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Teaching
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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 travel to Julliard every Wednesday, so I need to work with a piano tutor in my neighborhood. Or it could be relational...
The High Bar for an MVP
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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 keep learning too. My gut instinct as someone who...
The Conflict of Leverage and Joy
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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 the actual work product. If you are good at what you do – and...
GoodSphere
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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 rest of the system. Churn was a persistent...
The one Slack channel to create
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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” moments getting coffee (or matcha). I made the decision long before...
The First Rally Pilot
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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 solutions and ideas from around the world. I was both excited and frustrated. Excited by the potential of...
Setting Social Norms
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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 past 50-60 years which, while...
What problem do I want to spend the next ten years of my life on?
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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 one that I latched on to and took to heart (whereas “taking...
The Next Social Platform
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What’s next for me After moving on from the company I founded in 2011 and sold in 2019, I’ve been actively building a new venture that has been tumbling around in my head for years. I’ve spent the better part of the past two years especially navigating the concept idea maze, researching, and engaging in active discussion with others to “bring it down to earth.” As...
Writing The Next Social Platform Won’t Be Individualistic
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A few months ago, I wrote an essay that was published on Medium, The Next Social Platform Won’t Be Individualistic. If you haven’t read it yet, you should (no offense to my posts here, but it’s 10X better than any blog post I’ve written so far). There are two meta points about the article that I felt worth writing about. I won’t bury the lede here, this serves as an...