99 Pieces of Unsolicited, (Possibly) Ungooglable Startup Advice

“Every organization sucks, but you get to choose the ways in which your organization sucks.” – Mark Zuckerberg quoting Dan Rosensweig.

Have a contrarian point of view. Traits of a top-tier contrarian view:

• People can disagree with it, like the thesis of a persuasive essay. It’s debatable.


• Something you truly believe and can advocate for. Before future investors, customers, and team members do, you have to have personal conviction in it. And you have to believe people will be better

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Build honesty into your culture, not transparency.

Kevin Scott, now CTO of Microsoft, would ask in candidate interviews: “What do you want your next job to be after this company?” Most of your team members realistically won’t stick with the same company forever. This is even more true as you scale to 20, then 50, then 100 team members and so on. But the best way to empower them to do good work is t... See more

Hire for expertise, not experience. The best candidates talk about what they can do, rather than what they did.

Every great community has value and values. Value, what are members getting out of being a part of the community. Values, a strict code of conduct – explicit and/or implicit, that every member follows to uphold the quality of the community.

Build for good actors, rather than hedge against the bad actors. I love Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales‘ steak knives analogy. Imagine you’re designing a restaurant that serves steak. Subsequently, you’re going to be giving everyone steak knives. There’s always the possibility that people with knives will stab each other, but you won’t lock everyone in cag... See more