Deep in the trenches: October 8th 2020

Good morning everyone. You may have noticed I skipped the last edition. It’s been pretty intense (even more than usual) with actiondesk so didn’t make the time for this two weeks ago.

I also don’t want to force it and share a non interesting newsletter because I would’t spend enough time on it. I’m sure you receive too many emails already so trying to keep it interesting!

For new subscribers, I share every two weeks (usually 🙂):

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) Quote from Reid Hoffman

“Marines are start-up people who are used to dealing with chaos and improvising solutions on the spot. Army soldiers are scale-up people, who know how to rapidly seize territory once your forces make it off the beach. And police officers are stability people, whose job is to sustain rather than disrupt”. Reid Hoffman

This quote is from the book Blitzscaling, which I haven’t read. It was shared by a fellow founder on Y Combinator’s internal forum.

It’s an interesting way to look at things. I often talk about how Pre product market fit startups are completely different to Post product market fit.

If you’ve worked in a Post product market fit company (like me before starting Actiondesk), there are many things you need to unlearn.

Some differences:

• Pre product market fit

  • No need to try to be perfect, start things and see if it sticks

  • No need to structure things too much.

    • Too much time spent on structure is as much time not building your product and talking to your customers.

    • Also, too much structure can make it hard to throw things away and start over.

  • As the market is not pulling you yet, you need to be pushing things yourself. That requires tremendous energy.

2) Tweet on how startup stories can deter innovation - Kanjun Qiu

I suspect founding stories deter innovation. A coherent founding narrative can only be told after-the-fact, and is often simplified to sound linear. In the moment, when following instinct, I don't really know why I'm doing something, and the path is certainly not linear.

Potential founders - especially young people - thus believe they need a good narrative ahead of time, when in fact what they need is to follow their curiosity and interest. Sticking to a narrative can actually be harmful - it ignores new data, and becomes less authentic.

I couldn’t agree more with this.

• When starting out, looking up at successful startups (or just more advanced startups), it seems it was easy, or at least pretty straightforward.

• The reality is things are always very messy. Making a startup take off is super hard.

• As a founder of a very early stage startup, it can be demotivating to see how messy things are in your startup and how clean and beautiful seems to be in other startups

• It’s one of the main things I got from going through Y Combinator. We knew that in our batch, there’d probably at least one unicorn and countless very successful companies.

  • Yet and as smart and competent everyone was, we could see everyone had problems: customers churning, bugs, employees quitting, etc

I’ll conclude this by linking to this short video of the Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr talking to Steph Curry, and quoting his mentor Gregg Popovich (legendary coach of the San Antonio Spurs and 5 times NBA champion)

It’s supposed to be hard.

💻 A tool I enjoy

As you may have understood, I like to read, take notes and gain insights from various sources.

I also listened to a lot of podcasts, but you’ll notice I share way more tweets, articles or books than podcasts. The frustrating thing with podcasts for me is that you’re listening to it while cleaning your apartment or being in transit. You don’t have a notebook or your laptop to take notes.

As a result, there are probably some interesting stuff I heard on some podcasts which I completely forgot.

Airr solves this. Airr is a podcast app that lets you “highlight & share the best moments from podcasts” (from their website).

I’ve been using it for more than a month now, and this is really good. It’s still in beta so you have a few annoying glitches here and there but it’s worth it and I’m sure they’ll improve very fast. Some things I like:

• There’s a siri shortcut to highlight a specific time in a podcast (great when your hands are busy while listening to a key insight from a podcast)
• Airr highlights can be synced to Readwise (which I mentioned in a previous edition) which itself can be synced to Evernote, Notion or Roam Research where you can then organize your highlights.

🤓 One thing I learnt while building actiondesk

When the facts change, I change my mind, what do you do?

Not sure who this quote is from exactly. Google will tell you it’s Keynes or Churchill. Either way, on to my thought:

• I’ve been very adamant about not wanting to have a distributed team
• I believe strongly it makes building an innovative product significantly harder
• Being in the same room at least several days a week at the early stages is very important in my opinion

But it seems the facts have changed, haven’t they?

To me the main thing is that right now we don’t know when it will be safe to go back to an office (unless you’re only a few people in the office). This period might last a year, a year and a half, maybe more.

While we can still hope to be able to have a proper office after that, in the meantime, we need to get things done. 1 year and a half is an eternity in startup time.

That’s why we’ve decided to hire people remotely (in a close timezone though), ideally people who could and would move to San Francisco at a later point.

📚 On my reading list

• Stories of Your Life and Others - Ted Chiang
• Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
• How to take smart notes

I’d love to hear what you think about the newsletter! Feel free to respond to this email 🙂