Currently / Founder of Signed and Calendearing. Invested in hundreds of startups via Tifo.
Previously / Second engineer hired at GitHub, and advised GitLab ahead of their IPO.
Football / Minority owner of Oakland Roots (USL-C) and Cagliari (Serie A).
More about Zach →
Angel investor? I built Signed for you. Turns out angels deserved real software. Check it out →
zach holman
Zach Holman is a founder and investor in San Francisco.
Anyway, here's a bunch of shit I've written.
2026
Nov 3
The Death of the Angel Investor
Sep 27
You Should Have an LLC
Sep 16
As Someone Who Has Written This Blog Post,
Aug 5
Probably Won’t Pass You on to Another Investor
Jul 29
The Cold Email
May 1
There’s No Minimum Angel Check Size
Mar 24
Signed: A Portfolio for Investors
Feb 27
The Tools of Angel Investing
2025
Oct 30
Taking Money off the Table
Sep 29
Shipping Calendearing
Jul 21
Losing Money is the Point
Feb 3
Nontraditional Red Teams
Jan 30
From Cold DM to Owning a Soccer Club
2024
Aug 28
Send More Investor Updates
Apr 11
Announcing Tifo
2023
Oct 11
Hacking FIFA World Cup Rosters
2022
Dec 19
How to Name a Startup
Feb 12
The Kobayashi Maru of Comparing Dates with Times
2021
May 13
How does Angel Investing?
2020
Nov 17
My Favorite Tweet
Nov 11
Write Angry
2018
Aug 8
Double Shipping
May 29
UTC is Enough for Everyone, Right?
Feb 13
None of My Apple Gear Connects Together, Dammit
Jan 12
A Stack Story
2017
Nov 20
Staying Productive as a Solo Founder
Oct 11
The Depression Thing
Aug 14
Isolated Integration Tests in Shell
Aug 8
JavaScript for People Who Hate JavaScript
Jun 27
Women in the Room
Apr 11
Three Quotes from Early GitHubbers
Mar 22
How to Start Up Your First Startup
Feb 15
Slow Exits Are Fucking Up the Valley
Feb 10
Extracting Value as an Employee
Jan 10
Publicly Dogfooding Your Culture
2016
Dec 19
Kicking the @realdonaldtrump Beehive
Dec 15
Working Remotely in Cafes and Possibly Even Surviving
Dec 12
Bring in the Goddamn Adults Already
May 9
The New 10-Year Vesting Schedule
Apr 28
Evaluating Delusional Startups
Mar 16
Firing People
Mar 1
How to Deploy Software
Jan 28
Startup Interviewing is Fucked
Jan 8
Fuck Your 90 Day Exercise Window
2015
Oct 12
Opt-in Transparency
Oct 12
Dev Evangelism
Oct 1
Remote-First vs. Remote-Friendly
Jul 24
Diffing Images on the Command Line
Jun 4
Utter Disregard for Git Commit History
May 19
Just Don’t Hire 0x Engineers
May 7
Saying No to Sales
Mar 31
Pretty Unmistakeable
Mar 12
Even More Emoji Abuse 🚧🚨
Mar 6
Fired
Feb 9
This Uncanny Valley of Voice Recognition
Jan 23
The Correct Floor Plan For Your Startup
Jan 22
Don't Break the Streak Maybe
Jan 21
Post-Publicity Personalities
Jan 20
You’ll Always Miss Being in the Basement
Jan 19
How GitHub Writes Blog Posts
2014
Oct 16
Inertia
Oct 3
Move Fast and Break Nothing
Aug 25
The Video of the Talk on Talks
Jul 28
The Easily Amused's Guide to Searching GitHub Issues
Jul 21
Keeping a Journal
May 16
The Talk on Talks
Mar 14
A Day of Communication at GitHub
Feb 26
Only 90s Web Developers Remember This
Feb 13
Startups, Mad Men, and Missing Out
Jan 17
Travel Rewards for Lazy People
Jan 15
Who Owns?
Jan 13
GitHub's Public Speaking Culture
2013
Nov 14
How GitHub (no longer) Works
Nov 6
wat the wtf do programmers use as debug strings?
