On building of All Trades

Treat your company culture like a product, where your employees are the customers. Rather than preserving the established culture, founders should iterate on cultural principles and values to meet the evolving needs of a growing team. Document, iterate, and clarify cultural elements to reflect past, present, and future aspirations.

Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO)

Self-discovery is all about diving deep and uncovering who you are and what you truly want from life. It’s about finding the principles, passions, and goals that are uniquely rewarding and fulfilling to you.

The aim is not to change into someone else, but to become more of who you already are. To chart a course that is genuinely yours, that brings

Generally, teams think about switching costs as the amount of time and money needed to install one solution and remove another. But true switching costs are much more than that: they include the politics, emotions, career ambitions, esoteric business processes, competing priorities, and sheer laziness that all favor the existing solution. Those... See more

Jake Fuentes • Lessons learned from a startup that didn’t make it

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

Cate Hall • How to Be More Agentic

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

Problem choice and decision trees in science and engineering: Cell

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.

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

How We're Working Without Managers at Buffer

The build is taxing. Empathy with yourself and others who are building alongside you is crucial.

To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that's pretty cool.

paulgraham.com • How to Do What You Love

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