Linkedin connection requests are becoming weirder every day

My biggest mistake as a first-time founder was telling our teammates what to do instead of setting measurable goals and letting their creativity thrive while they came up with elegant ways to get there.

If you are a <$5M ARR company founder and are not CCed on all incoming customer support emails, you are missing the most valuable feedback you can get.

Most companies use sprints for R&D teams only. We also use it for all teams: marketing, operations, etc. It was new for most non-engineers initially, but now they LOVE it.

6 months ago, we switched from creating a 3-month plan with a Gaant chart to OKR's. It was a tremendous time saver. The Gaant chart was changing all the time while the OKR's take that into account by looking at the overalll big goal and keeping the team aligned.

For our company, using a Gaant chart was like planning a route without knowing the roads while using OKR's is like using a compass to point us in the right direction.

Every week, we gather as a team to review our "big rocks" for the next week & get "trophies" when we achieve last week's. We learned it from Techstars, and while I admit that not all members see its value, I think it makes the company focus on the most important things

Mentors are great, but unless you run the meeting, it can be a big waste of time. My way of running meetings is to present the problem I am trying to solve, the data I have, and my thought process on the solution. I then ask them to poke holes in what I had just presented

As an intern at a VC fund, we had a quote written on the wall at the entrance: "If everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough." Only as a founder did I truly learned to appreciate it.

2023 was the most productive year I've had. The most productive days were when I got enough sleep and a good morning workout. It seems trivial, but most people (including me just a year ago) missed it.

Every successful person I've met took their shot thousands of times and thought they were "lucky" when they hit. It's just human nature to forget all fo the times we weren't lucky after getting "lucky". x.com/toddsaunders/s…

It's crazy to think how successful founders are willing to invest a lot of time to help other founders and don't expect anything in return. I can't stop thinking about it every time I get help from the @techstars network.

I heard this from a mentor when I started @GetKidas and I still believe in it three years later. The CEO has only three jobs. 1. Inspire people internally and externally with a vision. 2. Hire and promote great people. 3. Make sure the company doesn't run out of money,

The first rule of startups is to be where your customers are. We forgot that when we recently launched a Discord Bot and tried various ways to spread the word - Google, LinkedIn, and cold emails. The solution was easy - Discord.

B2B2C is the eighth wonder of the world if you manage to do it right. Someone else is covering your acquisition cost and you are just collecting the revenue. The challenge: 99% of the companies I've met don't manage to do it right.

Never understood why people pay so much money for slack when Discord offers everything for free. Also IM is probably the #1 productivity killer for organizations

That was my biggest take from the book "The Richest Man in Babylon" It's funny how we fail in things that were obvious to some people 100 years ago.

Successful networking can be summed up as: Try to genuinely help the other person not to look how they can help you

Special thanks to Ron Kerbs, Dr. Dave Anderson, Lily Cornell Silver, Dr. Aliza Pressman, Lisa Damour, PhD, Hari Ravichandran, Michael Preston, Dr. Laura Erickson-Schroth, Reena Ninan, @molapus, and Keri Rodrigues, Lance Ulanoff and Jacqueline Nesi, PhD for sitting down for this interview.

To all those before Oct 7 who said Israel was exaggerating its security concerns, fuck you. To all those who said Israel was occupying Gaza before Oct 7, fuck you. To all those who said Israel could easily afford to send Iron Dome batteries to Ukraine, fuck you. To the UN