The #1 mistake we’ve seen startups make is they try to solve software problems with people, and people problems with software. Are startups hiring too fast and buying too much software? Our contention: Yes.
Tip of the cap to Affinity cofounders Ray & Shubby for raising $80 million dollars to accelerate their growth.
As one of the smartest and most successful humans alive, Charlie Munger employs mental models to improve his decision making. This article focuses on his 25 psychological tendencies, along with ways to put them into practice.
Top takeaways from an episode of Mike Maples’ (excellent) podcast Starting Greatness about the 3 types of waves founders can catch: 1) Technology, 2) Adoption, and 3) Regulatory.
What habits do you have today? Morning coffee, checking email, exercise, thumbing through Instagram, watching TV? Habits have a profound compounding effect, so its critical to pause and reflect on our habits—are they helping or hurting us?
With help from Shakespeare, we explore how intellectual honesty yields better decision-making, and the teams that make the best decisions win. Therefore, leaders would be well-served to define what “intellectual honesty” means in practice, and treat it as an operating principle or cultural value.
Insights and inspiration from Affirm’s 2020 Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) report, along with our hearty support of the high bar they set for other companies.
For example, Affirm achieved a 12.5% YoY increase in female representation in Engineering & Product— a massive accomplishment!
Analysis, insights and a “Prep & Screen” tool for evaluating “advisors” in their many shapes and forms.
According to writing master Bill Zinsser, author of On Writing Well, good writing is about humanity and warmth, expressed with clarity and strength. Business writing is often the opposite of this. Try these 4 tips for more effective business writing.
“It is nothing short of a miracle the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom.” —Albert Einstein
In this article we propose the S.A.T. Method—”Share, Act, Teach”—to improve your ability to learn and apply new skills. Shape those synapses!
In our most popular article of 2020 with 150k+ page views, we explore how the anatomy of a hurricane might offer some clues on how to handle the hard stuff.
Story of leveraging machine learning to predict—and reduce—churn (SaaS terminology for when a customer leaves). Our approach pitted two ML models against each other: XGBoost vs. Random Forest. The latter emerged victorious, and the model output (csv file from a Python notebook in Mode) was integrated both technically (Salesforce) and operationally (via weekly Red Account meeting) for the Clearbit Customer Success team.
A few data-driven insights on how knowledge workers use Chrome in their day-to-day. Hint: it’s not great. On average, the folks surveyed (n=60) had ~25 Chrome tabs open, with some having as many as 58 tabs simultaneously chomping away on RAM. We also propose 3 potential solutions to this proliferative problem, not including the Bullet Journal.
How has the notion of one’s “career” changed over the last 70 years? And is there a hidden lesson in the etymology of the word career?—derived from Latin carrus, meaning “chariot”!
Tongue-and-cheek thought experiment about psychologist Alfred Adler being a Chief of Staff, his principles, and his influence on the best-seller The Courage to be Disliked.
Fictitious quote: "The longer you wait to do something you should do now, the greater the odds that you will never actually do it.” —Grand Master of Intent
Discipline is the harnessing of emotion and converting it into repeatable action. This article explores why startups tend to breathlessly excited about various initiatives that often peter out.
80% complete
I’m almost done with a 20/20 vision document which I’m thrilled to share in the coming days. It will be distributed to DBT Ventures’ 3,000 readers on New Years Day.
Top highlights from a superb interview with Naval Ravikant on The Knowledge Project podcast. Learn new mental models for better decision making, and how to assess the quality of our decisions.
Bonus: a cult classic book on decision-making from the 1970s.
Somewhat of a pet peeve topic for many software executives, meetings seem to be the drumbeat of perceived work. Most startups lack principles for who, what, how, and why to meet, so we did some research on various meeting methodologies, e.g. Jeff Bezos at Amazon, Ray Dalio at Bridgewater, in an attempt to capture a few easy and actionable best practices to help you stand out as a leader.
The difficulty of startup fundraising ebb and floods like the tides, but the baseline is always “hard.” We propose a framework to help founders simplify their pitch deck: IOU$, i.e. Insight, Opportunity, Unfair Advantage, and Money.