Now, don’t get me wrong. I still believe that your passion is the number one ingredient for you to really start and grow a successful business. But there’s so much more you need to be prepared for before getting started. I’ve been in the startup industry for so many years now, as a coach, accelerator director, program manager and finally a founder myself. I’ve heard it all, all the beautiful talks and all the challenges you might encounter, how hard it is…etc. And I always thought as long as I love what I do, I will pull through. Read full article or {TWEET THIS} by Emna |
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Indeed, when a workplace software such as e.g., Slack, being sold as the miracle tool of team productivity, glues employees on its interface giving them the illusion of free choice and interconnected ‘simplicity’, it should normally be difficult for an organization to adopt a solution that gradually becomes a continuous, dehumanized, hyperconnected coffee break that makes them unable to focus on their goals by pushing them to immediacy. As early as 1995, XEROX PARC introduced in its guidelines for “Calm Technology” that technology “should require the smallest possible amount of attention” and communicate information “without taking the wearer out of their environment or task.” Or that technology “should respect social norms” not to “cause stress on” in particular. 24 years later and in today’s context, this hits home more than ever. Read full article or {TWEET THIS} by Jeremy Leon |
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I can admit this for myself and claim for many, that we all have been guilty for at least one of the things below: You’ve let your emotions of stress, worry, frustration, sadness lash out to the team as you’re struggling to keep up somehow. You’ve gone a bit ahead, or not taken the time to help your team mates. This means you are not considered your team mates who are struggling You’ve let yourself get impatient and either lashed out or done something aside from the team Because your group is behind schedule, you have found something small to blame that isn’t the only reason, or perhaps is never the case (I.e your team-mate is ill or has a personal issue and is not there for one day) Read full article or {TWEET THIS} by Dania Mah |
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For me, all of agile boils down to the following 4 points - Work in Small Batches Limit Work in Progress Get Feedback Do Not Sabotage Your Ability to Do the First Three Points The unfortunate part is that everything we are taught, everything that we have learned to do in the name of individual excellence runs counter to all of these. When it comes to working in an agile manner, doing your best(in the traditional sense of individual excellence) is the worst thing you can do. Read full article or {TWEET THIS} by Prateek Singh |
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In a remote-first company, communication is paramount. We often hear that engineering-focused companies are better candidates for remote working. I'm not sure; have you considered, for instance, if: Communication is an engineer’s strongest suit? Writing is an engineer’s best skill? Communication, for us, meant setting up processes and tools, then finally, writing down and recording everything! Add to that the fact that 70% of our team has to do all of this in a foreign language and we have a serious challenge to tackle 💪. We've set up some processes and rituals to help communication flow well between everyone and to make sure we can all give our best. Read full article or {TWEET THIS} by Guillaume Montard |
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Secondly, some attention is totally worthless. My first hand experience: We did a viral video together with two Youtube influencers, which now has over 7M views on Youtube. I think only in the first week, it had like 1M views and brought us hundreds of thousands of visitors. Do you know how many conversions we have actually made? De nada. Jackshit. Zero. I mean ok, some people did convert, but none of them became loyal customers. And it had absolutely zero impact on the business. We wanted to charge a % commission (on rent) instead of a regular SaaS fee. Now, this looks fantastic in a pitch deck. But in reality every commission business which has some real life component (except a very few cases) will have a pretty unscalable operational part. And this part will cost you a fortune to scale. Read full article or {TWEET THIS} by Dominik Vacikar |
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We had to be very intentional about how we communicated, and we experimented with it constantly. In the early days, we found that talking things through live via Skype worked better than simply emailing questions or deliverables. We’d sometimes augment communication between calls with screen recordings, and even developed our own screencasting tool to make it easier. For quick questions, we used Skype instant messaging. The communication flowed constantly, easily, and deliberately. It had to for people to stay unblocked and productive. Today, we’re heavy users of Slack messaging, Zoom video conferencing, and our own screencasting (Peek) and feedback (Articulate Review) apps. Read full article or {TWEET THIS} by Adam Schwartz |
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That was one major difference being a virtual team and then the other part dealing with non-US developers. I’ve had some experience with that, but more tangentially, like I said. I worked with a couple company positions. I worked for a mobile software development company and it was on the larger side for me. It was probably about 600-700 people when I joined, it did recently go public. They were still a pretty young company but kind of growing quickly. Engineering team was probably 20-30 people big when I joined at their offices that I was at, but it turns out that we actually had a whole offshore development team in India and actually growing that but for me it was a bit of black box. It was always a mystery. Read full article or {TWEET THIS} by mobycast |
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A lot of people view Slack as a distraction that just gets in the way of real work from getting done. It certainly can have that effect if you aren't careful. Slack can also be a tool that reinforces silos and discourages collaboration. Slack can also be an invaluable tool that helps people work together to bring ideas to life. It's just not possible to get the same level of communication through emails, meetings, and other traditional means. A little organization along with a little discipline can go a long way. Read full article or {TWEET THIS} by Dane Lyons |
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“Moving everybody into the Bay Area doesn’t scale. The Bay Area is way too expensive, and taxes are high. It’s not even the nicest quality of living for what you’re paying, and people have lives and families in other countries and other parts of the country. “The idea of remote work as a separate category will be gone within a decade or two. The tools still aren’t quite good enough, but they’re getting better by the day. “We’re going to see an era of everyone employing remote tech workers, and it’s not too far away. In fact, now’s the time to prepare for it. But I think in the meantime, the companies that are going to do the best job at it are the ones that are remote companies or that have divisions internally that are remote. It’s going to be done through lengthy trials. It’s going to be done through new forms of evaluating whether someone can work remotely effectively.” Read full article or {TWEET THIS} by Angel List |
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Have a great weekend, Utsav from Hacker Noon 👨💻 |
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