I’m an overly precise person. Like, an extremely precise person, by which I mean I’m obsessed with clarity and precision, more so than that I’m uniquely good at making myself understood. This obsession with precision often requires I sacrifice conciseness – it’s extremely difficult to gain the requisite confidence that I’ve really, truly explained an … Continue reading Multiple Pages on Writing Concisely →

When building a startup, one of the most common questions you'll be asked is to describe your competitive landscape. Most founders, including myself when I started out, have an intuition that the right answer to this question ought to be "we have no competitors." After all, what's more promising - a startup with no competition, … Continue reading Who Are Your Competitors? →

In my last post, I talked about communication within an organization. Towards the end, I alluded to a few ideas about a similar, but distinct topic - communication for individuals. Designing communication tools - whether levers, shared vocabulary, or merely a culture of investigation - as an organization requires one look at generic approaches. All … Continue reading Communication Is A Team Sport →

Or, Some Words About Words Arguably the single most important skill for any organization is effective communication. After all, communication is the bridge between individual actors; the mortar enabling that infamous business saying about a whole that's greater than the sum of its parts. But what, exactly, is communication? To be technically precise, the act … Continue reading Intro to Communication for Organizations →

There’s something of a folk theorem in economics that goes as follows: if you discover a $100 bill on the sidewalk, ignore it, because if it was real someone would have already picked it up. Formally, it's really a reformulation of the Efficient Market Hypothesis, but when expressed in this form I like to think … Continue reading The No Free Money Theorem and Entrepreneurship →

As a founder, it's your job to be obsessed with your product, market, and pretty much everything else about the company you're trying to build. It turns out (and I know this feels like it should be obvious, but give me a moment) that investors operate differently. I'm not just talking about investors having a … Continue reading Investor Priors Through a Founder Lens →

Founding a company is, to sum it up, difficult. This is common knowledge, in the sense that people state it when asked, but I’m not sure if people tend to really understand what it means to say this is hard to do. At the very least, while I had some foggy ideas, I certainly didn’t … Continue reading The Trials We Face →

Making predictions is fun. It satisfies something deep for many people to speculate about the significance of certain actions, the hidden goals and values of different people, and often, the future itself. Usually, these predictions are plausible - after all, making completely wild and indefensible predictions is usually a pretty boring activity. The thrill of … Continue reading Plausible vs Probable →

I'm doing things a bit differently this week - I don't have something to write a full post about, but have a couple things I've noticed recently around communication styles and practices. So I thought it might be interesting to aggregate those into a single post. Curious to hear if anyone finds this sort of … Continue reading A Series of Short Observations: Communication Style →

The purpose of this blog, as I’ve stated elsewhere, is twofold. The first purpose is to serve as documentation and guide for those seeking to understand my own thinking and the experience of building a startup; the second is as a record of my beliefs from which I can learn. Today’s post regards the second … Continue reading Learning From Mistakes →