Built to Last
THE BLOG

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What does an fighter jet, Messi, Zuckerberg and General Patton all have in common? When working in the software industry it is very common to not know exactly what the finished product or feature should entail. Requirements might be fuzzy when starting out, the initial idea might turn out to be suboptimal and when dealing with clients… Well, clients change their minds about what they want all the freaking time! This inherent uncertainty gave way…

Simple rules for reducing stress and burnout. As covid hit and people who where used to work in an office had to start working remotely, Slack (and similar tools) became the defacto standard for communication. A "ping" became the new knock on a shoulder and people became frustrated when a reply delayed. All of this lead to availability stress followed by burnout. However, I feel that my team and I have come up with…

Lessons learned from a decade working in and managing remote teams 2020 was the year that Covid-19 hit the world like a hammer. Restrictions and social distancing forced Working From Home to become part of the new normal. For many managers, this was the first time managing without being able to physically meet their team, and they struggle when unable to "grab a quick coffee" to check catch issues that might be brewing (no pun intended). In my experience, having first worked

A story of stretching too thin It's the summer of 2019. I'm sitting at my desk at Spotify's HQ in Stockholm, working hard to justify my relatively high hourly rate. My mind is not 100% present though. It's also trying to device new ways to recruite more developers to my own company. And it's trying to figure out a way to find a gig for one of our consultants living in Berlin. Suddenly I hear the all too familiar ping of an incoming Slack message. It's the guy in Berlin asking something about his vacation days. It's a perfectly normal…

A tool to find actionable insight In 2012 Gary Keller released a book called The One Thing. In this book he argues that you can reach extraordinary results by focusing your efforts at the most important thing. At it’s core is the focusing question, which helps you find the lead domino in whatever area you are focusing on. The question itself is as follows: - What’s the one thing you can do such that by doing it everything else is either easier or unnecessary? At the surface it seems like a trivial question…

For fun and profit (?) My first angel investment was made April 6th, 2019 and at the time of writing this I have a total of 12 companies in my angel startup investing. Does this make me qualified to speak on angel investments? I think so. But as always, do your own research, and don’t take the words from a random person on the internet as objective truth. Also, keep in mind the beginning of my career as an angel investor included the last two years of one of the greatest bull markets in history and, it's no guarantee that what used to work for me in the past will work for you in the future. With that out of the way, let's get into it…

If someone had given me ten cents every time I heard the sentence in the title, I would be a very wealthy man. However, that sentence is a perfect example of the worst type of feedback you can give someone. Before we dive into why that sentence isn’t useful as feedback the and the How of giving feedback, let’s take a moment to look at the Why and the What. WHY BOTHER? The Britannica Dictionary states: “Feedback is helpful information or criticism that is given to someone to say what can be done to improve something such as a performance, product, etc.” [https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/feedback] Notice that while it does contain the word criticism…

Faster alone, further together I’ll never forget the last time a founder told me that. Call it Ego, if you want. I certainly do! But I promised myself that I would never miss out on a deal due to my ticket size being too small again. Easier said than done when you are a small-ish angel investor. After all, the money you have in your bank account is all you have to play with(never borrow money to angel invest!). However, there is an established practice of syndicating deals. That is, multiple angels join forces to invest from a single legal entity and thus reach a larger collective ticket size. This concept is generally referred to as an SPV. SPV is short for Special Purpose Vehicle, which …

Throughout a startup's journey, the role of the CTO goes through four different stages, and each stage requires different types of leadership. Knowing what stage you are in and where the focus should lie is key for both CTO and founder. Below I’ve modeled the four key stages that a startup, and consequently that a CTO goes through. And while the actual numbers can differ between companies, the stages are usually the same. In this blog post, I will do a deep dive into each archetype, with a discussion at the end where I provide advice for founders (should you even hire a CTO?) and aspiring CTOs….

Prioritising Productivity Over Reactivity It’s Tuesday. Your calendar shows your morning is mostly filled with meetings. First things first though. The Task needs to get done before you go into the first meeting of the day. You just need to check your email quickly. You open the inbox. 132 new emails. Before you have time to reply to any of them you get a notification from Slack. It’s Carl. “Hey, do you have a minute?”. You really don’t, but you also don’t want to leave Carl hanging. “Sure! What’s up, Carl?” The rest of the day is an endless series of trying to catch up and The Task never gets done.….

Why forcing a choice is better than making a comparison There are two ways to build a company. You can build something incrementally better, such as a slightly better window cleaning company. Or you can try to build something that is different different. I have no problem with building something incrementally better, such as an IT consulting company.1 It is a great way to go about building a great life for yourself. In fact, if you are a first-time entrepreneur it’s probably the best way to start! However, if you are aiming for the stars. If you want to build something that lasts generations, possibly impacting the lives of millions. Then it’s not enough to build something slightly better. Then you have to build something truly different…

Every. Single. Time. I've seen founders of all backgrounds try to reach for the stars. Many fail. And most people who succeed take a long time to do so. Usually with a lot of failures along the way. Yet, every so often I come across someone who looks at other people's success and claims that there is some external factor that made them succeed in their venture. They claim that something like having a large salary at a big-name company before going out on their own is what gave them the unfair advantage to succeed over regular folk. Whatever regular folk means. If you ask me, this is pure…

Who are you selling to? Who is your customer? 🧐 If your answer is an enthusiastic "everyone!" I can tell you two things. You have high ambitions! 🚀 You're in for a world of trouble! 😳 The trouble comes from a lack of focus. If you're trying to serve everyone, you're implicitly serving no one. You have nothing to make you stand out. This is where the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) comes in. The ICP is one tool you can use to hone in on exactly who would benefit the most from your services. As you might already have realised, this is not only useful to the sales team. It can also inform product decisions, being used when choosing which features you should build next. Or help Marketing find the right channel and message. Or help Customer Success anticipate customer issues. With me so far? 😇 Good! So how do you create…

Should you ever rewrite your software from scratch? As a technical advisor (1), there is one question that I get asked by clients every so often. Is the state of the software so bad that it needs to be rewritten from scratch? It’s easy to fool oneself into thinking it might be a simple task. Just build a new thing that does what the old one did, right? Wrong. If you Joel Spolsky’s legendary essay Things You Should Never Do (2), you get the sense that you should never do a complete rewrite. However, if you’ve been working with mobile apps long enough, you will most likely have heard something completely different. “Always Rewrite the App Every 3-5 years”, was a common mantra in the mobile world. As you might have guessed by now, the answer is…

They Stop You from Figuring out How to Grow Whenever I am told that a company has under 20% market share of any market, I am skeptical. That is why my 3rd Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights piece is on Why I am Skeptical of Low Market Shares. The low purported share may be factual based on the company’s generic definition of the market in which it operates. But I don’t take 8% share or 11% share or 17% share as helpful in any strategic sense. A company should have a definition of market share that helps it grow. These low shares don’t help, even though the sentiment is typically that with only 8% share, there are 92 points-of-share available, so growth opportunities are virtually limitless. For the market in question to be validly defined and the 8% share to be a representative measure, the company needs to