Netto Farah

When working on larger projects and / or those with high outcome uncertainty, many org cultures (surprisingly pervasive even in many startups) tend to prioritize tackling low-hanging fruit or default to taking a consensus path ironically termed "the path of least resistance". This approach of solving easy sub-problems ("known unknowns" as Donald Rumsfeld fmr. US Sect of state, would have termed it) builds in sunk costs & illusions of progress, creating inertia to course correct. Most modern project or program operations turn out to be successful if we view them as a portfolio of risks (sorted by highest impact, high uncertainty to lowest impact, high uncertainty). Tackle the ones at the top first. Prove or disprove your hypotheses. Source of image: First round review #product #bets #operating #principles

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I saw a rare example of bad advice from YC recently. They told folks that it doesn’t matter if you’re passionate about your company’s product / mission. While that’s fine from the #VC’s perspective, as lots of enterprise b2b applications are extremely profitable, which was their point. And their business is driven by repeatably successful actions. Growing a b2b business in their wheelhouse, with their network is definitely a successful and repeatable activity. However … most people should not even be an #Entrepreneur. Let alone a founder of a VC-backed startup. The lifestyle will make them miserable. To be a successful #founder, you need to be motivated to get up and work on your company 10+ hours a day, 7 days a week. It’s all-consuming. Usually for an entire decade. So focusing on a product and customers that you don’t care about … that will compuound the personal pain and build a personal hell. I’ve seen that happen to a number of my friends and associates over the years, even when they were seen as tremendous successes. Focus first on what matters the most … your happiness. That includes solving a problem that you’re excited about. But only if you’re actually an entrepreneur. Before you dive into being a business owner…figure out if that lifestyle is for you.

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a note on intuition and building products (via mike knoop, founder - zapier, go follow him on twttr) -- Wisdom for founding teams is "talk to users". Over the last 10 years this has become the playbook for doing 0 to 1 work. As the advice became dogma, some founders forgot why it exists, and a new failure mode emerged: "the blind walk to product-market fit". YC popularized "talk to users" in response to the classic mistake of coming up with some idea in isolation, building in secret for months or years, and launching just to learn no one cares. Talking to users forces faster contact with reality. Your initial idea and and intuition are likely wrong in material ways, so you want to shrink the time to learn this. At Zapier, I tell teams to try and model this behavior: ship in the AM, demo to users in the PM. If you do this, you get 5-7 hits on reality per week compared to a team on a 2-week release process (or worse). This all makes sense and many founders conclude their idea, intuition, or experience don't really matter. They model finding pmf as y=mx+b where cycle time is "m" and the initial idea is "b". In this model, founder intuition gives them an initial head start but impact is quickly overtaken by iteration speed. This leads them to heavily discount or even outright ignore their own experience and intuition -- many get stuck doing a fast cycle, but ultimately directionless, traversal through the pmf maze. The modeling mistake here is the "m" term is decomposed into (iteration speed) * (intuition). Every time you make contact with reality, you learn something new. And you get to decide what to do with that new information. Should you ignore it? Update but carry on? Change directions entirely? This is why intuition is important. Your idea and experience do not just establish initial position on the Y-axis. They are a multiplier on every decision or change you make. The faster your iteration speed, the more overall impact your experience can have. If you're ideas are right, they are right faster. If they are wrong, they are wrong more obviously. All other things equal, founders with experience in a domain outperform blank-slate founders doing the blind walk.

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Technical founders can sometimes get so enamored with the product they are building that they really don’t understand why customers actually buy their product. I’ll take it one step further… Sometimes your product might be only 25% of why a customer buys, the other 75% is stuff you might not even realize until you take a closer look at each specific buyer. - Some buyers value the quality and responsiveess of your support above product feature maturity or feature parity with competitors. - Others use your product and also desire a partner they can work with, for example to teach others and conduct educational workshops. - Still others have specific KPIs and they are buying your product as a means to an end. They see the customer success team as partners who can work with them weekly to help meet and exceed their objectives (cloud cost optimization, increasing the satisfaction of the end users they support). Advice to the founders in my network, take the time to try understand why your customers buy. - It might have less to do with your feature roadmap and more to do with how you show up when they need you and how you help them win. - Your product offering also gets better faster when you understand all the manual things your sales, support, and customer success team do to get the sale and make customers happy. - Talk to more customers to understand why they first bought and why they continue to be paying customers. Understanding why customers really buy makes it so much easier to prioritize the product roadmap and find ways to improve the sales cycle and customer retention. What do you think? Have you experienced the disconnect that can sometimes occur between founders and customer facing leaders? Would love to hear your experiences and advice for others in the comments.

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Starting today, teams can now fully white label IntegrationOS’ AuthKit. I’ve always been a big fan of Plaid and the growth loop that in-component branding provides. Building a trusted brand that’s also visible to 2nd-party users is what I believe to be a big part of Plaid’s success. That said, our north star is to be the most open, flexible and developer-first integration middleware for high-velocity product and engineering teams. Our preference is to let developers embed IntegrationOS anywhere and everywhere - in any way they want. Almost all CPOs and CTOs want to offload the headache behind integrations to a vendor. They just also want access to the same flexibility they’re used to when building in-house. These two demands shouldn’t be mutually exclusive. White labeling is just another push to make sure they're not.

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Take it from me, there’s no better way to learn excellent and practical ways to overhaul your experimentation efficacy! Erin makes critical thinking fun and highly accessible in this workshop, June 11:

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Here's my commits/week vs. customers added. Not a perfect metric for total product effort, but a decent proxy. I get so excited about building products because, compared to consulting, there is unlimited upside. A fixed amount of product effort can make unbounded money while you sleep. (And yeah, I'm not factoring in time spent on customer support. Obviously that's rising with customer count and at some point requires hiring staff. But you get the point.)

