On building of All Trades

Everyone wants to have a unique idea but the alternative is to just to be ten times better. The market is full of crap. An underrated way to succeed at anything is simply to be better. Anyone can build a "quick and dirty" tool to chat with your PDF. Few people can build incredibly polished products. And those that do need time, effort, and... See more

Very, very many people at Stripe today are doing a quite different job to the one that they join for. In order to do that they've often had to learn a lot and stretch themselves into new areas.

“We are only leading when we are centered on making others better.”

A century-long vision allows you to build something that mostly ignores short-lived fluctuations in public perception or personal feelings. With a vision of that duration, you can think outside of yourself. If you couple that with a hum-drum process of Google Sheets and brain-trust meetings, you can build something meaningful.

There is something... See more

By casting a wide net, I learned that I have very little ability to predict how useful a call will be in advance. There is relevance, when work is closely related to something you’re working on, and usefulness, when work advances something you’re working on. Relevance is easier to predict, but it’s not a very good proxy for usefulness, which is a... See more

With the innovation of the org chart McCallum eased the tradeoff between scale and efficiency that many organizations face as they grow. This new ‘operating system’ for firms operates even more effectively in modern times by leveraging the internet, but the tradeoff between scale and efficiency has not gone away. Structures and processes that work... See more

intentions are just as powerful as goals, if not more so. While a goal is a specific target, a clear destination on the horizon, an intention serves as a guiding light, softly illuminating our path as we move through time and space. Goals can sometimes make us feel like we're wearing blinders, zeroed in on a singular endpoint, which can lead to... See more