periodic reminder: have you taken a minute to write down what your actual problems are lately? the practice of properly describing a problem often reveals its solution

Your biggest competitor should always be your former self.

My 2024 goal continues to be avoiding going back to this

YOU will be more successful if you SUPPORT others rather than tearing them down.

New goals don't deliver new results. New lifestyles do. And a lifestyle is a process, not an outcome. For this reason, all of your energy should go into building better habits, not chasing better results.

Tech-Free Saturdays:

Take a ‘screen sabbatical’ one day every week (Credit: Brad Stulberg). The goal is to reduce screen time, unplug from the constant influx of digital information, and reconnect with the physical world around you.

Charlie Munger’s 3 rules for life.

Keep it simple. People who get up early and workout are rarely poor performers in bad health.

An early workout every day beats 99.9% of productivity and health advice.

As soon as you start thinking something nice about someone - send them a text and let them know right away. It costs you nothing. Makes their day. And, if it’s someone you haven’t spoken to in a while it will open a door for a conversation and possibly an opportunity.

When designing an app, everyone looks at how other apps do it today. However, incumbent apps operate in a different context: they already have habit formation and many of their aggressive growth hacks have been eliminated due to public scrutiny.

Instead, using Internet Archive and old blog posts, find older screenshots & marketing materials when the incumbent app hit their inflection point (e.g., Snapchat in 2012) and construct a narrative on why they did what they did. You’ll be surprised by how explicit they were with their value proposition.

Never forget that you are presently living in the good old days.

Probably my biggest current privilege in life is slowly drinking morning coffee, reading Twitter, and calling it "work".

If a task has been on your to-do list for over a week, break it down into smaller tasks and just focus on tackling one of those smaller tasks today

Small software businesses are 10% software, 90% everything else. If you want to spend ~90% of your time coding, you want to work for someone

First-time founders care most about product.

Second-time founders care most about distribution.

The Lindy Effect for startups:

The longer you go without shipping product, the more likely you will never ship product.

Pro tip for anyone who makes things:

1. Make the thing

2. DON'T ship it – yet! Just sit back, take a break

3. Come back to thing 12-48 hours later

4. Fix/polish all the (now glaringly obvious) broken/rough shit you hilariously missed just 12-48 hours ago

5. K now ship it 👍

“You’ve exceeded your plan limits. Please click to schedule a call with your sales rep to help find a suitable plan”

Is the quickest way to lose me as a customer. Fuckin hate talking to startup sales reps. 🤢

Electron app memory usage: 150 MB
Native app memory usage: 0 MB (because you never ship it)

Un-sexy business tip:

👉 Spend the same amount of time promoting your business as you do building it.

A few emails/tweets aren't enough.

Charge money from day one!

I see so many apps just die because they didn't

It's easy to hate on all these new makers making MVPs, doing startup challenges or everyone cloning stuff. But at least we finally have people taking action and shipping. Even if their first products aren't perfect, they took the first step on a path towards making great things👍

Business used to be for "business people". Now it's for everyone that can make a landing page and put a BUY button on it. That's so incredibly crazy and great.

10 places to launch your startup on Reddit:

1. /r/Indiebiz
2. /r/Startups
3. /r/Marketing/
4. /r/SideProject
5. /r/Entrepreneur
6. /r/thesidehustle
7. /r/Sweatystartup
8. /r/Roastmystartup
9. r/EntrepreneurRideAlong
10. /r/Startup (without the "s")

The main reason why some people reach $5K MRR with a SaaS and others don't, isn't features or anything, it's simply keeping it alive and not abandoning it I think, which is harder than it looks

In my experience it takes at least a few years of trying and failing before you launch something successful online so don’t get discouraged if you aren’t there yet.

Your self-employed income goals are more likely to be achieved with a portfolio strategy.

Think 4-5 smaller income streams.

Provides much greater flexibility and reduced risk when compared to one big bet.

I see a lot of ppl quit their job and just go full time on a side project which I wouldn’t recommend, instead:

👉 build your side project while you have stable income from a job
👉 when the revenue from the side project surpasses your job for 6 months consider quitting

The idea of spending (small amounts of) "quality time" with your kids is dangerously mistaken, because the best moments happen at completely random times. You not only can't predict them, you may not even know they've happened.

Да, как минимум двум критически важным навыкам, обращению с ВРЕМЕНЕМ и ДЕНЬГАМИ, школа совершенно не учит.

There's something you know that others don't know.

Anyone can teach. Anyone can learn.

Teach what you know, and learn what you don't.

