To be simple, you have to be extremely opinionated. You have to remove everything that doesn’t match your opinion of what the product should be doing. You have to meticulously remove every single click, every single extra button, every single setting.

In fact, things in the settings menu are an indication that you’ve abdicated your responsibility to the user. Choices for the user are an abdication of your responsibility. Maybe for legal or important reasons, you can have a few of these, but you should struggle and resist against every single choice the user has to make.

In the age of TikTok and... See more

If you really want to have a strong culture of people who are mission-oriented, you can’t mix too many different kinds of people.

That’s where the “cult” in culture comes from. Early teams do look like cults. They are monomaniacal; they are weird; but they’re all kind of weird in a similar way. And if you start mixing too many different kinds of... See more

Good Teams Throw Away Far More Product Than They Keep

Nivi: There’s a lot of ways people try to assess whether someone has the ability to create new knowledge. Peter Thiel has his famous question: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”

He’s trying to find out if that person has opinions of their own. Do they have their own... See more