There are plenty of comprehensive pieces on the practice of product design out there—our own Kyle Turman has written an excellent post on the Pillars of Digital…
Learn the five copy principles that help us write great Marketing copy in the Slack voice and tone.   Part 1 in a series   Words give meaning to your …
Photo by Vanna Phon on Unsplash Customer acquisition is the lifeblood of many startups from e-commerce to gaming to marketplace companies, among others. Most of…
Glad you asked! This question is especially relevant to me right now, as I’m currently learning a new prototyping tool here at Slack. 🙃 Whether you’re trying to…
David Hariri on co-founding Ada, the pivot that created a unicorn, and what product-market fit feels like https://medium.com/media/ab4604eaa374f9c6ad782f259c79c…
As someone who used to teach design at an online code and design school, I’ve answered this question many times. That tells me many people wonder this—so if you…
I wish I could tell you that I had a flowchart to show you precisely when you should switch to management. There’s no simple answer — in my career, I’ve transit…
This is a really good question—without any right answers! It depends on what you want right now in your career. Ask yourself: What kind of impact do you want to…
If you’re thinking about this question early in your career, good for you! As a young designer, you’re likely eager for a job that pays you well and lets you do…
On Funding — The Denominator Effect I recently wrote a post about funding for investors to think about having a diversified portfolio , which I called “shots on…
On Funding — Shots on Goal Being great as a startup technology investor of course requires a lot of things to come together: You need to have strong insights in…
A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of talking to Samir Kaji on the Venture Unlocked podcast about a wide range of topics that we as venture capitalists think a…
Black box of PM Podcast: Season 01, Episode 01 tap tap tap… is this thing on? It’s been three years since I’ve last written, and I’m happy to share that I’m goi…
A founder recently asked me how to stop caring what other people think. I didn’t have an answer, and after reflecting on it more, I think it's the wrong questio…
A lot of people want to replicate YC in some other industry or some other place or with some other strategy. In general, people seem to assume that: 1) although…
I spent many years working with founders and now I work with researchers. Although there are always individual exceptions, on average it’s surprising to me how …
Almost every company and non-profit working on COVID-19 that I offered to help asked for support with clinical trials—for companies focusing on developing novel…
The most common question prospective startup founders ask is how to get ideas for startups. The second most common question is if you have any ideas for their s…
Experts on the COVID-19 pandemic seem to think there are three ways out—that is, for life, health, and the economy to return roughly to normal. Either we get a …
I’m trying to fund startups/projects helping with COVID-19, because it’s basically the one thing I know how to do that can help. I think we will soon have enoug…
Although I still hope things will go differently, the experts I’ve spoken to think we are likely to face a global tragedy—hundreds of thousands of deaths from C…
The most counterintuitive secret about startups is that it’s often easier to succeed with a hard startup than an easy one. A hard startup requires a lot more mo…
There is a lot of advice about how to be a good startup founder. But there isn’t very much about how to be a good startup investor. Before going any further, I …
I’ve observed thousands of founders and thought a lot about what it takes to make a huge amount of money or to create something important. Usually, people start…
Mental models are simple expressions of complex processes or relationships. These models are accumulated over time by an individual and used to make faster and …
Today, OpenAI released a new result . We used PPO (Proximal Policy Optimization), a general reinforcement learning algorithm invented by OpenAI, to train a team…
If the craft of Product Management is often mired in ambiguity, managing product managers is ambiguity². When you start managing PMs for the first time, you are…
I am pretty sure cryptocurrency is here to stay in some form (at least as a store of value, which is the only use case we have seen work at scale so far). There…
I think I am at least somewhat more productive than average, and people sometimes ask me for productivity tips. So I decided to just write them all down in one …
Some of the best PMs I know make their decisions based on first principles. A first principle is a “basic, foundational proposition or assumption that cannot be…
