Discover all 964 insights

Delegating vs doing it yourself. You don't want to do it yourself too often. So I basically borrowed from Peter, this is my first two by two matrix ever in my life, but he taught me something at least. You basically sort your own level of conviction about a decision on a grate, extremely high or extremely low. There's times when you know something is a mistake and there's times when you wouldn't really do it that way but you have no idea whether it's the right or wrong answer. And then there is a consequence dimension. There are things that if you make the wrong decision are very catastrophic to your company and you will fail. There are things that are pretty low impact. At the end of the day they aren't really going to make a big difference, at least initially.

A consecutive series of great actions never is the result of chance and luck; it is always the product of planning and genius. Great men are rarely known to fail in their most perilous enterprises… is it because they are lucky that they become great? No, but being great, they have been able to master luck.

There’s a man for you! He is forced to flee from an army that he dares not fight, but he puts eighty leagues of devastation between himself and his pursuers. He slows down the march of the pursuing army, he weakens it by all kinds of privation - he knows how to ruin it without fighting it.

I use TODOIST.com as my todo application manager and have the following routine: Every morning, I check the list of tasks of the day and rank them by priority and how I want to do them: the first task on top, the second task after. I check my meetings of the day to see if it fits the need. I have always in my calendar time that is blocked for my work ('no meeting'). Every evening, I check what I have finished or not from the day, and I either re-allocate to another day the tasks I have not done, either change ownership of them or cancel them. Every Tuesday evening, I check: My TODO for the next 7 days and I re-organize it. Here are some questions I ask myself: 'Do I really want to do that this week?', 'Should I postpone it to another week?', 'Am I the right owner?', 'How many tasks per day?'. I also keep some room for new issues I might contribute to (starting on Thursday, a bit more on Friday, …). My calendar for the next 7 days. My OKRs to I check if I am not missing something. From that, I prepare my next week priorities in my GDoc.

The other question everybody asks about people is when do you hire somebody above somebody. And when do you mentor somebody, and when do you replace somebody? And the way to think about this is that every company has their own growth rate, and every individual has their own growth rate.

Working with people you really respect, and are secretly worried are much better than you and will figure out how dumb you are, is the best.

There are three things I look for in a hire. Are they smart? Do they get things done? Do I want to spend a lot of time around them? And if I get an answer, if I can say yes to all three of these, I never regret it, it's almost always worked out. You can learn a lot about all three of these things in an interview but the very best way is working together, so ideally someone you've worked together with in the past and in that case you probably don't even need an interview. If you haven't, then I think it's way better to work with someone on a project for a day or two before hiring them. You'll both learn a lot they will too and most first-time founders are very bad interviewers but very good at evaluating someone after they've worked together.

Which is to say, you know, you can go to a small startup with 10 people, and everyone’s talking to users. And then somehow you go to a company with 500 to 1,000 people, and you try to figure out who’s talked to a customer over the last week—hopefully all the salespeople. But you start talking in marketing and engineering, and people haven’t done it. And what I would argue, look, I think the most important thing beyond just empathy, if you’re trying to make great products, you need to have great taste. You need people who are making to so deeply understand really the experience of building, the pain that people are going through, you know, what they’re actually—you know, the customer at the end is actually doing in order to run your business, that you understand it not just decently, but in some cases better than the customer has. And I think only then can you actually build products that are so well designed that they can actually automate the tasks. They can do it more efficiently.

“I’m a big believer that a small number of exceptional people who are highly motivated can do better than a large number of people who are pretty good and moderately motivated,” he told me at the end of that painful second week at Twitter.

It takes time to make oneself loved, and even when I had nothing to do I always vaguely felt that I had no time to waste.