🙋🏾‍♀️ In 2011, I was hired into my first junior role in tech @Groupon

👩🏾‍💻 By 2020, I was headhunted into a VP role in a global tech company @Brandwatch

🤖 I achieved this progression in less than a decade, without ANY coding skills

🔮 How did I do it?

*a thread*

🤓 I established a track record of results.

💪🏾 No magic formula can replace hard work: do your job well & hit all the targets you are set.

😬 When you're struggling, ask for help so you can stay on track to get results, or collaboratively adjust targets.

🎨 I stayed creative.

🧙🏿‍♀️ When challenges arose I was bold enough to try new solutions. Not everything worked, but constantly trying produced valuable innovations.

🧠 I was proactive in finding new, better ways to get the job done.

🤩 I was a self-promoter. I recorded my achievements & ensured they were mentioned in any performance / compensation reviews.

😎 I put myself forward for any opportunities to gain recognition e.g. speaking opportunities or awards.

👀I actively worked on gaining visibility.

🙂 I was myself. Some say you need to be ruthless to succeed. I don't buy it. I'm a nice person so I'm nice at work, too.

❤️ I didn't fake it. I always acted on my values, and spoke up when something didn't feel right. I showed integrity.

🤗 I was a team player. To everyone.

Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon RELATIVE to real economic activity. This last part is key.

Also, measuring “the money supply” is a tricky thing, because it lives and breathes with the economy.

As well as the obvious new generation of startups enabling remote work, there will be another new generation doing things enabled *by* remote work.

What will these ideas be? I don't know; this kind of idea is harder to predict. But if you have an idea of this type (even if, perhaps especially if, it wasn't consciously meant to be), the winds are favorable.

Note that "enabled by" doesn't imply the contribution of remote work is always positive, merely that the startup is enabled to exist. That could mean that it fixes problems caused by remote work.

The vast majority of images are jpegs, which are internally 420 YUV, but they get converted to 32 bit RGB for use in apps. Using native YUV formats would save half the memory and rendering bandwidth, speed loading, and provide a tiny quality improvement. It would also be \

a good path to supporting better video codec still image formats and 10 bit components. You can do it today, but you need to do the color conversion manually in a shader, which can be a big ask for some devs. Defining a FMT_JPEG_YUV that does driver injection akin to the \

external image support on Android could make it much more of a drop-in. Even doing it the hard way seems like it would be worthwhile for web browsers today.

A potential danger to America I didn't consider till now. The Bay Area seems to be less attractive to founders. What if this makes America as a country less attractive to immigrant founders? What if instead of going to another US city, they don't go to the US at all?

I know founders don't feel the same need to move to the US that they used to. The question is how much of this is due to the change in their opinion of the Bay Area specifically, rather than e.g. greater optimism about remote work, or decreased interest in the US overall.

10 reasons why I think now is the greatest time to launch a startup

You should probably consider starting something

Just listen to this:

You can start with the community

I’ve identified ~8000 communities that could be unbundled from Reddit

- They are thriving
- They could make you ~$1m/year of revenue
- You often need $400 max to build MVP to tap that untapped value
- It's fun

Sounds like a dream job to me

People in Silicon Valley don’t have an edge on you

SF held the monopoly on startups for decades. Now, being in SF doesn’t matter for 99% of businesses

Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise

The world is flat and is staying flat

Hell yeah. That feels good to say

You have 10x the amount of funding sources

You used to have to rely on VCs. Not anymore

To name a few:

- Fund via your community
- Fund via NFTs
- Fund via pre-sales
- Fund via tokens
- Fund via accelerators all over the world
- Etc

All of a sudden, you have 10x the options

Niche businesses can be worth billions

People used to laugh at niche. Why “go small” when you could “go big”?

The way to go big right now IS to go small

Large tech companies can’t be everything to everyone

Life gets better when:

You understand that grades never mattered but how you grade yourself does

You learn from disagreements, you don't get upset

You keep your private life private

You often have your phone in DND mode

Are you an entrepreneur / Indie Hacker looking for maker communities to join?

Here is a list of communities you possibly don't know about.

[Thread] 🧵

Bootstrapped:

It's a small community of bootstrappers, super friendly. Members make and sell desktop apps, SaaS products, and mobile apps.

Created by

MakerLog:

MakerLog is perfect if you want to build in public! It's a big community of 7000 members. Folks post their daily tasks and grow a network of supportive, like-minded people!

Created by @matteing

IndieWorldwide:

It's a community of 1000+ Indiehackers based on Slack, with weekly meetups and 1-to-1 founders meetings as well!
I LOVE meeting new IH every week!

Created by @AnthonyCastrio

Jetpack

It's a community of entrepreneurs, super focus on growth. You'll find some SaaS entrepreneurs, Content Creators, Brand Builders, and also some Agency Owners.

Created by

My guide to startups:

I've lost millions, hired hundreds, raised millions and sold companies before the age of 30

Read this to become better:

Venture capital & PR are like drugs

Drugs can kill you or save your life

Use accordingly.

If you’re lucky: your startup will be copied. Don’t be mad

The best startup revenge is overwhelming product/market fit

Okinawa is an Island in Japan with the highest life expectancy. It's called "the land of immortals"

The secret: almost everybody gardens

Entrepreneurship is a marathon not a sprint. Be sustainable

Find your gardening.

A wonderful online course is so valuable its like you’re stealing from the teacher

A bad online course is a teacher stealing from you

Tip: scout out for wonderful online courses

A few dollar investment will completely change a life

📊 My Twitter stats for January (vs December)

💬 Tweets: 271 (154)
👀 Tweet impressions: 560k (210k)
📃 Profile visits: 56.7k (24.4k)
﹫ Mentions: 445 (105)
👋 New followers: 899 (390)

What changed between Dec to Jan?

