On building of All Trades

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

Things I'm thinking about

Sari Azout • Moodboard

My entire philosophy of how I organize myself as a working painter can be summed up by something George Carlin said: “Just keep movin’ straight ahead. Every now and then you find yourself in a different place.”

You hear a lot in art school about how painters must continue to “grow” and “evolve”—but I think those are such bullshit words. There is... See more

Kieran O‘Hare • Following the ‘White-hot Fire Inside of You’

The art in “sheer persistence”

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.

So much of building something new is showing others that their problem deserves to be solved, that they should be seen for who they are and what they want to be. Generalists deserve better.

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)

Conventional hiring processes are designed to recruit the most skilled people to fill a specific role at the right price. The experience can feel dehumanizing — it’s laden with unwritten rules, negotiation, posturing, and indirect communication (if you’re lucky) through recruiters.

The process, at its core, is a transaction of resources. It’s not... See more

Sharan Bal • Hiring Humans, Not Resources

Here’s the bright side of groupthink: It enables the dissenters to quietly break apart in their own direction with little competition and free of nosy onlookers.