🔥 Hot Take Alert #4: Annual Planning Is a Colossal Waste of Time

One thing I do look back on fondly was how incredibly focused we were. Resources and time were so tight that you could feel the weight of all the things you weren’t working on. You had real conviction that the thing you were doing was the most important thing.

To pick a somewhat trivial example, at fireside chats with Mark (the predecessor to the co... See more

All companies must be “lean,” which is code for “unplanned.” You should not know what your business will do; planning is arrogant and inflexible. Instead you should try things out, “iterate,” and treat entrepreneurship as agnostic experimentation.

Nobody sets out planning to move slowly, waste time on bad ideas, and test nothing.

But here’s the key for an early-stage startup: "As we’re building our plans, we only focus on those first three months, that first chapter. So we break that down into monthly high-level goals, and that's what I hold the team accountable for,” he says. In other words, don’t try to get detailed for longer than a few weeks out. "At a startup, it’s alm... See more