Two myths in startup land that need dispelling: 1. Being first does not matter 99% of the time. 2. No one has real defensibility on day 1. It is built over time in people, processes, and products. Go build.

One of the biggest reasons it gets harder to do new things as you get older is that new things are generally undignified at first (indeed, this is an excellent heuristic for discovering them) and the older you get, the more dignified you're expected to be.

Whenever I'm tempted to think that a new thing seems too complicated, I read newspaper articles about pizza from the early 1950s.

A List of Things People Blamed on Radio 🧵

Engineering founder to CEO:

The story of a startup in 10 memes. 1. We're all naive at the beginning

This is genius. Italian singer Adriano Celentano released a song in the 70s with nonsensical lyrics meant to sound like American English—to prove that Italians would just love any American song. And it was a hit.

Fan Theories xkcd.com/2683

Yo wtf...just saw a stat that said only 30-50% of people have an internal dialogue. There's really 50%+ of the population out here walking around with NOTHING going on in their head?? Everything is starting to make much more sense

When an athlete is told to run at 85% they run faster than if they're told to run at 100%. It's called the 85% rule and here's why it works:

Every Founder in Year 1: "I love my company. These people are my family and I will run this business forever." Every Founder in Year 8: "I hate my life and my employees hate me. Please buy my business and let me go away for a very long time."

Don't imitate qualities of your heroes at random. Some are flaws they succeeded despite. The qualities that are easiest to imitate are the most likely to be the flaws.

A unit test shouldn’t: 🚫 Call a DB 🚫 Run a browser 🚫 Make an HTTP call 🚫 Rely on stuff on other machines A unit test should pass without a network connection. There’s nothing wrong with doing such things in a test. But if a test does these things, it’s not a unit test.

My son, who is a software engineer, just told me that people who know software just had their Elon Musk realization.

Last night when I was sleeping, I apparently rolled over, sleep-shouted in my husbands face “and that’s why we do unit tests!” And rolled back over.

Most people feel there are too many meetings. However most people also hate the idea that they aren’t being included in important conversations and decisions.

Many businesses are penny wise, pound foolish. “We require pre-approval for small business expenses”. “We can’t afford consulting or training.” “We use the free version. We can’t afford to pay for better tools.” “We don’t pay well.” “We buy developers cheap, slow laptops.”

I escaped the rat race 3.5 years ago. My secret sauce is not playing status games. I don't: - want to change the world. - want to build the next unicorn. - want to be featured on any lists. - want to get the highest valuation.

A mistake I see solopreneurs making: Selling products for problems they haven't validated. - No real problem - No real urgency - No real pain Remember that pain is an indicator of purchase. "Nice to have" doesn't sell much.