Don't tweet for the people that follow you. Tweet for the people you wished followed you.

Students are right to ask "when are we going to use this?" Too often teachers are unprepared to answer. Wasted opportunity.

The important things will never be on your exams.

Спочатку ти працюєш на заліковку, а потім на чувака, якого відрахували ще на 1-му курсі.

The bar is SO low on great customer experiences that as long as you give a F$%* you'll be ahead of 90% of other companies.

Great Quote: "Sell benefits, not features. Nobody who bought a drill wanted a drill. They wanted a hole"

Percentages without absolute numbers are almost always a sign someone is trying to sensationalize a bad or uninteresting metric.

“We had 1000% user growth last year!”

Sounds great until you realize they only went from 5 to 55 users.

A head of PR without a social media following is like a head of engineering that can’t code.

It's impossible to be 10x smarter than someone, but it's possible to be 100,000,000,000x richer.

As a founder, it's tough to execute 100x or even 10x better, but it's quite possible to have an idea that's 100,000x better.

There's a lot of leverage in working on the right thing.

"When promised quick profits, respond with a quick 'no.'", Warren Buffet

Diversify your income.

My favorite indicators of wealth (that have nothing to do with money):

• How often you can say "no"
• Never using productivity apps
• A calendar without recurring meetings
• Never waking up to a shrieking alarm clock
• Freedom from spending time with anyone I dislike

I don't know anyone's medical history but one thing I do know is stress is the precursor of every disease. Cellular stress. Mental stress.

Как прав был мой мануальщик, что лучшая замена ему - плавание. Все боли в спине как рукой снимает. Плавание - ЖИЗНЬ!

И помните, что именно сейчас, где-то в мире, есть человек, более занятый чем вы, который занимается спортом.

Computer science gives you far more leverage to change the world than any other study in our age.

Everything is becoming programmable...

Driving ➡️ Tesla
Money ➡️ Crypto
Genes ➡️ CRISPR
Home ➡️ IFTTT
Pixels ➡️ DALL-E
Sleep ➡️ 8Sleep
Mind ➡️ Neuralink

What else?

I flew the other day and saw a guy spend the entire plane ride in an Oculus.

One day, that'll be every person on the plane.

Most people shouldn't be worried about AI stealing their jobs. Small bash scripts maybe, but not AI.

It would cost $60 billion to start a human Mars colony. Our wars in Iraq, Afghanistan & Pakistan have cost over $3.4 trillion.

YEAR -- Price of a Gigabyte
1981 -- $300,000
1987 -- $50,000
1990 -- $10,000
1994 -- $1000
1997 -- $100
2000 -- $10
2004 -- $1
2010 -- $0.10

Apple 2005: 2560×1600 res, 30", $3,000, monitor only.
Apple 2012: 2880x1600 res, 15", $2,199—with a computer attached.

It's time for the password to die. Users suck at creating secure passwords. Companies suck at keeping those passwords safe.

It's crazy to me that a college student and a billionaire own basically the same phone and laptop.

For all the inequality in the world, access to tech in the developed world is a remarkably level playing field.

Whenever you find yourself thinking you’re late to a new technological trend, remember that Walt Disney thought he was late to animation in 1923

More startups are moving toward:

• alternatives to VC
• remote first
• community driven
• work life balance
• full transparency

I’m excited about this future.

When I started at Facebook in 2006, we had 5M users. MySpace had 100M users. Anything is possible.

Somewhere in the world, an unknown young person is probably starting a company now that will eventually be as big as today's tech giants.

Age when they co-founded these tech companies:

Bill Gates (Microsoft): 19
Steve Jobs (Apple): 21
Sandra Lerner (Cisco): 29
Jeff Bezos (Amazon): 30
Reed Hastings (Netflix): 36
Robert Noyce (Intel): 41
Diane Greene (VMware): 43
Charles Flint (IBM): 61
Dave Duffield (Workday): 65

Ask yourself if you would rather own 50% of a $100m company

Or 10% of a $1b company

Then you will know what you really want to build.

You can go broke generating revenue. You can’t go broke generating profit.

1999 - $5M to launch a product, 30M serious computer users. 2014 - $5K to launch, 3B serious phone users. Leverage / $ is up 100,000x.

There has never been a better time to be an entrepreneur. Never in history has the path to market been cheaper or faster.

Nearly all the most successful founders are revolutionaries. They want power, not money. That makes them hard to stop.

Everything in startups comes down to the team. Want the best design? Hire the best designer. Code? The best hacker. It's really that simple.

