Krebs cycle.
4,738 karma · joined February 23, 2015
Speaking of iPod videos, last week I shared one [0] about the story of the first iPod. A deep look into the crazy 11-month ride that led to its creation.
It's my first YT video, so please be merciful.
We built Pulse because we saw that keeping people inspired, motivated and aligned in any high-growing organization is hard. When you’re a small company and employees fit into a single room (physically or virtually), everyone knows what everyone else is working but at around 50 employees, this stops working and answering simple questions like “What are the company high-level priorities? What does leadership value most? Who are all these people I’m working with around the globe?” becomes super hard.
If you have a system like Pulse, you (and others in your team) get a central location to (1) streamline important comm about priorities, directions and status, (2) share, discuss, review or collaborate asynchronously and (3) hold institutional knowledge and decision history that’s important to keep so that employees, current and future, aren’t lost without context.
With Pulse, you get 3 different systems in one:
1) An internal publishing platform perfect for both small-scale distributed teams or high-growing companies. You may think of it as an “internal Substack for teams” with: - Follow/unfollow teams, people, and topics - Personal feed to get caught up with new updates - Ability to discuss and highlight key decisions taken - Daily/weekly digests with updates batched in a single email - Automated Slack notifications when a new update is posted - Bi-directional linking to create dynamic references between updates
2) A lightweight people directory that helps you better know where your team members are based, what updates they shared, how to get ahold of them for work, and any quick background they’d like to share. Every profile includes: - Basic info such as name, role, department, bio, etc. - Contact links: email, phone, twitter, linkedin, etc. - Location and time zone - Posts and comments history
3) A lightweight browser extension (Chrome, Brave, Edge, Firefox supported) that makes your default browser “new tab” your new “company home” so that keeping up with new updates is ridiculously fast and easy. Includes:
- Recently shared updates - Company (or team-wide) bookmarks - Company (or team-wide) time zones - Weekly b-days, anniversaries, or new hires
Looking forward to ideas and feedback from the community
This idea of writing as a proxy for thinking is the essence of many misconceptions.
I know many 1st-class thinkers who have such hard time in writing.
What separates most people from good writing has very little to do with style, grammar, local sentences structure, word selection, or even content per se.
Most people can't write well because they don't know how to control the logical sequence in which they present their ideas.
And that is the single most important act necessary to clear writing.
I shared more on what that means here in a recent essay [0].
Very few realizes it but before Gould the Goldberg Variations were very little known even to professional pianists.
Given how old the GB variations are compared to when they found success, it's like Argonautica by Apollonius of Rhodes winning a best seller prize in 2020.
By focusing on excellent written communication.
Great written comms is hard, and (like coding) requires lots of deliberate practice and training.
Most people and companies gloss over this, but it makes a world of difference if you're operating across time zones.
Great internal writing is what separate the great companies from the average.
Manual bidding is always preferable with fewer data points (low conversions, low clicks, no previous campaigns). Auto bidding is preferable as your GA accounts grow in conversions and the algorithms start to create a better profile of your customers.
Kevin Scott: Microsoft CTO - Lex Fridman [0]
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Score-Takes-Care-Itself-Philosophy/dp...
That is an actual original performance recorded in 1925.
Agree on that part. (:
Yes, he was extremely popular because he was a skilled general. He had a very good understanding of Roman military strategy and tactics. Not on the top-5 but surely on the top-10 of the best Roman generals of all time.
> If that was the case, then why did he not just run the Senate out of town
That wasn't possible. The Roman Senate and the whole Roman political scene was in complete stagnation. Plus, you couldn't really "run the Senate" remotely – many tried (including Caesar) doing so, none succeeded. You had to have a physical presence or to delegate (e.g. Caesar with Mark Anthony).
At the time, Pompey had strong political power and run for Console, but on his way to power, he found Crassus with the very same goal in mind. The problem is that Crassus was the richest man in Rome (a billionaire compared to today) and he had much more political influence.
Pompey (mainly because of Crassus's obstructionism) wasn't able to fully capitalize on his military success.
Caesar well understood that the stagnation was mainly due to the Crassus/Pompey (personal) rivalry and offered them to run himself for Console, (1) stop the Senate stagnation and (2) approve their reforms.
The rest is history.
I wrote about it here: https://leonardofed.io/blog/caesar.html
Without military success, one could become Questor or (if lucky) Praetor, but no way he could become Console. He had to demonstrate somehow his military value on the battlefield before.
Some exceptions were made from times to times (e.g. Cicero) but they were usually followed up by the mob.
No. Pompey wanted political power just as much he wanted military power. He was able to wield the second, but never really the first. That was mainly due to his rivalry with Crassus first and Caesar second.
He just wasn't at the right time in the right place. Crassus, despite being an inferior general, was richer than him and had more influence in the Senate. Caesar initially had less political influence than him, but he was superior on the battlefield.
Actium – like my other battles under August's reign – was mainly due to Agrippa's military skills. In a hypothetical ranking of best Roman generals of all time, he should probably be placed somewhere between 1st and 5th place.
As humans, our curiosity arouses around novelty. The object will tend to lose its novelty over time, and we'll tend to progressively lose interest in it up to the point where we go back to 'set point'.
Hint: look for mechanisms in your side projects to add novelty to the system so that your interest doesn't plateau.
When we built https://sametab.com as an internal side project, we used to constantly brainstorm new ideas about how this could eventually become. The more ideas we were founding the more the project looked new and appealing at our eyes.
If this sounds a little odd, here's how it works:
1. Install the Chrome extension [0], open a new tab and you'll see sample content. Hit the signup button and create a new account.
2. Now that you have an account, configure your company's page and invite your coworkers (they have to signup with their work email).
3. You're ready to create and publish announcements from the admin area. Everyone in your company will see them when opening a new tab.
[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sametab/glmeidaaam...