On building of All Trades
“Technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.”
Evan Armstrong • Want to Build? Technical Excellence Won’t Be Enough.
Steve Jobs
I wish when I was at my previous startups I had focused more on building and less on winning. Sure, I may not have done exactly what I had thought I wanted, but finding ways to love the process would’ve allowed for better outcomes anyway. What we want is such an abstract idea, built on a foundation of shifting sand, that it is pointless to try to... See more
Evan Armstrong • The Futility of Utility
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
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.
Very, very many people at Stripe today are doing a quite different job to the one that they join for. In order to do that they've often had to learn a lot and stretch themselves into new areas.
Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe)
Management systems have been designed to provide reliability and efficiency, not adaptability and agility. Many of the tools and practices of modern management are geared towards solving problems and eliminating deviations in processes, behaviors, and practices. Because of this framework, management training and leadership development is often... See more
Kotter • Why Change Capability Is The Most Important Missing Competency For Today’s Leaders
If you remain flexible – even in the places where you really do think you got it right – and give yourself the chance to be proven incorrect, you’re setting yourself and your company up for success.
The Not So Cookie-Cutter Approach to Company Building — 8 Lessons from Zapier
The future of work is flexible - teams need partners that are flexible and and allow for flexibility in their work structures.
Self-promotion makes me uncomfortable.
Maybe because I (read: most women) am not really great at it?
Or because I never want to sound sales-y.
Maybe because I (read: most women) am not really great at it?
Or because I never want to sound sales-y.
Sari Azout • A Moodboard for People Who Hate Self-Promotion
Mihika likens the role of a 0-to-1 team within a large company to that of Hestia in Greek mythology, who is the “keeper of the hearth.” It is Hestia’s job to always keep the hearth burning, even while other gods go out on separate quests. This means always keeping the 0-to-1 project alive and helping it spread to others, mostly through setting... See more
Lenny Rachitsky • Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma)
Makers are here to discover something new, to bravely explore. They crave being first to uncover some way to make technology do a thing that nobody else had seen before. Makers become increasingly more disinterested with a particular technology as it matures and becomes polished. Polish and reliability mean that the tech has become mainstream—and... See more