Ideavores - my thoughts on business, books, and really just about anything else
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Personal OKRs - Q1 Review and Q2 OKRs
“I’d shoot for the moon but I’m too busy gazing at stars." Not Afraid, Eminem My first quarter of foraying into personal OKRs is complete. I absolutely loved having these OKRs and using my OKR document as the centralizing piece of my personal life. Without further adieu, a review of Q1 and a look forward to Q2. |
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The Folly of Headcount
"I guess we'll never know what Harvard gets us, but seeing my family have it all, took the place of that desire for diplomas on the wall" Drake, Crew Love When discussing my company with family or friends, people generally ask me how the company is doing and how many people work there. The heuristic most people use to gauge company success is headcount. This same heuristic is often a talking point for CEOs/founders with media and often cited in articles. This is so fucking dumb and dangerous for businesses. |
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2019 - Personal Objectives and Key Results
"I ain't in it for the fame, I ain't in it for the glory I'm down to die for it, absolutely mandatory Respect this hustle, respect this hustle" - Respect this Hustle, TI New year, clean slate. While I generally despise weak platitudes about “this is the year I want to get in shape” for new years resolutions, I fucking love OKR (objectives and key results). |
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2018 - My Year in Review
“Middle finger to my old life” Jay-Z, Who Gon Stop Me As we close the chapter on 2018, I wanted to reflect on the year. I’m breaking this up into 3 parts – grades, worst of, and best of. In an attempt at brevity, I’m going to try to keep this in bullet point format as I tend to write 5,000 words when 50 will do (it's still long though). |
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Personal Stories - Becoming a Lawyer and Then my Quest to Escape
"You need git up, git out and git something How will you make it if you never even try? You need to git up, git out and git something Cause you and I got to do for you and I That's why" Outkast, Git up Git out I started my job as a lawyer on October 8th, 2012. My last day as a lawyer was October 8th, 2014. I survived 2 years, 0 months, 0 days. This is my story on why I decided to go to law school, my journey into Big Law, why being a lawyer is the worst, why people don’t quit sooner, and how I escaped into freedom. |
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Slack is the worst.
"Man I murder for fun but my job is never done; From morning morn' to the setting of the sun" Gucci Mane, Murder for Fun This is my personal tirade against Slack - the business "productivity" tool I hate the most. If you also hate Slack, I hope you find reading this as cathartic as I found writing it. If you really like Slack, you are a lost cause. |
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Masters of Doom – Takeaways and Impressions
"Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, when I was dead broke, man I couldn't picture this" Notorious B.I.G., Juicy David Kushner’s Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture was released in 2003 and reading it now was a blast from the past. The book chronicles John Romero and John Carmack, two brash young programming superstars who would create Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake. These were 3 of the most iconic games of all time (and a large part of my early childhood). |
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NPS - The tool I underestimated most in business
"50 told me go head and switch the style up and if they hate, let 'em hate, watch the money pile up" Kanye West, Good Life About 3 years ago, the CEO of my company came over to me and said we should roll out NPS and asked me to lead the effort. I told him I had never heard of NPS. Probably not a great start. |
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The New New Thing - Takeaways and Impressions
"Bet a thousand, shoot a thousand, n**** up it some more Fast money, Cash Money, that's all I know" Birdman, Get Your Shine On I can't for the life of me remember how this book was recommended to me (my best guess is via the Acquired podcast), but it was a thrilling look at the DotCom bubble right before it burst with a passenger seat with the man who helped fuel it, Jim Clark. The book chronicles the tale of Jim Clark's rise in Silicon Valley and the start of the Dotcom era all the way to its peak (the book was published in 1999, 1 year before the bust). |
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High Growth Handbook - Takeaways and Impressions
"Promise me you gon' stack, proimse me you gon' ball, Promise me you'll invest three fourths of it all." Andre 3000, Hollywood Divorce Elad Gill is an entrepreneur and investor who was at Google when it went from 1,500 to 15,000 employees and, when Twitter acquired his company, he saw Twitter grow from 100 to 1,500 employees and stayed on as an advisor to the CEO/COO as its growth continued. He's also invested in Coinbase, Airbnb, Square, Strip, and many others. He recently published the High Growth Handbook to help entrepreneurs survive their high growth phase. Here are my key takeaways. |
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The Broken Real Estate Market
"Anything I got is not a rental, I own that." Drake, Trophies When Elon Musk was thinking about the idea for SpaceX, he looked at the price of a commercial rocket and worked out that the actual cost of the raw materials was 2% of the price of the rocket. He looked at that as a giant market opportunity. I believe the real estate market is also similarly broken and ripe for disruption. |
