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Q1 Review and Q2 Targets

6/4/2019

 
“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 use my OKR document as the centralizing piece of my personal life. Without further adieu, a review of Q1 and a look forward to Q2.

2019 Q1 Objectives - Review
  • Put myself out there – this was my most successful and biggest failure of an objective. I was committed to writing more (Twitter/this website) and doing a stand-up comedy class. The stand-up comedy class was one of the best things I have ever done - extremely challenging and very rewarding. However, the time impact of attending class and preparing sapped the time I would like to have devoted to writing. 
  • Get my finances in order – closed out a lot of my tax stuff and started the house buying process in the UK. Not a perfect result, but overall pleased with where I ended up.
  • Epic Productivity – this was my most successful OKR as I pushed my body to new physical boundaries (completed a 3 mile open water swim, 60 mile bike ride, and multiple 15 mile + runs), completed a 5-day fast and got significantly better at skiing. I failed at doing any coding but hoping to rectify that this quarter. 

What stands out most in the past 3 months:
  • Stand-up comedy class and performance - an experience I would recommend for everyone. Check out Hoopla in London if you are interested.
  • The power of habit - I made working out a daily habit and it enabled me to hit all my goals. I didn't make writing a habit but rather a big beast that I needed the perfect conditions to even "start". This was dumb. 
  • Favorite books - Can't Hurt Me by David Goggins, Mindset by Carol Dweck, and Endure by Alex Hutchinson
  • Favorite new things - discovering 2 new podcats that I love - Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard and The Moment with Brian Koppelman. Both are great interviewers and tackle a plethora of issues from their unique vantage points. I also have been experimenting with a meat-free keto diet and have been using Keyto to track my ketosis levels - great tool so far. 

2019 Q2 OKRs 
  • Work on my writing - after the epic fail that was Q1 in the writing department, I'm placing a renewed focus on writing this quarter (without any comedy). I've started writing 500 words every morning about any topic just to get in the habit of writing. I'm going to focus more on putting my writing out there with twitter and this website. My goal this quarter is consistency (habit) over quality.
  • Continue Financial Planning - The main goals for this quarter are to (1) close out the home buying process; and (2) close out all my American accounts and consolidate all my accounts in the UK. I'm also considering giving up my American citizenship, so I'll see where that path takes me. Blog post on the topic coming for sure.
  • Personal Improvement -  In line with my writing focus, this is the quarter that I want to put together my personal mission, vision and values.

What I am most excited about in the next 3 months:
  • Seeing friends and family all over the world - I've got trips to LA, San Francisco, Barcelona and Ireland with some of my best friends and then close it out with a family wedding in Poland.
  • Triathlon - I'll be doing my first full triathlon ever at the end of June (this one). I have previously done a sprint triathlon in 2014, albeit very slowly. 
  • Personal values creation - I think this will be a fun exercise. We did something similar at work recently and I think writing these concepts down really crystallizes them. 
  • Launching our first international country at work - live with our first customers in our first international country by the end of Q2. Going global. 




The Folly of Headcount

27/1/2019

 
"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, 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. Whenever I encounter someone who asks me about actual measures of a successful business - gross margins, unit economics, LTV, etc - my heart skips a beat.

I wanted to document why I think aggressive fighting against growing headcount (even while scaling) is important. 2 quick notes: (1) my views are strong but weakly held, data to the contrary will always change my beliefs; and (2) aggressively fighting headcount still means you can hire, but makes it a conscious, difficult decision rather than the solution to all problems.

Without further ado, why increasing headcounts in an organization sucks:


Headcount disincentives ownership

The larger the staff count, the harder it is to feel ownership. The ideal size of a department is 0 or 1.

Once there are teams of team, the head of a department loses ownership because they are responsible for the output of teams but find it harder to feel like an owner.

Feeling and acting like an owner is one of the single biggest predictors of success. What are the signs that someone is an owner? An owner picks up trash in the office, an owner spends company money like their own, and an owner feels deep personal responsibility for failure and success. The further you remove an owner from the impact of their ideas and the “doing of things”.

John Boyd summed this concept up well by asking his mentees “Do you want to be someone, or do you want to do something?” Owners do something. Also, by giving people ownership you can hire and keep the right people. Great operators want to own things – if you give them full control of an issue they will usually feel empowered and enjoy their job.


People will create work

The pervasiveness of people creating work in modern companies is crazy. It is value destructive and any sign of it should be crushed immediately. 

Recently, I was at an airport in Geneva and there were 5 staff members who were organizing the line to security. I observed them pretty closely for 2-3 hours and nothing they did ever changed anything about the line or the efficiency of the system – but they looked busy and were constantly moving things and chatting with each other. The optimal solution was to just leave the line alone (the number of people needed to do the job was zero). They should all be fired immediately (I say fired rather than reassigned because a competent person wouldn't tolerate being in a fake work position). 

