Tools for progress #47
Playing With Guns and Phones, Nobody's Thinking Enough About AI, Everything is Sales
We (humans) read hundreds of articles on company building, angel investing, and self-management and curate the best ones into a weekly summary—helping founders and operators stay on the top of their game.
Better thinking
How to Use AI at Work (10 minute read)
So Shopify’s CEO just made AI a must-have job skill, and his memo on it (linked in article) has been going viral. Here’s what you should do - Keep AI open while you work, like a buddy sitting nearby. Figure out what you’re actually good at first, then use AI to amplify that. Write down your processes—this gives AI the structure it needs. When you find yourself doing the same AI thing twice, automate it.
Playing With Guns and Phones (18 minute read)
I think we underestimate just how bad phones and social media are for our mental health. Haidt’s book (The Anxious Generation) goes really deep on this - even arguing that the trending decline in happiness observed from 2012 onwards is due to the mass adoption of the iPhone. Intriguingly, there haven't been a lot of technology companies born to tackle this problem. Why not? It’s a societal level problem.
How Airbus Took Off (10 minute read)
Airbus represents a rare triumph of European industrial strategy, achieving global leadership by transcending national interests while challenging Boeing's dominance. Unlike failed collaborative projects, the consortium succeeded by focusing obsessively on customer requirements, embracing technological innovation, and making strategic compromises. By developing fuel efficient aircraft like the A320, Airbus not only competed with Boeing but fundamentally reshaped commercial aviation. Their willingness to challenge design paradigms through twin engine configurations and digital fly by wire controls transformed aerospace engineering, proving that collaborative industrial strategy can yield extraordinary technological breakthroughs.
Operational tactics
Every Marketing Channel Sucks Right Now (9 minute read)
Marketing is rough these days. Every major channel has problems: SEO takes forever, ads burn cash, influencers drive temporary traffic, and PR barely converts. If you’re a startup, forget competing in these crowded spaces. Instead, go small and scrappy with targeted efforts that don’t need to scale yet. Try something different, take some risks, and remember that no amount of marketing magic can save a mediocre product.
Subscription Churn Metrics (9 minute read)
Churn becomes your biggest obstacle once you've found product-market fit. This piece dives into real-world churn benchmarks for subscription businesses, showing you how your retention truly stacks up. First-term churn (averaging 25%) is where you should focus your energy. Smart tactics like boosting paid feature usage, nailing activation, and offering flexible downgrades can transform your retention game.
How to Make Yourself Into a Learning Machine (10 minute read)
Simon Eskildsen transformed from an 18-year-old Danish high school graduate to a Shopify infrastructure leader by treating his mind like technical infrastructure. He reads between 30 and 50 books yearly across diverse subjects, capturing important passages through Kindle highlights and Readwise. Facts become Anki flashcards (approaching 10,000 after four years), while complex ideas enter his custom-built Zettelkasten system of interconnected Markdown files. His story demonstrates how systematic knowledge management can substitute for formal education when combined with opportunity and disciplined execution.
Refer and we’ll send you our favorite books as a “thank you” for spreading the word.
Angel investing
Two years into his venture capital career, Kaushik Subramanian offers unfiltered insights that strip away VC's glamorous facade. He argues that VC is fundamentally a sales job that requires gaining access, gathering info, and making investment decisions. Surprisingly, many investors excel at schmoozing early but burn bridges when saying no, a fatal mistake in the relationship-driven business. The path to success lies in developing a differentiated network, trusting your gut instincts after meeting hundreds of founders, and recognizing when to stop and pull the trigger on a deal. Perhaps most revealing is that the only truth in VC is to back great founders and maintain a healthy dose of conviction that they will move mountains if they said they will.
Recessions Accelerate AI Adoption, and It Will Be Painful (5 minute read)
Economic downturns will be the true catalyst for enterprise AI adoption, not technological breakthroughs. And the transition is going to be painful. Tobi Lütke’s recent mandate making AI proficiency a performance metric signals the start of this shift and other executives may follow suit as recession pressures mount. Transitioning will be especially hard for enterprises that have fragmented data and undocumented processes. For workers, the situation couldn’t be more stark. They’ll need to demonstrate ‘leverage’ by building automations that replace entire workflows, even at the cost of being unpopular amongst their teammates. This doesn’t necessarily mean writing code but demands systems thinking, fast shipping, and effective prompt engineering.
#25: Nobody's Thinking Enough About AI (10 minute read)
AI progress is accelerating exponentially but there’s minimal serious discussion about its imminent societal impact. OpenAI’s Deep Research can create graduate-level reports in minutes, Operator Mode executes browser tasks like humans, and AI coding assistants are rapidly making programming careers obsolete. Even though CEO’s like Anthropic’s Dario Amodei are predicting superintelligence within 2 - 3 years, policymakers remain silent. There’s been minimal preparation for what likely will be the ‘biggest turnover cycle in history’ as intelligence becomes too ‘cheap to meter’. We must remain cautiously optimistic but must start planning now before the exponential progress outpaces our ability to adapt.
Managing your career
Everything is Sales (1 minute read)
Technical brilliance isn’t the only ingredient needed to ship a great product. Convincing skeptical engineers to prioritize user needs, persuading designers to tackle technical debt, and rallying reluctant teams behind tough pivots requires selling. And the best founders understand this truth. Their obsession with solving meaningful problems pulls others into orbit. They don't distinguish between building and selling because every interaction shapes conviction in their vision. PMs sell vision, designers sell experiences, engineers sell architecture, and CEOs sell possibilities. Whether you like it or not, you’re always selling.
Nailing The Basics: How to Collaborate Cross-Functionally (12 minute read)
Successful career progression hinges on collaboration. It’s critical at the IC level but becomes table stakes once you’re a manager. The first step is figuring out the upstream and downstream dependencies of your work. The more complex and important the project, the more you should rely on formal structure and process to avoid bottlenecks. For instance, a workback plan documents what needs to be done by when, and who is responsible. If you anticipate controversial points, schedule early review meetings so there’s time to make changes. Finally, make your time zone and working hours visible, overcommunicate, and use screenshots and recordings for things that are complex to explain. By becoming a collaborative team player, you'll gain access to high-profile projects and accelerate your professional growth.
Tips For Better Interactions (3 minute read)
If you want better meetings, here are some practical tips. Taking notes during meetings is one of the simplest ways to codify important discussions and help shape conversations. This practice transforms ‘rambling, rabbit hole-ing messes’ into focused meetings facilitators. Time your interactions strategically, especially for 1:1 meetings. Consistent meeting times create rhythm and preparation habits. Avoid the obligation to cover all topics during a teamwide meeting and instead, prioritize the meeting’s agenda items by priority. Having quality discussions on fewer topics is better than rushing through many because a great way to be wrong is to be right in a rush.