Like him or hate him, Gary Vaynerchuk is a force of nature. I have never seen anyone push the idea of hard work so much. He has been consistent over the years and it is quite amazing to see how he walks the talk. I came across this 4 minute video that I watch now and then, specially when things are not necessarily moving at a pace I want.
Well a lot of diverse stuff. I found this interesting list by Amr Kafina a indie web developer who sourced the list from mostly public domain and aggregated the public recommendations from founders. Then he built a site where you can search these by Title, Author or the Founder who recommended that book and a link to the Amazon page for the book.
There is no question that in the pre product market fit days the Founder has to do the selling, however the problem is much more complex than we give credit for. I found this series of articles by Martin Casado, General Partner at A16Z, which is absolute gold. Do you remember prepping for questions like “why is your solution better than everyone else?” or building the competitive quadrant pitch decks? Martin writes – “founders fill it in with a comparative set that’s often populated with so-called competitors that aren’t likely to be included in an actual sales bake-off ….so what you’re really positioning against is the status quo.”
“Victory awaits the one who has everything in order. People call it good luck. While defeat always follows bad preparations and people call it bad luck.”
Ronald Amundsen
Erling Kagge is the first man to complete the Three Poles Challenge. He walked to all the three poles. “- North Pole in 1990, the South Pole in 1993, and the summit of Mount Everest (the “third pole”) in 1994”.
Lindsey Rogers Cook, editor for Digital Storytelling and Training at the New York Times wrote this very interesting piece on How We Helped Our Reporters Learn to Love Spreadsheets. One of the key reasons Journalists became journalists was because they were not interested in Math. Or so we thought. But it is now apparent that an increasing number of journalistic disciplines are dependent on data and those who control the narrative – governments, politicians and corporations all want to twist those numbers in support of their own agendas. It is akin to the earlier question of whether Journalists should learn to code. While the answer to that was a resounding “No” , those who did learn to code went on to “have mashed databases to discover wrongdoing, designed immersive experiences that transport readers to new places and created tools that change the way we work.”
