Luc Cheung

How to identify your invisible asymptotes

One way to identify your invisible asymptotes is to simply ask your customers. As I noted at the start of this piece, at Amazon we honed in on how shipping fees were a brake on our business by simply asking customers and non-customers.

Here's where the oft-cited quote from Henry Ford is brought up as an... See more

We don't have enough experience with early versions of ambitious projects to know how to respond to them. We judge them based on where they are currently, not based on what they could become. The same is true for how we judge people. Someone should create a Substack newsletter called Early Days where they use Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to... See more

Email GTD

The goal of the system is that the vast majority of emails don't get to you, because they don't need to.

You should only be responding to the very few emails per day that are important for you to take action on, and everything else should go to the relevant person.

To do that, everything needs to have a clear "place" it should go. The... See more

With three young kids, my relationship with time is complicated. I am at the stage where my alarm clock is a tiny pair of lungs and the idea of a vacation is a 15-minute drive to Whole Foods. These words by Charles Bukowski stopped me in my tracks, I think because my honest answer right now is freedom, but one day, when the kids are grown up, I... See more

An analogy we use at KV is that building a company is like laying cement. Early on the cement is liquid and malleable – you can stir it around with your hands. As time passes, the cement hardens. Once it solidifies, adjustments require a jackhammer. And jackhammering leads to cracks and lots of noise.

As a result, we prefer to get involved as early... See more

Loneliness isn’t just making us unhappy, it’s silently killing us: Social isolation is as harmful as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. If the situation is so critical, why aren’t we doing more to fix it? Because we’ve been collectively ashamed to talk about loneliness . Our silence has incubated one of the most insidious crises our society has to face.... See more

The difference between average results and exceptional ones is what you avoid.

Be quick to say no and slow to say yes. Saying yes consumes time. Saying no creates time.

Never say yes on the spot. Always give yourself some space. Make it a rule. Tell people. That’s what Daniel Kahneman does. When he’s on the phone, he says, ‘my rule is I never say... See more