Remember this day. 551-day-old Instagram is worth $1 billion. 116-year-old New York Times Co.: $967 million.

I like this metric a lot: profit per employee as a measurement of startup success

Короче, два главных инсайта для маркетплейса:

1. кто первый встал, того и тапки
2. быть №1 на относительно небольшом рынке Украины куда круче, чем быть №150 на огромном рынке Штатов или Европы. winner takes all.

Average founders focus on competitors.

Great founders focus on customers.

As a legendary founder, I focus on my competitors customers.

Good communication in a remote team:

• Write status updates
• Communicate the obvious
• Format your writing effectively
• Confirm decisions to move them forward
• Offer conclusions in long discussions
• Make decisions transparent
• Take initiatives and deliver on your promises

There’s a great deal of discussion as of late about “remote” being the future of work.

Remote is the future of everything.

Education. Fitness. Experiences. Medicine. Relationships. Community.

The technology is finally cohesive enough—VR will simply accelerate this trend.

In the future "remote companies" will just be called "companies". I honestly don't get how spending 1hr+ per day commuting to an office for a 9-5 can be the way 21st century humans are supposed to work.

Remote work isn't about working from home or a coworking space, but about working from a place that fits your personality, and that optimizes towards a healthy work-life balance.

Advantages of Remote Work

• Higher employee retention 😌
• Increased team productivity ✅
• Global and diverse talent pool 🌏
• Intentional workflows and processes 🔁
• Reduced office costs 💰

Remote workers, there are more inspiring places to work than coffee shops.

• Hotel lobbies
• Hotel poolside (often buying coffee is enough)
• Food truck parks
• Parks with benches
• Museums
• Ultra-luxury gyms
• etc

The future of remote work is trusting people, empowering people and focusing only on outputs.

Yet people think it’s about technology or Slack or some nonsense coworking space.

Digital transformation is 99% about people and culture

Вокруг столько интересного и красивого! А люди не только проживают свою жизнь в офисах, но и убеждают себя в том, что им это нравится.

The pro of remote work is fantastic job opportunities, e.g. more meaningful work, freedom, much better pay — without the need to relocate.

The notion that sitting in traffic each morning to reach a room where one stares into a screen for 9 hours - every day, for 40 odd years - is desirable is the greatest con capitalism has ever pulled.

You have to choose between speed & quality. Don't kid yourself.

Speed is desirable at the start of a project because the deadline is so insufferably far away.

Quality becomes desirable at the end when you finally see all the ugly compromises you've made along the way.

A core reason why it gets harder to communicate inside organizations is the explosive increase in links between people [n*(n-1)/2]:

• 10 people: 45 links
• 67 people: 2211 links
• 250 people: 31.125 links This kind of complexity requires radical changes in how you operate.

Giving people instructions creates dependence. People giving intent creates independence.

Just learned about the Dunning-Kruger effect. It’s why un-skilled people think they know more than experts in a particular subject

"If everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough." - Mario Andretti

Пользователи всегда принимают любые значительные изменения в штыки, с этим надо смириться. Однако это не повод эти изменения не внедрять :)

Your job as CEO of a startup is to remain calm under pressure because someone has to be cool and collected when things are inevitably on fire.

The 3 Levels of Employees:

Level 1 — You do what you are asked to do.

Level 2 — Level 1 + You think ahead and solve problems before they happen.

Level 3 — Level 2 + You proactively look for areas of opportunity and growth in the business, and figure out how to tap into them.

First: some basic definitions.

There’s a difference between leaders & managers.

Managers are about ensuring the team’s efforts are effective.

Leaders lead the team to achieve the vision.

Learning to identify super talented people before everyone else does is one of the most valuable skills to develop.

Advice to new managers:

1 earn trust by giving it
2 inspire, don’t tell
3 eat lunch with your team
4 show their work matters
5 be a player-coach
6 feedback in private, praise in public
7 in victory, lead from back
8 in crisis, lead from front
9 be the manager you wish you had

It’s a classic manager mindset: if I don’t SEE you doing work, then you’re not doing work. I hate that mentality.

Your company's most valuable resource is people giving a shit. Ask yourself: does your system encourage or discourage that?

Founders: consider adding to your monthly updates a "what we stopped doing this month" section. Subtraction is investment by another name.

Visionary. Good at executing/operating. Talented.

Choose two.

Organizations look like their leaders.

programming progression

year 0: I know nothing
years 1-2: I know some things
years 3-4: I don't know what I don't know
years 4-4.5: I know everything
years 4.5-10+: I know nothing