Category: Startups

We’ve all received a work email that made us cringe – the ones that sound formal and threatening or vaguely like a punishment for something we’re pretty sure someone else did. They often have titles like “New Travel Policy” or “Changes to Benefits Package” or even “Office Happiness Update.” These subject lines sounds innocent enough, but in the modern professional…

I feel like a broken record. Lately, I’ve been sitting down with founder friends of mine and having a discussion about how their business is going. Inevitably, I get a sense that even those with a lot of tactical successes or growth seem to be missing a larger purpose. Inevitably, we end up in a discussion about “the big picture.”…

Psychologist Kelly Flanagan wrote a paragraph I loved so much, I thought about framing it: The third kind of marriage is not perfect, not even close. But a decision has been made, and two people have decided to love each other to the limit, and to sacrifice the most important thing of all—themselves. In these marriages, losing becomes a way…

One of my least favorite qualities in many of the “successful” individuals I meet (those who’ve achieved wealth, notoriety or a combination) is their insistence that they’ve “made their own luck.” That’s why I loved Michael Lewis’ commencement speech from Princeton this year: This isn’t just false humility. It’s false humility with a point. My case illustrates how success is…

There’s a common refrain that entrepreneurs are, by nature, optimists. I certainly fit in that classification. I’m optimistic about people, about companies, about technology, about the progress we’ve made as a species in the past 200 years vs. the prior 20,000 and the past 20 years vs. the prior 200. Reading Foreign Policy’s analysis of the global middle class gave…