On building of All Trades
“I want everything we do to be beautiful. I don’t give a damn whether the client understands that that’s worth anything, or that the client thinks it’s worth anything, or whether it is worth anything. It’s worth it to me. It’s the way I want to live my life. I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares.”
3-2-1: On the importance of beauty, fixing silent complaints, and a simple rule to make life easier
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
“Self-management requires an interlocking set of structures and practices.”
How We're Working Without Managers at Buffer
It’s not that people don’t want to work. It’s that their jobs feel, for whatever reason, unsustainable: unsustainable for their mental and physical health, but also unsustainable for their family, and their longterm survival. Many people actually really like the work that they do, if they were, indeed, allocating the bulk of their time to doing... See more
Anne Helen Petersen • The Expanding Job
At oAT, we’re on a constant mission to rethink how we do what we do and why
Instead of doing broad but thin market research (e.g., customer surveys), focus on one person (or a small group) and go as deep as you can, learning everything about how your product fits into their broader lives. Or become your customer—spend a day, a month, or even a few years in the role you're trying to sell to before attempting to build a... See more
Casey Rosengren • The Power of Designing for a Single User
You can start a company to make an impact and surround yourself with people on a similar journey, or you can seek to maximize the stock price and profits.
Putting up the big numbers
There’s a lot of emotional overheard that comes with building a company whose essence is hard to put into words.
sari azout • 2023 End of Year Letter
Another emotion I picked up in myself and in others is what feels like we’re floating in space a bit. Since the change is so fundamental and a lot of things aren’t figured out, it’s quite hard to navigate yourself within Buffer currently, since nothing feels “fixed” and ever changing these last few months.
I do get the sense that this is somewhat... See more
I do get the sense that this is somewhat... See more
How We're Working Without Managers at Buffer
The build is taxing. Empathy with yourself and others who are building alongside you is crucial.
Maximum leverage is the result of commitment, of daily persistence, of gradual and insane and apparently useless effort over time.