Thoughts, opinions, transcripts, etc.
Morning hike on day 1 of my 35th year. My 25th birthday was a melancholy one. I didn’t do much on my birthday ten years ago. I remember going to see a movie by myself in downtown Boston. It was the start of my second year of grad school and I’d just returned to New England… Continue reading The view from 35
In late 2013 I was facing a bit of a crisis. I had just launched Toofr a few months earlier and the service was failing. Earlier in 2013 I found a way to automate email guessing using a hidden API buried inside the Rapportive Chrome extension for Gmail. It worked amazingly well. It was fast,… Continue reading How I made a 5,000% return on a two-day vacation
I recently wrote about the prevalence of breakups between founders of companies. So how do you prevent founder breakups? You should be able to call each other out and the other side needs to listen. I mean really listen, not just play lip service. Founders need to be proactive about cultivating trust between each other and those… Continue reading Common outcomes of founder breakups
John Zimmer studied hospitality management at Cornell. He graduated in 2006 and joined Lehman Brothers, a prestigious investment bank, in order to get a better finance background but found himself bored within the first year of a two-year analyst program. When Logan Green, a friend of a friend, posted on Facebook that he was building… Continue reading Parallel entrepreneur profile: John Zimmer, Lyft
I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts recently and How I Built This has been particularly interesting. Beyond the travails and comebacks, it’s been fascinating to see over the span of a dozen podcasts how many founding teams break up. It’s far more likely that at least one of the founders leaves the company… Continue reading Why founders break up