u/CartographerFeisty66

might be a stupid question, but where do you actually keep all the different scheduling links that you have?

I have a bunch of different scheduling links. I have one for Zoom, one for f2f, and one with special time blocks for the evening. and another for for really short meetings (15 minutes).

I’m curious where you actually store these links before you send them to the people you want to meet.

Do you use something like a Google Doc somewhere? I just have all of them in a pinned message on WhatsApp, but I’m not sure this is the best way.

And also, one other thing I’m considering is just creating ad hoc links for each meeting and not reusing them again. But I still want to know if that’s a good idea or not.

i am interviewing new candidates for a role that opened in my company, and i gotta say that people who are early ai adopters are really hurting themselves in the interview process. instead of doing real research about the company and the industry and coming in with interesting insights and strategies, it is very clear that many of them just ask one of those ai agents to prepare them on the industry.

and so they feel prepared, but actually they are not. it becomes really obvious when they cannot pull from the top of their head names of competitors or understand the real dynamics of the market. there is this illusion that because they wrote a prompt and got a polished answer, they are ready for the meeting, but i have been seeing more than once that this is just not the case.

for me, that is a major turnoff, because it signals that this is how they will operate in the role too. not really diving deep, but relying on the illusion that ai can replace actually understanding complex and nuanced product problems that come up on the job.

hey, i want to share a practice that i’ve found really useful. i’ve been using one of those ai executive assistants for a while now, and at first, i mostly communicated with it through texts, emails, and ad hoc requests throughout the day. it worked quite well for small admin tasks.

recently, i added a new routine that made a surprisingly big difference. every morning, we spend around 5 to 10 minutes on the phone together, usually while i’m driving to the office, so i feel it’s a good use of my time.

during those calls, we go over my entire day: meetings, reminders, priorities, follow-ups, action items, preparation and data i need before calls, emails that need responses, and anything that might fall through the cracks.

i’ve found that having one focused daily sync is much more effective than only reacting to messages throughout the day. it creates clarity, gives structure to the day, and helps me feel much more in control of everything that’s going on.

what kinds of ceremonies or rituals do you do with your team that you think really help build culture and a sense of togetherness?

i try to put a lot of effort into this as well. for example, we have a daily coffee ritual. we do a batch brew with special beans that we buy from a specific place, and we all sit together for a few minutes just drinking coffee. i find it really contributes to the dynamics of the team.

i’m curious what daily rituals you maintain and nurture. looking for inspiration.

my agent reached out to me yesterday and said she’s looking for "more clients".
i’m honestly not sure what i think of it. cool? lame? I'm not sure what I think of it.

is anyone here getting hyper local newsletters?
we’re considering advertising in small-town newsletters (towns in the US with <50,000 residents), and would love to know if you get these and whether they’re a big part of how you consume info about what’s going on near you.
also, if you had experience in advertising in newsletters of this kind.

One of the things I’ve learned about startups is that everything’s on fire, always, even for those that look great. I remember about ~8 months ago, I saw an interview with Sam Altman from OpenAI. It was around the time Meta was poaching his talent, paying a gazillion dollars for AI researchers, and people started leaving OpenAI.

I remember the interviewer asked Sam how worried he was about losing his top talent. I was thinking to myself that Sam was going to say something like these people are great, but others are joining, and we have strong momentum... basically trying to make it look like "it’s not a big deal, right?"

But Sam really surprised me and said the opposite. This isn’t an exact quote, but he said something along the lines of: the number of catastrophic, existential crises that land in my email on Monday morning is beyond comprehension. So the fact that Meta is trying to steal some of our talent is just one item on that list.

That kind of proves to me that even OpenAI... the most amazing company at the time, an absolute leader in AI. even they still has this feeling that the ship is burning.

This is an important lesson for every startup out there

One of the things I’ve learned about startups is that everything’s on fire, always. even for those that look great. I remember about ~8 months ago, I saw an interview with Sam Altman from OpenAI. It was around the time Meta was poaching his talent, paying a gazillion dollars for AI researchers, and people started leaving OpenAI.

I remember the interviewer asked Sam how worried he was about losing his top talent. I was thinking to myself that Sam was going to say something like these people are great, but others are joining, and we have strong momentum—basically trying to make it look like it’s not a big deal, right?

But Sam really surprised me and said the opposite. This isn’t an exact quote, but he said something along the lines of: the number of catastrophic, existential crises that sit in my email on Monday morning is beyond comprehension. So the fact that Meta is trying to steal some of our talent is just one item on that list.

That kind of proves to me that even OpenAI... the most amazing company at the time, an absolute leader in AI - still has this feeling that the ship is burning.

This is an important lesson for every startup out there.

Okay, I have a recommendation for you that actually saved me thousands of dollars.
And here's the story: So I worked with a design studio for a rebrand to our website, and that was a fairly expensive project, and part of that defined all our visual identity. And part of the visual identity is that the designers showed us this line of photography that can represent the brand with people in specific scenes, in specific ages, in specific backgrounds, wearing specific clothes, and the whole setting and atmosphere was consistent.they showed us several options and finally we decided on a specific one.

Now towards the end of the process, our designers were like, "all right, now we can't use the photos that we actually picked because they're copyrighted and stock photos, so we need to do a shooting day where we find models" and we should get the models and dress them up and go to the scenes that we love and bring a photographer and do a day of shooting and all that, and that's a one time cost of thousands of dollars.

Easily.
And I was like, ah, I'm not gonna pay this. And there's this tool that I use called Weavy, which is part of Figma. And it's really hard to explain just the level of quality, control, and the ability not just to create the photography that we wanted, but actually produce a "factory" that can generate thousands of such photos with a very high level of control at a fraction of the cost of a human photographer and real models.

I don't know if this is a huge business for Figma, and I know that Figma is now in trouble because Anthropic is going after them and all that. But gosh... that product is freaking amazing. And I cannot recommend it enough. Not just because it's fun and easy and the quality is good, but actually it kind of, like, saved me thousands of dollars. And definitely something that you need to check out.

just how much money is FU money?

here’s what I think: I think of it as taking my yearly income and basically wanting to have enough money until retirement. so I multiply my yearly income by the years I have until retirement.

then I add my wife’s salary, because I don’t see a situation where I stop working and she has to go to work every day :) so I add her income as well.

and lastly I double everything - because if you want fu money, you also want to live at a much higher quality of life + have a lot more free time.

so the equation I end up with is:

annual household income × years to retirement × 2

or 2 × (annual household income × years to retirement)

How are you thinking of it??