Startup Systems
systems that power startups
Startup Systems
the way that you execute ends up really mattering. That was the second learning. The third is just focus.
Building high-performing teams | Melissa Tan (Webflow, Dropbox, Canva)
Angles that spread usually check the following boxes:
- Surprising — presents unexpected new information or theories
- True — we actually believe it
- Important — has an impact on our behavior
- Relevant — related to domains we care about
- Cool — we think we’ll look impressive for sharing it
Nathan Baschez • How to Write Essays That Spread
Product-market fit progresses in levels . It’s not a binary state where you have it and you’re golden, or you don’t and you’re not on the path. But it’s also not a vague spectrum or fuzzy sliding scale, where you can’t be sure where you’re at.
The 4 Levels of PMF
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
Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor)
“It's just to remind people that we don't work in years, quarters, weeks, we work in days. Each day matters and so never put out something tomorrow that you know can get done today. And that bias to action really permeates not just in the product teams but everywhere.”
It’s easy to be excited about what the company seems to do... to choose our path based on the public’s perception of the output. But once the company has more than one person in it, most of our day is about satisfying the customer, meeting supplier requirements and dancing with the tension of doing our jobs.
Often, we use the product we make as a... See more
Often, we use the product we make as a... See more
Product and Process
“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
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
So what is systems thinking? In his book The Fifth Discipline , Peter Senge gives a systems thinking definition as “A discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static ‘snapshots.’ And systems thinking is a sensibility—for the subtle interconnectedness... See more
Systems Thinking vs Design Thinking, What’s the Difference?
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.
There are few companies that have successfully scaled taste better than MSCHF (pronounced “mischief”). Well, not exactly a company, as they explained to me when I visited their Brooklyn-based workshop set across the street from a skate park, but an “artist’s collective that happened to raise venture capital.” Or, according to their self-selected... See more