Just last week, in an exchange at work with a partner company, I was slapped in the face with screaming ineptitude and fake work (in fairness it was the partner's partner so probably exacerbated things). At this other company there is a team (not even a person) that must sign-off on partner marketing. This team is given a checklist of things to look out for and are essentially incentivized to do the following:
  • Find any issues, however small
  • Take up the entire time period allowed to review (say a 5-day SLA)
  • Never make it easy

Why do they have those incentives? Because their job is to approve or disapprove things! By taking 5 business days and making a list of things that are wrong they are justifying their job. One of the 2 “errors” we made was having an object within half an inch of their logo on a landing page – I'm so glad we got that resolved! Now they can point to all the work they do and be vindicated by the organization's decision to have them on staff. 

A normal business – one where an owner made decisions - would make this 1% of 1 person’s job and make it clear – as long as it’s not wrong then its fine. Move forward and do something.

As Charlie Munger has stated – “Well, I think I’ve been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I’ve underestimated it.” Given the incentive is high – point out every single issue to keep your job – there will always be an issue with something we send over.

As you hire more people, the likelihood that someone in your team or your company is adding zero value or decreasing value multiplies. Don’t risk it.


Headcount means bureaucracy because people are nice

Companies want people to feel valued and that they are making a difference (yay). Companies tend to do this in a few ham-fisted ways:
  • Inviting them to meetings
  • Embracing democracy in decision making
  • Creating teams/positions

All this will change a fast moving company to a slow moving corporate blob in the blink of an eye. Good decisions aren’t made with 14 people in a room, democracy in decision making is dumb when everyone isn’t fully informed, and more teams create silos of information and people you need to “run things by.” This will crush even a 30-person company if you aren't vigilant. 

50% of my job is just fighting these things from occurring, aggressively. Luckily, I hate these things with a passion so its going fine.

Realize pain = fun in the long run

This is probably the hardest one to grasp but the most important. When you keep headcount lower than a normal company by an order of magnitude (say 50 v 500, not 50 v 60), you will feel pain. This pain will mean that when someone is on vacation things don’t get done as well. It will mean when you have a customer facing emergency you will bemoan not having more people to help. It will mean you lack expertise in many areas. It will mean that things will suck, often.

Looking back at events or even long periods (months) that really sucked at work – I often look back with happiness. It honed our operational excellence. It brought us closer as a team. Shared pain is the greatest builder of relationships.

I look at where I've become closest with friends, it’s always through shared painful experiences (sports team, pledgeship in a fraternity, 100 hour work weeks as a lawyer). Recently, I went to a wedding that was a logistical nightmare.  We couldn’t get on and then off an island where the wedding was taking place. People were stranded and 90% of the wedding missed their flights home. I’ve never had a more fun wedding – I made new friends and solidified bonds with old ones more than any enjoyable evening out. Those same principles apply in the work place.

Sub 50 Word Summary

Adding headcount must be deliberate and a measure of last resort. Adding people reduces ownership and increases the likelihood of mediocrity. Embrace understaffing. Embrace working harder. Fuck 12-persons meetings and running things by different groups. Do work.
 

2019 OKRs

1/1/2019

 
"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) at work so I wanted to roll them out in my personal life. 

To see all my objectives and key results – check out this sheet. I’ll be updating the sheet once every 2 weeks for anyone that wants to track my progress. If I fail in any objectives, then I will fail publicly.

I’m not going to dive into the key results here but rather wanted to write out my objectives and insight as to why I choose them (for all of 2019 and then for 2019 Q1). If anyone else is doing personal OKRs, I'm looking for an accountability buddy so let me know (DM me on twitter @Dbrychcy).

2019 Objectives:
​
  • Level up my communication skills – I think effective communication is one of the most important attributes of great leaders, thinkers, friends, and significant others. I have mediocre communication skills and I am afraid that what I put out won’t be good. So to that extent I am going do force myself to communicate more in the hopes that it will help me communicate better. This means engaging more with communities I’m involved in (Farnham Street and start-up stuff in London) and pushing my boundaries (improv class, tweeting, more blogging). In the past 6 years I have crafted 1 (yes, one) tweet and written 5 articles on this site, in 2019 I want to have over 365 tweets and 50 blog posts.  
  • Level up financially – I’ve been pretty blasé about my finances – which is generally good as a passive investor but it’s a bit of a mess right now. I have multiple accounts in multiple countries and its painful. I understand the power of compounding (though its power still astounds me), I want to be very deliberate with my finances and put myself on a path to success.
  • Foster an aggressive growth mindset – I did a decent job last year with personal improvement (detailed here). I want to step it up another level and really push myself out of my comfort zone. This objective is all about learning, striving to be a better person, and becoming healthier/stronger/faster. 

2019 Q1 Objectives:

  • Put myself out there – this quarter sets the tone for my communications target for the year. So I have signed up for an improv class, knocked 2 blog posts out, been active on twitter, and am going to do things that normally make me uncomfortable. I hope for this to continue.
  • Get my finances in order – the most boring objective, but the starting point to leveling up financially. Going to consolidate and merge all my financial accounts and get my taxes for 2018 all cleaned up and done. Build a strong foundation.
  • Epic Productivity – the most fun objective – this is essentially the things I want to be doing to “improve” myself. I’ll list my key results here as they are all fun, (1) Complete Codeacademy Python Course + build something; (2) Bike 50 miles in 1 day, run 15 miles in 1 day, swim 2 miles in 1 day; (3) Read 25 Books; (4) 10 Black ski runs; and (5) Complete a 5-day fast mimicking diet once per month

Looking forward to writing a lot more in the next year and hopefully not fucking up all my objectives too bad. 

