I first recommended Tom DeMarco’s Slack a few months ago in my Best of Books newsletter (and also mentioned it in this blog post). Here’s my original description of it, edited slightly with some line breaks: Slack is “the degree of freedom required to effect change.” This concept is key as more businesses and managers […]
At Twitter, Dan Rose tells a story about working at Amazon on the team that was incubating the Kindle. He recalls a meeting with Jeff Bezos, and his boss Steve Kessel: Steve brought me + 2 other people from the team, we got on Jeff’s plane in Seattle. Jeff was fired up from the start, […]
If you’re one of the millions of self-employed, you might know this saying all too well: When you work for yourself your boss is probably an asshole. Susan Piver writes at The Open Heart Project, which I found via Oliver Burkeman’s The Imperfectionist: I’ve spent a lot of time in my life trying to force […]
In Toronto Life, Steve Kupferman writes of surviving an illegal rooming house in Kensington Market. I’ll leave the descriptive bits to him, but what’s notable is how he actually got out of that situation [emphasis added]: My landlord patched up the bathroom, but he never fixed the roof. The leak spread to my bedroom, forcing […]
I recently dug up an archive of Shopify founder and CEO Tobias Lütke’s old blog, which linked to this interview with Signal v. Noise. Given Shopify’s impact, if you’re an entrepreneur, founder, or programmer, the whole thing is worth the read, particularly how well Shopify—at 28 people in Ottawa—adapted to constraints. For example, Shopify was […]
On Thursday, July 22, 2021, Kanye West set up his sanctuary at Mercedes Benz stadium, a listening party for his upcoming album Donda. The event sold out a few days prior, with a capacity of 42,000. Trapital’s Dan Runcie does some napkin math and sums it up well, “Very few artists can pull that off.” […]
I forget the year, but Facebook was only starting to catch up to Myspace, YouTube was shiny new, and I had just started blogging. Sometime around here, my friends and I watched one of Ryan Leslie’s videos—probably this one, with him playing all the instruments he needed to make a song. He had produced the […]
Don’t just do it yourself; do it FOR yourself.
Earlier into my career, it was easy for me to buy into the labels. I was either an “entrepreneur,” or I was an “employee.” The reality of the situation was more amorphous. For example, while I ran my own business and had a team staffed with self-employed and part-time colleagues, I actually worked with clients […]
A brief guide to navigate the meritocracy of attention.