The discussion on remote work vs in office work continues to rage.

But I think the word we don’t debate enough is “work”

There are a few types of work:
(1) figuring out what needs to be done
(2) doing the actual production
(3) reviewing
(4) delivering In phase one “figuring out” - I think is often done better in person with the highest bandwidth conversations possible. It can be done remotely - but sometimes it does miss the creative spark, incidental ideas, etc. this applies to planning a building, software, marketing plan…

I was recently asked advice by a founder meeting their first VCs. They are starting to fundraise and want a few million dollars to go prove out their hypotheses.

I told them 3 key things to remember: 1/ for you this is a meeting that might feel more important than many of your other meetings that week. For the VC, they have tens of these each week so they may not see it as a special one, at least at first,

Lots of discussion on choosing startup vs big company roles on my timeline.

My framework:
(1) influence on the world vs influence on the company
(2) risk now vs risks later (1) Influence

At a large company, anything you do can have a big impact on the world. Your product can reach billions of people and make a difference in a moment (or more!) of their lives.

You can work on very interesting challenges that *only* happen at scale

Things I am personally excited about for consumer tech in 2023:

(1) consumer AI. With all of the innovation, we are still in the “toy” and testing era. But the emergence of AI prompts and answers will retrain how we search the internet for information and imagery (2) private social togetherness. Most of the big social products have us talking *at* each other. We have hit the peak. We’ve lost the art of conversation that was so powerful in the early days of the social internet. Community and small group products will get much bigger

“It’s not you, it’s the stage of the company.”

I have had this same conversation recently with a number of friends who joined a startup very early, did amazing work, saw huge scale of the company, and were now feeling stuck, unwanted, some even pushed out by a new manager First thing I say - this is a normal thing. And is often a sign of a JOB WELL DONE. By joining early, you took a huge risk, likely worked your tail off, and were a big part of the company’s success.

People often say the most important attribute of a startup is speed. But I think speed is overrated.

The most important attribute is purpose. When you are a tiny company, the biggest advantage you have is being forced to limit yourself to do the one thing that matters. And make hard, scary choices to go all in on that thing.

NFL playoffs start today. My preferred story line for QBs
AFC:
Mahomes knocks out Big Ben, Josh Allen beats NE again. They have a rumble and Mahomes wins. Joe Burrow dominates next two weeks over Carr and Titans. Mahomes beats Burrow and retains king of the hill. NFC;
Jimmy G balls out and beats Dak and the Cowboys. Kyler tops Stafford making the Rams wonder what they paid for. Brady marches on.
Next week Jimmy G outplays Rogers. QB controversy in SF - trade Lance? Brady tops Kyler.
Brady then beats his old pal Jimmy G, embarrassingly 🐐

10 years ago, whenever social networks or other services were growing fast with deep habitual usage, people were skeptical and said “how will you make money at scale?” Social networks made no money, many other services lost money per transaction or for growth I wrote this post saying this was the wrong question. The only right question is will the usage and habits grow to a point where the scale is so large that you will be profitable medium.com/i-m-h-o/how-wi…

I wrote down some advice I often give people when evaluating startup offers and thought I would offer it here. The whole point of choosing to work at a startup is trading in some known / fixed amount of cash salary today for the upside chance of a lot more. So it is important you understand the value of your stake and upside, as well as the opportunity cost

There is a lot of chatter about when a startup should create a “growth team.” But I am recently hearing of a much better and even more important trend of startups starting a research team or a much better name coined by @abrashafi of @irldotcom, a

“Curiosity team” With a research or Curiosity team you want to hire PhD level social scientists and researchers.

People who know how to run studies - both qualitative (Eg interviews, diary studies) and quantitative (Eg surveys) - and identify and characterize real insights about your users

1/ Some personal news… 2/ I’m joining Apple to work on @AppStore and help customers discover the best apps for them.

Been noodling on the concept of 10x Career Decisions. Those are the ones where you take roles in which you get to work on something that grows at least 10x (users, engagement, revenue, market cap) while you work on it. The tech industry is rare in that there have been many many of these opportunities over the past 20 years as tech has exploded from millions of daily connected users to billions of hourly connected users.

We keep comparing “media networks” (Tiktok, Youtube, Twitter) and “social media networks” (Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat) as if they are similar. Both can be user generated content. At their core, they are more different than alike. Even if the social networks include some media In social networks - the most important piece is finding and connecting with people you know directly. This becomes your core. All of the network building is getting from your contacts into codified relationships in the product.

Rewarding the Bully. I have been trying to capture what is broken in our society and also in our social platforms right now and I think it comes down to this. So many of our systems right now are wired to reward the bully. Our social platforms celebrate the bully. The bully gets engagement. The bully gets replies who cheer them on, or try to debate. The bully gets amplified. It is one tap away to reply and be a bully yourself. The platform sees the engagement and makes bullies more famous.

Doing a lot of work to prevent something bad from happening is always hard to measure. “What if we overbuilt?” “Maybe the bad thing wouldn’t have happened anyway?” Disaster planning and preparation is an art, not a science. You can’t measure the success really unless or until the disaster happens. And in those awful situations, we often reward the heroes who fought through the disaster more than the ones who prevented it.

Seeing so much confusion about Clubhouse and consumer valuations. Here’s the thing. Companies that connect people, and have people generate content can become incredibly valuable. Like 20-30B (twitter snapchat whatsapp) and way beyond (FB, Instagram, Youtube) Any earlier VC valuation of a consumer company isn’t a “current value” based on revenues and multiples but is a bet on the potential it can become. For example many consumer networks get to very large scale before investing in monetization at all

The media business is in a real pickle right now. Audience and attention are all time highs, advertising is falling to record lows. For print - content creation is easier, but hard to get visual photographs next to stories without people taking risks in the world. Subscription print revenues are going up, but hopefully the economy can sustain that. Ad rates are plummeting since advertisers aren’t making $$