Software companies often forget about the humble developer. I know this too well as a former tech consultant.

The big companies focus on how to impress execs with flashy features but the product is a shambles under the covers. It’s left to developers to deal with all the bugs and somehow still deliver the requirements within the deadline. You’d be surprised how many famous products have defects that never get fixed because developers aren’t prioritized.

Jeff Lawson’s mindset is different. He’s an angel for the tech startup world. His company Twilio has gone from 0 to $64 billion in 13 years by concentrating on the problems developers face.

Do you know when you get an SMS update about your order? The developers probably used Twilio to set up the connection.

Jeff is a guy doing what he loves and changing the way businesses contact their customers. Here’s his story.

He’s a strong independent developer

At his core, Jeff is a problem solver. As a five-year-old, he would build robots out of cardboard boxes with his dad but was frustrated that they didn’t move. This led him to code at a young age because he wanted to make things work.

Jeff worked at many great startups and learned how crucial communication was to success. Yet the options to connect with users seemed primitive and it bothered him. He was told he needed to talk to communications giants like Cisco for a solution.

But these companies had no idea how to do what he wanted to achieve. They talked about installing underground wiring and three-year projects which didn’t make any sense for a fast-changing startup.

No one else seemed to be willing to take on the issue he kept facing so he decided to do it himself. The communications world was too hardware-based and slow but he came from the speedy software world.

His idea created a new business category.

“I started Twilio to solve a relatively simple problem: How do we bring communications into the realm of software and enable every software developer in the world to build out their ideas quickly and easily? That’s where we started.”

Engage in your own community

The problem with many entrepreneurs who create products to meet their own needs is they fail to check if anyone else has the same problem.

Jeff didn’t fall to this self-centered attitude.

“I know a customer segment that has a problem and I’m going to go solve it.”

He was already an active member of the software developer community so had rich connections with his potential customers. He didn’t give people a sales pitch but fed them enough to trigger their curiosity. Everyone Jeff told about it could think of ways it would make their job easier.

35% of startups fail because there is no market need for the product. If you have the contacts in an industry you care about, use them! It’s far better to find out no one cares early on than wait until you’ve sunk time and effort into building a fancy prototype.

This doesn’t apply only to tech startups. Jesse Enkamp is a world-famous karate instructor who was frustrated at how hard it was to maintain the uniforms. He asked around and everyone said they had faced the same difficulty so he built his own brand. It’s grown exponentially!

Empowering the disempowered

Venture capitalists weren’t hot on Jeff’s idea. They wanted him to make an app rather than a platform because it’s what managers look for. They thought no one pays attention to what developers want anyway.

Jeff faced a difficult choice whether to build what he knew the community needed or to take the simpler path to funding. He did what he believed was right and the VCs came running to him once he’d proved them wrong.

Jeff promotes the idea of following your customers rather than your investors. Many companies get VC backing but go nowhere so it’s not always best to trust them.

Twilio’s slogan is “Ask your developer”. It works because developers will always seek out the tools that help them do their job to the best of their ability. They don’t need to have adverts shoved in their face but they do need their bosses to listen to them.

Twilio has 10 million developers in their ecosystem now. They are being listened to. By valuing the opinions of the people who will use their software, they have created a strong sense of goodwill.

The dirty secret

“The dirty secret of every startup ever is that when you look at companies with these big, world-changing missions…those are usually retroactively put in place.”

Anybody else sick of billionaires preaching how they made money by focusing on a holier than thou mission? Jeff Lawson doesn’t do that and I love him for it.

Jeff was one of the first Amazon Web Services product managers and joined without knowing what it even meant. He was interviewed by the current CEO of Amazon, Andy Jassy, who told AWS was a secret but that “it’s really cool”. Jeff doesn’t pretend he joined for anything other than excitement. He didn’t know it would be worth $500bn someday.

Likewise, he built Twilio because he was a nerd who loved building stuff. He enjoyed the process itself rather than thinking about anything bigger than him.

Be honest with yourself, are you the same? I enjoy helping people but I love the challenge of what I do the most. I might not be changing the world but I am having a lot of fun.

Based on interviews with Secret Leaders and NFX.

I was sharing hot wings and discussing life’s big mysteries with a friend when she said something weird.

“Oo great point, give me a second. I’m going to send myself a message about that.”

I gave her an awkward smile because I thought the heat from the buffalo sauce had gone to her head.

