CEO diary entry: control, accountability, whiplash & anxiety

Put through that process, reality usually hits like a truck. Many concepts that sound good on paper are infeasible to implement, or simply don’t produce the expected results. It’s frustrating when that happens, of course, but the pace of experimentation and learning at a startup is unparalleled. I think this is an especially important form of rigor... See more

This sounds so myopic in hindsight that I’m almost embarrassed by it, but, at the outset, I didn’t even have a view on whether or not I should pursue venture investment, and I had no real concept for how I wanted to design a business—at least not beyond its engineering function.

We tell entrepreneurs to find a need, test, and trial until they find a solution to that need, move fast, and break things. Yes, betas work; our method is a process of induction, right out of the playbook of the scientific method. Yet we need to insert a framework of intentionality into that process so that at the end of our experiments, we have a

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The same idea applies to investing. The continuous goal, in my case, is a portfolio that has distinct advantages versus the market along dimensions like value, momentum, capital allocation, etc. There are no price targets, no return targets, no staking my results on a given outcome for a given company. A goalless process like this is incredibly ha

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Now, it’s worth remembering where I was back in 2004. I had a purpose which wasn’t static despite my belief it was. I was jumping to strategy whilst ignoring landscape, climate and doctrine. I was using storytelling to communicate with the entire group. I had no mechanism of learning. I was simply copying secrets of success from others combined wit... See more

I wish when I was at my previous startups I had focused more on building and less on winning. Sure, I may not have done exactly what I had thought I wanted, but finding ways to love the process would’ve allowed for better outcomes anyway. What we want is such an abstract idea, built on a foundation of shifting sand, that it is pointless to try to p... See more