Britt Gage

The problem you solve for customers is increasingly one they can’t even articulate for themselves . The ones that are easy to understand have already been built and funded over the last 20 years. Building something of true excellence will require a hungrier engagement with the world

as humans, we tend to do whatever it takes and to use any justification to keep busy, even if the task is meaningless. In the words of the scientists behind the study: “Our research suggests that many purported goals that people pursue may be merely justifications to keep themselves busy.”

The skills-based approach rests on two important frameworks. The first is the late Edgar Schein’s organizational culture model, in which culture builds upon a foundation of basic underlying assumptions — employees’ shared assumptions about what drives successful outcomes to challenges in their organization’s specific context. Underlying assumptions... See more

There’s a lot of emotional overheard that comes with building a company whose essence is hard to put into words.

Mastery is not only about getting better at your craft, but also about finding ways to eliminate the obstacles, distractions, and other annoyances that prevent you from working on your craft.

Top performers find ways to spend as much time as possible on what matters and as little time as possible on what doesn't. It is not someone else's... See more

Designing products for a single person

In business, there are countless examples of products invented for a single person that then became mass-marketable. Here are a few of my favorites:

• Baking soda —invented in the 1800s by British chemist Alfred Bird so that he could make bread for his wife, who was allergic to yeast.


• The typewriter —one of the

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Plans embrace boundaries and reality, they don’t ignore them. Plans thrive on scarcity and constraints. Plans are open for inspection, and a successful planner looks forward to altering the plans to make them more likely to become real.

The hardest transition as a founder is going from working directly on the product to not. There’s this joy that comes from sitting down to solve a problem and standing up when it’s done and good. Building a company or managing people is never just done.