Hey there,
Its inauguration week here in the US and I am hoping for a peaceful and smooth event. It's been fascinating to live through such a historically impactful year, but honestly I'm ready for some uneventful moments.
Lenny Rachitsky sold his company to Airbnb years ago and he spent a bunch of time there as a product manager, working on growth.
Now Lenny’s full-time job is his simply-titled “Lenny’s Newsletter”, where he shares everything he’s learned about building products and teams. With over 3,200 paying subscribers, Lenny’s Newsletter brings him a larger income than he had at his tech job!
In this fun interview, Lenny shares his journey—how he went from wanting to found another startup to being a one-man newsletter business, and the lessons he’s learned along the way.
Jeffrey GoldFord's creator session was really an awesome one. He talked about finding his voice as an artist, and shares his newest release with us. He wrote Walk With Me during the pandemic as a message of hope and togetherness. One of the silver linings about historically hard times is the art that comes out of them, and this song is certainly a part of that.
This short article by my friend Sol Orwell was so good. How many times do we caused unforced errors in our businesses or our lives, just by overthinking or over engineering? What would it look like to sit back, play the smarter game, and wait for the right moment to strike?
Matthew McConaughey's memoir was a really fun listen. I listened on Audible and I loved hearing him do all the accents and characters, it made for a really fun experience. He's ridiculous and lovable and weird in every way you'd expect him to be, and he has some pretty incredible stories. I'm not sure if it was just a reflection of his privilege or if his easy-going personality had something to do with it, but things in his career just generally fell into place for him in a way I don't think they do for most people. Overall, it was an entertaining book!
Thanks for joining me this week!
I'm a designer who turned into a writer who turned into a startup CEO. My mission is to help creators earn a living. Subscribe for essays on building an audience and earning a living as a creator.
Hey Reader, What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? You’ve probably seen some version of this question before. It’s a good one, though sometimes the answer isn’t immediately obvious. That’s why I like Graham Weaver’s 8 questions for what to do with your life. Graham founded the private equity firm Alpine Investors, and he teaches at Stanford. In Chapter 2 of my upcoming book, The Ladders of Wealth, I credit him with a principle he shared with his MBA students called "worse first",...
Hey Reader, If I could solve only one thing in my business, that would have the biggest impact, what would that be? This is the question every great entrepreneur obsesses over. Rather than trying to do everything at once, you look for the bottleneck and focus on solving that. There’s a book called The Goal by an Israeli physicist named Eliyahu Goldratt. It’s a 1984 business novel that business systems nerds love. However if you’re not a business systems nerd you probably… won’t love it. It’s...
Hey Reader, Have you ever spent money on something and immediately felt guilty afterward? Will Guidara spends his money foolishly on purpose. And he thinks you should too. He once bought an entire barrel of whiskey and put it in his basement. He also put a skee-ball machine in the office. Is he going to get a monetary return on either of these things? No. But that’s kind of the point. He calls it the 95/5 rule: Manage your money and time like a maniac 95% of the time (no expense is too...