Things I'm Thinking About

There are two types of founders.

Those who do lots of research, validate ideas, test many prototypes, and iteratively get to a product. This is a more technical and user-focused approach.

The other is where the product vision emerges fully-formed in the founder’s eye before it is brought to existence. Here, the founder zeroes in on their self express... See more

I aspire to Isak Dinesen’s way: work a little every day, without hope and without despair. What a way to live! To make! To be!

Self-doubt kills more early stage companies than competition or lack of funding ever will. We talk about companies needing financial capital, but rarely about the importance of emotional capital.

For most people, adjusting their self-image accounts for the difference between giving up and reaching their potential. Want to make the world a better pla... See more

Being a founder requires constant calibration between arrogance and humility, optimism and pessimism. You need the arrogance to believe that you have something important to say, but the humility to know most people won’t care. You need the optimism to convince yourself and others (employees, investors, customers) to believe in you. But you need pes... See more

Most of the social internet has become about building an audience and connecting people to brands and influencers. It’s better understood as a performance by the top 1%, not as a way to exchange knowledge or connect people to one another.

The people I find most interesting on social media are using it as a sort of diary/note to self, not broadcasting to an audience.

I really hate the term content creator. It’s such a corporate way of describing artists, writers, intellectuals, and other creatives who ultimately just want to create work they’re proud of.

Part of the problem is that the big social networks are not content platforms supported by advertising. They are better understood as advertising platforms supp... See more

The classic “ideas are worthless, execution is everything” adage is flawed.

Six+ months into an intense software build, I can attest that the little execution details make all the difference. But the constraint on executing well is not operational. It’s more often about having good ideas about how to resolve challenges.

In other words, good execution... See more

I would go as far as to say our greatness depends on the intensity of our focus. The thing is - long stretches of focused thought don’t yield overnight results. It takes years to make things that seemingly manifest in days.