On building of All Trades

For the past decade, our idolatry of startups and innovation has meant the focus has been: What can we disrupt? How fast can we grow? How big can we get? How much can we raise?

Founders are taught to possess enough faith that they can build something very big very fast. This creates a pressure cooker of responsibility that distorts reality to the... See more

Sari Azout • Can I Ramble for a Sec?

Founders need a new way of thinking, of building, of support that allows them to drive systematic, methodical and meaningful change.

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.

You can either build your dream, or help someone build theirs.

100 Simple Truths

Most projects have a right size and technology and communication networks have changed the best ‘right size’ for many organizations. If you’re struggling, it might be because you’re fighting the laws of organizational physics. Radically transforming the size of an organization changes more than we would think. We can begin to right size by asking... See more

What’s the right size?

On right sizing your org with better solutions

Hindsight is 2020

I don’t mean “hindsight is 20/20.” I’m talking about the year 2020.

See, early in 2023, I wrote an article about starting and growing a business in 2023, and in that article I referenced this very same seismic shift in startup dynamics — a shift that, no surprise, began all the way back with the pandemic in 2020.

That’s the tricky... See more

Joe Procopio • Starting a Business Looks Drastically Different in 2024

How startups changed since 2020:
-Consumer fell out of love with technology
-Business & Venture OverIndexed on AI
-Money went from Tight to Scared

What’s happening now:
-self founded, funded & reliant
-Profitable out of the gate
-solving problems and building with slower burn rate
-Innovating strategically alongside technical innovation

How do generalists help? Taking a broad approach gets you further faster

A company is built on details, not frameworks. It is all the little things, the small touches of craft and culture, that determines that long-term success of an organization. A solo founder will be able to build a small product that is a manifestation of their taste. And, if it turns out that the opportunity is huge, they should probably hire... See more

The One-person Billion-dollar Company

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

Superhuman

Pick a customer instead of an idea: “One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was that when you're starting a company, you often think you're picking an idea, but you're really picking a customer. It's actually pretty easy to change your idea, but it’s way harder to change the customer you're serving,” says Agrawal.