Kelly Watson

Come see me and the @LaunchDarkly crew at 🪐 #Galaxy24 where we’ll be toggling 🔘 on a bunch of exciting new additions to our feature management and experimentation platform 🚀 p.s. fellow CTO/CPOs hmu in DMs for a special event I’m hosting on Day 1

“If something in the figma isn’t in our design system yet, just ship with whatever we already have” xitter.gq/Culture_Crit/status/17…

“Build something tremendous or die” is the perfect articulation of the optimistic paranoia required to turn an idea & smart people (aka a startup) into an amazing business. But what @laserlikemike hits on the head is that the success itself is an enemy to both audacious optimism and paranoid execution. When you’ve cleared the hurdle of delivering something amazing! That works! And needs to scale! a team’s vision can get whittled down to incremental optimizations. You’ve achieved the Big Thing That Works so your attention turns towards the other things. These things get called “scale” or “excellence” or “efficiency” or “investing is us” but what you end up doing is talking a lot about how your work internally, or who-owns-what, or “buy in” and anything other than building another something tremendous. Little things take the time that big things used to take and big things become nearly impossible. And the death threat of startup life starts to fade. The more people join, the more abstract the risks to the business become. Runway becomes a “years” thing — more years than most people stay anyway. The drip drip of new customers, or new funding, or new features can make it feel like the whole company is just an engine that needs regular tuning—not a miracle of physics that the universe wants to destroy. But (always a but!) even successful companies need to build. As I say about PMF—products degrade and markets shift. Product market fit seeking has to be always always always on. And more companies are default dead under the hood than we’d like to admit. The level of intensity required to drive teams over years, is incredibly tough. Crises, real or manufactured, can wear on an organization’s spirit. As a leader trying to keep high and execution tight, it can feel like you’re being unreasonable, or too in the weeds, or (dear diary) a maniac that probably needs a hobby. Weekly meetings and quarterly plans and annual goals can become security blankets under which listless organizations lie. So you take a deep breath and push and try to build something tremendous. And try not to die. Again and again and again. And sure it’s hard, but it’s fun as hell. And when you surround yourself by people racing towards ambitious goals who are smart and hungry and ego-free, work can feel like play. So find people like that and build and build and build. It’s endless and tiring and probably irrational, but imo, the only way to go. 🚀✨