41–50 of 92 posts
> Rolling out of bed in my pajamas and getting back to work with things precisely as I left them was the most underestimated superpower that brought me joy, focus, and speed—I had forgotten how much goes into getting ready for work. There will be so much resistance to going back to the office.
4/ Think of a way to make your users have some skin in the game enough to yell at you to make your product better. Charge or trade for it early on. Waiting for your product to be "good enough" reduces the amount you'll learn each day. The first set of users paid me $20 on Venmo!
This will vary by type of market you are pursuing. Some things are harder to charge for and take longer to get a first sale, but, yes, you need to be charging. Otherwise, you are "playing house" (a thing they say at YC) or you merely "have the trappings of a business, not an actual business" (that's my typical phrasing for the phenomenon).
In a nutshell: The difference between a business and a hobby is paying customers.
8/ Be married to the problem, not the technology.
There are some great videos from YC that also make this point and I think it needs to be said more often.
There are also some great nuggets about self-management that can be useful to anyone doing anything hard in life or living through a crisis. Some of these resonate with me as a former military wife who raised two special-needs kids mostly alone as the husband was often gone.
13/ If you're worried about something that will cause your inevitable demise, use my patented Threshold of Worry (tm):
1. Set a quantitative value for the worrisome issue. 2. If it's above the value, worry! 3. If it's below the value, focus on the next risk & ignore
I have a longstanding policy of "bread and circus." If you can work on the problem, work on the problem. If you can't work on the problem, feed everyone and keep them entertained so they aren't freaking out, panicking, fighting, etc.
17/ When building a startup:
If you have fear, de-risk by talking to users. If you have uncertainty, build a prototype to rapidly rebuild your conviction. If you have sudden doubt, sleep. Try again tomorrow.
When my kids were little and I was chronically short of sleep, I learned that eating something, drinking something and/or taking a short nap could be the difference between feeling like everything is overwhelmingly impossible and feeling like "The sun will come out tomorrow."
19/ I was ruthless about ensuring I had as much deep work time as possible. Live somewhere boring. Eliminate meetings. Don't meet investors if you're not raising. Build a rhythm each day that enables the largest chunk of hours to get great work done. Users will notice your pace.
This is gold. Stop whining about how you have a phone addiction and you can't turn your phone off because all your friends and relatives will be mad if you don't answer it and so on. Stop claiming that all the shiny tech we live with is controlling your life and you are a victim of circumstance. Start taking control over your time and doing what you need to do to carve out time to think, to work without distraction, etc.
We live in an incredible era with amazing things. But you do need to pick and choose and not feel obligated to be plugged into everything all the time. You do have a choice in the matter.
> Rolling out of bed in my pajamas and getting back to work with things precisely as I left them was the most underestimated superpower that brought me joy, focus, and speed—I had forgotten how much goes into getting ready for work. There will be so much resistance to going back to the office.
A second category of worker benefits from the rituals of getting ready in the morning, context switching to office mode, seeing their peers in person (however briefly), and sitting down at a separate workstation that is dedicated to work and nothing else.
In my experience managing mixed on-site and remote teams, most people assume they’re in the first category but many people eventually discover they’re actually in the second category.
WFH is great for some, but actually quite difficult for many others.
> Rolling out of bed in my pajamas and getting back to work with things precisely as I left them was the most underestimated superpower that brought me joy, focus, and speed—I had forgotten how much goes into getting ready for work. There will be so much resistance to going back to the office.
It seems some hope to bait and switch their employees back into office and then say WFH isn’t allowed anymore.
As an early employee of several small startups that have grown to decent sizes, I'll never take the advice of a successful founder (I'll use it when it works). After hiring hundreds of people the most knowledgeable people were the ones who worked on successful teams at failing companies, and very few founders go through that experience in the same way as non-founders do. Founder advice is for founders.
The advise on how to take advise. In that case I would need to see advise takers that has failed a few times taking advise from successful founders giving advise before taking your advise.
As an early employee of several small startups that have grown to decent sizes, I'll never take the advice of a successful founder (I'll use it when it works). After hiring hundreds of people the most knowledgeable people were the ones who worked on successful teams at failing companies, and very few founders go through that experience in the same way as non-founders do. Founder advice is for founders.
Really, I think some twitter accounts are more vapid feel-good nuggets than actual advice (including this one) I've checked the thread and while there's some materiality to it, it's not anything I haven't heard elsewhere. I'm also wary of founders that might have "gotten lucky" (a weak project in SV is much easier to get financed than a more solid project elsewhere), I'm skeptical of that founder's current project (l…
He's not someone I consider to be full of bullshit, but his thoughts on startups are as valuable as anyone else's with a few extra grains of salt that are worth considering.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
“It’s like Stadia but for Chrome”
Showerthoughts: why not stream the entire OS at this point, with a dedicated storage? Like an EC2 with a desktop environment that you can access in a VNC-like way but with the resolution, FPS and input responsiveness similar to what Stadia/Mighty offers. Which will allow you to play Cyberpunk (Stadia) + browsing the web (Mighty) + do whatever else you want, like using After Effects (?).
I used it for about a year and it's fantastic if you have really fast (preferably wired) internet