Happy Thanksgiving, and please don't die of heart disease! myticker.com/

Since kicking off the new year, I’ve super fortunate to partner with @jaredhecht and the team to create Postcards, a social media app that helps you create meaningfully beautiful visuals to share with your close friends and family (like a group chat).

Adults should be raising our adolescents, not algorithms. In every school I’ve been to that’s banned phones in the classroom, we have seen material improvement in kids’ social interactions with other kids. That’s why I support banning social media for kids under 16. Australia has done it. Spain has done it. France is doing it. Germany is on their way. Now, the UK is moving to implement it. It’s time we do the same. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

A complex HIV case. Competing diagnoses. A treatment decision that couldn't wait. Dr. Gena Foster of @YaleMed walks through how she navigated it and the role Consensus played in helping her patient.

Been using it to re-remember and catalogue all my daughter's old funny behaviors that she's already grown out of. Been really great

I was once pitching in a board room at a top 3 VC firm for a $15M Series A. 12 people in the meeting. One of the GPs fully fell asleep. Out cold for 30 minutes. Nobody acknowledged it. Everyone just kept going. I kept presenting my Series A slides to an unconscious man in a Herman Miller chair and somehow that was considered normal. That's venture capital. You might fly across the country to perform for people who may or may not be conscious. It's a dance. And sometimes you lead and sometimes you follow and sometimes your partner is unconscious. If you're raising right now, just know: every founder has a story like this. The process is weird. The power dynamic is weird. You're not crazy for thinking it's weird. No one talks about it because they want to continue raising. But I'm happy to stick my neck out there. It is weird.

Should you track your sleep? @TheEconomist It can be helpful in some people, but, as noted: "As many as 30% of those who track their sleep report feeling anxious about the data they collect, a phenomenon researchers called orthosomnia." economist.com/science-and-te…

Social media is increasingly anti-social Only 7% of Instagram time & 17% of Facebook time is spent on content from friends or followed accounts. The rest is algorithmic video from strangers. This is what happens when you condition algorithms on looking time rather than real social engagement. TikTok set the template; everyone copied it. And over half of the long posts on Meta are written by AI. People are not engaging, or even creating the content on those platforms anymore. Real human content and conversation has migrated away from these platforms to substack, discord, etc. osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/6n…

The fallacy of this is that more creates more. More hours, more hiring, more something. And it is true in a sense. If you put in more work, more work will happen. But I think for most startups, the leverage is really in how differently you approach the problem, how well you cultivate your team, and the strategy. Any large company can outspend you on hours. They have thousands or tens of thousands more people, spending more hours. If hours worked were the metric, every large company and government organization would always win and do the best work. More hours, better output. This thinking is often representative of younger founders, where the startup becomes their identity and life. They have a hard time doing anything else, and cannot understand that your work is not the person that is you. But activities outside of work can grow you as a person too and make you do better work. I’ve never worked this way. As a designer, I always saw the need to take a step back, to take a break. At times, I might work 12 hours or 16 hours, or whatever amount was needed, but it wasn’t the norm. You just can't grind design, you need inspiration. But taking that step away from the work, would give me more perspective, inspiration and I could approach the problem differently or I could just see the solution. Grinding is never good for any creative problem, and startups or creating new products are often mostly about creative problem solving. Grinding works ok for email jobs, or where you just executing on very clear playbook. With Linear, we’ve never worked this way. We work reasonable hours, 5 days a week. All of us founders have families. Many of our employees have families. I personally stop every evening, spend time with the family, cook dinner for the family, eat dinner together, and focus on things outside of work. Sometimes I work in the late evenings or weekends, but to me the pride is that I don’t need to. Company should be succesful without it. My goal is to build a company that is sustainable in the long term, and doesn’t require heroics or personal sacrifices every single day. There are times when our team is heroic. Launches, incidents, some other work that just needs to be done. They will work late into the night because they know it is the right thing. But we don’t require that every day or every week, and the more this happens, the more I think it is a failure of our company and leadership. The team and the leaders should always keep a reserve to use when something is needed. Our thinking was also that quality, which we value, doesn’t emerge from working more or stressing people more. It emerges when you create the conditions for it to emerge. Often it is the appreciation, space, time, and how the person feels. A person who is rested will do better work. I wouldn’t attribute much of our success to working a lot. The success came from having clear thinking, ideas, and focus to do the right things. I sometimes wish we could move the culture more toward a Zen master. Real mastery is not exerting the most effort. It is achieving the outcome with the least necessary effort.