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- Issue #3
AI generated art using the machine learning model Stable Diffusion (here’s the text we gave to the program: beautiful illustrated rocket ship, flames coming out of the engines, stylistically similar to Salvador Dalí) - we’ll discuss this more in the next issue 😉
Welcome to Issue #3. We’re super excited to share that we’re closing in on a 100 subscribers! We’re so appreciative of everyone who’s supported us so far, and hope that you’ll one day be able to say that you were one of the earliest readers of a publication that reaches thousands 🤞
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WHAT'S INSIDE
🚀 When company’s grow (or shrink) quickly, things are known to break. How do you manage rapid change while maintaining business performance?
♢ If you follow crypto, you know that Ethereum’s “Merge” was one of the biggest headlines over the past few weeks. so what exactly is the merge and what's expected in a post-merge world?
❤️ Take time this week to appreciate the little things, as Wait But Why’s Tim Urban points out that many of our life experiences are in their tail end 🥺
A DEEPER DIVE: MANAGING THROUGH SCALE
In business, when things work well, the business grows 📈. When the business grows, sometimes things break 💥, and companies - startups in particular - often find themselves in a constant balancing act of trying to maintain growth 🚀 without letting too many things break along the way. Those “things” at risk of breaking could be the tech infrastructure, sales & marketing strategies, recruiting practices, or even company culture. Whatever it is, it's important to have a principled approach in times of both growth and decline, because broken things can be very hard to fix (see Better.com’s four rounds of layoffs in less than 12 months)
Here’s some articles about managing rapid change inside your organization:
What it's about: The authors of the book “Scaling Teams: Strategies for Building Successful Teams and Organizations” share some lessons on how startups should think about team growth
TLDR / Key Takeaways:
Competition between teams isn’t necessarily unhealthy. If done intentionally and openly, It could help the business innovate and more quickly identify the best approach
Consider allowing for open leadership meetings where any member of the function can attend (so long as the members attending take notes and share a summary to the rest of the org). This helps 1) drive a greater understanding of goals and process across the org and 2) forces leadership to be intentional about how the meeting is run since they might have drop-ins from the rest of the team
When doing headcount resource planning, be sure to survey current employees and understand where bottlenecks exist. Understanding the day-to-day challenges help ensure resourcing decisions take into account current team dynamics.
Prize cross-disciplinary collaboration and career mobility to ensure factions don’t form that impact employee morale or productivity
What it's about: Product growth expert Lauren Schuman shares lessons from scaling growth teams at SaaS businesses
TLDR / Key Takeaways:
When building a new team, spend time aligning on your organization’s mission (”find the right problem to solve”)
Identify under-utilised / neglected resources to give attention to and prove your team’s value in order to justify further resource investments
Data & analytics is key to knowing if your experiments are successful, so invest here early
MENTAL MODEL OF THE WEEK: OPPORTUNITY COSTS AND COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE
Delegation is an activity that comes up a lot in business:
At the individual contributor level, an employee decides whether to delegate tasks to software (e.g. an engineer writing code to automate a task) vs. doing it themselves manually
A manager decides whether to delegate a job to her direct reports or perform that job herself
A business decides whether to delegate a piece of their value proposition to an outside party (i.e. buy / partner), or build it internally
Delegation, in its various forms, often comes down to considering opportunity costs and comparative advantage
For: Decision Making
What is it: A mental model for thinking about how time (and other resources) is best served and how value is exchanged between parties
When it’s used: Build-buy-partner decisions, headcount resource planning, technology investment decisions
When it’s NOT used: Justifying workaholism (i.e. spending time at work vs. with family), or spending time on a hobby (in other words, when the economic decision is not necessarily the best one)
In the example above, let’s assume that at any time of day, Serena could easily monetize her time (event appearances, investments, etc.)…this is probably more or less true
Let’s also assume that because she’s both a world-class athlete and is most familiar with the layout of her property, she would be able to mow her lawn at an above average speed
Because each hour in her day is so valuable (and thus her opportunity costs are so high), even if she could provide her own service faster than the market, there is a comparative advantage in choosing to outsource this task (so long as the contractor charges less than Serena’s opportunity cost)
Note: Keep in mind that there is no ‘price’ for Serena to consider if she cuts the lawn herself, and there’s no opportunity cost for the contractor to consider (because we assume they set a price that they find fair for their time spent)
Related resources: Using the power of comparative advantage in startups, should you play to comparative advantage when choosing your career?
YOUR NEXT STRIDE
For a full list of open roles, click here. We refresh this list every week and only add the best high-profile roles suitable for senior (e.g. 10+ years of experience) operators.
If you want to share an open role, please use this form.
This week's featured roles
EDUTAINMENT-ISH
More entertainment than education if we're to be honest
Watch 🍿
Skandal! Bringing down Wirecard (Netflix) How a journalist uncovered a massive fraud at Wirecard - once a golden child of the fintech industry.
Read 📚
Children of the Land by Marcelo Hernandez Catillo. For Hispanic Heritage month, we wanted to feature a Latinx author. NPR’s ‘Best Book of the Year 2020’ is a memoir that examines the trauma of displacement, and illuminates the human lives behind the immigration headlines.
Listen 🎧
The Great Merge is over. But what exactly is it, and how might it impact crypto? Listen to this 12 minute explainer by Bankless, this session of Around the Block featuring Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum) and Brian Armstrong (Coinbase), this episode by the Economist “Will Ethereum’s merge transform crypto” (dives into the environmental impact), and this Web3 with a16Z session.
RANDOM BUT INTERESTING
This is our random grab-bag section. You can think of it as coming down the rabbit hole of curiosity with us just because — or fodder for anecdotes for your next speech 🤷🏽♀️
Tim Urban (author of Wait but Why) breaks down relatively common place actions into lifespan counters. Ever consider the fact that you might only have 300 books left to read in your lifetime? Or less than 60 winters left?
The intent of his article wasn’t to be morbid, rather it helps us to zoom out a bit and appreciate the rarity of the things we often take for granted. The biggest insight for me was when Tim pointed out how living in close proximity to loved ones has a big impact on how much more time you have with them in your adult years (Tim points out that we spend over 90% of our in-person time with our parents/guardians by the time we graduate from high school)
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Hasta Luego 👋🏽