Agency is not something schools teach us; maybe even the opposite. We show up and are tested within a (too narrow) set of constraints, and we are discouraged when we take the initiative that cannot be easily managed. Are you pushing yourself enough to take control of your life? Are you hiring people around you who bring that energy and discipline?
"Most people do the obvious thing. They don't want to look weird or different—but winning is weird and different. You're definitionally different because you stand apart from everyone else as the ultimate winner." -- This is why I think it's worth playing "business games", investing in relationships, and building habits that are measured in decades.
Tobi Lütke (founder and CEO of Shopify) is a great thinker and a fantastic entrepreneur who approached building his company so differently than everyone else. I've enjoyed listening to his thoughts on Entrepreneurship towards the end of the video and learn how he imagines Agentic Commerce shaping up in the next few years. Worth listening to on your next commute to work.
Can Duruk offers an excellent format to run 1:1s with engineers effectively, both to ensure their day-to-day work is well-balanced and to provide them with enough feedback to help structure a career they'd be proud of.
Thinking in terms of "time blocks" is an interesting exercise to run for yourself and your team. Is it worth running a daily meeting or setting another meeting? Are we rushing to write code to realize that arguing about the requirements would have saved us days of effort? What are the alternative costs of our decisions?
Want to see what a 20-year-old with high agency looks like? Read this post by Eric Zhang: "Honestly, I may have been kind of annoying to work with. I remember within a week of joining, I had reformatted the whole codebase, encoded it into CI, and then written an essay on Slack about how we should rewrite the frontend in Svelte + Tailwind and the container runtime in Rust. People said no, but then I went ahead and did it anyway."
I loved the beautiful and inspiring story by Charlie Munger sharing his experience in the Air Force (as a weather forecaster), where he picked up and practiced inversion thinking: "How can I avoid killing the pilots?" The beauty is asking the right questions first, inverse death ("what can kill us?") and inverse best outcomes ("how great looks like"). In that order.
@bhalligan: I always tried to keep a good relationship with the CEOs of HubSpot’s competitors, like Salesforce, Zendesk, Marketo, Eloqua, Mailchimp, etc. It served us well. I recommend founders do the same.
@jspujji: "Forward deployed engineer" is the best Silicon Valley rebranding for a "sales engineer," ever.
- Oren
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