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How This Head of Engineering Boosted Transparency at Instagram
Management

How This Head of Engineering Boosted Transparency at Instagram

While leading engineering at Instagram, James Everingham spotted a problem: the inevitable dip in transparent decision-making and communication as teams scale. Drawing on three decades of experience, he shares how to operationalize transparency during hypergrowth.

The Simple Tool That Revives Employee Motivation
Management

The Simple Tool That Revives Employee Motivation

At Pinterest and LinkedIn, product leader Jack Chou learned firsthand how vital it is to zero in continuously on what keeps people motivated as a company scales. Now Head of Product at Affirm, here are the four components of workplace motivation that he leans on from the start.

The Top Comms Mistakes Startups Make — And How To Avoid Them
PR & Marketing

The Top Comms Mistakes Startups Make — And How To Avoid Them

After two decades of comms experience with companies like Eventbrite, Yahoo, Mattel and Nike, Terra Carmichael shares four common PR mistakes and her techniques for sidestepping them.

My Lessons from Interviewing 400+ Engineers Over Three Startups
Engineering

My Lessons from Interviewing 400+ Engineers Over Three Startups

Engineering leader Marco Rogers (Lever, Yammer, Clover Health) debunks some of the most common recruiting tropes and walks through his four top interviewing practices for startups.

The Type of Team Diversity You’re Probably Not Paying Attention To
Management

The Type of Team Diversity You’re Probably Not Paying Attention To

Grammarly Head of People Itamar Goldminz shares a model that can help managers build stronger teams — and become more intuitive, effective leaders.

Hypergrowth and The Law of Startup Physics
Management

Hypergrowth and The Law of Startup Physics

Reboot.io founder and professional coach Khalid Halim has guided the leadership at Coinbase, Lyft and Checkr through some of the steepest parts of their growth curve. Here, he shares the two promises every founder must make before hypergrowth.

What Your Startup Can Learn from Astronauts, The Daily Show, and the Coach of the Boston Celtics
Management

What Your Startup Can Learn from Astronauts, The Daily Show, and the Coach of the Boston Celtics

Organizational psychologist and Wharton professor Adam Grant jumps into unconventional workplaces to surface insights that'll help the rest of us work smarter and better.

How Food52 Strikes a Winning Balance Between Content and Commerce
PR & Marketing

How Food52 Strikes a Winning Balance Between Content and Commerce

Food52 co-founders Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs have always led with engaging content, confident that sales would follow. Here's what startups can learn from them on how to connect content and commerce to build a brand.

ClassPass’ Founder on How Marketplace Startups Can Achieve Product/Market Fit
Product

ClassPass’ Founder on How Marketplace Startups Can Achieve Product/Market Fit

It's rarely a straight line to product/market fit. Here are ClassPass founder Payal Kadakia's hard-won tips for marketplace startups that helped her guide her company from a near-bust to a $470M game-changer.

Our 6 Must Reads For Creating and Accelerating Trust on Teams
Management

Our 6 Must Reads For Creating and Accelerating Trust on Teams

Trust is intangible, but foundational to nearly every part of company-building. We've assembled our top posts from leaders who have gotten particularly tactical with fostering trust on their teams.

Pricing Lessons from Working with 30+ Seed and Series A B2B Startups
Sales

Pricing Lessons from Working with 30+ Seed and Series A B2B Startups

As CEO of Entrepid Partners and First Round's Sales Expert in Residence, Gaffney works directly with founders and early sales teams to establish go-to-market strategies and growth plans. Here he shares his pricing principles and experiments so early-stage teams can generate foundational revenue.

Hack Back Distractions with Tactics from This Behavioral Designer
Management

Hack Back Distractions with Tactics from This Behavioral Designer

Hooked author Nir Eyal has seen an epidemic of employees who get so distracted at work that they don’t have time to do their job. Here, he shares tactics that'll help you fend off distractions and help reinstate focus and creativity.

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For the founder's notepad:
"If you personally want to grow as fast as your company, you have to give away your job every couple months." – Molly Graham
“Asking ‘Why can't this be done sooner?’ methodically, reliably and habitually can have a profound impact on the speed of your organization.” – Dave Girouard
“End every meeting or conversation with the feeling and optimism you’d like to have at the start of your next conversation with the person.” – Chris Fralic
“Focus is doing things with a clear intention. It doesn’t mean you charge single-minded toward a goal. It means you pay rapt and incremental attention to how you need to turn the rudder on a project.” – Fidji Simo
“It’s essential to grow with the company — rather than having the company grow around you.” – Cristina Cordova 
“You have to be impatient with shipping, but patient with your career.” – James Everingham
“‘I trust you, make the call’ might be the six most powerful words you can hear from a manager.” – Sean Twersky
“Your job as a CEO is to build fire departments, not put out fires.” – Sam Corcos 
“Can you say with confidence that each report would want to be on your team again? If you aren’t sure that the answer is yes, it’s probably no — much like how if you have to ask, ‘Am I in love?’ you’re probably not.” – Julie Zhuo 
“People can get addicted to yak shaving. An effective engineering generalist knows when to move on. Pay attention to whether they used their time wisely, not just the results.” – Mike Krieger 
“It sounds so simple to say that bosses need to tell employees when they're screwing up. But it very rarely happens.” – Kim Scott
“You’ll know you understand the customer problem enough when you can predict 75% of what a customer tells you. Keep having these conversations until three-quarters of it is stuff you already know.” – Christina Cacioppo
“I have a rule: no company swag until the business has at least $250K of revenue or 250k users. Until then, you don’t get to “feel” the benefits of having started a company.” – Gagan Biyani
“The business model ends up becoming the business. It’s equally important as the market you’re going after and the product that you build.” – Jay Simons 
“If speed is the yin, the yang is prioritization. You can’t be fast if you don’t know what’s important.” – Jaleh Rezaei
“If you treat your connections as a kind of personal ATM you use for frequent withdrawals, you’ll quickly be disappointed (and overdrawn).” – Karen Wickre 
“Delighting the customer always yields better returns than countering or copying a competitor. It’s just a lot harder to do.” – Andy Rachleff 
“When you’re a founder, every moment you’re not writing code or getting users, you need to be making a conscious choice: Is whatever you’re doing worth your time?” – Alexis Ohanian
“‘Why would a customer not want this?’ is often a far more interesting question than why they would.” – Rick Song
“When you leave the planning process wondering if you put too many resources behind a single bet, that’s the bet that ends up succeeding. Bold ideas need bold resourcing.” – Lenny Rachitsky and Nels Gilbreth
“Treat customer development as a one-on-one with a direct report — you just want to ask the hard questions.” – Ryan Glasgow
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