supersync

I tell everyone founder - acquisition is the death of everything you worked for. Acquisitions teams are sales teams with 0 follow on accountability, structure, or goals. They are quite literally there to tell you what you want to hear & get you to believe it’s true. With maybe the exception of Microsoft, it’s not.

Is my goto

This is also how most people, regardless of age, learn.

The key is - did you have to warn your son again?

I subscribe to natural consequence parenting within guardrails. People learn from experience reliably, the key is to allow manageable consequences.

Learn to build a network inside the companies you want to work for

Start with Sarah Johnston’s advice: https://briefcasecoach.com/

Having worked in HR - you are trapped in the ATS system black hole. Never apply for a job cold. Always have an employee refer you in. You will 3x your chances (from 2% to 6%) with that one decision.

Employment isn’t by companies, it’s by teams.

Get your LinkedIn & Twitter game going.

I’ve been where you are. I made $50k more a year by making the decision to hire a career coach.

You’ve got a lot to offer. Giver yourself a real chance.

Your work and achievements are an inspiration, even now.

Sometimes progress really is one person at a time. You & your team changed the lives of millions.

My own social startup failed. It is so hard to watch your dream, all that you are, die.

All I can pass on is that your journey is not done & taking good care of yourself is how you’ll be able to take it.

My sincere wish is that you allow your karma balance to settle.

You deserve to enjoy life, to do work you find meaningful, and to be remembered for your contributions.

You overcame incredible odds time & again. If anyone has proven investment in second chances make a difference, you have.

Tough to solve when petrodollars are still the reserve currency globally.

Slack is the wedge the Salesforce product team is using to reinvent itself.

I’ll boil it down to “new systems generate new social systems, that become imitations of themselves, that then cannibalizes the initial system.”

The insight I see here is we need new social technology.

The “hands on” founder is back with Gen Z, along with verticalized ambitions. There were easy wins building on the institutional tech stack we've inherited, but today you are more likely to conform or fail if you launch a transformational innovation on that stack.

Instead, I see founders going to the source of each institution to create change. Cul de Sac in AZ going after that.

In the same way, we’re designing a vertical reinvention of the org as a guild. There’s institutions we’re build on for sure, but the security comes more from community than the enforcement of agreements by traditional institutions.

It’s smart to move out of it, but the fact that you have to in order to progress is a clear indicator why companies will perpetually undervalue talent - even in competitive markets.

The concentration of mega-gifts at the top has very perverse impacts.

Harvard built a $100M building a few years ago that is used by a total of 100 people a year.

Philanthropy combines prestige, PR, and “legacy” in a way that massively overvalued those three vs. any kind of measurable impact.

The alternative you are suggesting is badly, badly needed in the non-profit world.

But the “brand” game has won vs the execution game, esp. in higher Ed.

“Doesn’t add business value”

But do you know how the business makes money (the actual processes)? Can anyone tell you how to add value in concrete terms?

Because in over a decade of consulting on technical leadership, Agile, lean and DevOps, the most consistent issue I’ve seen is that those questions are unanswerable for almost anyone in almost any company.

In the absence of a clear path to value creation, everyone optimizes locally for “best practices” because…

the root problem is almost all decisions have to be explained to people who know next to nothing about your area & you need to still sound rational.

The local maximum for that usually is “this is how _____ does it & it’s the new trend now.”

The glaring piece missing from this analysis is the psychology of the young men themselves.

Raising two young men myself, I’m blown away by how powerful cultivating intrinsic motivation is. My eldest just went from constant gaming/sleeping/hiding in his room to working a full-time job, launching a side hustle, and enrolling in classes.

Yes, my modeling & encouragement mattered. But the fulcrum was him accepting that living up to other people’s expectation in high school had left him tired, depressed, and lost.

The author has clearly identified that young man lack a goal worthy of their efforts.

He’s just completely ignored intrinsic motivation and the power of cultivating it.

I don’t think that’s an accident. I think our entire approach to young men as a society ignores the fundamental power of their interests.

Having seen it up close, the even greater issue for society is this program & how it’s used has created an engineering culture of order takers.

That’s the least valuable configuration of engineering teams.

Admin controls the money

They spend 99% of it on tools they use for their own jobs

The 1% is whatever fad they are supposed to buy into in order to maintain a semblance of legitimacy (“student success” for example)

If you want to make money in education

Get your state legislators to pass a law that requires schools to comply with a new regulation that makes your solution relevant

That’s how the big edtech companies got to $1B+, with only one exception: 2U

I’d pay an $80 to $100 premium for a dumb TV

I’d even consider replacing a couple

Smart TVs are just terrible

It’s a basic productivity issue:

Trading a burst of short term productivity for burn out is the equivalent of taking a pay day loan

Just not worth it except in the rarest of occasions

Almost everyone appreciates it and does the same

If possible, I go off camera and make it a “walk & talk” so we both get some time outside

Agree that coded integrations are still very relevant, but the addressable surface for UI is pretty large now.

There’s a way to provide cost optimized customer service that doesn’t put the burden on the customer to drive the process.

While I’ve been more of a product leader than engineer, my best friends are engineers and we’ve had many long talks about the experience.

After serving as an agile coach, SaaS founder, and doing lots of freelance web dev/digital agency work, I came to the same conclusion.

How is there not a model for harnessing the genuine power of programming?

The other answers I’ve seen here are ones I’ve said myself many times before, but they’ve just proven unsatisfying.

So here’s the conclusion I came to:

We need a new business model design explicitly to achieve this outcome.

I ground it in intrinsic motivation:

(Some) engineers love building things that help people

That’s the beauty of a small startup, as an engineer you are proximal to the user.

You don’t just get to build something helpful, you get to feel when it’s helpful. You get rich feedback, you can use your intuition.

So my question was - could we create even more intimacy between engineers and the people they help in a way engineers enjoy?

At first that might sound scary. We’ve all faced the overwhelm of engaging with users who don’t “get” the process.

So the key is to edit the context.

First, we rule out “growth at all cost.” The engineer needs full autonomy to regulate the pace at which they engage with the user.

So at the entity level we’ve made the decision to never sell - meaning no investment capital, no board with a vested interest in overriding the engineering experience.

That also means we need to edit the alternative model - a service company. The engineer must have decision making power over whether or not they want to keep working with a client. We put that into our agreement with each client.

We’ve already fired our first few clients that weren’t a culture fit. It’s amazing. Our engineers now work with companies and people they want to work with.

Once the engineer has autonomy and real control over pairing with users, something magical happens - they get really excited about the novel problems they uncover and just dive in. The productivity is ridiculous.

And we keep it at 80% WIP.

Here’s the technical innovation that has enabled this: Coda.io

It turns out sophisticated low/no code tools enable computational thinkers to solve business problems so fast they can even design internal products in real-time with the user.

Talk about feedback loops.

The emotional payoff is incredible - we’ve literally had users on calls cheer, cry, and say they feel like they have hope again that their work won’t always be a grind.

If this all sounds a bit unbelievable, you aren’t alone. Every engineer who has joined our team has gone through a journey of testing “wait, is this for real though?”

I’m not sure if we’d be a fit for you or you for us.

The wisdom you’ve gained, and that you seem to still have your curiosity and heart, makes me so curious to get your take on what we are up to.

Everything we are doing is so new most of the time my answer to questions are “I don’t know” but I’m having the most fun of my life figuring it out with our team.

My info is in my about section.

Good luck on your journey!