Britt Gage

Being a founder requires constant calibration between arrogance and humility, optimism and pessimism. You need the arrogance to believe that you have something important to say, but the humility to know most people won’t care. You need the optimism to convince yourself and others (employees, investors, customers) to believe in you. But you need... See more

Emotional labor is the opposite of the industrial economy’s task-based, measured output. Even if we don’t dig ditches, the offer for a certain kind of work was: Process this pile of papers and we don’t care whether you like (or pretend to like) your job. The labor is the easily measured stuff.

But AI and mechanization have turned this sort of task... See more

Foster likens his approach with Zapier to playing poker. Sure, there’s a general set of guidelines and best practices to follow, but there’s no golden rule that applies to every single hand. “We tried to deeply understand the cards that we were dealt and if the advice applies in the particular situation that we've got,” he says.

Take, for example, the ambition to “make your venture-backed startup profitable”: to develop, market, and distribute a product or service that’s never existed before, in a form that’s valuable and accessible enough for large numbers of people to want to pay you for it, in sufficient quantity that your revenue consistently exceeds your costs.

If... See more

When I’m clearing my inbox, responding to comments in a doc, cooking lunch–these are chores.

Chores are the backbone of industrial productivity. We can check them off, measure them and see them stacked up.

Most of the time, most of us do chores. Finding a way to do your chores more productively is quite leveraged, and you can put it to use right... See more

Who owns research?

That depends on the type of research. Marketing often owns marketing or market research. Makes sense, right? This might be qual or quant research that helps Marketers do their jobs well.

Who owns CX, UX, user, customer, or “design” research? I would have to say that your CX or UX Researchers own it. Perhaps your Service Designers,... See more