On building of All Trades

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

Evan Armstrong • The Art of Scaling Taste

How can we go from accumulating insights to embodying and integrating learnings?

Sari Azout • My Favorite Questions

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

Fuzzco

Beliefs are more about belonging than they are about truth.

100 Simple Truths

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.

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

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

How Talent Teams Can Better Weather Boom-and-Bust Cycles

Agreeableness is not the same as agreeing. In fact, they have little in common. Finding someone who’s only job is to agree with everything that is said is easy. On the other hand, agreeableness is the skill of having a contrary position and being pleasant about it. It’s the hard work of bringing professional work to people who expected something... See more

429 Too Many Requests

You can’t be a hoarder of power within an organization. Once you get to a point where you feel like something is ready for lots of scale, get comfortable with letting it go so you can move on to the next building challenge.

23 Tactical Company Building Lessons, Learned From Scaling Stripe & Notion

Founders that step away grow their startup; find a team to trust and then share the power to increase your scaling velocity.