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
Separate what you can control from what you can’t. It’s a small way to lift some weight off your shoulders. Take 15 minutes to create a list of everything that you’re worried about. Then label each one as a ‘within’ or a ‘beyond’ to see your sources of stress and anxiety laid bare
The 100 Best Bits of Advice From 10 Years of First Round Review
I have learned so many things from music about writing. I think there are three important elements: rhythm, harmony, and free improvisation. I learned these things from music, not from literature. And when I started to write, I tried to write as though I were playing music.
Deborah Treisman • The Underground Worlds of Haruki Murakami
It’s hard to get a company to do a new thing, and the bigger the organization, the harder it is to change. Companies that are trying to change tend to require an equal and opposite force to overcome the inertia. Large enterprise sales teams are built around signing a single customer, while on the small business end of the market all you need is a few quick calls around an otherwise self-serve solution. When an executive wants their company to change, they often hire expensive, high-status consultants like McKinsey to make a plan that gets everyone on board.
If organizational inertia is one form of resistance that you might want to overcome, what are the business equivalents of simple machines that create mechanical advantage and multiply your input force into a much larger output force? And if they exist, do they have an equivalent trade-off of physical machines where you have to apply the force over a longer distance to gain leverage?
Maybe! Startups often hyper-focus on a small number of customers that share specific traits. This compresses all of the startup’s energy and force into a small space. It’s the opposite of being “spread thin.” The advantage of this approach is that you’re more likely to solve a problem, overcome inertia, and gain adoption by the customers you focus on. The trade-off is that it might be questionable how many more customers you’ll be able to find. I call this a market wedge, where you sacrifice scale for power.
Here’s the bright side of groupthink: It enables the dissenters to quietly break apart in their own direction with little competition and free of nosy onlookers.
Rachel Greenberg • The Backwards Hack to Surviving The AI Revolution as an Entrepreneur Isn’t Mastering the New Tech
From James Clear, Fwd: 3-2-1: Making your habits fun, how to host a good party, and tips for prioritizing
"10 years or 1 hour. Those are the two time frames worth prioritizing.
10 years is shorthand for thinking longer-term than nearly everyone else and doing things that are really ambitious or meaningful. Most of the deeply meaningful things in life
... See moreWe can decide that technology exists to create opportunity, to help people find resilience, meaning and connection. We can realize that technology changes the status quo, and that change is up to us.
Late-stage technocrats
There are some industries primed for what we call AI leapfrogging. Leapfrogging happens when an industry or market (usually an outmoded industry, or an emerging market) skips a step along the technology transformation chain.
These industries have historically not been digitized and don’t have a dominant cloud incumbent. We see greenfield opportuniti... See more
These industries have historically not been digitized and don’t have a dominant cloud incumbent. We see greenfield opportuniti... See more
The AI Spectrum for Founders
Think about distribution from day one
If you’re going to build a product, you want people to use it. But far too often, founders get drawn to the building and tinkering side of the business, forgoing the go-to-market piece until they’re actually ready to get out and sell.
That’s a mistake, says Foster. “I think one of the biggest things that founder... See more
If you’re going to build a product, you want people to use it. But far too often, founders get drawn to the building and tinkering side of the business, forgoing the go-to-market piece until they’re actually ready to get out and sell.
That’s a mistake, says Foster. “I think one of the biggest things that founder... See more
The Not So Cookie-Cutter Approach to Company Building — 8 Lessons from Zapier
- Reflect on your progress. While job titles are fixed, your daily accomplishments are not. Writing every day to think about what you actually did today that made you a better version of yourself is a great exercise to ensure you focus on the right things. Journaling is a powerful tool to add to your mental gym.
- Conduct personal experiments. Making
Anne-Laure Le Cunff • The tyranny of job titles: from vanity growth to personal growth
These are direct actions we take internally in our rituals for generalists at oAT — so cool to see this mirrored back to us.