2018 - Year in Review

1/1/2019

 
 “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 exercise of 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).

Grades 

  • Personal Learning: B+ – to the best of my recollection I read 56 books in 2018. I joined the Farnam Street community. I’ve gone deep (and deeper) into several subjects – investing, financial history, business biographies (deeper), biking, and blockchain (deeper). I’ve stepped up my podcast game and am learning a lot through that medium. I’m leaning into twitter and its my number one source of curiosity, exploration and recommendations.
  • Personal Health and Fitness: B – this is probably my most generous grading and largely reflective on where I am currently. As discussed later, improved my health a lot but still no where I want to be.
  • Personal Emotional Well-being: C Minus – this is a huge, glaring weakness for me. I struggle to be optimistic about myself and that has impacted my relationships with others and my own ability to find happiness. I tend to focus on “what is defective” in everything rather than what is good. While a generally helpful business trait, less so personally. Working on it.
  • Business Improvement: A – our best year at Capital on Tap. After a few years of 90-100% growth, busted out this year with 150%. Also, hired some great people in key positions.
  • Business Health and Fitness: B Plus – in a very strong place to build on our success in 2019. I think as we add process and scale we need to be diligent about maintaining simplicity. Simplicity = speed and speed is our best weapon.
  • Business Emotional Well being: B Minus – I am struggling in the transition from scrappy start-up to "established" business as I prefer chaos and struggle to calmness and success. In Ben Horowitz’s book the Hard Thing About Hard Things, he writes about war time CEOs and peace time CEOs and how those are different skill sets (and usually different people). I live for war time.

Overall GPA of 3. I'll be posting later today or tomorrow my 2019 objectives, so hopefully this scoring will be more quantitative rather than qualitative next year.

Worst of 2018

Before going into what was good, I want to embrace some of the suck in 2018.

  • Biggest Frustration – myself. I think I have so much room to grow and become a better person (friend, co-worker, leader) that I find myself frustrated with myself when I revert to bad habits and laziness. Being too tired to read or workout or finish some analysis – I’m not too tired, I’m just lazy. I know I’ve got the capability to do better, need to unlock it.
  • Worst Moment or Memory – in February, a few days after my relationship with my long term girlfriend had ended (the hardest thing by far I went through in 2018), I got a phone call from my parents letting me know our family dog Duke had passed away. Sitting in my flat, by myself, I was utterly broken in that moment.
  • Worst Health Moment – getting blood tests back and having not the greatest level of cholesterol. But it did kick start me into health regimen that has seen me drop from 195 to 172, lower by body fat from 18.9% to 14.6%, and overall invest more into my health (including getting this awesome bike and Zwift).
  • Biggest Business Failure – my failure (which is continuing) is in always wanting to be scrappy/start-upy even when that might not be the right course of action. What worked when we had 15 people and £1M in revenue is not what will help us scale at 75 people and £50M in revenue. Personally, I don’t want nice things at work (I would argue we should have shitty chairs not fancy chairs), I don’t want great perks and benefits, I don’t want high salaries (including for myself), I don’t want to hire anyone else. I want to work hard and build something great. I'm obsessed with keeping a chip on our shoulders, but at a certain size my mindset needs to shift a bit (not all the way). I’m struggling with this but aware of it.

Best of 2018

Now that that cathartic exercise is complete - on to the good about 2018. I've tried to keep the lists as short as I could. 
  • Best Books – Snowball by Alice Schroeder, Living with a Seal by Jesse Itzler, and Bad Blood by John Carreyrou
  • Best Podcasts – Invest like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy – extremely smart with interesting and varied guest interviews. Less about investing than the title suggests. Shutdown Fullcast continues to be the stupidest podcast in the world but if you have any interest in college football it is amazing. The recent episode “Behind the Fullcast – A Special Look at How a Terrible Podcast Gets Made” was the best podcast episode I have ever listened to.
  • Best Twitter Follows - @AustinAllred (founder of Lambda School, my favorite company in the world, following him to keep track of the progress), @AndrewChen (insightful business twitter), @DavidPerell (great podcaster and discoverer of people/content), @MorganHousel (the best writer on the internet), @trengriffin (if you love unit economics and gross margins - you need to read and follow Tren), @naval (smartest insights into life - a shining beacon in brevity as well), @rrhoover (helps satisfy my curiosity twitter craving and also great podcaster), @m2jr (totally authentic and honest, also not worried about voicing what may be unpopular opinions), @paulg (the OG) @Eriktorenberg (insightful twitter and great podcast). I obviously struggled to keep this list short and also back-doored some nore podcast recommendations.
  • Best Newsletter – Farnham Street Brain Food. Always good book and article recommendations. It's my “never miss” newsletter.
  • Best New Discovery – Wattbike Atom and Zwift (linked earlier). I’m obsessed with efficiency and I’m natural lazy, so the ability to get an amazing workout in my living room at any time is a real game changer.
  • Best New Trend – more extended trips with long time friends and family. From the sun soaked costs of Croatia, to gritty Berlin, to exploring Ireland to skiing in the Alps and more - its been phenomenal. Exploring the world with people you’ve known for over a decade is just magical.
  • Best Work Achievement – hiring more exceptionally smart and hard-working new positions. The growing number of people who are much better than me in most facets of the business is amazing.
  • Best Moment or Memory – recent memory (cue recency bias), but a couple of weeks ago I went skiing with my parents. One beautiful sunny afternoon my Dad and I were at the top of Val D'Isere skiing together. 2 Polish immigrants standing on top of the world. I loved it.



