Collection of Favorites
My biggest takeaways from articles, podcasts, and conversations worth remembering.
Founder
In the long run, the measure of our success will be the amount of value we create for our customers.
Focus is saying No to something you believe with every bone in your body is a good idea, but you say no to it because you aren't focused on it.
Seek absolute truth.
Leadership
Raise the aspirations of others by believing in them before they believe in themselves.
Design
Constraints drive better design. You get a limited number of credits to spend on visual hierarchy.
Your design is complete when you cannot take anything else away.
Design is a way of thinking about the world. It's about decomposition and recomposition. You take something complex, break it down into its fundamental components, understand the relationships between those parts, and then rebuild it in a way that's simpler, more powerful, or reveals something previously hidden.
Because it exists, it can be improved.
Care about craft.
Steve Jobs
Don't accept whatever purple gradient the AI gave you as the end, that is just the beginning.
Assume no one knows anything about you; keep your UI simple and clear.
Indifference to everything is the worst way to live.
Public Speaking
The three best ways to start a speech are with a story, with an attention-grabbing fact, or with a question.
Product Building
Limit the number of decisions a user has to make; make it super intuitive.
Ship quickly.
Start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology, not the other way around.
Products are packages of emphasis. One product may emphasize something that another product doesn't.
People DO judge a book by its cover.
On onboarding: cut friction when it doesn't help the user understand why the product is for them. But if friction helps them understand why it's for them, how to use it, and what's most relevant to them, don't shy away from it. Test it and confirm it works.
Deciding what to build starts with pain.
Writing
Explain your idea verbally and then write it down. This usually helps it be more concise, which is good.
Keep writing simple.
User Experience
Give users something in the first 30 seconds that earns you the next 30 seconds.
General Marketing
Become something that people want to talk about. If people aren't talking about you, ask yourself why.
Consumer products scale best when people invite their friends to use it. Product + growth is key.
Sell an experience or outcome, not a product. "We don't sell saddles here."
Social Marketing
Twitter is a medium for cultivating relationships, not a hard close. Invest time, contribute to the conversation, build friendships, and reap the rewards later.
Hiring
Hire for trajectory, not necessarily experience.
Restlessness > resume.
Sales
Sales should be an experience.
30-day call back.
Management
It's the job of a manager to make sure there is sufficient known valuable work to do, otherwise team members begin to work on "hyper-realistic work-like activities."
Brand
Your brand is the sum of the experiences someone has with you.
Pat Grady
Being Great
Dopamine from information gathering is a dangerous drug. Get your dopamine from action.
To be great you must aspire to be great.
Work on important things with exceptional people.
Find what you love doing, commit a significant amount of time doing it at the highest quality possible, and share it with others.
Wanting to be great vs wanting to be normal. Normal is average. Average is the enemy. To be great you have to have special focus, special commitment, special preparation and discipline, and the ability to say no to some things. Stack great days on top of each other.
Complacency is enemy #1.
Excellence is a way of life. It's a habit.
Be obsessed with learning to do things as well as the people around you who are doing them better.
GTM
Know what market you are trying to win.