Our Webinar on how to prevent and escape burnout starts in 30 minutes! linkedin.com/posts/stokedliv…

Webinar tomorrow at 1pm Pacific Time about Attentional Management: how to find your focus in 2025! linkedin.com/posts/stokedliv…

failures of leadership trigger failures of morale. if you want front-line workers to keeping fighting for you, they have to believe in your cause and in your competence. each one is necessary but each alone is insufficient. if you are lacking either, those workers will either leave or dial it in. both of which will be fatal to your company. to communicate both cause and competence, you have to be present. absent leaders are not leaders at all.

conjecture: the commodification of code will lead to programmer certifications -- ie software as a licensed profession -- in order to satisfy insurance companies seeking. code not written or approved by licensed professionals will not be covered in case of outage or breach.

If you grade on a curve, students help each other less. If you fire on a curve, your employees will help each other less. This is fatal to collaboration.

As a founder, if you can't organize, you can't prioritize. And if you can't prioritize, you'll never move down the critical path. Can't emphasize how much just stack-ranking the most important tasks, and doing the top ones at the expense of all else, will move you forward.

Every founder has the engineering team that s/he deserves. That is, if they are burned out, dissatisfied, looking for a new role, then hey, that's the culture and company you built, buddy.

everybody has trauma, nobody gets a pass. the weird thing about our time is that a universal condition has been deemed so exceptional that is serves as an ejector seat relieving us of adult responsibilities.

Deals billed as "exciting opportunities" are never either of those things. I don't know what school of deal-making trains people or bots in that language. It's a hundred foot high red flag.

the crazy thing about the simulationists is that they believe they need some objective argument to justify simulations *really* existing. i mean, the mind is the simulation. that's all you need.

Essentialism is thinking in shorthand. It shows an inability or unwillingness to engage in more complex perception. Shorthand can be useful for people who have done the work. And disastrous for people who haven't.

founders obey a peter principle just like corporate employees. but in founders' case, they are not promoted beyond their ability to perform, but instead grow their companies just past their ability to manage it. at that point, they either fail, change, or find capable lieutenants

Small failures tend to cascade. Maybe you start with someone who's not quite the right fit for the problem they want to solve. Then they hire an expert to help them out, but that person is even less of a fit, but expensive, and suddenly you have a whole team solving the wrong problem and strong incentives against replacing themselves until everything collapses.

if you can't handle conflict, you can't lead a startup. you're going to have to make hard decisions under great uncertainty in the face of strong disagreement with people who have a big stake in your business. the only way forward is through. ducking the conversation doesn't work.

bridge rounds signal that you are growing slower than you thought you would, a weak signal. in this market, they are also an ersatz A because the A market is dead.

The weird thing about this chart is how much the second graph is the inverse of the distribution of other goods in society, and how much that differs from the first. One reflects a power law, the other is a bell curve.

A great way to waste time in VC is to make big bets in a hurry and then spend all your time trying to save them. marry in haste, regret at leisure.

Some founders don't realize that if they seriously f*ck their fund-raising process and cap table, many of the soft commits vanish.

Digital ownership is next to meaningless for the same reason that software companies scale well -- the near-zero marginal cost of bits. Everything predicated on digital ownership has the same problems as media, publishing and music. It's easy to make copies. There's an acute negative feedback loop that is glossed over by the prophets of blockchain. Scarcity is the foundation of value. You can't get around it. You can do scarce things with bits -- there are lots of great software products, there are lots of distribution strategies that matter. But content itself, ownership of data that creates value based on scarcity, has a problem.

truly amazing how much bad news can be packed into the first investor update after a round closes.