“How Ta-Nehisi Coates built the best comment section on the internet—and why it can’t last.”
Technology
Why Bitcoin is and isn’t like the Internet
The similarity is that Bitcoin is a transportation infrastructure that is decentralized, efficient and based on an open protocol. Instead of transferring packets of data over a dynamic network in contrast to the circuits and leased lines that preceded the Internet, Bitcoin’s protocol, the blockchain, allows trust to be established between mutually distrusting parties in an efficient and decentralized way.
The Silent Killer – The Company Your Community Never Created
A must-read for anyone trying to build or expand a tech hub outside of Silicon Valley. It rings true for Austin, that’s for sure.
Culture & Mission
no company has a culture; every company is a culture. A startup is a team of people on a mission, and a good culture is just what that looks like on the inside.
Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
That statement is easy to dismiss, thinking “yeah, of course”, but few companies truly understand the truth contained in those words. Culture cannot be bolted on, but it can easily fall by the wayside if left unminded or is de-prioritized in times of growth or crisis. The effort to repair it later takes years and culture rarely runs as deep as it did in the early days.
Be mindful of your team, your startup and the internal reflection provided by your culture. If you want to build a great company, you cannot afford to let it slip.
Building a Different Future
Startups operate on the principle that you need to work with other people to get stuff done, but you also need to stay small enough so that you actually can. Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future. A new company’s most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think.
Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
This passage has been top of mind for me as I search for my next challenge. It highlights the joy and the energy that comes with a startup. It also notes the tremendous pressure that comes with building a different future (much less convincing people that it is the right future to build).
“Nimble” is easy to throw around. It sounds good, but it requires significant energy in practice. Yet, when I think about those teams where I’ve found the most success and felt the greatest reward, nimbleness and agility were core to the team’s foundation. Solving hard problems requires a dogged pursuit of new ideas but it also requires the ability to discard concepts that were once deeply held.
Being nimble requires an elastic mind and a bias toward action, prioritizing progress over process.
It brushes aside the formulaic cycles that can come with some success.
It requires energy and a thoughtful outlook.
And, in the right environment, it returns more energy than it required.
I am actively looking to join a great team who understands this and who in turn are looking for a product leader that is passionate about user experience and building a different future. Here’s my LinkedIn profile if you’re interested in my background. Please reach out if you’d like to talk!
On Acquisitions
The thing you want to buy reflects a different way of thinking, which has value, but that difference is at odds with the culture you already have. Like an organ transplant, natural antibodies will fight against having the new organ fit in. And the more you do to force it in, the less of what you wanted to acquire in the first place remains. The vast majority of acquisitions fail for this reason. Few executives recognize the paradox, or think themselves immune to it.
Scott Berkun in The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work
