8 things startups can do early on to optimize for focus & productivity:

1. Synchronous meetings only for p0 and p1 items

All meetings should be 25 minutes by default with the ability to extend by 15 minutes if necessary.

Each meeting should have a clear agenda that outlines its context, asks, action items, etc.

Meetings should be brief & impactful

2. Asynchronous for everything else

- Stand ups
- Project demos / updates
- Design / Eng handoffs
- Documentation walkthrough

A simple flowchart for meetings:

3. Strive for 90% focused work / 10% meeting & sync time

- No meetings on Tues & Thurs
- Encourage turning off Slack & distracting notifications
- Track your time to better understand your distractions
- Buy your team a copy of Deep Work & Getting Things Done

4. No recurring meetings

Recurring meetings are a productivity killer. Try to avoid them when possible.

Instead, assess whether a follow-up meeting is needed at the end of each meeting.

THREAD:

Wealth tips for founders & early employees...

• Secondaries
• Tax benefits
• Hiring a CPA / Financial Advisor
• Diversifying
• Tools I use
• and more...

Create a plan for your options early:

Think of this as investing in your company. If your company fails, your options will be worthless.

If your company does well, exercising too late will be costly.

Secondaries:

Secondary transactions typically first occur at the Series B [although if your numbers are up and to the right & there's demand for allocation -- it can happen at the A].

Take a small % off the table to de-risk yourself financially (rent, food, transportation, etc)

Existing investors will often offer to purchase your secondaries.

This way it keeps your cap table clean and gives your investor slightly more allocation.

Look over your ROFR/Co-sale agreements and chat with your co-founders and/or investors.

If you're selling stock to an existing or new investor during a financing, a "discount" is usually applied.

Make sure you negotiate the discount on the Preferred share price and not Common.

5-20% is considered normal.