Thanks for checking out Thoughts Brewed—a monthly newsletter sharing my journey in startups, leadership, design, remote work, and life in general. And as with most things of mine on the internet, without filter.
If you like the content, please give it a like it and share it with friends.
At the end of September, our team launched Stark for Mac into private beta, and once again made substantial changes not just in the accessibility space, but software development as a whole.
The morning of, I shared a message with the team, and it’s something I come back to here and there. Why? I tried to capture some of my learnings on how to invoke global change in an uncharted territory as well as some fundamentals on leadership. It’s as much a reminder for our team as it is more myself.
Though there are some pieces of sensitive information removed, I hope you take from it what you need to make your team and product better. And maybe, just maybe, put a dent in the world. Leadership is never a one trick pony and company building is a recipe which truly needs to come together.
Enjoy.
Team,
It's happening! The kickstart of the platform is finally here, and we've collectively worked so hard toward this. Over the last months as a CEO I’ve personally been stretched to a place of [necessary] challenge and, in turn, discomfort. Because of that, I've grown further than I ever have in my career prior to this. All thanks to the opportunity you all give me daily, the effort I put in, the grace of my family and friends, and support from those I admire and seek advice from. And it’s evident the same applies to all of you in your respective roles. Please turn to whoever your "person" or "people" are today, and truly extend my love to them. Without the people who carry us, we couldn't do this.
In moving through these learnings, I’ve come to realize that what ensures you build a great product is the same formula necessary to build a great team and organization—which goes back to what they say about your team being your most important product.
I firmly believe this.
The product is a reflection of the people who build it, and I know in Stark, you can feel it.
Reading the blog post for launch as I wrote it, my mind kept going back to a single thought: what has to prove true for all of this to succeed in the way we intend? And in this thinking exercise I’m overwhelmed with emotions. To succeed, a few things must hold true:
Our ability to craft narrative around the meaning of what we do is significant. As we improve at articulating the simple language around a complex topic, it becomes like an engine that turns on in the minds of other people. We become a catalyst of that thinking process around accessibility at scale. In doing that we create a narrative which allows customers to build on themselves.
We fundamentally change the tech industry as we know it—in particular with the software development cycle and how the folks within it build software.
As a byproduct, the digital world becomes navigable to everyone. More people have access to educational opportunities, preventative and maintenance health become a realistic possibility for a surplus of individuals, and many gain access to the future of finance. Disabled individuals become key contributors to the global GDP which further invokes change on a legal scale.
You see, it is one thing for technological solutions in finance, education, healthcare, and more to exist. It is an entirely different matter whether or not individuals everywhere can capitalize on them. Stark makes that possible.
The pieces for this are coming together, and seeing this massive leap toward that is a pride of which I cannot express in words.
As we traverse a green space with old players, we inevitably land on uncharted territory. People will push back, they will tell us no. But as we’ve said time and time again: the map is not the territory. Keep going. Carve paths others haven't dared touch. Challenge why this never existed in the first place.
We'll make people wonder how something can be so complex yet beautiful. But before we reinvent the wheel, it’s best we utilize our time by understanding where this all started, and speaking to thee giants in their respective fields that have defined categories like us, and moved humanity forward to a place they themselves could’ve never foreseen in all the big audacious ass visions they originally had.
Over the course of the next months we’ll spend time thinking about and asking questions like: How do we define a new set of standards? A new way of thinking? How do we think about the customers differently? The competitors differently? We’ll pick what dimensions allow us to innovate, and we’ll do exactly that.
We’ll identify the orthodoxies that exist in our particular industry and understand how it impacts others. As a disruptor, if you’re somebody in an industry that does things a particular way, you can rest assure there’s another startup looking to break the rules. Our competitors know who they are, which means they’ll come to find out today we are the ones that are blowing shit up.
Because of this, there will always be ambiguity in what we do. Mental models will become more complex. The goal is to get to a place where that’s continually ok because we’re utilizing communication and quick iteration cycles to achieve clarity.
The way we came together these last 1.5 weeks tells me we are fully capable of doing exactly that. It was unlike anything I’ve seen from the team, and was wonderful to witness and be a part of. The energy was palpable.
Our ability to do all of this efficiently is purely contingent on exactly that, and that will increase the more experience we collectively have. Kudos to all of you for the frequent communication with clarity. For the way we jumped in to help each other, and got to resolutions quickly. The way you vocalized when we didn’t have enough bandwidth, and provided the various routes for solutions when a problem arose. The way we asked questions before jumping to answers to ensure we were weeding out as much of the wrong to get to the right [for right now].
Thank you for doing this important work, growing in your individual roles, and collectively rumbling together as a team to ensure we succeed.
Thank you for being the Pirates this industry never saw coming. Leading this ship is one of the greatest experiences of my life.
I love you all 💜 Let’s knock ‘em clean off their feet…
Insight
Setting the tone
When setting the tone for virtually anything in a company—from feature idea to long term vision—it’s important to ask yourselves three things:
Why are we doing this? / What’s the ultimate goal?
How does this impact the user?
What has to prove true for this to work?
The key to success in any team
You must ensure it's safe for people to make make mistakes. How do you do that?
Separate out people from ideas + problems
Quick recovery
Blameless post-mortems
But how to you set yourself up to make mistakes in the first place? We set in place a culture of shipping. We make mistakes. We actively learn what happened. We recover.
Watch this video from Pixar’s Ed Catmull detailing how they do this, too.
Worth thinking about
"We have been fighting on this planet for ten thousand years; it would be idiotic and unethical to not take advantage of such accumulated experiences. If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you."
— General Jim Mattis
Good to pair this with this article around why you should stop reading the news.
As always, thanks for reading! And if you have any questions about the topics I’ll be covering, go ahead and AMA by replying to this email or pinging me on Twitter. If I don’t have the answer, we’ll deep dive together.
I appreciate you. And until next time…