keeptrying

Beautifully put.

Your observations aptly apply to industry as well except for your final one regarding the incentive structure.

Thank you for commenting.

I was just remembering this essay today…

In the age of Facebook, Instagram, people will have to take a course to look at their fish.

1. Walking. 4-5 km per day or more. 2. A system of meds and supplies and checkup.

I be cared for my dad with Alzheimer’s fir the last 10 years.

Walking helps: 1. Keeping muscle tone 2. Healthy lungs 3. Aids digestion 4. Fixes knee and back issues 5. Creates a routine 6. Aids blood flow 7. Helps sleep

It probably won’t help in the OP case unfortunately but the faster you can make walking a Solid habit for your parents the easier it becomes to take Care of them.

I have a whole system to make sure there’s 3 month of meds and supplies available.

Plus doctors and nurses for checkups and daily care.

Hard but very doable. My parents are in india. In the US setting this up will probably be 5-10x more expensive.

Confidence is a choice till it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

If confidence is failing you, think about the work your grandad did to make a living. ( Mine used to toil away on 3 acres of land for his entire life.)

This kind of “brain dump” meeting is a great signal that you are possibly getting fired.

It also means they find you very valuable.

A good thing to highlight are all the things that could go wrong + associated costs to company and what you’re actively doing to manage those problems.

That’ll give them pause.

Kevin, we met in SF. you have a habit of being hard on yourself and giving others the benefit of a doubt.

I agree with others here - this was a toxic work culture. None of this was your fault but your method of building back up your confidence seems useful.

Also anyone who fires someone with a pregnant wife is a repugnant human being.

There's a difference between willingness to look stupid and intentionally trying to flip the bozo-bit on others to figure out their boundaries.

You can actually make this a habit and it becomes hard to fix!

If you ever want to start a company, you have to make it a habit to look impressive.

Yes :)

These set of questions are very thorough and will help you avoid 80% or more of the bad situations. I had to figure out all thsi on my own and most startups won’t answer these questions even after getting an offer.

Some more question you might want to ask: - is there a double trigger clause? (If not then the founder can restart your vesting after an acquisition and do other nasty things.)

- can I exercise my options after beating while I’m at the company. (You’ll be surprised but I’ve seen companies that don’t allow you to exercise while you’re employed there which means you can kiss qsbs goodbye and you can’t leave comoany if it gets too big else you’ll lose the options)

- can I sell my exercised stock on the secondary market? (Some companies don’t allow this)

95% of people don’t ask these questions and can get screwed.

Been there, done that unfortunately - long time ago. Pivoted to selling experiences Sold by adventure SME. Was impossible to scale as each needed support to get their adventure itineraries online.

Painful.

Travel planning seems to be common wrong idea and the other is dating websites.

His investors I do feel sorry for but honestly as long as he has $10M left (which I'm guessing he does), he'll be fine.

Just so people understand this doesn’t mean that indian food is healthy.

This really should be paired with the fact that Soouth Asians (indians) are 4x more likely to have a heart attack than any other population.

I am an indian and I did 2 nutrition startups.

Most South Indian food is unhealthy - heavy carbs laced with oils. Delicious but unhealthy.

A small part of North Indian food is healthy - roti, daals, veggies etc.

Liquid sends documents to Adobe cloud so use judiciously !

It is nice though.

I had a part-time cofounder in the end. He was really good and we buit and launched app. Make 2k/month but I had to go back tot he workforce due to family reasons - dad got sick.

Don't persist as a solo founder but do it if you have to.

I was a solo founder and at the end of my journey, I realized I would have given up 25-50% of my company just to 1. have someone else to talk to on a daily basis 2. have someone I could bounce ideas off, 3. someone who could have focused on the parts where I was bad (even if they didn't have that skillset).

I would have done twice as much as solo founder.

Push yourself to find a co=founder. Invest 10% of your time in it. Have no expectations. Slowly you'll get a nose for the kind of people you will want to work with. Also you'll polish up your people skills which you'll need to raise money and to run a sucessful business in the future.

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go further go with a team. (There is no fast startup.)

The downside of OKRs is that it incentivizes everyone to sandbag their efforts and then stick to that effort. Also no one is going to stick their neck out on goals which are ambiguous or lack clarity. There is just no incentive - in fact there's a massive dis-incentive.

If you have a startup with less than 300 people and you have good communication and goal setting, don't use OKRs. Use KPIs and then nehlp your teams to keep iterating.

Input management is so much more effective than output management but it needs visionary leadership. Read: High Output Management - Andrew S Grove (ex Intel CEO).

Some anecdata: I know 8 people who angel invest (small sample yes) and 0 have made money.

To heighten your chances you're going to need to write 20-40 checks which means about a $500k investment. And then curl up in to a fetal position till 1 > 20x at least to break even.

Deliberate Practice leads to Tacit Knowledge.

Or rather the former trains the acquisition of the latter.

Example:

David Chapman (@Meaningness):

RT @michael_nielsen: I mention all this mostly because of the relative lack of attention the media in many countries have paid to successes… reply | retweet | favorite | original

I do see retweets. Anyway if getting rid of them?

Don’t see anything in settings.

There’s no soft way to say - “you’re not good. You need to get better.”

It is hurtful and painful to hear however put.

Relentlessly upping a teams standards in everything - strategy, execution, effort etc, tires out everyone on that team. But that’s usually what you need to win or succeed in a competitive system.

People who push for this will always be called assholes because they force team members to stretch themselves which is never a comfortable proposition.

The corollary to this is that to win by not being an asshole, find something that is needed/wanted but no one else does or that which you can do 10x better than everyone else. Without competition you won’t need to push you or your team that hard.

(The only catch with having no competition, is that, having no competition will slow down the rate at which you can improve or stop all improvement in most people.)

19 employees seems such a small number that you can’t but think they could have as easily not fired them and just cut everyone’s pay?

Org mode has a diary feature so the git repo not strictly necessary.

Beorg for mobile.

The idea of pushing formats back to org mode is brilliant design.

You basically coerce all manner of new formats into soemthing you can easily manipulate in the future - which is kind of the essential feature of a note taking system.

You will obviously have to update those scripts a little as these other formats change but then again you’ll only have to do so for the systems u really care about.

Would be great if you could wrap all this back up into a emacs package for easy install ;)

Yes. Very true. Scheduling learning is hard. And incentivizing it is even harder.

I personally love to learn. It’s what I do best. If I don’t do it I get bored.

I even setup my reports with a skills matrix which shows the skills they need to get to. Still find them not really pushing themselves.

This might be one of the only books that I would classify as a “must read”.

The perspective of being able to debug your own brain is invaluable and understanding other methods to do the same are worth the price of the book.

Buy an electronic and paperback. Great book.

I really don't think it was about the money. He was making $120M a year at the time?

He probably had a sense of ownership on that idea and wanted to see it through to economic viability.

I don't know - thats the only way I can rationalize