Britt Gage

Paul Graham said, “when people visit your startup, they should be surprised how few people you have.”

Different backgrounds, different views, different experiences. The best teams are diverse. These are the ingredients that spark innovation.

Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation—anchored in understanding customer’s needs, prototyping, and generating creative ideas—to transform the way you develop products, services, processes, and organizations.

When using design thinking principles, you bring together what is desirable from a human point of view with what is... See more

A better way to attract and build an audience is to create a world people want to inhabit .

When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at four a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at nine p.m. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important... See more

• Trust : Does the product work the way your user is expecting it to? Do they have to second-guess their interactions? Or, considered another way, is it clear that you trust the user to be able to complete tasks without error?


• Purpose : Do your users know why they’re there? Are their behaviors clearly tied to customer, business, or their personal

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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 mistake is thinking your startup idea is venture-scale and getting on the VC treadmill. Once you’re on the treadmill, here’s what changes:

1. High growth expectations: VCs are looking for companies that grow big enough fast enough. If your business isn’t suited to this kind of rapid growth, it can lead to undue pressure and unrealistic

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This has been the core question I’ve sat with for the last decade—how to balance money and meaning on the entrepreneurial path. And there are three archetypal ways that I’ve seen people approach the question:

• The deferred life plan


• Being bivocational


• Choosing to integrate