👇

1 - Tweeting more frequently

Up til Dec, I would tweet on Sundays and remain mostly inactive during the week.

From mid-Jan, switched things up and started tweeting almost daily.

The goal is to share 1 useful thing / day.

Takeaway - Tweeting daily is work, but rewarding.

2 - Building in public

I've been sharing since 2019, but it was never as intense before. My SEO course literally got built while I was tweeting about it.

Takeaway - 💯 for the engaging experience. But it's exhausting if this isn't your main thing. I'm building @delightchathq

What didn't change 👇

• Delivering value to the lives and journey of others.
• Being transparent about progress.
• Being nice to every person who DM'd or emailed me about their struggles in life or business.

Final note - I 100% think people should build in public IF the target audience for what they are building live on Twitter.

If that's you, try it out. Go through all my tweets for January, see what worked (and what didn't lol), and replicate it in February.

All the best 💪

1/ Pro Tip: Best way to find a job at a startup…

Hint: it doesn’t start with a job board…

a thread

2/ Go to @crunchbase and set up a filter for the following:

1. Amount raised: $5M - $10M
2. Announced on: today - 3 days ago
3. Headquarters location: your preference
4. Investor Name: @Accel, @Greycroftvc, @Sequoia, @a16z etc...

It should look something like this.

3/ When a company raises money… they are going to use the capital to build out their team.

It isn’t rocket science!

4/ When successful venture firms with track records like, @Accel, @Greycroftvc, @Sequoia, @a16z sink money into a startup. Their chance of success increases astronomically.

5/ Filtering for recent fundraising allows you to get a pulse for when a company is going to add positions to their job board (if they haven’t already)

🤪 Headlime "acquired" https://t.co/WgpMX0G7kZ

I started Landingfolio back in 2015. It now gets ~1000 visitors a day. Ranking #1 for loads of "landing page" keywords.

Seems like the perfect time to do this, now that I launched the landing page builder.

So close to 1.000.000 sessions! 😍

I forced a bot to read over 1,000 hours of Things That Happened in 2020 and then asked it to write a list of Things That Happened in 2020 of its own. Here it is.

Spending time with family for the holidays?

Here are 10 thought-provoking questions guaranteed to spark an interesting dinner conversation.

👇👇👇

1) In something he calls the “theory of maximum taste,” columnist David Brooks says that each person’s mind is defined by its upper limit — the best content that it habitually consumes and is capable of consuming.

How did you improve your "content diet" this year?

2) Malcolm Gladwell says there are 3 three things we need for work to be satisfying: 1) autonomy, 2) complexity, and 3) a connection between effort & reward.

He adds, “Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning.”

Do you feel this way about your work today?

3) Research shows the seemingly trivial social encounters — chatting up a person in the elevator, making small talk with the barista, or even just smiling through your face mask at a passerby — can have profound positive changes in your mood.

When's the last time you did this?

4) Some of the world's most successful (Beyonce, Adele, LeBron James) adopt an alter ego when they have to perform.

It's a psychological tool that helps people reason & see the situation from a slight distance

When have you used an alter ego to reduce anxiety & gain confidence?

Think you have a good memory? Think again 🙃

I give you 10 types of memory bias:

1) Rosy retrospection bias = we tend to remember the past as better than it was
2) Consistency bias = we incorrectly remember our past self as similar to our present self (self-image bias)

3) Mood-congruent memory bias = we better recall memories consistent with our current mood
4) Hindsight bias = we consider past events as being predictable (the knew-it-all-along bias)
5) Egocentric bias = we recall the past in a self-serving way (this happened to ME)

6) Availability bias = we think that memories that come readily to mind are more representative
7) Recency effect = we best remember the most recent information
8) Choice-supportive bias = we remember the options we chose as better than rejected options

9) Fading affect bias = our emotions associated with unpleasant memories fade quicker than emotions linked to pleasant memories
10) Confirmation bias = we tend to interpret memories in a way that confirms our prior hypotheses

So next time you say "I'm sure I remember!" ... :)

I've spoken to 1,500+ companies about their plans for remote work Post-Covid

Here are the things I heard will happen in 2021

[ a thread ] 💻🏠🌍

🏢HQ's are finished: companies of all sizes will cut their commercial office space by at least 40-60%

The will give their team the choice to work from home 2-4 days a week, and come into the office 1-2 days a week

🌍Fully distributed: ~30% of the companies we talk to are getting rid of the office entirely and going remote-first

Companies doing this have seen their workers decentralize rapidly, leaving expensive cities to be closer to family

⭐️Access talent: The first reason they are going remote-first is simple – it lets them hire more talented people

Rather than hiring the best person in a 30-mile radius of the office, they can hire the best person in the world for every role

💰Cut costs: The second reason they are going remote-first is because it lets them be far more cost-efficient

Spend $15,000 / worker / year on office space or provide the best remote setup on the planet for $1,050 / worker / year

Some wed night thoughts on investor “value add”:

1) At the end of the day, money is a commodity. That mere fact should make every vc shudder.

It is amazing how many ppl (incl myself) clamor to get into a commodity business!

2) As such, to differentiate, different investors provide other things beyond money. Sometimes it’s community. Sometimes hiring help. Sometimes expertise or sector-focused networks. Etc

3) And some VCs are truly value add! For example, if I had an edtech co, I would hands down raise from @jwdanner - he has been there as an entrepreneur, built schools, and invested in so many hit edtech companies.

4) But at the end of the day, regardless of who invested in you, it’s the founders + team who are doing all the work.

5) when I think about what I’ve done for my own founders, it’s ranged from doing intros (mostly to other investors) to cust acq advice to feedback etc

But the reality is - all of my founders would’ve figured out how to get that intro or that piece of advice w out me