Vasili’s notes, Nov 8
50y from now, it will seem weird that we only recognized heart attacks when they already happened.
Startups
Most founders spend most of their time doing fake work and working on fake progress.
Having weekly sync up with someone you trust is the most underrated tool for founders.
The value of a founder coach comes from asking simple questions every week that make founders think, not from being ingenious about startups - the idea is to have someone who has the context to monitor yourself against a checklist of biases every human being falls into.
RAT is a risk-first tool for running your company focused on four major risks every business faces: market, product, distribution, ROI.
Writing a pre-mortem is a tool to help you identify the most deadly risks - write a TechCrunch article describing why your product failed and then work out the risks backward.
Time
Most people systematically undervalue their time.
Time adds another dimension and enables seeing different things; after 2y of running a group of founders, I understand things about startups I didn’t understand before because I was too close to them.
Time adds context to what’s truly important because you can see your actions’ long-term results.
Notes—Productivity
Having 2h of rest between 3h in-depth work sessions is the best tool to battle procrastination because you get bored during these 2h and want to work.
Having an action plan is important to prevent unnecessary cognitive load at the moment; if you need to think every time you need to do something, you will not be productive.
Health
50y from now, it will seem weird that we only recognized heart attacks when they already happened.
Internal tools
80% of b2b software is built for internal use.
When people are not sure about what tool they will need, they pick the most generic purpose tool possible to lower the risk of failure - i.e., it’s better to have an everyday knife that you can cut both cheese and branches on a camp rather than having a special purpose knife that is great for one thing but fails in many other realms.
Excel outlived many competitors because of the general-purpose tool paradox - people master tools like excel and then choose them as a hammer for every new vague task just because they know the tool well already; generic tool network effect.