Startup Systems

systems that power startups

There are two types of founders.

Those who do lots of research, validate ideas, test many prototypes, and iteratively get to a product. This is a more technical and user-focused approach.

The other is where the product vision emerges fully-formed in the founder’s eye before it is brought to existence. Here, the founder zeroes in on their self... See more

sari azout • Things I'm Thinking About

“Almost always, when I look at a team or project at a larger org trying to make a decision with differences in opinions, the root of those differences almost always starts with shared context,” Weiss says. “Or lack thereof.”

The first step to identifying if your team is lacking shared context is to ask yourself a series of questions, Weiss says.... See more

firstround.com • How to Take Bigger, Bolder Product Bets — Lessons From Slack’s Chief Product Officer

Superhuman

We try to be as rigorous and data-driven as possible in quarterly planning. All objectives are measurable, either in terms of quantifiable thresholds or Boolean “was X completed or not.” Our objectives are very aggressive, and often at the end of the quarter we only end up completing 70% in one direction or another. The remaining 30% helps identify... See more

Lenny Rachitsky • How Perplexity builds product

how Perplexity builds

Startups will have “we’re amazing” moments and they will also have “we’re crashing” moments. In order to weather those storms, you need high levels of trust.

Build Your Culture Like a Product — Lessons from Asana’s Head of People

Every day, we make decisions. These require effort, and there’s probably a finite amount of energy available for these focused choices.

That’s why our digital habits matter. Not to save us five or ten minutes a day, but to save us from a few hundred unimportant decisions that break our flow.

For example, if instead of trying to come up with a unique... See more

Digital shortcuts and cognitive load

Replacing bad systems with bad systems

seths.blog

The network effect is sticky and hard to overcome, and as we move the internet of things from our phones to just about everything we touch, it’s worth thinking about resilience, flexibility and the reason we need something in the first place.

Often, we end up compromising about our compromises, maximizing for the wrong outcomes and getting hooked on a new system that forgot what the original system was even for.

When a system is new, few are watching, so a handful of people with intent can design it and optimize it. As it gains in scale and impact, it calcifies at the same time that new tech arrives to codify the decisions that were made when the conditions were very different.

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.

The first thing to do when thinking about starting a project, before you invest in systems design, infrastructure or fancy tools, is to practice getting some customers. And the second thing to do is to find out what it’s like to delight or disappoint those customers.

Customer traction is just about the only thing all successful organizations have in... See more