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Great take from Orel Zilberman - Slack is killing your productivity. Derrick Schommer and I heard this message while doing ICP interviews. DevHuddle has features available (and some on the roadmap) to fix the interruption-tax of async communication tools that are treated as sync communication tools. It helps to have a culture of truly async collaboration to increase everyone's velocity. https://lnkd.in/eypeaVXV

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What if playing it safe is actually holding your startup back? 🚀 In product development—especially in startups—taking no risks might be the biggest risk of all. I’ve seen firsthand how moving too cautiously can lead to being outpaced by competitors or missing key opportunities. As technology leaders, it’s not about avoiding risk; it’s about understanding, managing, and embracing it strategically. In today’s fast-moving startup world, speed and calculated risk-taking can be the difference between success and failure. 💡 In my latest blog, I break down practical strategies for managing risk while driving growth. Are you ready to take your product to the next level? 👇 Click the link to read more. How do you approach risk in your business? Are you pushing the envelope or playing it too safe? https://lnkd.in/efAUA5xb

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If you live in San Francisco, you’ve probably seen the Vercel billboards asking, "What will you ship?". Of course, I’m a huge fan of Vercel and Guillermo Rauch, but I kept coming back to that question and why this message resonated so deeply with me. It resonates because it’s not just a slogan – It’s an invitation to think about what you will bring into the world and why. The most meaningful impact we have is not just in what we create, but in how we empower others to create. It speaks to the act of building as a fundamental expression of possibility. As the year draws to a close, I’ve been reflecting on why we’re building Structured. We’ve explored countless ways to frame the problem we’re solving and the personas we could focus on. But through every iteration and pivot, we’ve consistently found ourselves circling back to the same fundamental mission: making it easier for more people to build data apps. Data is the raw material of the modern world: the stories of the past, the insights of the present, the foundation of the future. But the tools to use it remain opaque, locked behind complexity and privilege. To simplify this, to make creation accessible, feels like a life’s task. By lowering the barriers to building data apps, we democratize opportunity, enabling more people.. educators, scientists, entrepreneurs to transform raw data into meaningful applications. To build for the builder isn’t just a strategy; it’s our purpose. To enable creation is to expand the surface area of innovation, allowing ripples of progress to extend far beyond what we can immediately see. In that, “What will you ship?” is a philosophy, one that inspires us to shape Structured into something greater than the sum of its parts

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It had been far too long since I last caught up with Andrew Lau, CEO & Co-Founder of Jellyfish, to get the latest on the company. We also discuss the results from their State of Engineering Management Report. In this video, we chat about: * Details about Jellyfish * Customer examples & use cases * Finding from their State of Engineering Management Report * The culture at Jellyfish * Why Jellyfish should be on your radar for your career

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Alexey's growth eng class is an awesome and refreshingly different approach to accelerating growth teams. I spoke last year and cohort had incredible talent, and Alexey really brought out what problems growth teams concretely face when getting wins. Take Alexey's class!

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Thanks for the insightful pitch strategies. When can I get a slot to pitch to you?

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tl;dr: Not every ad channel is going to deliver results. Don’t be afraid to cut the cord on the underperformers before they drain your budget. Ever invested in a channel that just didn’t work out? If you’re a dev marketer, your answer’s most likely yes. At ScraperAPI, Google Ads was a total bust. We tried. We spent. We waited for results that never came. Outside of branded searches, it was a total disaster. It was a stark reminder that not every channel — no matter how popular — is always worth the spend. While I’m a big believer in the idea that growth doesn’t happen overnight, you need to know when it’s time to jump ship before you drain your whole ad budget. Our problem at ScraperAPI was that we were building a product that devs didn’t quite know to even search for yet. Hindsight's 20/20, but I wish we’d poured all that AdWords spend into channels that *actually* helped devs understand our product — like Quora, Reddit, and other dev communities — instead of holding out for a payoff that simply wasn’t coming. tl;dr: Not every ad channel is going to deliver results. Don’t be afraid to cut the cord on the underperformers before they drain your budget.

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Over the last 8+ years, I’ve helped grow multiple startups across different verticals - each with completely different performance review systems. Some are political and opaque, and others are * refreshingly * transparent. We’re building Seam to help rewrite the playbook for performance reviews. Here’s a quick breakdown of our strategy: 1) Simplifying performance management Seam does away with the old system in favor of real-time data and transparency. It’s a breath of fresh air for everyone. 2) Removing guessing games With Seam, managers can analyze employee progress (or areas of improvement) in real-time — no more guesswork when evaluating performance. 3) Improving transparency (for everyone) It’s not just managers who benefit. Employees get to see their performance metrics — fostering healthy competition and promoting productivity. Performance management today is broken - we’re building Seam to fix it ⚡ https://lnkd.in/grBNi7ee

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YC founders: here's a harsh truth that might help you when hiring. Great people want to work with great people. But...A-players hire A-players. B-players hire C-players. Keeping the hiring bar relentlessly high is critical, especially early on. A single person that isn’t great can drag the quality down of the entire team. Folks will look around and realize the standards are lower than they thought. They’ll realize that they don’t need to be as good. They’ll realize they can learn less from their colleagues. People make the organization, not the other way around. And that if you don’t have great people, you won’t have a great organization.

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Founders, waitlists don't work unless you talk about your product somewhere else or offer some type of lead magnet. Nobody cares about getting updates. That's not enough of a value exchange. Just published my latest teardown (search Roast My SaaS on YT) about a startup with a huge missed opportunity to capture leads & onboard them. Too bad the video is a little over 15 minutes and LinkedIn doesn't allow me to publish it here as well. #buildinpublic

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