Brain Dump n. 4

1. Coworking is great for starting relationships. The standard to begin a relationship is through coffee breaks or similar. But this is suboptimal: short, time-constrained, and not super similar to real relationship dynamics. I hate when a normal few-second silence drops in and both people feel the urge to keep up the conversation to avoid the awkwardness of a situation that would have been otherwise fully normal.My antidote is working together, either in a coworking or even better at home:If successful, it’s then easy to continue building the relationship with a higher-effort activity.

   1. The flow is natural: both people mind their own business until one comes up with something worth sharing;

   2. That threshold is super low: you don’t need to talk about the thing for an hour, you can say it, the other person acknowledges it, and you both move on;

   3. It creates an environment that opens conversations: what just happened at work, what are you preparing, where did you buy the furniture, who is this person in the picture, what do we eat? Real small chats.

2. It’s very hard to make things very simple. The amount of technology we have in our hands is insane, but we barely notice it. If you press a letter on your keyboard:

   1. the physical pressure applied to the keycap activates an electrical switch underneath the keycap;

   2. this switch closure generates an electrical signal;

   3. the electrical signal is transmitted along a conductive trace on the keyboard's circuit board and is sent to the keyboard's microcontroller, which processes the signal, identifying the key pressed and the duration of the keypress;

   4. …and so on followed by other 1000 steps if you take into account all the full-stack software components of it.

3. Life thoughts:

   1. Don’t be afraid of your obsession, own them. This obviously needs to be contextualized, but for most things, it is okay to be obsessed and open about them. It applies from trivial things (like third-wave, hipster coffee shops) to more substantial stuff (like playing an instrument). Own it and tell others how you appreciate the minutiae of the espresso workflows, or the feeling you get when you put notes together, or whatever color you might like.

   2. Cross the river at its source. Solve things as soon as possible and don’t wait until the river is too big to cross.

   3. Your position determines if you're playing on easy mode or hard more. Many unintentionally choose to play on hard mode by not sleeping enough, not eating healthy food, or not investing in their most important relationships. You can't remove struggle or emotion from life, but you can put yourself in a position where they don't control you. Consistently doing the simplest things makes the biggest difference. (Farnam Street)

4. Startup thoughts:

   1. During my first work-related trip at Habyt, I took a train instead of a cab and promptly flexed my cost-saving action to Luca, the CEO. He answered: “Why are you worried about saving 40€ while we are building a $1B-in-revenues company?”. That sentence stayed with me ever since and always reminded me how big we were aiming.The value of being cost-conscious in a startup is obvious, but the value of not being cheap is not. To me, so much damage is done to an employer's reputation when showing cheapness while aiming at the moon.Spending 60€ on a dinner will not make a difference, just do it.

   2. Know everything about your past competitors and present ones and especially know the underlying reasons why they are failing. (20VC?)

   3. When building a company, anxiety is normal for your first year. Forgive yourself and accept that the first twelve months are gonna be shit. From Jacob Glanville, CEO of Centivax, when I asked him how to solve anxiety. I actually managed to solve it by realizing I had nothing to lose, but I still forgive myself for all the ups and downs.

   4. Nothing important has ever been built without irrational exuberance.

   5. Mediocre success sucks. So when a startup comes to me with an idea for an experiment, the one thing I tell them is to make sure that there’s a well-defined distinction between success and failure. Don't fall in the messy middle. If the hypothesis fails, make sure it fails clearly and unambiguously. If it succeeds, make sure it succeeds equally clearly and unambiguously. (Abraham Thomas)

Thanks for reading and see you next week. :)

Brando