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

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

We are living through the emergence of a new business category which I believe will become an important part of our digital lives: community-curated knowledge networks  (a thread on why) https://t.co/ZNg3FHiGUD

Problems also arise when you pursue risky paths to income. When startups become your deferred life plan, you can invest years of your life into projects that never pay of

I started this company in one of the recessions and had seen suppliers and customers go to the wall in droves. To me, getting more customers and more orders meant safety and security.

To the people who worked for me, growth meant change.

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 lack of a clear direction is a major roadblock for purpose-driven brand owners. 

We find they are often wearing so many hats it’s hard to focus. 

One moment you’re the product creator. 

The next you’re the CEO. 

Then you’re writing emails. 

Next, you’re launching Facebook ads.

All the while you’re trying to keep track of critical metrics that... See more

Projects rarely unfold in a linear fashion; they require frequent course correction. Most trainees should spend more time on a project’s decision tree than they currently do. Once you get into a project, you will have learned from your initial experiments, new papers will have been published, and technology will have advanced. As a result, at any... See more

There’s lots of well-intentioned advice out there about the risks if a business takes off and there isn’t a solid foundation to stand on. But at the same time, it's no surprise that startup leaders see words like "optimizing headcount through capacity planning models" and file it away as unnecessary bureaucracy that’s more befitting of the “BigCo”... See more