Collapse the talent stack every chance you get . As I reflect on the teams I’ve led and hundreds of start-ups I’ve worked with, there is a consistent unfair competitive advantage i’ve witnessed when the talent stack was collapsed - when the lead designer was also the product leader, when the front-end engineer was also a designer, when the designer... See more

If you want to build a product that millions (or hundreds of millions) of people can use, you must defy this tendency to prioritize the core product at the expense of the “first mile.”

That you should never outsource your story or any component of your competitive advantage.

you actually need to do the opposite and reduce your scope by shedding parts of your responsibility to enable new teams around them. This feels very counterintuitive after years of trying to gain additional scope. But the decision here is that you can either keep it all yourself and do a B job at it, or you can shed these areas to enable them to al... See more

Those who really win (an industry, or in a career) did so by delaying gratification. One of the greatest competitive advantages in a startup team — or any bold new project or turnaround — is simply sticking together long enough to figure it out. This is hard because our natural human tendency is to crave short-term rewards and seek short-cuts to sa... See more

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