Startup Advice

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

Complicated problems have a solution, and the solution can often be found by breaking the complicated portions into smaller pieces.

And complicated problems often have an emotional component, because there are parts of the problem we don’t want to look at closely, or deal with personally.

If you’re lucky enough to be handed a complicated problem,... See more

Apologizing for slow replies is a symptom of unrealistic demands in an always-on culture. How quickly people answer you is rarely a sign of how much they care about you. It’s usually a reflection of how much they have on their plate.

How can I maintain my creativity, optimism, intellectual vitality, and sense of agency in the face of the stress that comes from building a company and the endless forces luring towards conformity?

We start raw, then our hearts and minds get boiled by constraints, pressure, feedback, and challenges. How do we keep our head up and maintain our... See more

if the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) gains traction, then the company will likely receive funding and a growth period will occur. Invariably, that means more people will join the team and the vision from the initial engineer needs to be shared.

Early on, when the team is small (2–15 people), typically processes are loose as the overhead in aligning... See more