Zvi Band

Author: Zvi

  • It’s February 2020 Again

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    Zvi
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    (I wrote this the other morning before hearing about a similarly titled article making its rounds, for the nerds who were about to message me as such.) I remember February 2020. I was in Reno at a friend’s birthday party when a friend and I started talking about this Coronavirus thing we kept hearing about.…

  • Silence

    Silence

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    Zvi
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    Do you have the patience to waitTill your mud settles and the water is clear?Can you remain unmovingTill the right action arises by itself? Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu We’re starting off with an ancient text? Yeah, buckle up. Since attending my first silent retreat this past summer, I’ve been asked to share about it…

  • Teaching

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    Zvi
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    “No one learns as much about a subject as one who is forced to teach it.” Peter Drucker The best way to learn is to teach. And there was a time where the only way to be taught was to find a local teacher. Local could refer to either to geographic proximity – I can’t…

  • The High Bar for an MVP

    The High Bar for an MVP

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    Zvi
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    One of the areas that I mentor entrepreneurs repeatedly on is the construction of the minimum viable experience that will allow one to test out their current hypothesis. This mitigates the risk of building something no one wants by establishing a cycle of learning, hypothesizing, and building just enough to learn. It’s also something I…

  • The Conflict of Leverage and Joy

    The Conflict of Leverage and Joy

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    Zvi
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    Anyone who has progressed upwards in their career knows the cadence. You start off as an individual contributor, whether intentional about your craft or industry, or just luck of what was available and convenient at the time you were looking. Be it an assembly line, box, code editor, or spreadsheet – your hands were on…

  • GoodSphere

    GoodSphere

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    Zvi
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    Since founding Contactually in 2011, I’ve spent ~9 years building software focused on helping professionals leverage relationship marketing in order to grow their business. In hindsight, it took us too long to realize how software was only part of the solution. In fact, software by itself is a one-legged stool – completely useless without the…

  • The one Slack channel to create

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    Zvi
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    As many people consider what mix they and their companies should have of in-person and distributed work, a lot of thought is to put into the gaps left behind when everyone isn’t in an office together. Beyond camaraderie, how do you account for the cross-pollination of people and ideas, the “I just had a thought”…

  • The First Rally Pilot

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    Zvi
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    From the very early days of thinking about what could be next for me, I was clear on the general direction I wanted to head. What started off as a kernel of an concept bled into many, many deep dives on societal shifts, research on social isolation and the causes behind it, and fragments of…

  • Setting Social Norms

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    Zvi
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    One of the larger cultural challenges we face presently is the loss of social norms, opening up the responsibility – and better yet, opportunity, for community organizers lovingly dictate how people show up for the benefit of much-needed deep human connection. I’ve pointed out before that we’ve been living in an individualistic world for the…

  • What problem do I want to spend the next ten years of my life on?

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    Zvi
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    As the acquisition of my last company closed, I told myself I wouldn’t leave safe harbor until I couldn’t stop thinking about a different company that I wanted to build. I’ve had the opportunity to receive counsel from a number of others much more experienced than me. Of the various pieces of advice, there was…