use Audible for almost all of my reads and only actually read 3–4 books in the year.

The Lens Of Asymmetry

Fri, 30 Sep 2022 09:00:00 -0700

The Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) claims that if an investor wants higher rewards they must take greater risk. This belief in the symmetry of the public market is one of the pillars of EMH. The idea that you can find an investment that is low-risk and high-reward, on the other hand, would be asymmetrical. Warren Buffett, and other similar investors, insist that this asymmetry is exactly what has given them their edge.

Writing Unoriginal Content

Thu, 17 Mar 2022 10:00:00 -0800

If you look over my blog posts you’ll see they have giant multi-year gaps between them. The main reason is simply my changing interests, and/or cynicism, at a given moment, and how I get caught up with other activities. I’ve repeated one reason to explain this to myself for years, “someone has already said this, and has said it better.”

The Psychology of Censorship

Thu, 17 Feb 2022 08:20:39 -0800

Most Americans condemn censorship unconditionally, regardless of their political party. We are patriotically proud of our freedom. We have access to just about any book that has ever been on a “banned” list, and generally maintain a belief of superiority over other countries, such as China, due to their censorship.

10 Early Indicators of a Toxic Workplace

Wed, 27 Feb 2019 15:16:09 -0800

The importance of culture has been becoming more evident as more and more workplaces strive to redefine what it means to work and be happy. Books like Delivering Happiness and The Culture Code are becoming required reading for early-stage startups to unicorns like AirBnB.

Bottom line: a good culture is important.

How Much Time Should You Invest in Training

Tue, 16 Oct 2018 15:15:37 -0800

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax.”
- Not actually Abraham Lincoln

This quote has almost become cliché but I constantly see that, by and large, its message is being ignored.

I am laying out a framework to aid decisions around whether training is worth it and at exactly what point is it worth it.

How North Star Metrics Can Lead You South

Mon, 24 Sep 2018 15:15:41 -0800

What is a North Start Metric (NSM)?

Let’s start with a definition:

The North Star Metric is the single metric that best captures the core value that your product delivers to customers.
- What is a North Star Metric

It serves to unify a company or department to produce a single result that everyone can concentrate on.

How to Write a Bug Report

Mon, 17 Sep 2018 15:14:46 -0800

tl;dr: skip to the bottom to see the template.

Perhaps the most generic title I’ve ever written. It sounds like it’s straight out of a 1,000+ page 80’s textbook on “Testing Duties in Middle Management”.

The problem is that I frequently run into terrible bug reports. Googling brought about some decent results, but the articles I found were still lacking. They often took either the side of the software engineer or the side of the tester, and rarely the side of the user. Even rarer were explanations or reasons given to “why” the steps were what they were. Many missed vital steps altogether.

Debugging 101 Locating the Problem

Mon, 10 Sep 2018 15:14:18 -0800

I was recently observing a couple programmers attempt to fix a bug and watched (with considerable tension) the painstaking stabs in the dark as they tweaked and changed different lines of code.

I instantly knew what I would do, and it is much more similar to a binary search (see example below) that rapidly solves almost every bug I come across.

Zen of Y Combinator

Sat, 02 Jul 2016 13:38:58 -0800

This is an unofficial list of repeated sayings I have found in my studying of startups. This comes from reading, listening, watching, and working in a YC company.

Make something people want. [1, 2, 3]
Talk to users. [4, 5]
Do things that don’t scale. [6, 7]
A small number of users that love your product is better than a lot of people that like your product. [4, 8, 9]
Be careful with cofounders. [17, 18, 19, 20]
Growth solves all problems. [4, 10]
Solve your own problems. [2, 11]
Release early and iterate. [8, 14, 15]
You make what you measure. [8, 15]
Be relentlessly resourceful. [13, 16]

References