​

​On that happy note, I bid 2018, goodbye. On to the next one.
Picture

Personal Stories - Becoming a Lawyer and Then my Quest to Escape

28/10/2018

 
Picture
"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. Hope you enjoy this mini-novella.  
 
Why I went to Law School
 
3 simple reasons: Money. Money. Money.
 
My undergraduate degree at Georgia Tech was in Civil Engineering. I always knew, anecdotally, that engineering is a generally safe and well-paying job in the United States. The stats – graduating from Georgia Tech, the median salary for civil engineers is $60,000. The top-end civil engineers make $113,000 per year (with 10+ years of experience). That’s pretty solid.
 
Unfortunately, during my 3rd year at Georgia Tech, I found out the lawyers were being offered $160,000 starting salary right after law school at top law firms (it was $130,000 for top firms in Atlanta and $160,000 for top firms in NYC). Essentially, I was being told I could become a successful civil engineer and make $113k or I could just graduate law school and make $130k with a $20k bonus.
 
With that one nugget of information, I decided I wanted to be a lawyer (in fairness, I was torn between being a lawyer or a doctor and oscillated between the two for a couple months because doctors also make a lot of money). Was this a dumb reason to select a career path? Absolutely. Did I talk to any lawyers in my making my decision? Absolutely not.
 
So I set off on my new life plan. That summer I studied for the LSAT (the law school entrance exam) and did alright. I applied to ~8 schools and ended up choosing the University of Georgia (UGA) because they offered me a full academic scholarship. It wasn’t the highest ranked school I was admitted into, but tuition at the other schools would be $45,000 per year. I chose “free” law school.
 
Side bar: I was graduating from Georgia Tech in May 2009, which was one of the worst times to be hitting the job market as a new college graduate as almost no one was hiring. This was particularly acute for construction companies that were some of the hardest hit by the 2008 Great Recession. This was likely a big contributing factor to my thinking that 3 more years of school would be a good idea.
 
Getting a Big Law Firm Job
 
From the first day of law school, my only goal was to get a job at one of the big law firms in Atlanta.
 
This is where things get interesting. The downside to having chosen to UGA, is that it wasn’t in the prestigious “T14” law schools. The T14 is a collection of the top 14 law school in the country (there are about 150 ranked schools). Going to a T14 school essentially increases your likelihood of getting a big firm job because those firms primarily hire from T14 schools. UGA was ranked number 30. To get a big firm job out of UGA, you essentially needed to be in the top 10-15% of the graduating class (it’s a bit more complicated and ridiculous but I’ll get into that in a second).
 
The problem with finishing in the top 10% of this next tier of law schools (generally those ranked 15-50), is that 80% of students thinks they will be in the top 10%. This creates 1 spot for every 8 people that believe they will achieve that result. Add on to that, the fact that these are all people who are accustomed to succeeding. They have all done well in their undergraduate studies and done well on their LSAT. This creates a huge imbalance of perception to reality.
 
Now, let’s continue down the rabbit hole of getting a big firm job and just how fucking ridiculous the system really is. In your first year at law school, known as 1L, everyone takes the same first year courses and you usually get grades for your first year at the very end of your first year (caveat: this is how most law schools are structured but there are differences). Essentially, your first semester is worth 33% of your final 1L grades and your second semester is worth 66%.
 
Your 1L year matters more than most people understand. After 1L most people take unpaid internships or any legal job they can get for the summer. Most of these jobs aren’t based on your grades because you apply in January/February and you don’t have any real grades yet. However, you start interviewing for 2L summer job (the jobs you take after your 2nd year) in August and September (before you start your 2L year).  
 
Essentially, if you are trying to get a big firm job then the only data point is your first year of grades. I received an offer in September of my 2L year (10 months before I would start) for my 2L summer job. The 2L summer job is one of the greatest jobs of all time. You get paid $3,000 per week, the hours are easy, not much is expected out of you, and every week you are seduced with sporting events and open bars. It is amazing and has nothing in common with being a lawyer.
 
After the summer is over, the law firm then decides if they want to make you an offer. So in August, before I even started my final year of school I landed a 6-figure job in Atlanta plus a signing bonus plus all my Bar training and exam expenses paid for in full.
 
The major issue is that if you don’t get an offer after your 1L year for a 2L summer internship its almost impossible to get a big firm job. 95% of first year law firm associates spent the 2L summer at that law firm. So if you screw up your first year, its almost impossible to get a big firm job.
 
