Alex Wittenberg

your job is not to manage peoplebut to manage processes and lead peopleYou manage processes on how you expect work to be done, where each person's authority starts and ends, how their careers are made, and how all this can be discussed, and/or changedAdditionally, you are leading people by example and through empathy. 

A decentralized brand is a fiction made real, an egregore, a self-sovereign entity that lives through the imagination and belief of many. One does not simply decide what a decentralized brand "is." It is not something that can be created by focus groups, strategists, and identity designers. Like Bitcoin, a decentralized brand has its own autonomy,... See more

Mumford, who was an expert on cities and architecture, publishing the monumental The City in History in 1961, had a unique insight into the way that technics operated in an urban environment. His essay is concerned with how technical systems, from ancient times to today, have the propensity to enable or resist authoritarianism. As he writes:

While a DAO may be able to generate 10-30% returns by investing its assets in financial assets, a well-managed DAO can generate far higher returns by investing in things that allow it to control its own destiny — investing in people (contributors), marketing, growth initiatives, and acquisitions. In our view, the returns from making the DAOs... See more

Shopify’s big strategic question is how it can build network effects. It wants to sell higher-margin products to merchants for the money, but it might be more important in the long term that those products build a network, pull more merchants and users into the system, and make the core business more sticky. Shop Pay is one building block, but an... See more

Is the task easily definable, and how can you determine whether it has been done or not?Easily defined tasks can be packaged up and shared anywhere or with anyone, and often work well as bounties or grants. Other contributions are less well defined: someone may make many inputs over an epoch without them having been defined in advance, and the... See more

Rippling’s expansive product strategy requires a unique modular org structure. Each product has a relatively autonomous GM and engineering team. Given each sub-product has massive scope, they’re like startups within a bigger startup. In fact, Rippling has over 50 former founders within the company, many of whom are running various product... See more

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The great irony of all our efforts to avoid facing finitude—to carry on believing that it might be possible not to have to choose between mutually exclusive options—is that when people finally do choose, in a relatively irreversible way, they’re usually much happier as a result. We’ll do almost anything to avoid burning our bridges, to keep alive... See more