My takeaway from my first million episode with Michael Birch (best known for selling Bebo to AOL for $850M): stick to what works: michael spent his entire career building viral social applications, sometimes copying 80% of the code of a prior project to launch a new business. this is in stark contrast to the state of front end development where there is a new frameworks and shiny technology every month.
"Like things go from sort of nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing to you overshoot because you've been investing in something that had more potential."
- Michael Birch on income from running his startup
Jason Fried is the founder of 37 signals, a private web design company best known for basecamp and creating the ruby on rails framework. Jason has made a name for himself in the valley as a champion of bootstrapping and arguing that most businesses do not need or are even helped by VC funding.
My takeaway from his recent episode on Lenny's Podcast: aim for simplicity.
"Simple can also be hard, but complicated is a lot harder."
Companies become complicated when they grow too big or are doing too many things which results in enormous amounts of energy being directed at keeping the lights on.
Startups, in the beginning, can be simple. This is their biggest point of leverage against incumbents.
https://overcast.fm/+6K1HaZVAE
A lot has been said about Charlie Munger since his passing. While I never met the man, his principle maxim, "always invert", has been a big influence on how I approach open ended problems.
The gist goes as follows: when faced with an ambiguous problem like living a good life or building a successful business, look at what it takes to accomplish the opposite and avoid doing those things. The logic is that it is far easier to find figure out what not to do then try to identify all the things that one might need to do.
You can see a great example of this in Munger's Harvard commencement speech on how to be miserable
https://www.stripe.press/poor-charlies-almanack/talk-one?progress=22.18%25
Matt highlights Automatic's sabbatical policy - a fantastic policy that more companies should adopt. After college, few careers offer real breaks, leading to burnout and loss of talent.
I experienced this firsthand last year. I was burned out after running a startup for three years and had the entire company take a month sabbatical. This definitely felt conterintuitive as our company was goining thorugh a pivot. But a dull blade cuts little and we all needed a break.
We ended up shutting down the old business and going in a completely new direction. It worked out and we now make more in a month than we did in a year.
Created 2023-12-29T04:40:40.035000, updated 2024-01-01T06:06:02.607000 · History · Edit