Ridejoy: Lessons Learned
On April 24th, 2011, I sat down with my friends Kalvin and Randy for an intense 10 minute interview with Paul Graham, Sam Altman, Jessica Livingston and several other partners…
What Makes Effective Problem-Solving Teams
What Research from MIT, CMU, and Google Found on Making Smarter Teams
We all want to work in teams that exhibit high performance and solve problems effectively. But while it’s often easier to understand what drives individual performance, team performance is a more…
Learning from Volkswagen
Takeaways for Engineers, Product Managers, and Executives from a Massive Cheating Scandal
Volkswagen has been eviscerated after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced in September that VW had installed “defeat devices” to cheat on their emissions testing. It turns out least 500,000 diesel cars made by VW…
Why Being Real Matters
Where “fake it till you make it” falls down
There’s a great article on TechCrunch by Danny Crichton called Startups and The Big Lie. Crichton, who is a former colleague back in my days at The Stanford Daily, has a great…
24 Ideas From Scott Berkun About Tech, Leadership, and the Future of Work
Book notes from “A Year WIthout Pants”
One of the few people who can match Paul Graham as writer is Scott Berkun. They have both succeeded as technologists, Graham in Viaweb + YC, and Berkun in Microsoft and Automattic. They…
One Woman’s Incredible Startup Journey in Peru
The other night, while wandering the bustling streets of Barranco, my adopted neighborhood in Lima, Peru, I walked into a Chinese restaurant called Chifa Hong Fu. [1] I was struggling…
17 Essential Best Practices for Making Things Happen
I previously wrote about my PIF coworker Sarah Allen’s little rules of working life, which I thought was pretty awesome. I decided to think through some of my own rules, or as I’m…
Sarah Allen’s Little Rules For Working Life
I’ve learned a lot of stuff working with the fellows in my program, particularly Sarah Allen, who’s paired with me on the Smithsonian Transcription Center. I noticed that she’d often mention a…
Listen to everyone, then make up your own mind
Lessons learned from Ridejoy’s seed round
“Don’t take too much advice. Most people generalize whatever they did and say that was the strategy that made it work.” Ben Silbermann, cofounder of Pinterest When we raised our seed round…
Great by Choice
The surprising lessons of how tech startups succeed over the long term
Summary: Great by Choice describes the results of a deep investigation into how young companies can survive and thrive in chaotic, turbulent environments to achieve spectacular results. The book is of great value startups…