Startup Systems
Some signs of cultural corrosion caused by raising too much money:
- Hiring too many people—slows everything down and makes it much harder for you to react and change. You are
Fictive Kin • Pmarchive · How much funding is too little? Too much?

It’s hard to get a company to do a new thing, and the bigger the organization, the harder it is to change. Companies that are trying to change tend to require an equal and opposite force to overcome the inertia. Large enterprise sales teams are built around signing a single customer, while on the small business end of the market all you need is a few quick calls around an otherwise self-serve solution. When an executive wants their company to change, they often hire expensive, high-status consultants like McKinsey to make a plan that gets everyone on board.
If organizational inertia is one form of resistance that you might want to overcome, what are the business equivalents of simple machines that create mechanical advantage and multiply your input force into a much larger output force? And if they exist, do they have an equivalent trade-off of physical machines where you have to apply the force over a longer distance to gain leverage?
Maybe! Startups often hyper-focus on a small number of customers that share specific traits. This compresses all of the startup’s energy and force into a small space. It’s the opposite of being “spread thin.” The advantage of this approach is that you’re more likely to solve a problem, overcome inertia, and gain adoption by the customers you focus on. The trade-off is that it might be questionable how many more customers you’ll be able to find. I call this a market wedge, where you sacrifice scale for power.
Evan Armstrong • The Art of Scaling Taste
Or how you could integrate pool-party motifs into a CRM for pool cleaners.
All of which would set your brand apart from the get-go and take you from being one of many to being the one and only.
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Superhuman
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firstround.com • How to Take Bigger, Bolder Product Bets — Lessons From Slack’s Chief Product Officer
Lenny Rachitsky • How Perplexity builds product
Perplexity reporting
Building high-performing teams | Melissa Tan (Webflow, Dropbox, Canva)
Not all best practices fit for all orgs. Right-size and test when trying on your ops!
In my 13 years working at startups, I’ve witnessed many examples of unnecessary chaos—here are a few.
A major release has been planned for months, but launch communications—new positioning, website copy, customer email, blog post—are reviewed at the last minute.
A manager reschedules 1:1s every week because of... See more