Sep 4
This Machine Rebases Branches
Aug 6
Inbox Zero, Everything Zero
Jul 25
More Git and GitHub Secrets
Jun 18
Bugfixes as Therapy
Apr 29
You Won't Regret Positive Feedback
Apr 22
The Conference Circuit
Apr 11
Keeping People
Mar 28
If Only I Knew This Shit in College
Mar 28
GitHub: Behind the Feature
Jan 7
You Suck at Retina
2012
Dec 12
Chat Trumps Meetings
Dec 11
Left: A Jekyll Theme
Nov 20
Open Source Misfeasance
Oct 12
The Product is the Byproduct
Sep 20
Abusing Emoji in iOS and Your Mac 👑💩
Sep 14
Unsucking Your Team's Development Environment
Aug 6
How to Build a GitHub
Jun 21
How to Screencast Your Talk
Jun 19
What They Don't Tell You About Public Speaking
May 22
Git and GitHub Secrets
Apr 27
How to Survive Tech Conferences
Apr 19
Aggressively Probing Ruby Projects
Feb 29
Ruby Patterns from GitHub's Codebase
Feb 25
Word of Mouth
Feb 2
The Apple Voice
Jan 26
Scaling GitHub
2011
Dec 12
Women Should Do Startups
Nov 23
From "Hack" to "Popular Project"
Nov 9
Swearing
Nov 7
Stories From a Music-Fueled Distributed Streaming Bender
Nov 7
Hubot Play
Nov 2
Don't Give Your Users Shit Work
Oct 24
Slide Design for Developers
Sep 28
Scaling GitHub's Employees
Sep 21
How GitHub Uses GitHub to Build GitHub
Sep 7
Customer Support Doesn't Have to Suck
Sep 6
Glue Languages Make You a Better Coder
Sep 2
A Documentation Talk
Aug 18
How GitHub Works: Creativity is Important
Aug 17
How GitHub Works: Be Asynchronous
Aug 16
How GitHub Works: Hours are Bullshit
Aug 15
How GitHub Works
Jul 27
Steve Jobs Sometimes Lies to You
Jul 21
Blog Marketing for Ego-Centric Assholes
Jul 20
Improving Yourself is Easy
Jul 19
Double-Shipping Software for Profit
Jul 1
Parallaxing Parallax on iOS
Jun 8
VAGRANCEPTION
Jun 7
The Most Important Code Isn't Code
May 13
Fame
Apr 18
Open Source Doesn't Just Market Itself
Apr 4
Why GitHub Hacks on Side Projects
Mar 21
Your Talk Looks Like Crap
Mar 10
OS X Isn't for Developers
Mar 4
I Liked It When Quick Bars Got Me Drunk
Feb 28
Winning San Francisco's Startup Scene
Feb 21
New Apple Patent Shows iPhone 6 Dispensing Ice Cream
Feb 7
Graduated with a Major in Startups
Jan 25
OAuth Will Murder Your Children
Jan 3
Automating Inefficiencies
2010
Dec 14
Reputation: kind of a big deal
Nov 25
Text Snippets. Boom.
Oct 28
Steal the Code
Oct 21
Facelette: On TechCrunch in Three Hours and $0
Oct 17
My Favorites From Rails Rumble 2010
Sep 24
Hey Twitter: Give us our Tweets
Sep 13
A Nike+ Importer for Garmin
Sep 7
How to Discover Your Music
Aug 20
Dotfiles Are Meant to Be Forked
Aug 10
Apple OnLine 4.0
Jul 28
Enslaving Branches: How GitHub Does Enterprise
Jul 18
Is that the new iPhone with the antenna thing?
Jun 17
Web Apps Aren't Apps
May 26
Androidvertising
May 23
The Clean Slate
May 8
Rebuild Facebook
Apr 27
Apple is Petrified
Apr 17
Gizmodo
Apr 6
Cloudy With a Chance of Clients
Apr 3
The Soloist
Mar 6
Your Ad Blocker Probably Blocked This Post
Mar 1
The Human is a RESTful Client
Feb 13
Boastful, a new tweetback library for your blog
Feb 5
The Future of iTunes
Jan 30
Legacy Migrations in Rails
Jan 27
iPad Ambiguity
Jan 24
Immeasurably Improve Your Life by 34 Percent
Jan 20
Simplifying Rails Controllers with named_scopes
Jan 18
WiiFailure™
Jan 17
Getting Real. Real Tasty.
2009
Nov 30
Because 11Mbps is better than 10Mbps
Nov 10
More Logical File System Organization with iTunes 9
Oct 19
Positioning Apple