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Max Hodak - Fast progress requires strong gradients

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One of the things I did early on in Transcriptic’s history was invite successful operators by for lunch to speak to us. One question I’d always ask if no one else brought it up was “what should the balance be between firefighting versus building for the future?” That tension had driven my team crazy basically since the beginning of the company. Without exception the answer was “oh you firefight all the way down,” with specific color ranging from “we were literally rm -rfing files off production servers to keep Gmail from running out of disk space,” to “you realize we’re talking about Twitter, right?” My high level observation was that many of the most successful startups spent a huge amount of their time on the verge of completely falling over (but rarely did) while many companies with great beautiful technology ran out of money and died. The mental model this built for me was that iteration speed was a defining characteristic of successful companies, and that contact with the customer

Max Hodak - Fast progress requires strong gradients Max Hodak - Writings Fast progress requires strong gradients October 2016 One of the things I did early on in Transcriptic’s history was invite successful operators by for lunch to speak to us. One question I’d always ask if no one else brought it up was “what should the balance be between firefighting versus building for the future?” That tension had driven my team crazy basically since the beginning of the company. Without exception the answer was “oh you firefight all the way down,” with specific color ranging from “we were literally rm -r

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