One of my biggest learnings this year was becoming aware of and starting to learn how to predict the nuance and conditionals around things that seem simple from the outside.

"My job is to put myself out of a job" encouraged me to actively coach engineers so I could be free to work on non-engineering problems. ​ One thing that helped us execute well without brutal hours was articulating clear goals at multiple granularities. After our Series A, we made a mock deck for our next fundraise. What story would our future investors want to hear? With that as a goal for the round, we would set “episode” goals for the ~6 weeks between board meetings. And using those, we’d set goals for the week - what did we need to get done to stay on track? ​ I learned the hard way that it’s in our nature to wait too long to do the hard, but obvious thing, especially when it affects other people. ​ The benefits of faster decisions compound over time, whether the decision is to let someone go or to trust someone with more, so make the decision, and take action sooner. ​ We learned that having this quiet space to think, talk, and dream together was critical.

A good founder is capable of anticipating which turns lead to treasure and which lead to certain death. A bad founder is just running to the entrance of the maze without any sense for the history of the industry, the players in the maze, the casualties of the past, and the technologies that are likely to move walls and change assumptions. Some of these theories come from academia, but increasingly they come from investors and entrepreneurs on blogs.