nof1

Made a quick Streamlit app to help me figure out how much protein my kids are getting each day. Sharing it in case it's useful for other parents!

When people ask me how startup life is I talk a lot about the roller coaster. You can be on top of the world and in the pits of the despair in the same day. One of the struggles is that often you are the only person thinking about something and so many burdens rest entirely on your shoulders. I've found these 4 things help:

1. Having very frank and open conversations with your co-founders. Hopefully you have a founding team you can be really honest with. Go on walks. Talk about your feelings. It can take awhile to build this relationship but it's very worth it.

2. Find mentors. Doesn't have to be someone you meet with every month (though those are great too!) but if you're struggling with some imposter syndrome on a new task ask your investors to intro you to 2-3 people who have done that thing well before. Everyone is happy to share advice. I go into those meetings and say "Hey I'm XYZ, I'm working on this ABC task and would love your advice, here is what we are doing today and what we're planning on doing. What would you do if you were me?"

3. Get a coach. You investors can probably intro you to someone. They can run from $250-$1000+ an hour but very worth it. I meet with my coach 2x a month and it's kind of work therapy. A chance for me to be very vulnerable about where I am and to talk out my problems.

4. Show some vulnerability to your company. Every now and then saying hey I'm not sure about this thing or I'm new to this can actually inspire more faith in you because then when you say hey I'm confident in this thing, they believe you more since you were willing to share a time when you weren't confident. Also can inspire them to speak up if they aren't sure. If we all go around pretending we know everything all the time then our employees will do that too and then you have a culture where things aren't optimal but people don't think they can talk about it or get help.

You are either a company who knows how to make remote work -- in which case it doesn't matter where people live and you can afford to pay them the same rates. Or you're a company that can't make remote works and relies on having people go into the office, and if so you can get by with paying local rates. But as more and more companies figure out remote work, I think local rates will mostly disappear, especially for developers.

The answer is yes! 1000% yes. Coaching has been the most valuable resource to me in becoming a leader. I have my own coach but my team uses Torch.io and really likes it.

Streamlit for Teams is in private beta, so prices are still negotiated case by case. When it is open to everyone in a few months, the prices will be on the website. And the goal is to make it so that it's affordable for even very small companies.

I would start with going back to what has and has not been working for your company during the pandemic. Check with your employees on what their feelings are. Try to distill that into what you want culturally. We were an almost entirely local company before the pandemic and have now embraced remote. So returning to the office for us means being very mindful that over half of our company will always be remote and making sure that they are still involved in decisions, team building, etc. as opposed to an ad hoc office culture where bonds and decisions are made in hallways.

Check the GitHub repos of people who are on the team. Company code might be private but you can get a sense of who is on the team and how they code. Also see if you can talk to teammates before joining to get a sense of what the day to day is like. There are great engineering teams in the sense of eng practices but horrible culture in terms of management, getting along well with other orgs, etc. So you want to make sure you have both.

We have our parents record themselves reading books to our kids. Best if you have the same book at home and they can follow along.

And so much cheaper than a Canada Goose parka!

I'm a bit horrified and a bit proud?

I've faced this problem numerous times and there are two key parts:

1. Some people just have zero clue. They just don't have self awareness of a good set of internal metrics on how to perform. These are almost always people that had flags when we hired them but we were hiring fast for a role and brought them in.

2. As a manager I didn't give hard feedback early on. It is difficult, especially with people with potential to give that hard feedback (you're moving too slowly, this isn't up to snuff). I've had to do hard corrections later on that could have been solved if I had stepped up and spent the time early on to say hey this needs to be better and how.

Also, underinvesting in promising talent is a huge problem at startups. You often have first time managers or execs who are managing way too many people. So potential leaders don't get the mentorship they need. Given that attracting new, good talent can cost tens of thousands of $s in time and recruiting costs, it is a smart move to put money into leveling up and retaining people! Find them mentors outside the company (YC has a great community for this, as do other VC funds and industry groups), pay for coaching, or find a mentor in the company that has more time. It really pays off.

Important context: this is actually higher than the rate of people who normally get the flu vaccine. CDC data from 2018-2019 flu season: Vaccination coverage varied by state, ranging from 46.0%–81.1% among children and from 33.9%–56.3% among adults, and of the ten states with the lowest coverage for children eight were also among the ten states with the lowest coverage for adults.

From article: In the US, this would mean vaccinating between 197 million and 230 million citizens. Globally, it’d be between 4.7 billion and 5.5 billion people.

Though that depends on the equitable distribution of the vaccination

In my head they are building the set of Free Guy and testing cars in it.

I hadn't thought of that - very clever!

Incredibly important that we have this record as a democracy

It's all a matter of time but most restaurants aren't physically configured to make a lot of robotics easy to implement. We'll see much faster adoption if a number of chains redo their infrastructure to be robot-first. It'll almost certainly happen within the next 10 years at some chains.

I'd really like to see governments focus on supporting continuing education.Instead of just focusing on 4 year degrees we should think about how we can support people taking 12 weeks every 5 years to level up or gain an adjacent skill set to evolve what they can do in the workplace.

I have found when in doubt give something that can be consumed. Find out their favorite food/drink etc. and just go one step beyond. If they are a tea drinker give a cool tea blend plus a new mug. If they are a beer drinker, give a selection of beers they probably haven't tried + a snack food that pairs well with them. It's not a new iPhone but it shows you know them and it's something you know they will definitely use.

Not sure this is good news for me as a Slack user...

We were one of their first customers back when the team was maybe 5 people. Always liked their approach but definitely had no idea they'd make it this big. Congrats guys!

Ah so that's the region of the brain I'm missing

We should just go straight to 10G

You're often not selling what you think you're selling or not selling it to the person you thought you'd be selling to. Approach your sales process the same way you did your product development - you need to beta it. Get a few early customers in and really learn from them. How did they make the decision? What do they think the main benefits are? How are they using it? What would they tell a friend? Who influenced the purchase and who paid for it?

I don't think we'll dramatically extend human lifespan in our lifetime (or reverse it), but I'm hoping breakthroughs can dramatically improve quality of life well into the 90s.

A step that is missing is picking your strongest argument. A mistake that I often see made is that people have 50 reasons why that person is wrong but usually 49 of them are fairly weak and could be debated. You are generally better off picking your one killer argument and just bolstering that. Otherwise you get into a position where they seem like they are winning because they knocked aside a bunch of your less meaty arguments.

Great list!

Thanks that's really useful!

There should be a branding mark they can put on their products - like "organic" or "cage free" -that helps people knew when buying that they are supporting a company like this

I wouldn't be surprised if Africa eventually surpassed the West in AI. Often it's easier for countries and companies with less existing technological infrastructure (or baggage from the previous dominant paradigm) to ramp up on something new.