Laszlo Bock, Former SVP of People Operations at Google, "It is important that we make work better, and it is too easy to inadvertently make it worse using technology." A reminder of the responsibility that comes with technological solutions in HR.
More: metisstrategy.com/interview/…
“As leaders, we have to have the courage to enter the danger with people." from The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni.
Find this and more underrated gems here youtube.com/watch?v=EQyLMviv…
The concept of Amazon’s two-pizza teams is straightforward: no team should be big enough that it would take more than two pizzas to feed them. Ideally, this is a team of less than 10 people
More here: aws.amazon.com/executive-ins…
A great heuristic for deciding how to market and avoiding a dead zone price point. From Zero to One by @peterthiel
"The Trap that people fall into is thinking that the answer to their problems is elsewhere."
@ShaanVP on the importance of focus and intensity for founders.
youtu.be/Tcs3r5DYytw?si=d_XX…
"There's a law of large numbers in 1 to N, run the experiment many times and sort of see how things work. But 0 to 1? Every sort of event in the history of progress, technology or science has something singular and non-repeatable about it." >>@peterthiel
From the other side of the table, @gradypb with all the unsexy details of @sequoia's $52M investment in @ServiceNow xitter.cf/gradypb/status/1829192…
1/ my partners @sequoia like to tell a story about how we had this brilliant SaaS thesis that led us to Fred Luddy, founder of @ServiceNow... but the truth is that we pinged him because it was a company, and my job was to find companies. here is the actual CRM record, starting in 2008:
lmwa [“left message with assistant”, back when cold calls actually involved picking up the phone]
lmwa
emailed
lmwa
emailed
lvm [“left voice mail”]
lvm
lvm
emailed
emailed
emailed
first response!!!
And finally, from Mr. "I was happy to be a human task reminder" @chrishlad, a sales manifesto chris-hlad.ck.page/posts/100…
First up is @bosmeny drilling into what it really took to close their 2nd ever deal @clever youtu.be/SHAh6WKBgiE?si=00tt…
More people more problems. @shreyas on a vicious, vicious circle :)
Tiago Forte (@fortelabs): "At every stage, I’ve had to “fire” myself from each job and give it to someone else"
His 0 to 1 (or rather 1 to 12) journey of building out Forte Labs.
Find the full article here: fortelabs.com/blog/creator-t…
Brian Chesky on why Airbnb took months to hire their first employee youtu.be/RfWgVWGEuGE?si=Cp5N…
Founders on Founder Mode: After an exciting few days on X, we decided to get you the best things to come out of @paulg's new work. First a link to the OG piece. Founder Mode (paulgraham.com)
@hnshah and why this advice might not be for everyone xitter.cf/hnshah/status/18303542…
“Founder mode” is a double-edged sword.
Wrote about this some years ago.
As a first-time venture backed founder in 2007, I was green when it came to startup leadership.
I was throwing what we ended up calling “Hiten Bombs” instead of leading with clarity, conviction and direction.
Here’s how it went down…
Every week. Actually, it was usually daily. I would drop a bomb on someone in the company.
It would be some new idea, some new direction, some new brilliant thing I came up with. Something we absolutely had to do right now.
A new feature I thought would help us grow. (But really, it wouldn't.)
A competitor-inspired idea. (A feature that wasn't actually game changing).
Something I had heard from an investor, advisor or friend. (And it seemed really cool at the time, I swear... but still, worthless).
At best, it was an idea I had gotten from an important customer the day before.
This was constant. Went on for months. It got so bad that the jokes made their way to me. The whole company started calling them Hiten Bombs. I heard it in the halls and walking by people's desks.
I didn't realize it at the time, but to my team the barrage of random ideas seemed like they were coming completely out of left field.
Good or bad, none of my ideas were based on any kind of framework or filter. I was shooting from the hip.
Thinking that I was helping us focus and execute.
I was dead wrong.
Every time that I threw a "Hiten Bomb", things actually blew up.
and finally some TnCs xitter.cf/yanatweets/status/1830… :p
Wild to see how many managers read this essay and thought, ‘This is about me and how I should operate.’
@paulg's footnote predicted this:
"people will start misusing it. . . managers who aren't founders will decide they should try act like founders."