Welcome to the startupy newsletter, a laid back column about very serious ideas. Every week, we curate the hottest links from our universe and share them with you here.
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MOOD
🪐 COOL THINGS CURATED IN OUR UNIVERSE
1. On Amazon's culture
Sitting with this line from Working Backwards, a fantastic look inside Jeff Bezos and the operating principles at Amazon.
I can say confidently that the extra time we spent slowing down to uncover the necessary truths was ultimately a faster path to a large and successful business.
*linking to the startupy pages for each - which are packed with more insights and rabbit holes!
2. A refreshing vision for what marketing (and the Internet frankly) could be
Startupy curator Rob Hardy introduces the concept of non-coercive marketing in this fantastic essay. A must read for anyone who's never felt at home with traditional marketing.
The key ingredient in non-coercive marketing is the golden rule. We should market to others the way we'd want to be marketed to ourselves. Non-coercive marketing places full authority and trust in people. It creates the conditions under which they can make empowered decisions for themselves, and do so in their own time. It doesn't seek to persuade, manipulate, or pester people into a decision that's already been made for them. It merely opens new doors, tells the truth about what's behind those doors, then surrenders the outcome, trusting that the right people will step through when they're ready.
3. On calmness
From Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind:
Calmness of mind does not mean you should stop your activity. Real calmness should be found in activity itself. We say, “It is easy to have calmness in inactivity, it is hard to have calmness in activity, but calmness in activity is true calmness.”
4. On building things that are really really good
One of my longstanding beliefs is that life's too short to be mediocre. Some good ramblings on the subject:
Alexandr Wang, founder of Scale, on hiring:
Over time interviewing, I’ve found that I mainly screen for one key thing: giving a shit. To be more specific, there’s actually two things to screen for: they give a shit about Scale, and-they give a shit about their work in general.
Frank Slootman, CEO at Snowflake on raising standards:
Raise your standards, pick up the pace, sharpen your focus, and align your people. You don't need to bring in reams of consultants to examine everything that is going on. What you need on day one is to ratchet up expectations, energy, urgency, and intensity.
Brie Wolfson on what she misses about working at Stripe:
What I’ve learned from having the privilege of working in a place that asks for my best and helps me get there is how much it can unlock in a life. The benefits extend far beyond the skills required to get great work done. The really, really good stuff comes from looking back on something you created and thinking, “I had no idea I could do that.”
Of course you can have the desire to build something good, but not the skills. From Aaron Swarz on taste: Negative taste is the ability to tell when something is bad. Positive taste is the ability to make something that is good.
If you're feeling the gap between your taste and your skills, keep going. via Ira Glass 👇🏽
5. On why following the news is a waste of time
Aaron Swartz on why he hates the news.
With the time people waste reading a newspaper every day, they could have read an entire book about most subjects covered and thereby learned about it with far more detail and far more impact than the daily doses they get dribbled out by the paper.
If you're not convinced, here's another argument by David Perell:
And a related 2017 essay from Clive Thompson on the dangers of being stuck in the present
To make money, newspapers had to train us to come back every day—to become convinced that if we stopped keeping up, stopped checking the papers, we’d miss something important, or mesmerizing, or, more likely, deliciously lascivious... A culture that is stuck in the present is one that can’t solve big problems. If you want to plan for the future, if you want to handle big social and political challenges, you have to decouple yourself from day-to-day crises, to look back at history, to learn from it, to see trendlines. You have to be usefully detached from the moment.
✨ CURATOR SPOTLIGHT
co-founder of Fora, going down the personalized travel 🐇 🕳️
Why are you building a human-powered online travel agency?
Around 25 years ago Expedia entered the travel distribution landscape, heralding a new technological revolution in travel. Fast forward 25 years, nearly any hotel and any airfare anywhere in the world is bookable in minutes.
Yet people have been left behind in the era of frictionless travel booking. Hotels have less profit to deliver exceptional hospitality, managing infinitely complex and expensive multiple distribution channels. Consumers are bombarded with infinite choice, stripped of the distinctive qualities of any one specific travel provider, and agents struggle to make their career math work with zero technology and commission levels that Expedia would find laughable.
What if it was possible to combine the technology of an OTA with the human touch of a travel advisor, while providing a cheaper and better channel of distribution for hotels and other channel providers?
I believe it would allow travel providers to focus on what they do best, and make becoming a travel agent the best job in the world.
A podcast worth listening to?
Danny Meyer: Hospitality & Humanity
Danny Meyer is the leading thinker about hospitality – how it's delivered, how it can be scaled, how it can make you feel. An antidote to the automated better faster cheaper philosophy to living.
Things worth reading and watching?
The 100 Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity
As we live longer the traditional systems of work and retirement will begin to break down. How do we rebalance our lives vocationally and what do we need to learn to live lives of meaning and contribution?
Projects worth following?
Fora Travel is my company with a mission to reconstruct the travel industry and provide hundreds of thousands of jobs in the travel industry. And vocational meaning, community, flexible and fun work
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