Yet she taught me a simple trick that has turned Whatsapp into my favorite note-taking app. I gave up on the dedicated apps a long time ago as they always felt clunky. I never managed to keep a system for more than a few weeks at a time.

If you have the same problem, why not try transforming the way you use Whatsapp?

It’s simple to set up and takes under a minute. All you need is a friend who won’t consider you weird for removing them from a group.

• Go to Whatsapp and click “New Group”.
• Pick the friend you chose and press “Next”.
• Name the group whatever you like, I called mine “Ideas” then press “Create”.

• From inside the group, click on the group name and scroll down to click on your friend’s name.
• Choose “Remove from group”.
• Now you have a group all for yourself!

This group can be your new hub for your notes to yourself and only you can see what you put there.

Why it’s so great

Accessibility

Max Phillips gave a great explanation in Debugger of why the iPhone Notes app is so great. Yet it doesn’t work for everyone and a large portion of the world can’t afford an Apple device.

If you’re one of over 2 billion people active Whatsapp users, you won’t need to worry about downloading another app or buying the latest phone. It doesn’t matter if you switch between different phone OSs either as you’ll always be able to access your Whatsapp history.

Multimedia

You can upload voice notes, images, documents, or whatever else takes your fancy to Whatsapp easily. It’s designed to allow you to share things quickly with other people but this makes it great for sending different media to yourself too.

Whatsapp Web means you can use your dedicated group to send yourself something between your devices in a painless way.

Messaging features

Here’s where Whatsapp shines vs actual note-taking apps. The features designed for a great experience chatting to a friend work for organizing your messages to yourself.

• Quoting messages: If you want to continue a thought from a few days prior, you just need to swipe right on it. Now when you come back to it, you can click on the quoted message to see where it began.
• Starred messages: You can star messages that you know you will refer back to in the future and don’t have to worry about scrolling through miles of text.
• Search: Whatsapp’s search functionality is powerful and you can quickly find something from months ago even if you forgot to star.
• Forward: I personally use my personal group to draft messages I want to send to someone else but don’t want to accidentally press send. You can forward the message when it’s done and don’t need to mess about with copying and pasting.

Whatsapp is for you

You can create a conversation with yourself on Facebook Messenger and Slack but it’s not the same.

On these channels, many people can reach me to who I wouldn’t want to give my phone number. Whatsapp is where I talk to the people I want to talk to. It has a comforting sense that comes from a decade of use and having conversations with loved ones.

I don’t have the same dread of opening the app as I do of other apps where people can contact me. Even better, you can pop your phone in airplane mode if you want to talk to yourself and not be disturbed.

It only takes a minute to get set up so there’s no harm in trying it out and seeing if it works for you.

Maybe this will be the solution you’ve been waiting for and didn’t know it.

“No, I didn’t know what my job was going to be, or what my title was going to be. It was super important to the Amazon people that we come that Monday.” — Andy Jassy

When Andy started working at an online bookstore in 1997, no one could have predicted he would one day be running a $1.7 trillion empire.

Those first few years were far from glamorous. Amongst other things, he was Jeff Bezos’s personal technical assistant and floated around other roles. A more stereotypically ambitious person might have left to start their own company but Andy stuck around and as result will go down in tech history.

Away from all the media attention and headlines, he created a small division called Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2006. Without getting too nerdy, it provides a service to other massive companies like Netflix to host all of their content in the cloud. It is in these relative shadows where Andy operated for over a decade as he built something spectacular.

You probably think Amazon’s online retail division where you buy batteries is massive and you wouldn’t be wrong. Yet AWS brings in over half the profits of the entire company on just 12% of the total revenue. Amazon is a cloud computing company with a side hustle of dominating global online retail.

Everyone has heard of Jeff Bezos; both his flaws and gifts. It’s almost reassuring to understand the mindset behind someone with such immense power in the world. Yet many of us know nothing about who Andy Jassy is and I think it’s time that changed.

No thrills

“You can’t feel 30 per cent smarter when the stock is up 30 per cent, because then it means you have to feel 30 per cent dopier when the stock is down 30 per cent, and usually neither is true” — Andy Jassy

Many entrepreneurs are obsessed with looking cool. They rush to create sleek brands and pick names with missing vowels. They want to fix a problem most people didn’t even realize they had. They chase revenue numbers to brag about while at the same time have no idea how they will make a profit.

