On building of All Trades

the power of imagination and optimism is an amazing and essential part of innovation. But over the years, we’ve become so enamored with the unicorn valuation as the goal, that we started valuing the wrong things and overlooking the fundamental physics of business.

Where does VC go from here?

Contrary to what most founders assume, having more resources doesn’t make things easier. Instead, it introduces the challenge of resource allocation — deciding where to invest time, money, and personnel for the best return. As your startup grows, and as you hire more employees, it means you’re going to have more mouths to feed and more people with... See more

Are You Prepared to Pay the Real Price of Startup Success?

I’m thinking about how the only way to get better at making things is to make things, and to let the thinking happen inside the work – where you can judge a thing based on how it feels – instead of outside the work.

Sari Azout • Things I'm thinking about

On being outsiders and insiders at the same time

I aspire to live consciously, to follow my own inherent energy, to help other human beings, and to immerse myself fully in the present moment.

Superhuman

Reflect on your progress. While job titles are fixed, your daily accomplishments are not. Writing every day to think about what you actually did today that made you a better version of yourself is a great exercise to ensure you focus on the right things. Journaling is a powerful tool to add to your mental gym.

Conduct personal experiments. Making

Anne-Laure Le Cunff • The tyranny of job titles: from vanity growth to personal growth

These are direct actions we take internally in our rituals for generalists at oAT — so cool to see this mirrored back to us.

We’re in the business of being fundamentally different, not incrementally better.

Lenny Rachitsky • Be Fundamentally Different, Not Incrementally Better | Jag Duggal

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

For the past decade, our idolatry of startups and innovation has meant the focus has been: What can we disrupt? How fast can we grow? How big can we get? How much can we raise?

Founders are taught to possess enough faith that they can build something very big very fast. This creates a pressure cooker of responsibility that distorts reality to the... See more

Sari Azout • Can I Ramble for a Sec?

Founders need a new way of thinking, of building, of support that allows them to drive systematic, methodical and meaningful change.

Job titles are just the most visible ladder of them all. It’s interesting that pompous executive job titles were invented during the Victorian era. This is when we started the trend of calling a cleaner a hygiene technician. A bin man became a waste management and disposal technician. Later on, a call-center worker became a communications... See more

Anne-Laure Le Cunff • The tyranny of job titles: from vanity growth to personal growth

Generalists have shirked the the notion of a true job title to fit their work and have followed the thread of providing value and making an impact. No wonder there’s a group of talented professionals hiding in plain sight given how constricting the traditional job titles have become in affirming our professional worth.