Start up thought pebbles

From 2021 to the latter part of 2025, I worked for an exceptional tech startup. My distillation of what goes in my backpack for any future engagement is as follows.

• Void pressing is the rarest skill. People who can hear what isn't said in the meeting, summon and incant, give it a name, and agglomerate a convo around this. That's the bees knees, the legs, and all its wings.
  • My favorite story about this was hearing about our CEO having a company OKR's meet with the executive team. Our head of marketing noticed the CEO look dissatisfied the whole meet, and asked what the sigma was up. He summoned forth this felt like a company ritual without real blood. No stakes. It didn't feel like it mattered.
  • So they scrapped all the OKR's and started from scratch. The subsequent OKR's smelled like baked bread.
• Working backwards beats greedy next steps.
  • A friend described this to me helpfully.
    • If your thought process begins at the current state, and sees the next step, executes, then the next, executes, and so forth, this is the greedy — as an algorithm, not as a vice — process.
    • Backwards working means you start from the result and create the steps to follow. This often shows truly important steps vs the simple greedy steps to take.
• Leadership does exist. I don't know about you, but leadership is one of those words in the mall window that makes me roll my eyes. I used to bet you just work hard and voilà mon ami you're a leader.
  • I was wrong. These people are centrifugal forces spinning up galaxies of meaning. They're fountains of push and pull.
  • There's enough leadership posting already. What's significant is to realize it's out there and emulate what I like.
• If I'm good enough, I'm old enough. Or the corollary: if I'm good enough, I'm title enough.
  • Need I say more?
• Effort is only loosely correlated with impact.
  • I like to pair this fine red with the cheese above on working backwards.