Britt Gage

Enter the MTA’s Extra Credit campaign, which is trying to sell students on the appeal of MetroCards (or later this year, free OMNY cards ). Last month, the agency began giving away a free virtual reality Meta Quest 2 headset each week to a random high school student who uses their student MetroCard and has perfect attendance that week.

There should be Retroactive Public Goods Funding for those founders crazy enough to try something truly new that failed as a business but succeeded in creating useful mutations, maybe even ticker tape parades, and certainly not derision.

We try to be as rigorous and data-driven as possible in quarterly planning. All objectives are measurable, either in terms of quantifiable thresholds or Boolean “was X completed or not.” Our objectives are very aggressive, and often at the end of the quarter we only end up completing 70% in one direction or another. The remaining 30% helps identify... See more

Constraints breed creativity.

By running your startup with the stated goal of being cashflow positive, you force your team to take ownership of every dollar just a bit more and consider outside-the-box solutions earlier. It also can influence team members to be willing to go beyond their stated areas of ownership to get things done.

There are endless tasks to be done in starting a new venture. But most of the tasks are necessary but insufficient. You can’t begin without them, but by themselves, they won’t create enough impact for your work to make a change happen.

And every new project must create change, or else it fails.

We spend our time focusing on the tasks because the... See more

“I want everything we do to be beautiful. I don’t give a damn whether the client understands that that’s worth anything, or that the client thinks it’s worth anything, or whether it is worth anything. It’s worth it to me. It’s the way I want to live my life. I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares.”

I was particularly compelled by Kusserow’s argument that so many of the characteristics we often consider “personality traits” — things like shyness, creativity, confidence, organization, and shyness — are actually “class-learned attributes.”