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How I started documenting at a new company
I once got a job at a company that was acquiring a massive piece of intellectual property from another and it was my task to build a team to maintain and transition the knowledge as well as running assets (servers, databases, etc). The company that hired me had no relevant the documentation and the IP…
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A manager should multiply, not add
If you are managing a team of people that are transporting rocks from A to B and you spend one hour picking ups rock from A and dropping them on B, you added one hour of work. If you spend that one hour procuring wheeled carts so that people don’t have to carry rocks on…
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Standups should be asynchronous
Quick definition: A standup is a type of meeting commonly done in software development teams and now expanding to other knowledge working teams. During the standup meeting you say what you’ve done, what you are planning to do, and whether you need help or are blocked. Normally they happen daily and they are called standups…
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Your first tool for distributed work: the headset
This is an essential tool that every worker on a distributed team or company should have, no exceptions: a headset. Let’s explore why. When working distributed you are going to be having a lot of calls and the quality of audio is important. All meetings are tiring the same thing work is tiring, but bad…
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Be distributed because it’s cooler, not cheaper
There are two motivations that drive the creation of distributed teams or companies: it’s cheaper there just isn’t any available people locally There’s nothing wrong with these motivations as starting point, but if they become your sole driver for being distributed the results are probably going to end badly. Remote workers will be treated as…
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My biggest hiring secret: text interviews
I built a kick-ass team of 6 developers in little over 6 weeks, by myself, doing all the hiring and without using any recruiters. When I tell people how I did it there’s one aspect of my hiring process that raises the most eyebrows: text interviews. When someones profile looks promising (CV, GitHub, cover letter)…
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From bank to Google, what’s your staff onboarding like?
I remember two onboarding experiences the most. Joining Google was an amazing experience, I felt like a hero in a hero’s parade. Joining a Swiss Investment Bank made me question my life choices. Google At Google, I had clear instructions sent to me well in advance about what to expect, where I was supposed to…
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Talk to each other, you are missing out
For the past few weeks I’ve been talking to entrepreneurs, trying to help with their problems. I’ve heard both of these statements repeated a few times: Marketing is easy, but coding is impossible. Marketeers and Building a thing is fun, but then I have no idea how to market it. Coders It’s frustrating to hear…
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How can the price of oil or anything be negative?
The price of oil being negative is clearly a milestone of sorts, but $0 is not such a special price point. It feels special, it feels different, specially to consumers, but it’s not. I won’t explain why oil got so low. There’s a mix of a pandemic going on, Russia fighting OPEC, etc. There’s also…
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Finding a co-founder for your startup
Update: this list is now being maintained on it’s own page: Finding a co-founder Someone recently contacted me at MicroMentor with a few questions about their startup, including, how to proceed without a business partner. I told him he should probably find one and then I discovered I had more co-founder search resources than I…