Let’s recap how to ensure you get a 6-figure job right out of law school:

  • Go to a T14 law school and finish your first year in the top 50% or go to a Tier 1 law school and finish your first year in the top 10%
  • Get a 2L summer offer
  • Don’t get too drunk and don’t make your work too shitty that summer while enjoying lavish parties and huge pay checks
  • Get a full time offer before you start your 3L year
  • Don’t get terrible grades (essentially don’t fail anything) in your 3L year
  • Pass the bar exam
 
So 1 year of hard work and 2 years of making sure you don’t fuck up. Then you achieve the holy grail – a big law firm associate job.
 
The Life of a Big Firm Associate (Why being a lawyer is the worst)

From the outside, being a big law firm associate seems awesome. From the first day, you get our own office (inclusive of book case, L-desk, 25th floor views), amazing benefits, a secretary, and you are surrounded by extremely smart people.
 
But then reality sets in. And reality is dark. Let’s jump in to all the terrible things about being a law firm associate (plus why being a partner isn’t much better):
                       
  • Inefficiency is the name of the game – lawyers make money by billing clients by the hour. Associates bill at $250-$500 an hour and partners at $500-1,000 an hour.  What that boils down to: if you are slow, you can make your law firm a lot of money. Because of this, there is less incentive to find faster, better ways to do things because you are just going to cut how much money your law firm makes. Misaligned incentives are on the greatest indicators of a broken system, and law firms rank high on broken systems. This was probably my single biggest frustration because inefficiency is the work of the devil (and governments).
  • You have a lot of bosses – as an associate, any partner or senior associate can knock on your door and ask if you have availability to take on more work. You generally want to say yes because you want to appear helpful as well as have more work to bill more hours. What this causes is work for 6 different bosses at any one time and they all think their work is the most important. Its dreadful.
  • You don’t know how to be a lawyer – despite lawyers receiving 7 years of graduate and post-graduate schooling, you have no idea what a lawyer does or how to do it. Law school teaches you to “think like a lawyer” but it doesn’t teach you how to “be” a lawyer.  I wrote 2 memos, 2 briefs and reviewed 0 documents (think e-mails) in my 3 years of law school. That is almost the entire job of a lawyer, to sit quietly reading (80%) and writing (20%).
  • There is little imagination to do new things – the motto for most law firms is essentially, “we do things this way because that’s how they’ve always been done.” Law firms are risk-averse institutions, so the ability to change is very hard. If you like change or pushing for improvement, for the love god, don’t be a lawyer.
  • Achievements don’t really build on each other – when you finish a case, meaning trial is over or settlement is reached, you are done. So, outside of having gained more knowledge, you have to start from scratch on every case. This is the business equivalent of launching a company, making it successful, and then shutting down the company to launch your next totally unrelated company. Yes, you get to translate a lot of learnings, but you are starting from scratch. What makes running a business fun is that every storm better prepares you for the next storm. Success begets more success.
  • Once you finally become a good lawyer, your job changes to salesman – as you traverse up the ranks of a law firm, you are expected to start brining in new business. This is a real slap in the face for many lawyers. Essentially, once you start becoming a skilled lawyer, you are told, “hey so those legal skills are great but the real skill is bringing in new clients so we can make money.” The legal model is terrible.
  • Billable Hours – enough has been written about billable hours so I won’t lament them much further. Essentially, you have to account for every 6 minutes of time to particular client. Also, if a lawyer works a 12 hour day, most of the time that’s 8 billable hours which is a fucking bitch.
 
Why People Stay

Despite my grievances above, I want to examine why so many people remain at law firms. Here is my best distilled version:
  • Money – this is the easy one. Lawyers at big law firms are very, very well paid. In NYC, first-year associate makes $190k with a $15k bonus. A fourth-year associate makes $255k with a $65k bonus. An eight-year associate makes $340k with a $100k bonus. So at age 32, you can expect to make almost half a million dollars if you stay on the partnership track.
  • Prestige – being a big firm lawyer is prestigious. It’s one of those things your parents want to tell their friends and prospective girlfriends/boyfriends want to tell their friends. To many people, you have immediate standing and respect by just being a lawyer.
  • Type-A Trophy Collectors – the path to becoming a big firm associate is essentially the natural path for many who love external recognition (trophy collecting). Good grades in high school à good SAT score à admitted into a good undergrad à good grades in undergrad à good LSAT score à good law school àgood grades in law school à job at prestigious law firm. By working at a big law firm, you essentially signal to society that you achieved all these milestones.
  • Golden Handcuffs – this is a collection of money, prestige and trophy collection with the addition of lifestyle design. I was shocked at the expenditure of many associates and partners. For associates taking home $300k per year, let’s call it $14k per month after taxes and 401k, they would spend: $3k on a mortgage, $2k on student loans, $2k country club membership, $4k for school (private school for 2 kids), $2k on living expenses. That leaves $1k a month in “savings” and all of that would be spent on your once a year family vacation. That means they live pay check to pay check on THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS. Once you get locked into this treadmill of private schools, country clubs and a nice house – you can’t stop being a lawyer because its hard to earn that much money anywhere else.
  • Challenging Work with Smart People – this is my only positive note on this list. A lot of big firm lawyers are extremely intelligent and are generally hired by executives of Fortune 500 companies who are also extremely smart and hard working. Solving hard problems and working with very smart people is one of the most satisfying parts of being a lawyer.
 
