The Founders' Tribune

"Don't be a Career" by Steve Jobs

Patrick Collison on thinking for yourself: "Nobody is going to teach you to think for yourself. A large fraction of what people around you believe is mistaken. Internalize this and practice coming up with your own worldview. The correlation between it and those around you…

"Advice I'd Give Past Me" by Patrick Collison

Max Levchin on leadership: "The most important skill of a leader is getting people to be their absolute best... At PayPal, I remember always being blown away by the ability of my co-founder, Peter Thiel’s, ability to extract stellar results from people who were often dismissed…

"I think the right initial metric is “do any users love our product so much they spontaneously tell other people to use it?” Until that’s a “yes”, founders are generally better off focusing on this instead of a growth target." - Sam Altman

"Before Growth" by Sam Altman

First time I’m reading this. Feels like an essential field guide for any builder, not just PMs.

I think the most interesting part of this is Brian taking the time to explain to a new PM what great looks like. Straight out of Andy Grove's High Output Management: "A manager generally has two ways to raise the level of individual performance of his subordinates: by…

"You should be using time series data to give you insight into what people are doing with the product and see if the changes you are making are improving things. If you haven’t instrumented the app and chosen a metric you want to improve, you are just guessing" - Brian Armstrong

“After we closed our Series C with Peter Thiel in 2012, we invited him to our office... I asked him what was the single most important piece of advice he had for us. He replied, ‘Don’t fuck up the culture.’” - Brian Chesky

Garry Tan on the job of the CEO: "Can you convince people to follow you? Can you hire, can you manage, can you fundraise and manage investors? Can you drive the vision of the company? Most importantly, can you be the magic that brings all of those things together, to build a…

Garry Tan on why the co-CEO model rarely works: "Everything takes longer... You have to wait for the co-CEOs to agree. That makes every decision you have to make much longer... You slow down so much, that your startup will die."