I’m working a little over the holidays, but my big focus for the past several weeks was put out into the world this past week. A super small team-within-a-team at Wildbit launched People First Jobs [https://peoplefirstjobs.com]. What is it? Essentially, it’s a new kind of job board — one that is focused on helping people find jobs with companies that take a balanced approach to work. A backlash against the valley mentality and always-on hustle has been in full swing for a while. While there ar…
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Dan Cederhom recently announced that he is leaving Dribbble, the company he started over 10 years ago. It’s one of those 20-things-I-learned kind of posts, but hang in until the end where he makes a great point that hits close to home. Under point 19, aptly named Take care of yourself first, he shares a little about his experience with anxiety. > Anxiety is a medical condition—it’s biological. A chemical imbalance where our primitive “fight or flight” response kicks in at times it shouldn’t. I…
Derrick Reimer shares the story of his last year. He had left Drip [https://www.drip.com/] and started working on Level [https://level.app/], an alternative to Slack (reminds me a lot of Twist [https://twist.com]), before choosing to walk away. His desire to build a calmer chat tool is laudable and the story is interesting. But one point leapt off the (web)page and grabbed my attention. After building an early prototype and sharing with interested users, the results were not what he had hoped:…
On the topic of tech companies with money to spend, Microsoft’s purchase of GitHub was interesting! Paul Ford had some things to say about this. > GitHub rode the wave of git adoption to become the central repository for decentralized code archives. As a result, 27 million users maintain 80 million projects on it—some private and closed off, some open sourced, many abandoned after a weekend of inspiration. That’s a significant portion of the software in the world. The article is a bit of an exp…
My teammate Garrett Dimon [https://twitter.com/garrettdimon] shared some thoughts earlier this year on employment vs. self-employment [https://garrettdimon.com/2017/employment-vs-self-employment/]. One part stuck out for me: > Being self-employed is great. And it’s not so great. Like anything, there are tradeoffs. For you, the tradeoffs may be worth it. Or, they might not. Or, they may not be the right tradeoffs at this point in your life. Just don’t put self-employment on a pedestal. There are…
The desire to "go out on your own" and run your own business is obviously a strong one in our culture, but it has a dark side.
There’s a reason email is so addicting. Like a roulette wheel or a slot machine, there’s always a chance of something exciting coming your way. On the other hand, there’s also an equal chance that terrible news is coming your way in any given piece of electronic mail. The kind of email that makes it hard to sleep at night as your heart races and anxiety kicks into high gear. That was the kind of email we received from Loren Brichter when he had decided to sell his company to Twitter. In an int…
Here’s a nice look at how several companies are learning to be family friendly. I’m especially happy with this one as the first two pictures are of the Wildbit office. One of our founders, Natalie, shares some of the thinking behind the space and the importance of children being welcomed in the space. She followed up with an expanded post [http://wildbit.com/blog/2016/03/24/ideas-for-building-a-family-friendly-culture] on our site. The paragraphs of mine were written weeks ago, but it's tellin…