Reflections on a movement

My favorite interview question of all time is to ask people to describe a best practice that they learned in their career and then ask them to tell me a situation where that best practice would not be applicable. Most people can't do it.

MVP is simply for whatever the hypothesis is that we're trying to test, what is the most efficient way to get the validation we need about whether a hypothesis is true or not?

People act like having a startup fail is the worst thing that can happen to you. And man, that's not even in the top 10. It's bad, I've done it, it's awful. It's really bad, but far worse is to be in a company that won't die, a zombie, undead company that you hate, but you can't leave.

No individual person can ever make promises on behalf of an organization, it's not possible, it's a category error. You're replaceable. If you want your organization to be trustworthy, you have to embody those promises in the structure of the organization itself.

If you're asking whether you should pivot or not you probably know the answer already. If you have product-market fit you would not have time for this. When it's working there's no time for naval gazing.

Making a profit is actually about maximizing human flourishing. That's what it means to be for profit. Philip Morris has actually great ESG scores it's absurd. How can that possibly be right?

Get fired for doing it the way you think is right. There's nothing that was a faster career accelerator than being known in the industry as the person who stands for that principle so much that you got fired over it.

Write out the list of features that are necessary in your MVP. Cut it in half and cut it in half again and build that. Most people's natural idea of what is necessary is so laughably wrong. People are naturally off by usually one or two orders of magnitude.

My favorite interview question of all time is to ask people to describe a best practice that they learned in their career and then ask them to tell me a situation where that best practice would not be applicable. Most people can't do it.

Ask your lawyer: if tomorrow Philip Morris shows up and offers you $1 per share more than your company is currently worth to buy it to sell cigarettes to children, do you have a fiduciary duty to say yes or no? Most would say you have a duty to say yes.

The referenced Monty Python sketch involves guards who refuse to guard someone because "I can't guard him if he's a guard," creating circular buck-passing.

AI is a management technology. The thing it does is manage intelligence and other intelligences. If you ever watched the Monty Python 'can't guard him if he's a guard' skit, it's like that. We're talking past each other.

"It" and "that" refer to implementing legal structures (like public benefit corporation status) that protect a company's mission from shareholder pressure.

It's always too early until it's too late. Founders will go to their lawyer and the lawyer will say, 'Listen, sounds great, but you don't need to do that right now. You can always do it later.' And then it's 18 months from the IPO and it's 'too late.'

Give yourself a fixed period of time to take some decisive action and see if it feels better. Can we take six weeks to try to make it work? Can we just spend all of our time 100% on the one and only one thing that matters right now?