Andy Jassy is made of different stuff. It took 3 years from ideation at a retreat with all the top Amazon executive to the first proper product launch for AWS. He never made revenue predictions or oversold what the division would become. The user experience of AWS is a nightmare except for people well-versed in the tech world. This is a product built for people in the know and there was no attempt to dumb it down.

Though what AWS had was a clear selling point. Many businesses ran their own servers, which was often hell because of the expense and lack of flexibility. It was an unwanted burden thought necessary because it was the only safe way to store data. All Andy needed to do was prove them wrong.

Many of the early clients were startups who needed computing power but didn’t want to be slowed down by having to build all their own infrastructure. As these companies blossomed, so did AWS’s reputation.

The big transformational win came from the CIA who migrated from a legacy IBM system. If the Central Intelligence Agency could trust Andy Jassy’s AWS then so could the rest of the world. It took 10 years for the first $10bn but only a year to go from $30bn to $40bn in 2020.

God-level Intrapreneurship

According to some, you can never be successful unless you are your own boss. They paint being an employee as living torture and claim people need to open their eyes and be free. Andy Jassy’s story is proof this hyperbole is nonsense.

Andy’s AWS division was valued at an incredible $500bn by the Economist. This would make it worth more than Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and put it in the top 10 publically traded companies in the world.

Not bad for a guy who kept the same boss for 24 years.

The truth is AWS could only have been built at Amazon. It started as a technology designed to help Amazon develop new products faster but the wider market opportunity was clear. No other company could have started building similar software and have a tech giant as a client from the start. This meant they could and they did learn faster than everyone else.

“We treat Amazon’s consumer business as an external customer.” — Andy Jassy

Andy is a company man through and through. The Financial Times notes how often he uses company slogans to make points in his interviews. You might consider him corporate and boring but you cannot deny the impact he’s had on the world. Sometimes it pays to stay at a company and be fully immersed.

Better than Bezos?

Usually, when an idolized founder-CEO announces they are stepping down, the stock price takes a hit. People struggled to imagine Microsoft without Bill Gates or Apple without Steve Jobs. Yet the opposite happened when Bezos stepped down.

This implies stock market investors are confident in Andy Jassy’s abilities though many believe Bezos will still have a hand in the company.

It’s not only the investors who think Amazon may be better under Andy. According to a survey, 90% of employees believe work-life balance will be improved under the new regime. The majority believe it is a “good decision” to make him CEO despite many taking a “wait-and-watch” approach.

If I were to ever take over from a world-famous founder, reading how happy the employees seem to be for me would mean everything. It’s a fantastic testament to his service at the company. Early AWS employee, Manny Medina calls Jassy “Not less smart [than Bezos], just way more approachable”.

To be loved by investors and employees yet unknown to the wider public is an interesting mix. It shows he is more focused on what matters than the whole world knowing how good he is. It seems Amazon is in good hands and scarily it seems Andy thinks the company has barely begun.

“One of the amazing things about AWS and Amazon is that we‘re still such a small overall share of the market segments in which we address. It’s still very early days.” — Andy Jassy

“I’m very happy to talk about what’s gone on with me, because I don’t think people do it enough” — Tom Blomfield, Founder of Monzo

He’s absolutely right. If you read enough entrepreneurship advice, you’ll realize many people seem to have missed the mental health awakening completely.

Work harder than everyone else!
Do you only work 100 hours a week?!
Never give up!
Who needs friends?!
Do you want to be average?!

It’s easy to get brainwashed into the cult of hard work above all else. There’s this weird paradox where boasting about your results makes you arrogant but bragging about how hard you work makes you a hero. It’s an outdated badge of honor.

I’ve talked to many entrepreneurs and freelancers who are scared to admit they need a rest. They’ve been told so many times if they just keep trying, eventually they’ll be successful. To keep this mentality going, they tell themselves anyone who grows too effortlessly must be a fraud.

This is what makes Tom Blomfield’s confession so important. He founded Monzo, the app-based bank, which now has over 5 million customers and a valuation of over a billion dollars. It even raised money during the pandemic through big names such as Accel Ventures, Y Combinator, and Stripe.

The hype may not have reached the US but I’ve never seen an app gain such vigorous support amongst tech-savvy millennials in London. A quick scroll through my phone shows me over 100 of my contacts have accounts. Pretty impressive considering it lacks 15-second dance videos.

