Nobody Knows What They’re Doing

As a new founder, it’s tempting and often discouraging to compare your inside to another’s outside. Every other founder and company looks so well put together, whereas you are of course all too aware of your shortcomings and insecurities.

Because of how much we deify the great entrepreneurs of our time, we end up inevitably comparing our new company

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Learning is complicated.

While we’re doing it, it’s easy to imagine that those around us are completely sure of themselves, moving forward in a well-lit space.

In fact, if you visit a growing company, a useful school or anywhere that growth is happening, you’ll quickly see that everyone is stumbling forward in the shadows.

That’s part of the deal.

Learning is complicated.

While we’re doing it, it’s easy to imagine that those around us are completely sure of themselves, moving forward in a well-lit space.

In fact, if you visit a growing company, a useful school or anywhere that growth is happening, you’ll quickly see that everyone is stumbling forward in the shadows.

That’s part of the deal.

Confession — I get inferiority complex from all these "How X builds product" posts by @lennysan. Everybody appear to have their shit together, all organized and confident. My experience has been very different. If you want to do something new and hard, it's a constant doubt,… Show more

People early in their career should learn from computer science: meander some in your walk (especially early on), randomly drop yourself into new parts of the terrain, and when you find the highest hill, don’t waste any more time on the current hill no matter how much better the next step up might appear .

Necessary chaos embraces the uncertainty inherent to startups. Here are a few examples:

As growth accelerates and larger teams are needed, people stretch into new roles, teams scale and split, and new processes are formed.

After a promising call with a potential new customer, the product roadmap is re-prioritized to incorporate features that will hel... See more

What I Wish Someone Had Told Me

1. Optimism, obsession, self-belief, raw horsepower and personal connections are how things get started.


2. Cohesive teams, the right combination of calmness and urgency, and unreasonable commitment are how things get finished. Long-term orientation is in short supply; try not to worry about what people think in the short t

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The early vision was to democratize software creation. We all felt we had this crazy superpower of being able to build software, which had given us these advantages in our careers. You can have tremendous influence in an organization — even if you’re not in leadership — by building software and deploying it to people. So broadly, we were exploring

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