Blog

The Bezos way: sleep, puttering, and three high-quality decisions a day

Dan Kim on “The Bezos way“: Jeff Bezos has always been one of those people whose ideas and thinking make a lot of sense to me. When he talks, I listen.So when I recently came across a fantastic interview with Jeff Bezos, I jumped right in. The entire interview is great and I really think watching the whole thing is worth your time. But there was one section that really stuck out to me: his prioritization of sleep, calm, and quality. It’s 2 minutes and 29 seconds of your day well spent, but here’s the basic gist:8 hours of sleep a

October 20, 2018

Quote of the day: Ends and Means

Do the ends justify the means? Is it worth lowering your standards and giving up your principles in order to find a better outcome? Many times, the means are the ends. How we choose to act changes who we choose to become. The way we choose to get to where we’re going defines what it’s going to be like when we get there – Seth Godin

September 2, 2018

An Intro to Web Site Testing with Cypress

Devon Campbell: End-to-end testing is awesome because it mirrors the user’s experience. Where you might need a ton of unit tests to get good coverage (the kind where you test that a function returns a value you expect), you can write a single end-to-end test that acts like a real human as it tests several pieces of your app at once. It’s a very economical way of testing your app.Cypress is a new-ish test runner with some features that take some of the friction out of end-to-end testing. It sports the ability to automatically wait for elements (if you try to

August 29, 2018

The Orange Juice Test

Des Traynor: Spending money is very easy. Spending money effectively is very hard. There are lots of dodgy people & service providers out there who will promise the world, send the invoices, and deliver mediocrity six months late. Or worse.It’s helpful if you can eliminate these chancers from your considerations early on, to make sure you’re only talking to people well equipped to solve the problem you have. This is where the Orange Juice Test comes in. What follows is a brief extract from the book “The Secrets of Consulting“.LeRoy was president of a custom software firm that that had

August 11, 2018

The 4 questions you should stop asking during your one-on-one meetings

Claire Lew: Looking at the clock. Staring into the distance. Short, nondescript answers. A CEO recently told me how he’d frequently see this body language from an employee during their one-on-one meetings. Flat. Disinterested. Preoccupied. It felt lousy to witness, but it’d always been this way. He’d silently concluded that he was wasting both of their time. “I want to know what’s on his mind and how I can help, but these one-on-one meetings just aren’t working,” this CEO admitted to me. “I’m not really sure what to do except to stop having them.” To see if I could help,

July 4, 2018

Opening Up Our Beta Program

We’ve decided to open up our beta program, this will let you, our users, be able to test new features before we release them to the general public. If you’re interested, please fill out the form below, and we’ll get in touch.

July 4, 2018

Ryan Holmes talks about the tech job no one talks about

Hootsuite’s Ryan Holmes: Mention “tech jobs” and thoughts typically turn to developers — the programmers and engineers who translate great ideas into working technology and keep the platforms we all use humming along. But the reality is that it’s impossible to scale and sustain most software platforms today without a highly capable, highly trained sales team. Indeed, at many of the most successful cloud software companies, the sales squads are just as big as the technical teams. I’ll repeat this for clarity: the current innovation boom hasn’t just created an outsized demand for IT pros; it’s created an equal — if not greater — demand for

May 29, 2018

Learning by fixing

Drago Crnjac: Breaking things and fixing them again is one of the best ways to learn. I learned this lesson early, thanks to my younger sister and her Japanese robotic toy dog. Somehow, I convinced her to let me take apart her robodog so I could see how it works. “I’ll put it back together. Don’t be such a baby!” How wrong was I? It would probably have been easier to put back together a Volkswagen Beetle than this toy dog. There I was, sitting clueless on the floor, surrounded with plastic parts and electronics. My sister was crying and

May 12, 2018

Steve Jobs’ Secret for Eliciting Questions

Andy Raskin: Last month, I was enjoying the remarkably good crab cake and poached eggs at Just for You Café in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood, when I overheard a mentoring session taking place at the next table. I recognized the mentor as the famous, fifty-something ex-CEO of a household-brand Internet company; the mentee, I pieced together, was the twenty-something CEO of an app on my phone that had raised over $70 million in VC cash. “My leadership team just gave me anonymous feedback,” Young CEO told Famous CEO. “One thing they said was that I’m not open to being questioned.”

May 10, 2018

The Little Trade-Offs

Claire Lew: I was running a leadership training a few months ago, when a CEO said this to me… “I think I know why it’s so easy to become a bad manager, even when we don’t mean to be: It’s because of the little trade-offs.” I nodded and smiled. I knew exactly what he meant by “the little trade-offs.” I’d made so many myself as a leader, across my own career. The little trade-offs are the moments when we succumb to what feels most pressing in front of us, at the expense of what our company needs down the road

May 9, 2018

Flybase