Max Miranda’s Twitter Introduction

Max Miranda
5 min readMay 12, 2021

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I was 17 years old, and had just landed in SFO. Sitting on the tarmac, I was doing what all 17 year old boys do: grooving out to Fall Out Boy. I take out my headphones to ask my parents, “What’re we doing for dinner?”

“What do you want?” my mom replied.

“Well… if I don’t end up going to school in California, I should really try In-N-Out at least once in my life.”

“Eh, sure”.

We were in the Bay to tour UC Berkeley, where I was waitlisted, but our flight had been delayed several hours so we had failed to make our tour earlier that day.

It was a Saturday night so there was a long line at the In-N-Out. In front of us there was a group of three college kids. Two of the kids were wearing Cal attire — I overheard one of them say, “Yeah, at Berkeley, studying is so intense, these kids shove textbooks up their asses.” Another chimes in, “Yeah, there’s a fuckton of studying.”

My Dad pokes them on the shoulder and in an offended tone states, “Excuse me”.

They turn around, and there’s a pause — at this point, my mental dialogue is just that scene from The Office where Michael finds out Toby is coming back.

“Do you even know how much a fuckton is?”, my Dad asks.

“What?”

“One fuckton is two shitloads”

I brace for the worst, but, almost magically, a second of paused confusion gave way to uproarious laughter.

We start talking and really hit it off. One of the kids, John, even turned out to be a fellow Jew, a fact I would use several times over the coming months to convince my grandmother that Berkeley was not, in fact, “a horde of antisemites.”

We explained to him that our flight had been delayed so we missed the scheduled tour. “No problem, I’ll give you a tour!”, he replies casually.

“Well, our return trip actually leaves early tomorrow morning, so we would need to be finished by 8:30, and we wouldn’t want to bother you.”

“It’s no problem at all”, he tells me. “I’ll be there.”

And he was. At 7:30 am he walked us around the lush greenery and polished marble buildings as if he were showing around an old friend. We capped it off 300 feet in the air on top of the Campanile, Berkeley’s landmark clocktower. As I took in the majestic view with the sun rising over the Berkeley Hills, I pulled my dad to the side and told him, “If I get in here, I have to go.”

The view from the top of the Campanile

As you might imagine from the fact I’m telling this story, I got in. John later convinced me to join his fraternity (something I had no intention of doing before meeting him). That fraternity had a massive butterfly effect on my life — because of it I:

  • Joined the mock trial team only to meet my girlfriend of 4 years
  • Decided to study Computer Science
  • Got into a mobile development club which got me a job as an iOS Engineer at LinkedIn
  • Met some of my best friends for life

I owe almost everything good I have in my life right now to that one random introduction at an In-N-Out. And I owe that moment entirely to my dad: for being willing to look like an absolute jack-ass to make a friend. How does this relate to Twitter? Because that story is about not being afraid to put yourself out there, and up until this point “being afraid to put myself out there” has been my entire social media strategy.

I owe almost everything good I have in my life right now to that one random introduction at an In-N-Out.

Yes, the worst case scenario is that I look like a complete idiot to all of my friends and family — which I can live with. But in the best case scenario, I find a community of people who I enjoy talking to and get a whole bunch of random encounters that change my life for the better. I’m not sure I have much of a choice.

Wait, who are you?

Hi, I’m Max.

I’m also:

  • A Dog dad to Charlie
  • An iOS Engineer at LinkedIn
  • Looking to build something that I can tell my grandchildren about
  • Brother to Danny Miranda (whose podcast inspired me to do this)

So, what will you Tweet about?

  • Books I’m Reading
  • Life in Big Tech
  • Startups
  • Anything cool I build
  • Tech Trends
  • Whatever else I find interesting (video games, sports, stocks, crypto, general observations about life)

My metric of success is: “If I were just discovering this profile, would his feed make me smile?” That could be through a funny joke, an interesting take, or a longer form piece like this.

I’ve heard that Twitter is about “reading the room.” Well, I want to Tweet about where my curiosity naturally takes me rather than where the room is headed, as my ultimate goal is to attract people that are curious about similar things.

How am I going to Tweet?

Generally, if I don’t make it a priority to track something, it doesn’t happen. So, I’m going to Tweet at least a couple times a day for at least the first 100 days after posting this, in the hopes of tricking my mind into a consistent schedule.

I’ll also be throwing in some threads — I’ve seen lots of cool threads recently touching on things I’ve always wanted to know more about. Writing threads strikes me as an opportunity to research a topic in depth and then discuss that topic with the world.

As a note as I’m setting out, I’d like to remember to bring some nuance on any opinions I raise. I know Twitter tends to be a platform tailored to hard-lined opinions, but being able to understand why two perfectly sane people can feel different ways about a situation is, I believe, one of the most important skills one can foster.

In Summary, my goals are:

  1. Get comfortable with the uncomfortable
  2. Find my people
  3. Make some of them love me
  4. Don’t be afraid when some of them laugh at me

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Max Miranda
Max Miranda

Written by Max Miranda

Software Engineer, Startup Enthusiast, Trying to Remain in the Present

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