At 35, Tom was living the dream of many aspiring entrepreneurs with this cutting-edge and cool product. Yet he didn’t feel like he was living his dream. We read success stories where companies skyrocket and failure stories where they collapse. We can assume the “success” makes their founders happy because we rarely hear about the times when it makes them miserable. It’s the blindspot scenario as it seems counter-intuitive.

It all started turning sour around two years ago for Tom.

When a startup is no longer a startup

“The things I enjoy in life is working with small groups of passionate people to start and grow stuff from scratch, and create something customers love.” — Tom Blomfield

It takes a certain type of person to found a new company. They need to thrive on the chaos of being the underdog in an environment where nothing is defined. For some, this is when they feel most alive and they can take their paintbrush out to work their magic.

Yet when the idea works, it goes into a new phase of scaling up. Now there are hundreds of employees who rely on the former underdog to make good decisions so they can pay their rent. Such responsibility can be terrifying for someone who was happily working out of their garage with a small team. Research shows founders often make terrible CEOs because of the difference in the skill set required.

This is what Tom found out and he realized he lacked the motivation to make the transition. He wasn’t excited by the prospect of making Monzo profitable or going public. Yet understandably, he knew investors would want him to stay on.

Staggered transition

When he told the board how he felt, he received unanimous support from everyone. I’ve heard many cases of people admitting they were struggling and being surprised by how much others cared. I hope you see that if the board of a high-flying FinTech startup can be understanding then maybe the people you know will be too.

A plan was created to give Tom space to recover his wellbeing and decide on his future with the bank. He became the first President of the company in May 2020 and handed the CEO role to TS Anil; a veteran banker loved by his friends for his dad jokes and dance moves. Tom was crucial in Monzo’s history but Anil has the right skills for their future.

Over the next few months, Tom’s responsibilities reduced to the stage where he felt he could leave guilt-free on good terms. TS Anil had the best possible start because of the peaceful transition and the founder’s vote of confidence. Their approach seems for any other founders out there who feel the same way as Tom did.

Tom doesn’t know what he wants to do next yet. He wanted to be public about why he stepped down so other entrepreneurs know they are not alone. He had a call with TechCrunch specifically for this reason to get the story out.

I wonder if he will follow in the footsteps of his fellow co-founder Paul Rippon. After retiring a couple of years ago, Paul now lives and works at an alpaca farm with hundreds of adorable animals running around. Every founder’s personal dreams are different and yours doesn’t have to be working until you burn out.

“I’m now feeling pretty great. I’m enjoying life again”. — Tom Blomfield

Silicon Valley has been unquestionably the place to be for aspiring tech entrepreneurs for decades. The whole industry has seemed to revolve around the Bay Area of California. Yet 2020 has challenged many things we thought permanent and Silicon Valley’s dominance is one of them.

Peter Thiel was one of the first high-profile founders to leave in 2018 and even then people were predicting the end was near. Yet there was little significant movement despite the chatter until the pandemic struck. This year the brain drain of top entrepreneurs has accelerated:

• Austin, Texas: Elon Musk (Tesla), Joe Lonsdale (Palantir), Drew Houston (Dropbox), Douglas Merritt (Splunk)
• Miami, Florida: Keith Rabois (Founders Found)
• Lanai, Hawaii: Larry Ellison (Oracle)
• Denver, Colorado: Alex Carp (Palantir)

All the cool kids aren’t in one place anymore and it’s not just individuals as companies are shifting headquarters too. The garage where Hewlett-Packard was founded is known as the “Birthplace of Silicon Valley”. Yet its spinoff, HP Enterprise, joined Oracle in moving to Texas this year where AMD and Dell were already based.

This feels like a tipping point more than ever. Soon it will merely be one of many places the ambitious go to chase their dreams rather than the place. Several factors are leading to this trend which I will explore:

“If a team has been winning for too long, they tend to get complacent, and then they don’t win the championship anymore. California has been winning for too long,” — Elon Musk

A venture capital rule has been shattered

I was surprised to hear about the 20-minute-rule where venture capitalists would only invest in companies that were within a short drive of their office. If it sounds elitist and lazy, it’s because it is. I wonder how many venture capitalists lost out on great investments in the past because of this.