Why and how I left
 
I made it 160 days into my legal career before semi-publicly claiming I wanted to quit being a lawyer. 160 days.
 
Scouring through old e-mails I found my first, “I hate being a lawyer and need to quit this job e-mail.” It was sent to one of my best friends and funniest people I know, Aidan Shaughnessy, on April 17th, 2013. I told her I wanted to buy a place in Montenegro and start a hostel.
 
When she asked why I don’t just go for it. I replied succinctly and with poor grammar – “I need to work here for at least 2 years Eth! Gotta build that resume.”
 
I fulfilled that promise and not a day more. So how did I get out? Giant leap of faith.

After my first major trial ended in Denver in July of 2014, I was going to take 2 weeks off of work and go to Europe in August. This was my first real vacation since I joined the law firm.
 
However, my vacation was more of a career transition trip. My goal was to check out some top-MBA schools in Europe and study for the GMAT that I was taking in September. My trip took me to Budapest (for fun), to Poland (to visit family), and then off to Paris (visits HEC and Insead) and then to London to check out London Business School.
 
Prior to arriving in London, I e-mailed an old Georgia Tech friend, Alexis Luck, who lived in London to see if she wanted to grab beers.  She agreed to meet on Saturday August 30th for beers at her local pub in Notting Hill. She also told me that her husband, Dave, would be joining (or as he puts it now “I was not excited to be wasting my Saturday with some random loser from Georgia Tech”).
 
Once we sat down at the pub, we started discussing why I was in Europe, why I was leaving the law, and my plans to get an MBA.  Dave told me about his start-up, Capital on Tap. He also said that he was always looking for smart people and that he thought MBAs were dumb.  We continued to drink for many more hours and then parted ways as I had to drunkenly take a train back to Paris that night.
 
A few days later, on September 3rd, I followed up with Alexis asking if I could have Dave’s e-mail. I sent him a short e-mail the next day:

Hi Dave:
I wanted to follow up with you about our conversation this past weekend. 
 As you know I am quite disenchanted with my current job. I am very interested in being part of a rapidly growing organization and helping to continue the expansion.
If you think there is a position for me at your company, I would be very interested to discuss further. I am very flexible as to my role, position, and my salary at Capital on Tap.  I attached my CV if you were interested in taking a look. Look forward to hearing from you. 

 
That was it. Reeks a bit of desperation, but whatever. I would have joined as administrative assistant or a CFO, I didn’t give any fucks. I just wanted to get the hell out of law.
 
It took us about a week to get a call setup but then things moved quickly from there. I accepted the position (no title – just “help me with important projects”) on Tuesday September 16th, sold my condo on Sunday October 5th, had my last day at my law firm on Wednesday October 8th, took a redeye to London on Thursday October 9th and had my first day at work on Monday the 13th.
 
I doubt I will ever have a more life-changing month ever again, but it was fun.
 
So what would I tell lawyers who want to leave the big law life:
  • Don’t inflate your lifestyle so you can’t live on less than 6 figures. If you succumb to golden handcuffs, then you will never take them off. The main reason I could be so open to any role at any salary was because I refused to inflate my lifestyle (and I finally had a reason to celebrate going with my free law school option and not incurring 150k of student debt – thanks for that scholarship UGA).
  • Don’t be afraid to take risks. Particularly big risks.
  • Bet on yourself. You’ve succeeded at every societal milestone so take a chance by betting on yourself. I took an 80% pay cut and moved to a city that was 3x more expensive to live in.
Also, when I told my friends and family about the new opportunity they all seemed excited for me since they knew how much I hated being a lawyer. The only people who thought I was crazy were other lawyers who thought I was “throwing away” my legal education and path to partner (which I was, thank god).
 
A few nice words about my time as a lawyer
​

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention what I got out of my two years working at my law firm.

First, the lawyers I worked with were exceptionally smart. I focused on construction litigation so most of the lawyers in my group had both engineering and law degrees. The intellectual horsepower at a good law firm is something that is hard to replicate almost anywhere else.
 
Second, I learned what hard work was. People spend a lot of time talking about work-life balance these days. I think spending a year doing 80 hours+ a week every week is humbling and will teach you a lot about yourself.  Combining smart people with strong work ethics is a recipe for success, I don’t care what about work/balance “expert” says.
 
Third, one of the partners, Chad Theriot, essentially took me under his arm after about 6 months. Not only is he extremely smart and exceptionally kind but was the best teacher and motivator I could have ever asked for as a young lawyer. He was the only reason I made it 2 years and when we were travelling for work and working together, it was fun. Like not even kind of fun, but actual fun. He also shielded me away from having 6 bosses since he had enough work to keep my busy.
 
