Peter Reinhardt

    1. COVID-19 Interventions

      As our city, then our state, then much of the globe started staying at home, we began to compile weekly updates for Segment on the world’s response to…

    1. Judging Product Market Fit

      In the past few years we’ve tested many different product ideas with Segment’s customers to see what resonates with who. Finding product market fit with new…

    1. Finding Product Market Fit

      There’s a fine line between the “reality distortion field” founders create and just being a bit delusional. During our first year and half as a company — May…

    1. Replacing Middle Management with APIs

      There’s a trend in Silicon Valley startups to create a software layer in industries that were traditionally pure human services. Uber and Lyft have created…

    2. Milestones for SaaS Companies

      When you know your next milestone, you can focus on it. But between product market fit and profitability most startups will only hear the mantra: “grow! grow!…

    3. The Impact of Self Driving Cars

      The average American drives for 101 minutes a day. That’s 10% of waking life. Driving. Even our neighborhoods and cities are constructed around the needs of…

    1. MVP Doesn't Mean Anything

      “Minimum Viable Product” has always confused me. What the hell does viable mean? Is an idea “viable” when someone says they like it? Tweet it? Sign up for it?…

    1. radioactive.js

      One of the biggest problems I’ve encountered in writing about nuclear reactors is that people don’t understand radioactive decay. This is a huge problem…

    3. Flying is Violence Against Air

      I’ve loved airplanes and rockets forever. I studied aerospace engineering in school. But one thing has always bothered me. You know that dream where you swish…

    4. Thorium Reactors

      My last article about thorium as an alternative nuclear reactor fuel drew way more readers than I expected. I intentionally glossed over the complexities of…

    1. Thorium

      About a century ago, an adventurous Scandinavian discovered the first black thorium rock on a remote island in the Norwegian Sea. Now thorium is slowly heating…

    1. Better Email Search

      Email holds all of our conversations, contacts, notes, and plans. All that information is languishing in my archive folder. I should be able to access this…

    1. One Year Since Leaving MIT

      I left MIT one year ago - I had one year of coursework left as an undergrad in Aerospace Engineering. After [a long story] I…

    2. Building a Movie Showtimes API

      I built TheReelBox.com to demonstrate an easier way to find nearby movie showtimes than Fandango or Google Movies. (More importantly, it generates demo data…

    2. Give My Smartphone More Sensors

      I’ve been thinking about what the mobile revolution means, and I agree with Paul Graham’s points. Mobile devices are our constant connection to rest of the…

    3. Onboard Video from a 12ft Rocket

      This summer I worked at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA on the Solar Cell Array Tester (NPS-SCAT. ha. ha.) It’s a nanosatellite, and it’s…

    1. Semi-Truck Aerodynamics

      Mark Chodas and I put together a project to test the viability of boat-tails as a way to reduce drag on semi-trucks. We built a 1/27th scale model for initial…

    1. Huge N-Body Simulations

      During high school I wrote a C++ program that simulated thousands of masses and their gradual accretion via mutual gravity. Some simulations were designed to…