The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture

If you can set up a system where anyone can publish anything, and dynamically allocate more resources to the ideas that seem most promising, you're much more likely to produce a lot of surprisingly awesome output. This is important for reasons deeper than just "people are bad at predicting success"—I think there's something about surprise that audi... See more

My guess is that Amazon’s success is a byproduct, a side-effect of a process driven, flexible, in-the-moment way of being. In the famous 1997 letter to shareholders, which lays out Amazon’s philosophy, Bezos says that their process is simple: a “relentless focus on customers.” This is not a goal to be strived for, worked towards, achieved, and the

... See more

We are in an age of noise.

The frameworks that got us here, of jobs-to-be-done or product-market fit, will be insufficient going forward. For founders to have extraordinary outcomes, they will have to find alpha in markets that aren’t easily understood.

Which is to say, technology alone won’t be enough. The other essential ingredient will be taste.... See more