Startup Advice

And what you see internally is what I'll say is razor-sharp focus on reducing cycle time and bias to action and how do we reduce cycle time. I think it's basically the core of it culturally to me is getting people to think about smaller units of time for decision making. It seems obvious but I think you really have to reinforce it culturally. So... See more

Elon Musk on remote work May 31, 2022 https://t.co/gTw1Bdh18h

It is no coincidence that these three skills – managing the pace of change, elevating the next generation of leaders, and enabling the entire company to hit its goals – often make the difference between a functional leader topping out as an SVP and a cross-functional leader accelerating their trajectory as part of the C-Suite.

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

Both True: “The customer is always right” and “The audience doesn’t know what they want”

It can help to reverse the polarity of our relationship with new ideas. We often treat them with reverence; before long, confirmation bias sets in and we begin looking for reasons why they will succeed and ignoring evidence suggesting they might fail. A common failure mode is to jump on the first idea and get started—this is probably the worst... See more

A better use of some of that capital is continued experimentation.

In a world with an emerging new class of startups, the Silicon Valley Small Business, thinking of investment capital specifically as a means to learn more about your users faster through experimentation is worth considering.

The more you learn, the more you’ll be able to iterate to... See more