I write about startups, leadership and books
The first holy shit moment for AI coding was the launch of Github Copilot in October 2021. For the first time, developers had an AI partner that actually understood context and provided boilerplate code for common patterns.  The second holy shit moment came a year later, in November 2022,
Conventional startup wisdom tells us to focus, focus, focus. Success, we’re told, comes to those who find a narrow niche, dominate it and then expand from there. Parker Conrad believes this is all wrong. Maybe it was good advice 10 years ago but now everyone is doing it
I finished reading Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk biography this past week. It’s awesome! Definitely one of my favorite biographies and a book I’ll return to many times. The dude obviously understands something about building transformative companies, and it's awe-inducing to see
I humbly present the best advice I can offer to forge a lukewarm career in tech: Stay comfortable . Avoid colleagues who are smarter and more ambitious than you - they’ll only make you feel bad about yourself and you’ll struggle to stand out. Also, never work for
You could argue that having an iPhone isn’t actually something to write a blog post about. After all, there are over a billion people who can say the same. But that just makes it even more incredible. The richest person in the world has the same phone , uses
In this post, I explain the core factors that determine salaries. I’m going to start off by making a bold statement: your salary is largely disconnected from how valuable your job is to your employer or society. This may sound crazy the first time they hear it, but
Many South African founders have been heavily influenced by startup advice from Silicon Valley. The advice you get from places like YC Startup School is incredibly valuable, but it’s also mostly written for American founders. Having worked on various startups in South Africa for the last 14 years,
“I want to become the CEO of a Fortune 500 company.” - LinkedIn user I saw this in a post on my LinkedIn timeline a while back, and it’s been on my mind since. What struck me was not the post itself - that was just a run-
"When your mind is telling you that you're done, you're really only 40 percent done.” - David Goggins That quote from Goggins is about pushing yourself beyond your physical limits. It applies equally to the execution of “the basics” in startups. Almost everyone
If you take 30 seconds to scroll through your LinkedIn, you’re bound to see several people announcing their latest promotion. And why not? Celebrating achievement is awesome! At the same time, some of these people have just been promoted into a job they will fail at. Let me
Could your product team double their velocity with the right structure and culture? A few months ago, our CTO and I set out to make this transformation in our product team. The project is still ongoing, but the needle is moving 💪 We took a clean-slate approach and reconsidered
ChatGPT-3 speaks with absolute conviction despite having no idea what it’s saying. Many people criticize the current state of AI because of this, but the same can be said for many startup advisors. In emerging startup ecosystems, you often find people who get a tiny bit of
Rolling up to your loss-making company in a Lambo is a jerk move. Nobody wants to work hard for someone who they feel isn’t in the trenches with them. I’ve spoken to a lot of founders who say things like “as CEO I should
Org design is the hidden black art that affects every interaction in your company. It's also incredibly hard to learn because the impact of decisions on structures and roles play out over months. That’s not to mention the fact that these decisions are usually made by
We recently discovered a critical bug in our product. It was in production for about two weeks and almost certainly cost us a lot of money 💰 In the immediate aftermath of a situation like this, there’s a strong urge to prevent it from happening again. Ideas to