Fourth, and this doesn’t fit perfectly in this category, but a thank you to my parents. To have supportive parents along each step of my life journey is such a blessing that I took for granted for many years. In college, I would call up my parents and tell them I wanted to go to law school, a month after telling them I wanted to be a doctor, and they would just tell me “ok sounds good.” When I called them and told them I’m quitting my legal job, a job that I had gone to school an extra 3 years for, and then add on top of that that I was taking a huge risk at a tiny start-up – they said it sounded a bit risky but it could be a lot of fun.
 
Part of me wishes they would have told me “hey you are making a bad decision” or “maybe give it a month to make sure you want to do this” or even “have you talked to anyone who has joined a startup in London”. You know, the basic questions. But alas, I’ll settle for the most supportive parents imaginable.  
 
Also, I should mention I was a mediocre lawyer
 
In case this ever reaches the eyes of my fellow lawyers, I want to make clear that I was a mediocre lawyer.
 
I was only good at 1 thing – working a lot. I embraced 9/9/6 – 9 am to 9 pm, 6 days a week. I was a workhouse.
 
Having said that, as someone who has a natural distaste for all authority and rules, I was difficult to manage and just did my own thing a lot. If I thought I had a better way than a partner/senior associate, I usually did it my way. I’m a terrible employee. 

Slack is the worst.

16/9/2018

 
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"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.

I'll add two caveats before I go on what I believe will be an expletive-riddled screed. First, my experience is based on using Slack in a relatively small company (60 people) and all of us in a single location. I can't imagine its usefulness for a largely distributed team, but I have been told it is good for that. Second, I love the Slack business model - selling into developers or smaller teams, simple and transparent pricing, very little integration upfront, and a very sticky proposition once companies get on Slack. These are all beautiful business concepts and Slack is one of the best SAAS businesses out there.

Now that the niceties are out of the way, here are a few of the reasons why Slack is the fucking worst.

1. Most business conversations should be asynchronous.

Slack tries to make it easy to connect in real-time with co-workers, creating a simple direct messaging and group messaging system to help businesses communicate. What actually happens is more akin to a water cannon filled with shit aimed at everyone in your business.

A little history to start. When we first started using Slack 2 years ago, it started off relatively innocuously. A general channel for general company announcements (people going to the pub, the need for an iWatch charger) and some direct messages. I thought, "Hey this is great. Its like gchat with a better UX/UI and a great place to communicate quickly with the entire company. " I was a fan.

Fast forward 6 months later, I'm a member of 20 different channels and 50 direct messages. The channels are where the greatest travesties are committed. For those of you that don't use Slack (you are so lucky) channels are essentially a group chat that you generally need to be invited to. 

Let's walk through one of these travesties. I was a member of a channel for a new product we were launching - call it NewProductChannel. In this channel we had all the various stakeholders (about 8 people) that were involved in the product launch. The idea of the channel was to make it simple and fast for engineering to talk to operations or risk to talk to finance. Sounds great in theory.

What quickly happens is that while engineering and operations are chatting together, risk and finance are inundated with meaningless conversation. Yes, it can be good that risk and finance see those conversations so they can step in if it impacts their team or understand any potential delays. What happens instead is that they stop caring about the hundreds of irrelevant messages. Then, when finance wants to discuss a topic with risk, they have to scroll through hours/days of message to find where they last discussed an outstanding issue. This is madness.


This type of project and work should generally be done asynchronously. A daily update e-mail with the product owner relaying to all teams all important updates and a project tracker/checklist in google docs so anyone can check at any time to see the status of each element. This way you have almost real-time updates on everything about the product launch minus the 2,000 messages on the minor details. And you control the cadence at which you get the messaging.

You could argue that Slack should be used in conjunction with the daily e-mail update and the tracker. This is patently absurd. 75% of the messages were irrelevant to the people involved (should have been direct messages) and then, to make matters worse, there is an expectation that everyone has read the messages. The logical conclusion is you get a stakeholder, let's call her Katie, saying: "I told everyone in the NewProductChannel about the changes! If I can't communicate it there then what is the point of the channel?" 

Good question Katie - there is no fucking point to the channel. 

Slack anger level: High

2. It limits the depth and communication of ideas. 

If you are sending an internal e-mail to all stakeholders involved in a project, you generally:
  • spend time drafting the e-mail
  • spend time reviewing the e-mail
  • ensure the right stakeholders are being included
  • expend lots of effort to make sure your idea is clearly explained and documented.

Slack renders all of that obsolete. It turns mature, educated employees into teenagers communicating via whatsapp.

Let's walk through an example. Assume you are building the customer flows/journey for your new product. You chatted with engineering in the morning and came to the conclusion you'd have to remove one of the on-boarding features to ensure you could still hit your ship date and simplify your MVP.

Here is what that communications looks like on an e-mail:

"Hi all:

After discussing with Katie and John this morning, we believe that we should take Feature X out of the MVP of the product launch. Here was our thinking behind it:
  • Feature X was only going to be available to 8% of expected customers signing up. 
  • Feature X adds significantly more back-end complexity than previously scoped. By removing it, we can save 2 days of engineering time and will simplify testing and release.
  • This will catch us back up to plan after the testing issues last week.

