What makes a good engineering culture?
10 Lessons for Young Designers -
The ones I like (which are most of them)
1. Be Authentic. The most powerful asset you have is your individuality, what makes you unique. It’s time to stop listening to others on what you should do.
2. Work harder than anyone else and you will always benefit from the effort.
4. …Make things with your hands. Innovation in thinking is not enough.
6. Being original is still king, especially in this tech-driven, group grope world.
8. Instinct and intuition are all-powerful. Learn to trust them.
10. If all else fails, No. 2 is the greatest competitive advantage of any career.
Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 7 Notes Essay -
Choice quotes:
Understanding exponents and power law distributions isn’t just about understanding VC. There are important personal applications too. Many things, such as key life decisions or starting businesses, also result in similar distributions. We tend to think about these things too moderately. There is a perception that some things are sort of better than other things, sometimes. But the reality is probably more extreme than that.
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Paul Graham: Founders. Ideas are just indicative of how the founders can think. We look for relentlessly resourceful people. That combination is key. Relentlessness alone is useful. You can relentlessly just bang your head against the wall. It’s better to be relentless in your search for a door, and then resourcefully walk through it.
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Roelof Botha: It is so rare to find people who can clearly and concisely identify a problem and formulate coherent approach to solve it.
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Roelof Botha: You can discover a lot about founders by asking them about their choices. What are the key decisions you faced in your life and what did you decide? What were the alternatives? Why did you go to this school? Why did you move to this city?
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Paul Graham: Another corollary to the power law is that it’s OK to be lame in a lot of ways, so long as you’re not lame in some really important ways. The Apple guys were crazy and really bad dressers. But they got importance of microprocessors. Larry and Sergey got that search was important.
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Peter Thiel: Isaiah Berlin wrote an essay called “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” It revolved around a line from an ancient Greek poet: foxes know many little things, but hedgehogs know one big thing. People tend to think that foxes are best because they are nimble and have broad knowledge. But in business, it’s better to be a hedgehog if you have to choose between the two. But you should still try and know lots of little things too.
“If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people. But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that. Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue. At Amazon we like things to work in five to seven years. We’re willing to plant seeds, let them grow—and we’re very stubborn. We say we’re stubborn on vision and flexible on details.” — Jeff Bezos, Interview with Wired
The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs -
“There are a few drivers for the Law of Shitty Clickthroughs, and here’s a summary of the top ones:
Instagram's First Investor Explains What He Looks For In Companies -
Startups: How to communicate traction to investors -
How to:
How To Get Media Coverage For Your Startup: A Complete Guide -
A very thorough guide and extremely relevant to tech startups.
Hiring Talent: 4 Traits Your Start-up Needs -
1. Adaptability
“ask where they want to be in five years. While most job recruiters look for candidates who know exactly where they want to be, we’re the opposite.”
2. Honesty
“we ask them if they’re nervous. If we ask someone whether they’re nervous and they say no, but they’re sweating, shaking, and breaking out in rashes, it’s pretty much a red flag they’re not being genuine.”
3. Confidence
“Say, for example, a candidate says they think the start-up down the street is building something awesome. Then I say, “that start-up is the worst idea since pink Vitamin Water. And that stuff tastes like Robitussin.”“
4. Enthusiasm
“Making sure that they’re not more enthusiastic about the idea of working at your company (free food, crazy team outings) than the reality of the job (disruptive ideas, talented co-workers) is super important.”
Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann’s Lesson for Start-Ups: Go Your Own Way -
My favorite parts:
Don’t take too much advice:
But here’s Pinterest co-founder and CEO Ben Silbermann’s advice: “Don’t take too much advice.”
“Most people generalize whatever they did, and say that was the strategy that made it work,” Silbermann said. In reality, there’s very little way of knowing how various factors contributed to success or failure.
Being comfortable as a non-engineer:
Silbermann is not an engineer, so at Google he worked in online sales and operations.
“I left, not because I didn’t love the company, but because [with] my particular background, it would have been really hard to built products,” he said.
The fallacy of fail fast, lean, and traction:
Silbermann said, “The hard part about that idea of ‘minimum viable product,’ for me, is you don’t know what ‘minimum’ is, and you don’t know what ‘viable’ is.”
In the early days, Pinterest had “catastrophically small numbers,” Silbermann said. Nine months after launch, the site counted 10,000 users, with few of them active on a daily basis.
Silbermann said he recently picked up Eric Ries’s “The Lean Startup,” and was grateful he didn’t read it at the time, because it might have convinced him to give up at that point.