Hi @OVOEnergy , I am in consumer electricity limbo because of a bug on your side. Smart meter installed October 2024 and I still don't have access to live data or the ability to compare tariffs. After 20 calls with your customer service my instruction is to wait. What a joke.

Working hard for a long time without asking "what are the better things to be working on" is a hidden form of laziness.

Strive to be great on the HOW and WHAT of running a business. What value do you provide the customer, society etc. AND how do you achieve this goal? This lets prospective hires know how serious you take your mission. It also provides professional capital to your employees!

Ambitious people need each other. Ambition breeds a particular kind of frustration, and the more ambitious you are, the larger it looms. Without like-minded peers, ambitious people become suffocated by life — chained by tall poppy syndrome and the dogmas of complacency. As social creatures, humans need to feel validated by their peers in order to go all in on who they are. We become like the people around us, so it’s hard to sustain ambition in a complacent environment. This is why actors move to Hollywood, musicians move to Nashville, and basically every podcaster/biohacker/Internet-writer type lives inside a twelve-mile radius in Austin, Texas. Moving in search of ambitious peers isn’t a new idea. It’s why Ramanujan, one of history’s greatest mathematicians, went to Cambridge. At home in India, even though he showed a divine aptitude for math, he flunked out of school and hid under a cot because his parents disapproved of his obsession with math. Though he taught himself number theory by working through problems in a borrowed textbook on his own, he knew that his genius was ultimately constrained by a lack of ambitious peers. And so, he wrote to Cambridge mathematician G.H. Hardy to ask for help getting his work published. Once they met, everything changed for Ramanujan. See, ambitious people don’t just need peers. They need mentors. They need people who will encourage them to pursue hard and meaningful projects. In college, I felt insane for being driven and obsessive. The anti-dedication environment drove me nuts. My ambition was only validated when I arrived in New York City and met people who exuded the kind of heart and hustle for which I’d always been called crazy. The people I interviewed on my North Star Podcast became some of my peers. @paulg, the founder of Y-Combinator and the low-key father of online writing says: “Ambitious people are rare, so if everyone is mixed together randomly, as they tend to be early in people’s lives, then the ambitious ones won’t have many ambitious peers. When you take people like this and put them together with other ambitious people, they bloom like dying plants given water.” Fight to find your kindred spirits, even if it means moving across the world like Ramanujan or staying in on Saturdays to write on the Internet. The more ambitious you are, the more consciously you’ll need to cultivate your social circle. Ask yourself: Who do I need to surround myself with?

My success rate for opening a @Zoom meeting on the first try : 0%.

Is there such thing as too early for OKRs?

working on an upcoming post about the prevalence/ importance of CSV export in every B2B SaaS product why do you think that’s the case?

Most founders don’t really need help with what they think they need. (technology, go-to-market, fundraising, etc) Instead it’s the unexpected stuff… Getting along (or parting ways) with a co-founder. Building and managing a board. Firing someone. Keeping your home-life intact. All the things no one talks about - but are just as critical to your success as everything else.

Just used ARC to get audio from Nintendo to Homepods. Sounds like a Zelda morning. #DadDuties

I’m a strong believe in SQL for PMs: - just a hop, skip and a jump from pivot table concepts - satisfying and practical coding skill with daily use - forces you to learn app data models, which makes you a better systems thinker - get to google diff between join types monthly

Paul Graham to founders: Be hard to kill.

If you’re building a startup be grateful. Not everyone gets to experience being given a mission and vision that helps change people’s lives for the better. Win or lose please enjoy it.

Prediction: many startups will initially be founded as an AI company, however they’ll ultimately focus on data problems & infrastructure because there’s a lot of work to be done inside of companies before they can leverage AI.

Consistency over intensity:

Startups pay staggering salaries to C-Suite, VPs, and Engineers, etc but in every company there is some 26 year old Operations Associate and that's the person who is holding the entire company together.

As a startup employee, your hope should be that if your company fails, it does so quickly, within 6-12 months, versus slowly and painfully over multiple years. The opportunity cost and psychic pain from slowly dying companies is real.

never forget Amazon puts out some of the simplest investor decks of all-time and is a $1 trillion company

What?

Counter intuitive but next 2-3 years will be a golden era for well run, reasonably valued* focused growth stage ($20-100M revs) private tech companies. Never got the hype of the '20-'21 🦄's and just get to focus and build... IPO outlook for '25/'26 will be solid...🤞

Prediction: Dual income tech couples affected by layoffs will choose to shoot their shot at starting a small business (e-commerce, local services, etc.) What they'll discover is Shopify, Gusto, and most SMB tooling is now 10 years old and ripe for disruption.