When we launch we will be tracking to ensure that the expected customers remains consistent (sub 10%). I will be responsible for tracking and will report back post launch. If you have any questions please let the group know by close of play today."

Here is what the same communication looks like in Slack

"@channel I spoke with engineering this morning. Will need to get rid of feature X in this version of the build to hit ship date. Simplifies things. Let me know if you have any questions."

So why did Slack suck for this? 
  • Glossed over who the stakeholders were
  • Blew past the core components of the decision making process (which are helpful here but also helpful for future builds)
  • Didn't assign ownership or follow-up with any party
  • Could easily be missed by anyone in the channel if it falls under an avalanche of more messages

These are scary differences for anyone in a fast moving business. Making matters worse, Slack finds more maddening ways to make everyone's life worse. For example, they added an ability to respond to a particular message with a separate thread. So now, you don't know if you can even scroll through the channel, you might have to scroll through the sub-threads. Fuck Slack.

Slack anger level: Irate

3. Take e-mail anxiety and ratchet up slack anxiety by factor of 10. 

Its exhausting and anxiety-ridden enough to wake up or come back to 40 unread e-mails (I'm an inbox zero fan). Slack is massive multiplier to this exhaustion and anxiety. Instead of just 40 unread e-mails, I now have to add 20 slacks from 7 different people and a lot of buzz in some of the channels I'm in.

Now this wouldn't be that bad if people treated Slack like e-mail. With an e-mail its generally accepted, at least in my experience, that a 24-hour turnaround for non-urgent e-mails is appropriate. And urgent e-mails are usually marked as such or you know you need to respond because you get to read the subject line and who it came from.

Slack destroys the elegance of e-mail in three ways.
  1. You don't get to preview the message. So you don't get to know if its your CFO telling you about a major issue or if he just wants to grab lunch. You have to click on their direct message to get the pleasure of knowing how urgent it is. 
  2. Slack makes people lazy. If I am looking for a presentation from last month, I know I could probably find it in my e-mails/shared drives with 1 to 4 minutes of effort. But why expand that effort when I can spend 11 seconds slacking someone: "Hi Katie - can you re-send me the operations presentation from last week. Thanks". Now I don't have to do any work! With e-mail, I know Katie would have responded within 24 hours but I wanted some info right now. So I slacked her. I am becoming a monster.
  3. Slack requires your "immediate" attention. Because Slack is immediate, there is a sense of urgency to responding (higher priority than e-mail). This makes it harder to do uninterrupted, productive work or to set aside time to "answer Slacks from 4 to 5 pm" - people expect responses now! Also, if you check Slack on your phone and get back to your desk and forgot that someone messaged you - you are fucked. The message is "read" so no longer looks "unread" in Slack. It would be like an e-mail disappearing from your inbox if you read it. 

The nail in the coffin when your company uses both e-mail and Slack is you don't know where information is stored or communicated. If someone sent me a slide deck 2 weeks ago, now I have to check e-mail and slack to find it. So essentially we added the worst communication tool man has ever invented as the primary means of communicating in our organization. Yay.

Slack anger level: Fiery hatred of a 1,000 burning suns. 

4. Let's stop taking crazy pills and go back to e-mail.

E-mail works really well if you know how to use it. Slack ruins lives. That's all you need to know. 

Slack anger level: None - full cathartic exercise complete. 

Also, thanks to John Biggs at TechCrunch for his hatred of LinkedIn for inspiring me to write this. ​

Masters of Doom – Takeaways and Impressions

26/8/2018

 
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"Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis
When I was dead broke, man I couldn’t picture this"
​Notorious BIG, 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).
​
The most fascinating part of the book was the scale of company the two John’s built.  They created a gaming empire with essentially 5 programmers and a few business and administrative helpers. That’s it. 5 guys, gallons of diet cokes, and stacks of pizza boxes created a massive business in the mid-90s. This was one of the first “holy shit the internet can do incredible things moments.”


The book is a quasi-business history, quasi-biography (of the two Johns), and quasi-cultural discussion of violent video games. I absolutely loved it.  Here are my takeaways.

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NPS - The tool I underestimated most in business

12/8/2018

 
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"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.

He gave me a brief overview of NPS - its promulgation by Bain & Company and the HBR article that unveiled NPS to the broader world (very good article to understand the correlation between company growth rates and NPS). I was then left to my own devices to figure out what to do next.

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The New New Thing - Takeaways and Impressions

11/8/2018

 
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"Chasing paper paper chasing, look that's all we know
Coming through the neighborhood on them 24's
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). Starting with Jim Clark's Silicon Graphics to Netscape to Healtheon, it's a tale of how Silicon Valley became the hottest place to work and chase money, creating its own counterculture and breaking all the rules along the way. 

Overall impression: Fun read with great insight into the 90s Dotcom go-go era. Falls a little short for me in being a must read because we don't get the same passenger seat ride when the tech bubble burst and all these companies got their comeuppance. For fans of business eccentrics and learning more about the history of the Valley, its a really fun book (I like to think of it as beach reading for nerds). My takeaways and favorite excerpts:

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High Growth Handbook - Takeaways

21/7/2018

 
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"Promise me you gon' stack, promise 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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