Deep in the trenches: August 21th 2020
Good morning everyone,
For new subscribers, I share every two weeks:
1) Resources I've learnt from
2) A tool I'm enjoying
3) 1 thing I've learnt building actiondesk
4) What's on my reading list
Let’s go:
Some interesting resources I’ve checked out lately:
1) Podcast interview with Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy
Really enjoyed this podcast.
Khan Academy (a website with online courses for students from all age) grew 250% in a matter of says as COVID started.
They now serve 100 million students 🤯
The story of how Sal started it is inspiring. He just started tutoring some kids in his family
Then he made videos which the kids said they preferred to in person teaching
Other people started to watch these videos, and he thought there might be an opportunity to serve way more people than only kids from his family
Interestingly, Khan Academy is a non profit organization.
Sal explains that based on the testimonies he got from students all around the world, he couldn’t see himself putting a paywall on any of the courses.
Secondly, he thought about all the companies whose founders had a vision and that vision was compromised when that founder was not in the control (which inevitably happens over a long enough period of time)
Sal talked about mastery learning which is a fascinating method to me makes so much sense.
The idea is that a student shouldn’t move on from a concept as long as they don’t master it
Benjamin Bloom showed in the 80’s that with such a method, you could improve drastically the outcomes of the majority of students (see Bloom's 2 sigma problem)
2) How work is changing at Figma
The hot design startup (we use the product and it’s great) Figma has changed their work policy and it’s interesting.
They’ll have employees attached to a hub as well as remote employees
Employees attached to hubs will be expected to come to the office a certain number of days per week (ex: 2 for the San Francisco hub)
The other days, they can work from home or come to the office
The only constraints for remote employees will be to have enough hours of overlap with the hubs (all in North America).
I personally tend to think that the future will be either companies full remote either companies with micro hubs and proper offices, with a flexible work from home policy such as Figma’s.
I find mixing both dangerous as you may have first class citizens (people in the office having some face time with management) and second class citizens (the ones who are remote).
Let’s see how the Figma experiment works!
3) Why People are Switching to Airtable, Coda and Notion
I found this article very insightful on the journey a user goes through to switch from an app to another. If you are yourself a founder of a SaaS startup, particularly one that competes with existing softwares, I highly recommend it!
A tool I enjoy
I enjoyed trying out Akiflow. It’s somewhat similar to Command E which I use and recommended before. A few features I like
You can send a slack message directly to someone or a channel without actually opening Slack.
This is actually great because it prevents you to see all the messages you may have and gets distracted while you’re in deep work
You can create a calendar event through a shortcut, much faster than going to google calendar, create event, etc
In two clicks, you can see your google analytics reports
This is also great as GA is notoriously very slow to load.
One thing I learnt while building actiondesk
I heard a fellow founder saying that “Culture is not what you preach, it's what you tolerate” and it made me think quite a bit, and I fully agree with this.
I do believe the level of a team will decrease to the level of what is deemed acceptable.
See this short video on the topic.
On my reading list
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