Brandy Cerne

Artificial invitation mechanisms (i.e refer a friend) are not PLG. Sustainable growth from the product comes from built in in natural product-led acquisition. Don't start a startup where you need to go through someone else to get users.

Have a contrarian point of view. Traits of a top-tier contrarian view:

• People can disagree with it, like the thesis of a persuasive essay. It’s debatable.


• Something you truly believe and can advocate for. Before future investors, customers, and team members do, you have to have personal conviction in it. And you have to believe people will be better

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Kevin Scott, now CTO of Microsoft, would ask in candidate interviews: “What do you want your next job to be after this company?” Most of your team members realistically won’t stick with the same company forever. This is even more true as you scale to 20, then 50, then 100 team members and so on. But the best way to empower them to do good work is... See more

By committing and living up to the daily obligations of his commitments, the person integrates himself into a coherent whole. Commitments organize the hours and the days of a life. A committed person achieves consistency across time. His character is built through the habitual acts of service to the people he loves. His character is built by being

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what’s dystopian always involves surveillance and monetization, what’s utopian is unmonetized and unsurveilled.

A child is born with both ego and heart and soul on full display. But for many people, around adolescence, the ego begins to swell, and the heart and soul recede. People at this age need to establish an identity, to carve a self. Meanwhile, our society tells adolescent boys to bury their emotions and become men. It tells little girls that if they

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I’d love to sit and chat with my grandmother, Evelyn. She passed away in my late teens, so I knew her, but only when she was older and not her truest self—Alzheimer's has robbed her of her memories. I want to meet her as a 14-year-old, or maybe as a young mom—my age, in her early 40s. I want to know her desires and what scares her. What does she... See more