Unsurprisingly, hiring friends and former colleagues was by far the biggest channel. This also in part explains why multi-time founders, and anyone with a large network (e.g. Y Combinator), have an advantage:
“All of our early hires were friends/ex-coworkers.”
“First hires were practically all former colleagues. Several people who worked with me in
Ideas sometimes seem to need days or weeks or months to get to a point where they feel fully formed. If you try to force a solution to a problem into a preset window of time, you will almost certainly reach a suboptimal solution.
I’ll often have ideas sitting in my focus folder for weeks or months and keep tossing thoughts into them, and then one... 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 more senior the designer, the more abstract the problem they should be solving.
To break it down more tangibly, let’s look at some examples of levels and appropriate responsibilities:
Designer Lvl 1: Design a form that lets people edit their profile. Pretty scoped—assumes there is a profile, and that the solution takes the shape of a form.