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Shorebird Handbook

CEO

The page is about Eric, CEO of Shorebird. The page is intended to be helpful. If it sounds pretentious or overbearing, please let me know so I can fix it. Thanks.

CEO bio

Section titled “CEO bio”

Eric is the founder and CEO of Shorebird. Shorebird is the Flutter company. Before Shorebird, Eric co-founded the Flutter project and lead Flutter and Dart at Google.

Eric Seidel Headshot

Before Shorebird, Eric was an Engineering Director at Google responsible for Flutter and Dart. Before managing, Eric was an engineer at Google, including co-founding the Flutter project in 2014. Previously he was a technical lead on Chrome responsible for WebKit. Eric was the first WebKit reviewer at Google, helped launch Chrome 1.0 and later instigating Google’s fork of WebKit, Blink. Prior to Google, Eric lead a small startup for 15 months as part of Y-Combinator’s Summer 2006 batch, and prior to that worked on Safari at Apple where he brought SVG to Safari and helped start the Safari on Windows project.

Fun fact: due to my long work on WebKit (including implementing the HTML parser), BSD copyright rules, and WebKit’s usage on basically every digital device around the planet, my name is in essentially every digital device out there.

Socials

Section titled “Socials”

Talks

Section titled “Talks”

Appearances

Section titled “Appearances”

Values

Section titled “Values”

My Kouzes Posner Values are Family, Health, Trust, Communication, Autonomy.

I expect to act within my values, I expect to be trusted, I expect to have open lines of communication and I expect you will want similar. I recognize you may not have the same values as I do, but I will start from that assumption.

My autonomy value (and assumption that you share such) means I have historically had trouble telling people what to do. I do much better to align on where we’re going and trust your autonomy and decision making to get us there. I will respect your time and expect you to respect mine. Getting home to family and making space for my own health and wellbeing are crucial and I will assume you want similar.

On management

Section titled “On management”
  • I think of myself as being in a support role.
  • I’ve been told “you can’t always be in the room” so you have to get people to make the right decisions without you there. I’ve come to believe “you’re never in the room”, so the only thing you can control is incentives. Crafting incentives is I believe the primary job of a leader.

Managing me

Section titled “Managing me”
  • I work out of my inbox, so short emails are best (rather than chats or doc comments) if you need something from me as once it’s in my inbox it’s on my todo list and will (eventually) get done. Chat is fine if it’s urgent.
  • My calendly is widely shared and open for others to use to get on my schedule. Those at Shorebird have direct access (and currently full visibility of) my calendar.

On meetings

Section titled “On meetings”
  • We’re a small company, so we shouldn’t have many/any internal meetings yet.
  • Meetings should have an agenda.
  • I prepare for my 1:1s. I keep 1:1 docs with anyone who has a regular 1:1. I take notes in that doc between meetings.

Quotes and platitudes I agree with

Section titled “Quotes and platitudes I agree with”
  • Begin with the end in mind (Stephen Covey, 7 Habits)
  • Focus on the user and all else will follow
  • The doer decides (e.g. responsibility deserves autonomy)
  • Paul Graham: “Meetings are a necessary evil. Sometimes necessary, but still evil.”
  • Problems of success — e.g. some classes of problems only happen when you succeed, so let’s deal with them after we’re on a path to succeed.

Questions? Send me an email or ask me on Discord.