On building of All Trades

Your business exists in the context of a marketplace, but also in the context of your lived experience.

Defaulting to the norms of your industry will shape your business to be similar to the rest, where the best entrepreneurs zero-in on their self expression. Do you have an eye for good design? Inject design into a tasteless industry. Do you have a... See more

Sari Az • Check your Pulse #49

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.

6 Ways I Sabotaged My Own Startup’s Culture

Growth is change — communicate often.

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

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

First, we get distracted by the inclination to make the group as big as we can imagine. After all, the change is essential, the idea is a good one. It’s for everyone.

Except that’s a trap. Because a group that’s too large cannot be coherent or organized.

Or perhaps, we blink and settle for a group that’s too small. Change requires tension, and if our... See more

Small groups, well organized

On small groups, well organized. An old but new way of building our organizations.

When a company actually wants the opinions of those who work there, there are far more effective ways to have a productive conversation around the insights and desires that we each bring to the organization. Asynchronous and structured, these interactions are vital sources of connection and wisdom.

The obligations of the Town Hall

Everyone wants to be picked, but no one wants to organize the collective ‘we’.

It’s the ‘we’ that creates a school of thought, a movement, a network, a culture.

Curate, connect, organize and lead.

Generalists are hiding in plain sight. Their identity is tied to connecting the dots for others instead of themselves. oAT exists so that they’re seen for the impact they make, even when others might not yet see or understand.

in my role as a more traditional COO (which I also thoroughly enjoyed) I was touching on a large number of parts within Buffer. It also created a certain level of pressure, one that Joel described very well in this post. I felt the urge to try and “keep everything together” and within an arm’s reach so everything would go according to plan.

With... See more

How We're Working Without Managers at Buffer

The COO role shifts when you’re building a networked instead of a structured organization

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.