On building of All Trades

Stop trading time for money, start trading value for money.

100 Simple Truths

Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous. Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and by occasional revolution. Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy. Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power.

Packy McCormick • Pace Yourself

Reflect on your progress. While job titles are fixed, your daily accomplishments are not. Writing every day to think about what you actually did today that made you a better version of yourself is a great exercise to ensure you focus on the right things. Journaling is a powerful tool to add to your mental gym.

Conduct personal experiments. Making

Anne-Laure Le Cunff • The tyranny of job titles: from vanity growth to personal growth

These are direct actions we take internally in our rituals for generalists at oAT — so cool to see this mirrored back to us.

Stories that resonate are the ones that sit with the stories we already believe and value.

Seth Godin • Decoding ‘story’

Instead of doing broad but thin market research (e.g., customer surveys), focus on one person (or a small group) and go as deep as you can, learning everything about how your product fits into their broader lives. Or become your customer—spend a day, a month, or even a few years in the role you're trying to sell to before attempting to build a... See more

Casey Rosengren • The Power of Designing for a Single User

There’s wisdom to not talking about our goals. See Derek Sivers TED Talk. It could make you feel closer to your achievement than you are. But a spoken goal, the big one you feel in your bones, the one you’re afraid to say out loud because to not achieve it would be crushing. That takes courage. We reward courage by rooting for you. Some people call... See more

Kyle Thiermann • How can people root for you?

I’m not one to build in public, but there’s utility in making sure it’s known how people can root for you.

As an extension of this “don’t hire until it hurts” philosophy, Foster notes that Zapier was very hesitant in the early days to bring on anyone with management experience (even though the founding trio themselves didn’t have any). “Our first people managers were just me, my co-founders, and early employees that we promoted into those roles. We were... See more

The Not So Cookie-Cutter Approach to Company Building — 8 Lessons from Zapier

Early stages require both execution and strategy, the doers and the managers. Find both.

A solid foundation requires a robust team structure. Hiring individuals who not only have the requisite skills but also align with the company’s culture is crucial. However, building a foundation goes beyond just assembling a team; it involves nurturing and equipping them with the tools and knowledge to excel. Continuous training and professional

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

scott belsky • Tweet

Hiring generalists collapses the talent stack, thereby improving decision making and synthesis of information, and giving companies to act quickly when time and resources are limited.