On building of All Trades
How can I maintain my creativity, optimism, intellectual vitality, and sense of agency in the face of the stress that comes from building a company and the endless forces luring towards conformity?
We start raw, then our hearts and minds get boiled by constraints, pressure, feedback, and challenges. How do we keep our head up and maintain our... See more
We start raw, then our hearts and minds get boiled by constraints, pressure, feedback, and challenges. How do we keep our head up and maintain our... See more
sari azout • My Favorite Questions
Progress is not automatic or inevitable. It depends on choice and effort. It is up to us.
Progress is not automatically good. It must be steered. Progress always creates new problems, and they don’t get solved automatically. Solving them requires active focus and effort, and this is a part of progress, too.
Progress is not automatically good. It must be steered. Progress always creates new problems, and they don’t get solved automatically. Solving them requires active focus and effort, and this is a part of progress, too.
What is progress?
"Hi, would you rather work with a company that's owned by some private equity schmuck, or a company where some of the prosperity you helped me generate gets reinvested in you and your community?" It's a competitive advantage to do the right thing. So I feel like that we're going to have a new wave of founders who take that seriously, who are going... See more
Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology)
You walk down your high street. What do you prefer to see there? The economist will say: Walmart, Best Buy, the Gap. Scale economies — cheaper prices — better for “consumers”! But the human being will say: an independent cafe, a good bookshop, a boutique clothing store. Why? Because they offer many things that mega scale organizations don’t.
Sari Azout • 10 things worth sharing this week
At the end of the day, having an exciting vision (even one where illegibility is an asset) does not exempt us from building a product that people actually want.
sari azout • 2023 End of Year Letter
The first step is to understand the fundamental difference between humans and AIs. We are analog, chemical beings, with emotions and feelings. Compared with machines, we think slowly—and we act too fast, failing to consider the long-term consequences of our behavior (which AI can help predict). So we should not compete with AI; we should use it. At... See more
Esther Dyson • Don’t Fuss About Training AIs. Train Our Kids
We’re building a human-first company in the age of AI. To be a generalist is to fundamentally be human, to be graded on soft skills, willingness to show up, and be curious and to build trust.
Learning to thrive in a resilient culture is essential. Being indoctrinated into a rigid and fragile mindset is not.
Manipulation, indoctrination and addiction
Being original is always the best strategy. We now live in a world where every day there are hundreds of companies launching or redefining themselves. Brand is no longer a secret and the process to create one has been codified