#Photographer, @MIT alum, #engineer for @VoriHQ, #aerialist, board member of @blackburnf, and @MITFCU
Oakland, CA
Joined May 2009
- Tweets5.4K
- Following1.1K
- Followers894
- Likes64.2K
Clinton Blackburn retweeted
🇺🇸🗳️✏️ REMINDER! Students will be off on Tuesday, Nov. 3!
#DallasISDVotes
Clinton Blackburn retweeted
The higher you go up the chain, the easier it is to be disconnected from parts of your company or org.
Do your best to create psychologically safe spaces where folks can share how they truly feel and take addressing the feedback seriously so they keep sharing.
You don’t have to action on everything your workforce wants but even talking about it and saying why you won’t goes a long way.
Clinton Blackburn retweeted
#HeadStartAwareness Month is a time to hear from #HeadStart alumni.
When Miami native Dr. Anthony Abraham Jack looks at Head Start, he says, "I see a portrait of America." Read why: nhsa.org/2025/10/30/three-pa…
A bit of my work over the past few months…
Big retailers have entire teams for pricing, inventory, and merchandising.
Independent grocers have an owner wearing every hat.
Today we shipped Chip, a virtual employee inside our OS that helps runs the store.
Now all grocers have the AI superpowers of Walmart and Amazon.
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My most ridiculous hackathon project used this code to fax invoices…so the recipient could pay by check.
My first project as a new grad at @stripe was a service to turn chargeback evidence submitted through our API into PDFs and fax them to our banking partners. I'd never seen a fax in my life.
It was nobody's dream project, and I was sure I'd get fired, so I went deep. I learned how much complexity we could hide behind a simple API, even when our banking partners still relied on paper faxes. Two years later, I got to build the first version of Stripe Radar to stop fraudulent chargebacks in the first place.
You often don't get to choose where you start, but going deep, becoming the expert, and earning the trust to take bigger swings is still a great way to build a career. AI has changed how we work, but I don't think it's changed that playbook.
@vikrams039 wrote the guide I wish I'd had as a new grad: vikramsingh.me/increase-your…
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Clinton Blackburn retweeted
Ok last one and then I’ll have some coffee and get nicer again
You think you want viral tweets and stunts because that’s what grabs your attention on the timeline when you’re scrolling for fun.
What you actually want is a steady drumbeat that conveys focus, care, and wisdom to people who might buy things from you.
Clinton Blackburn retweeted
I may be a little too long away from the stabilizing influence of climate reporting. This morning I spilled coffee beans while loading the grinder and cursed, "F*****g physics!"
BTW, I was laid off in May when NPR nixed its Climate Desk. I’m pleased that one of my final stories is at the intersection of consumer decisions and climate change. I think these stories help more people connect to this potentially existential issue.
If you're looking for an experienced national journalist, I have 23 years at NPR under my belt. That includes time as an editor and planning coverage for a dispersed team of staff and freelance reporters.
Clinton Blackburn retweeted
My personal AI writing policy - write and read every single word I want a human to process, own my writing, be concise
Clinton Blackburn retweeted
if you're job searching right now: choose the team, mission and approach that resonates most, and where you'll have the most fun.
not just the buzziest or apparent leader. with model advancements, products reinvent themselves every 3-6 months, so the leaderboard resets often.
if you're chasing hype, you'll be unhappy once you're (inevitably) out of the hype cycle.
Clinton Blackburn retweeted
Introducing Superset for iPhone.
Remotely control agents running on your computer. Review and ship PRs from your pocket.
Clinton Blackburn retweeted
YC-backed @VoriHQ is growing fast and wanted a knowledge base that could keep up with them.
Before using Falconer, engineering knowledge lived in multiple places. Early Vori engineer, Clinton, knew context was a bottleneck for growth.
Now runbooks in Falconer update themselves as code changes, coding agents have accurate context, and engineers can unblock themselves. Vori engineers now have more time to build.
Read the full story: falconer.com/customers/vori/
Clinton Blackburn retweeted
Grocery is a $1.5T domestic market — bigger than restaurants, bigger than hotels. But it's running on technology from the Reagan administration.
We just raised a $22M Series B for @VoriHQ to make every supermarket in America autonomous.
Clinton Blackburn retweeted
Today a reset is taking place. The senior engineer making a million dollars a year in San Francisco uses the same frontier coding agent as the junior engineer in the Midwest. We talk to companies every day that are taking advantage of this reset, adopting expensive tools, putting in long hours, and still hitting a wall when AI struggles to understand their business context and intent.
The real truth is somewhere between the teams’ heads and the codebase.
Falconer gives everyone in the company, from engineering to sales to marketing to finance, a reliable source of truth. One that’s easy to contribute to and helps keep itself up to date.
If you want to know what changed in your product last week, ask Falconer to write a changelog.
If you want to understand how payment flows work for your new product, ask Falconer to create a diagram.
If you want to capture the decisions in your long Slack thread, ask Falconer to turn it into a document.
When the code changes, your PRDs, strategy docs, and runbooks get updated. Your employees are happy, your coding agents are happy.
Falconer was built with lessons in mind from making engineers at Uber and Stripe the most productive in the industry. We built custom tools for top tier talent. The results were remarkable. But outside of these companies, no one has access to these custom tools.
That’s what we had in mind when we built Falconer.
The quality of information you feed yourselves and your AI tools is how you get the most out of them and separate yourselves from the competition.
You can start centralizing and curating and compounding those gains over time, or you can let the bad information multiply, rot, and pollute your knowledge—severely limiting your AI leverage.
Everyone wants more knowledge, and everyone has knowledge to contribute.
Falconer is now available as your source of truth to achieve the productivity gains you’ve been searching for.
Clinton Blackburn retweeted
2025 wrapped: We crossed $355M in payments volume at @VoriHQ 🚀
Grocery is the most important consumer spend category on the planet—and Vori is building its AI-powered infrastructure.
• +$22M in incremental sales for grocers
• 1.26M lbs of bananas sold 🍌
• 577k+ cost changes detected by Vori AI
• 50+ teammates building this every day
• Live nationwide — Seattle → Staten Island
2026: escape velocity. $2B+ in payments.
Buckle up.
Clinton Blackburn retweeted
2024: We launched and went $0 to $153M in payments volume at @VoriHQ
2025: We 10x
2030: Vori is one of the largest payments businesses on planet earth
Watch our Year in Review below ⬇️
I visited @stripe this week for the first time since leaving. This was also my first time wearing a visitor badge since my interview 7 years ago. It felt good to be back and see old friends!
Clinton Blackburn retweeted
I couldn’t look people in the eye walking down the sidewalk earlier
Like, I simply didn’t want to
And not just about VP Harris. Clowns around here didn’t even approve a statewide minimum wage increase to $18 and not making people slaves just bc they’re in prison
It’s absurd
Clinton Blackburn retweeted
There are a lot of lessons to learn:
- you have to win to wield power
- you can’t “teach your side a lesson” by helping them lose
- other minority groups want to be white & will vote alongside white interests even when it hurts them
- black people consistently vote pragmatically
