Britt Gage
@brittfgage
Founder, of All Trades. Building a new type of company for generalists and the founders we seek to serve.
Britt Gage
weofalltrades.com
I started this company in one of the recessions and had seen suppliers and customers go to the wall in droves. To me, getting more customers and more orders meant safety and security.
To the people who worked for me, growth meant change.
To the people who worked for me, growth meant change.
6 Ways I Sabotaged My Own Startup’s Culture
Startup Systems and
Growth is change — communicate often.
The result of this garage-centered approach to entrepreneurship was a business paradigm that looks liked this:
In the above model, notice how the product is at the center of the company, and all the work and effort of building the actual business is focused on marketing the product.
In the above model, notice how the product is at the center of the company, and all the work and effort of building the actual business is focused on marketing the product.
Aaron Dinin • The “Garage Startup” Is Officially Dead
Everyone wants to be picked, but no one wants to organize the collective ‘we’.
It’s the ‘we’ that creates a school of thought, a movement, a network, a culture.
Curate, connect, organize and lead.
It’s the ‘we’ that creates a school of thought, a movement, a network, a culture.
Curate, connect, organize and lead.
Generalists are hiding in plain sight. Their identity is tied to connecting the dots for others instead of themselves. oAT exists so that they’re seen for the impact they make, even when others might not yet see or understand.
So why wouldn't all founders start by engaging with users individually? Because it's hard and demoralizing. Sales gives you a kind of harsh feedback that "marketing" doesn't. You try to convince someone to use what you've built, and they won't. These conversations are painful, but necessary. I suspect from my experience that founders who want to... See more
Jessica Livingston: Why Startups Need to Focus on Sales, Not Marketing
the power of imagination and optimism is an amazing and essential part of innovation. But over the years, we’ve become so enamored with the unicorn valuation as the goal, that we started valuing the wrong things and overlooking the fundamental physics of business.
With capital at zero cost, growth at all costs became the mantra. How fast can you... See more
With capital at zero cost, growth at all costs became the mantra. How fast can you... See more
Where does VC go from here?
ON SMALL TEAMS
Impressive things accomplished by small teams:
Impressive things accomplished by small teams:
- Instagram had 13 employees when they were acquired by Facebook for $1 billion. They had 30 millions users at the time.
- Mojang (the company behind Minecraft) had 37 employees when they were acquired by Microsoft for $2.5 billion. At that time, Mojang had revenue of about $290 million
sari azout • the power of a good prompt, small teams, extreme questions to trigger ideas, working online/living offline
There are no shortcuts. The lottery winner isn’t ultimately happy after their sudden change of fortune. The home built hastily rarely survives the first storm. The single-sentence summary of a book or news event is no substitute for the full story.
Rick Rubin • The Creative Act: A Way of Being
“Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of [lightning] to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.”
— Chuck Close, artist
— Chuck Close, artist
Superhuman
This Maria Popova quote stopped me in my tracks:
The reason we’re so increasingly intolerant of long articles and why we skim them, why we skip forward even in a short video that reduces a 300-page book into a three-minute animation — is that we’ve been infected with this kind of pathological impatience that makes us want to have the knowledge but... See more
The reason we’re so increasingly intolerant of long articles and why we skim them, why we skip forward even in a short video that reduces a 300-page book into a three-minute animation — is that we’ve been infected with this kind of pathological impatience that makes us want to have the knowledge but... See more
On becoming and