After 2020, venture capitalists have been forced to zoom like the rest of us and it doesn’t matter at all where you are physically located. The relic of an idea you need to be geographically close by is over. Entrepreneurs should no longer feel the need to set up their company in the Bay Area just to tick a box. If a VC passes over you in 2021 because of distance, it’s a blessing in disguise as they weren’t up to date with how the world is changing.

Life costs too much there

Salaries are high around Silicon Valley but so are rents and taxes. What’s the point in earning $100k a year and working crazy hours if your disposable income is mediocre?

Rules such as the 20-minute-rule and proximity to Stanford in a small area has meant demand for housing has crushed the supply. As the number of unicorns booms, more people are willing to take the risk of struggling to pay rent to see if they can make it big.

Individual taxes make other states look far more desirable as California ranks second last out of 50 states according to the Tax Foundation. Places like Austin in Texas have no state taxes meaning far more of your income goes into your pocket.

Y Combinator graduate, Ben Rahnema, rented a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco but for the same money has a 3 bedroom house with a backyard and home gym in Austin. Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Political monoculture

There’s a common link between many of the major founders who’ve left Silicon Valley; they are part of the Paypal Mafia. They all had a part in the payments company and therefore know each other pretty well.

Several members of this group have made the same point about why they moved:

“…increasing intolerance and monoculture.” — Alex Carp

“Austin is *far* more tolerant of ideological diversity than SF.” — Joe Lonsdale

“I think San Francisco is just so massively improperly run and managed that it’s impossible to stay here,” — Keith Rabois

Politics and business have become even more intertwined this year than previously. Some leaders see it as their duty to enforce certain views on the people they work with. This can make it pretty tense when the powerful disagree with things unrelated to the business itself.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings made it clear he thought Peter Thiel’s political judgments tainted his leadership credentials when giving feedback to the Facebook board in 2016. Whatever your opinions of Trump, is it acceptable to rule out half the country’s population based on political views?

It’s difficult for people who intentionally create a bubble to accurately serve a population where they don’t understand a significant portion. It’s too easy for a leader to project their views across a company and to their user base without realizing people can rationally disagree with them.

Remote work is here to stay

It’s funny to think the tech startups who aimed to make online life as easy as possible needed a single location where they all physically went every day.

Twitter and Slack have told their staff they can work from home permanently. Facebook employees may with the permission of their manager. Other companies are still deciding their strategy but it’s fair to assume the policy will be widespread.

It’s great for employees especially those with children or other dependents. People have moved back to their home towns or whatever town they would live in if they didn’t need to worry about their commute. 2020 has proved offices aren’t mandatory for productivity.

Entrepreneurs no longer need large and expensive offices in San Francisco to attract the best employees. They can base themselves wherever is convenient for them and hire virtually.

Foreign competition is heating up

America used to have a near-monopoly on big tech but the world is catching up. The USA still has the most unicorns with 147 but China has 120, India 47, and the UK, France, and South Korea are all in double figures. Silicon Valley has relied on recruiting the best minds from across the world but now those minds may choose to stay closer to home.

No country is blind to the potential of a homegrown unicorn and the positive effects on the economy. Governments all over the world are promoting an environment to help their citizens succeed. Imagine if the future Satya Nadellas and Sundar Pichais decide to build their careers in India instead.

Silicon Valley has had it good for a while but now everyone else wants to keep hold of their brightest and can create the incentives to make them stay. The tech city may be considered the American dream but in the last few decades, the talent has been global.

Silicon Valley is not dead. It will need to get used to sharing the spotlight though. The lifestyle and cultural problems are in plain sight but this time we have proof geographical location isn’t as important as once thought.

This is great for entrepreneurs and techies who would rather live elsewhere without sacrificing their careers. The competition between cities and countries for the best talent should lead to further disruption in their favor. It’s also great for consumers everywhere to get products designed by people from different places with different ideas.

Mindfulness is the art of living in the present moment. It’s also a rapidly growing billion-dollar industry. These two faces throw up some hilarious contradictions, especially when combined with technology.

I’m not against the meditation app industry. They’re making the big bucks, but they’ve introduced healthy practices in many people’s lives which non-profits have been trying for years. Maintaining purity could mean denying millions of a means to de-stress.

My own practice has come from what I’ve learned in karate and yoga. I’d never considered using an app because part of the joy in my training is a completely tech-free hour. But I let my curiosity get the better of me when I got a perk that allowed me a year free subscription to an app.

