The Cost of Craft

One thing I do look back on fondly was how incredibly focused we were. Resources and time were so tight that you could feel the weight of all the things you weren’t working on. You had real conviction that the thing you were doing was the most important thing.

To pick a somewhat trivial example, at fireside chats with Mark (the predecessor to the co... See more

The value of building slowly. The popular belief system still centers around the “lean startup,” A/B testing, and shipping quickly. There are two reasons why I don’t think that’s necessarily the ideal approach.

Firstly, teams tend to underestimate the gravity created by shipping their first product. Once you share something with customers, you natu... See more

Start with an ambitious, high-potential idea, but challenging and full of ambiguities — the rough shape of a nascent great idea. It typically isn’t new, but solves many problems in a simpler, more intuitive way. It ignites people’s curiosity and self-motivation. At the end, it should seem “obvious” so that others want to copy, because there aren’t ... See more

To avoid feature bloat and ruining the core experience, is your organization capable of sorting through a flood of design ideas and synthesizing and evaluating them holistically? Do you have the development talent and leadership to implement a good design that includes evaluating visual design, usability, and design strategy from an objective and l... See more

It’s hard to have a conversation with anyone in tech without the word “scale” entering the conversation; “Internet scale” is a particularly popular variation of the term. Scale is a concept that is at the root of most venture investing: because software has zero marginal cost – one copy costs just as much as 100, or one million – there are massive ... See more

One valid criticism that the distributed work trend often receives is that there are too many companies focused on the “easy” stuff — building a new collaboration product, for example — and not enough time laying down the difficult infrastructure needed to make the situation workable for a significant enough number of people.