The actual meditations are well made and I’ve enjoyed them. Yet the business side worms its way through the app and it’s clear the sacrifices made for money and growth. I left the default settings on for a month as an experiment to see if it could win me over. Here’s what you need to be careful of!

P.S. I won’t say which app it is but it has millions of users.

#1 Push notification reminders

How many times have you heard a mindfulness guru tell you to switch on all your notifications? When many people are trying to reduce their distractions it seems like a joke for the app to encourage them on for the best experience.

A push notification is almost the exact opposite of being mindful. It takes you out of the present moment to check your little screen. The important notifications are cliché daily reminders; mainly so you don’t forget you have the app installed. I found myself reacting to the notification, rolling my eyes then scrolling Instagram for a couple of minutes. Not ideal.

Here are some of my favorite reminders (for the wrong reasons):

• “The beginning is always this present moment” — Do you mean the moment you literally just pulled me out of?
• “Make meditation a daily practice, and it will soon become a habit” — A daily practice is by definition a habit. In other news, if you splash water on yourself, you get wet.
• “It’s time to meditate” — Most people can’t just freeze what they are doing to start listening to a 10-minute meditation unless they were already planning to do it.

At the start, the reminders were helpful but once you’ve dismissed them a couple of times, they’re useless as accountability. You end up recognizing the sayings as they are on a random repeat.

How to take back control: Turn off notifications and emails. Meditate when works best for you not when your phone tells you to.

#2 Use of celebrities to pull you in

I’ve never watched a Hollywood blockbuster where the whole cast is comprised of meditation gurus. So why would I want to listen to meditation sessions by Hollywood B-listers?

It feels commercial and dirty. We see up to 10,000 adverts a day with famous faces used to sell all types of brands. I expect a clean and relaxing user interface but instead, I’m met with garish colors designed to emphasize the attractive celebrities they’ve got on board.

I’m being exposed to exactly what I’m trying to avoid in other apps like Instagram. It’s hard to disconnect from the outside world when the person’s voice and picture trigger so many associations. When the subscription models are so expensive, you have to wonder whether a cheaper product without huge spending on marketing would better achieve the mission they preach.

How to take back control: Use the app in black and white because it’s less engaging and go straight to whatever you want to do, don’t browse.

#3 Tracking overload

If you are meditating purely to keep a streak up, then I question your mindfulness. It’s not an attack because I did it myself near the start. I was on a Zoom with friends until late in the evening so I played the meditation with my sound off so I didn’t lose my streak. I was happy to delude my mind and look at my great stats.

Gamification is effective in many instances of making a boring task more enjoyable. Yet meditation isn’t meant to be a dopamine dump; it’s where you listen to your own thoughts and it might be boring sometimes. I acknowledge for some the gamification is the trigger but over time they engage more with the meditation itself.

Post-meditation, the app turns into a mess. You’re encouraged to do 6 separate activities on the completion screen. It’s trying to get you as attached as possible to the app. Share with your friends so you can guilt them for not meditating! Record your thought of the day and spend even more time on your phone!

How to take back control: If you find yourself going through the motions to keep a streak then break it. Start afresh the next day or the day after when you’re in the right frame of mind.

#4 No option to unsubscribe

This is the most infuriating. Part of the point of being mindful is being intentional in your actions yet the app doesn’t allow you to cancel your subscription. It’s in fact impossible to without emailing customer support even on the desktop site. This should never happen in 2020!

I have a free annual subscription through a deal but they generally offer a 7-day free trial before it charges you the full price (non-refundable) without any reminders. It’s a trick used by many companies in the hope people forget but we should rightfully expect more from a company preaching mindfulness. I’m going to need to remember to cancel my membership when I inevitably get bored with the app and stop using it.

It’s more distasteful when you consider many users of the app will have downloaded it to deal with too much stress in their lives. A surprise charge then fighting with customer support will only make things worse.

How to take back control: Read the conditions closely and if you want to cancel, do it at least 2 days before the last day. Companies might count the 7th day liberally.

Criticisms aside, meditation apps can add value to people’s lives. There’s growing scientific research into their effects and the competition between companies is encouraging legitimization. All you have to do is remember one thing. Use the apps to serve you, don’t serve them.

“I’m sure I’ll amount to nothing” — Brian Chesky

Brian Chesky’s high school yearbook message could not have been more wrong. Yet 8 years later, he could be forgiven for believing his own words when he couldn’t afford rent in his San Francisco apartment as an unemployed designer. Times were tough and he and his roommate Joe Gebbia were frantically thinking of ways to make some money. When a design conference led to local hotels being fully booked, they spotted the opportunity to let people stay for the weekend for a small fee.

Their cheap and cheerful hosting, with air mattresses and Pop-Tarts, worked a treat. Such a simple idea had legs and Brian knew it. Within a few months, another friend joined them and Airbedandbreakfast.com was created. Fast forward 12 years and Airbnb is worth $31bn with Brian steering the ship as CEO. The guy who said he’d amount to nothing revolutionized the global hospitality industry.

Though he naturally became the leader of the company, he values the Airbnb culture above all else:

“Why is culture so important to a business? Here is a simple way to frame it. The stronger the culture, the less corporate process a company needs. When the culture is strong, you can trust everyone to do the right thing. People can be independent and autonomous. They can be entrepreneurial. And if we have a company that is entrepreneurial in spirit, we will be able to take our next “(wo)man on the moon” leap.” — Brian Cheskey

Story is based on these stories and interviews

Define your culture before you have any employees

Airbnb isn’t a story of how a wannabe entrepreneur got funding and hired a thousand people in a year then disappeared. Brian was far more meticulous than that. He believes they were one of the only companies in Silicon Valley to list their values before hiring anyone. For Brian, it doesn’t matter how good your product is when you start if you don’t build your company with the right people.

It took 6 months to hire the first Airbnb employee and hundreds of interviews. Imagine how much short term income they sacrificed by staring at resumes rather than gaining customers. It paid off spectacularly.

The first employee was so important because it was someone joining the “Airfam”. They were going to become part of the company’s DNA and the example for everyone to follow. For each applicant, Brian asked himself “…would I want to work with 100 or 1000 of these guys?”

This doesn’t mean Airbnb wanted a company full of clones, he recognizes the importance of having diverse people from different backgrounds with different ideas. Yet they should all share the same underlying drive and value system. As he puts it “culture is simply a shared way of doing something with passion.”

Don’t cheat with universal values

“There’s no such thing as a good or bad culture, it’s either a strong or weak culture. And a good culture for somebody else may not be a good culture for you.” — Brian Chesky

The mere mention of culture can draw eye-rolls from employees across the world. This is because many companies define values that are too fluffy or generic. Honesty and integrity “don’t count” as they should be the baseline for every company anyway. If your values could be copied and pasted to any organization then you’re doing them wrong.

Brian suggests a few principles which zone in precisely the type of people you want at your company. It’s not about traits that make someone world-class in their field but what makes them fit regardless of their skills. Take a couple of examples from Airbnb’s values:

• Champion our mission — Airbnb’s mission is to make people feel like they belong anywhere. Brian used to ask interviewees would they still work with him if they knew they would die in 10 year’s time. If they said yes then he knew they shared the same beliefs.
• To be “cereal” entrepreneurs — This is a throwback to Airbnb’s struggles. When they only had 2 bookings a month, they started selling election-themed cereal too which for some time was the bulk of their income! They want to encourage whacky ideas not a regimented strategy like other companies.

Hire people that intimidate you

Founders pour their hearts and souls into their company yet this sense of ownership can sometimes backfire. The need to control everything can subconsciously prevent them from hiring the best people for the job. They may not want to be challenged because of personal pride.

Brian takes the opposite approach:

“I think that’s what the first thing is, to build a team that is so talented that they kind of, slightly make you uncomfortable to be with them, because you know you are going to have to raise your game to be with them.”

To create a strong culture you need people who won’t just make your employees better but force you to be better too. It helps to stop the idea of self-importance overpowering the conditions for the strongest possible culture.

“It’s a tragedy if the founders outlive the company”

We often hear founders call their companies their baby and unfortunately some act like an overbearing parent. In reality, many people influence a child’s development from teachers to friends to afterschool sports coaches. It’s what helps prepare the child for life without being dependent on their mother or father. Think of the culture of the startup as a child’s character.

Brian and his co-founders have always thought about their company and mission in the long term to build something that endures. If Airbnb is around in 100 years’ time then the culture will be the same regardless of how the world looks and what they are selling.

“Problems will come and go. But culture is forever.”
– Brian Chesky.