Today is my official last day at Fundera / Nerdwallet.
For the first time in my life, I have absolutely no clue what will come next. This is a new experience for me and it fills me with anxiety. But I am eager to learn how to explore and embrace the uncertainty.
When I was a teenager I played tennis competitively. I was a nutcase and would regularly throw tantrums and break rackets when I lost. I saw a sports psychologist and he told me about an ancient Chinese phrase called wu wei which he described as meaning "go with the flow." While it's a minor perversion of this Taoist concept, Westerners have adopted it to represent an orientation of "effortless action," "non-doing," or "action through inaction." I love it and it has served me well.
As a Type-A-Control-Freak-INTJ, wu wei doesn't always come naturally, but when it does it's beautiful. I am ready to go with the flow.
Every once in a while I interact with a new product and have an epiphany: "Ah! This is it. This is the future and how the world will work."
Over the summer I caught up with one of my favorite entrepreneurs, Howard Lerman, and he said he had something to show me. It was a new product he and a bunch of colleagues from the various companies he had previously founded were building. He gave me a high-level overview of what they were doing, but showing always beats telling. And when Howard demoed Ro.am, I knew that I was witnessing what the future of work looked like for companies that operate out of an office, remotely, or a combination of the two. There has already been a lot of good coverage of Roam and I encourage you the check it out: Howard's remarks, CNBC, TechCrunch, Squawk Box, and IVP.
Many companies are trying to find ways for people to work better together remotely by creating some version of a browser-based HQ. We've seen everything from Meta's futuristic avatar-based version of the workplace metaverse to various permutations of gamified work experiences. Most of them come across cartoonish and impractical. But Roam actually feels like a HQ, but in the cloud. It's a viable virtual office.
I fell in love with it for several personal reasons. First and foremost, it mimics a physical office. I can see who is present, who they're meeting with, "knock" on their "doors," and have spontaneous conversations. It's the only thing I've seen that comes close to the in person experience. It's intentionally skeuomorphic, or as Howard describes, a "breakthrough office graphical interface," the same way Apple designed for the iPhone when they were acclimating the world to transitioning from desktop to mobile.
Today is my official last day at Fundera / Nerdwallet.
For the first time in my life, I have absolutely no clue what will come next. This is a new experience for me and it fills me with anxiety. But I am eager to learn how to explore and embrace the uncertainty.
When I was a teenager I played tennis competitively. I was a nutcase and would regularly throw tantrums and break rackets when I lost. I saw a sports psychologist and he told me about an ancient Chinese phrase called wu wei which he described as meaning "go with the flow." While it's a minor perversion of this Taoist concept, Westerners have adopted it to represent an orientation of "effortless action," "non-doing," or "action through inaction." I love it and it has served me well.
As a Type-A-Control-Freak-INTJ, wu wei doesn't always come naturally, but when it does it's beautiful. I am ready to go with the flow.
Every once in a while I interact with a new product and have an epiphany: "Ah! This is it. This is the future and how the world will work."
Over the summer I caught up with one of my favorite entrepreneurs, Howard Lerman, and he said he had something to show me. It was a new product he and a bunch of colleagues from the various companies he had previously founded were building. He gave me a high-level overview of what they were doing, but showing always beats telling. And when Howard demoed Ro.am, I knew that I was witnessing what the future of work looked like for companies that operate out of an office, remotely, or a combination of the two. There has already been a lot of good coverage of Roam and I encourage you the check it out: Howard's remarks, CNBC, TechCrunch, Squawk Box, and IVP.
Many companies are trying to find ways for people to work better together remotely by creating some version of a browser-based HQ. We've seen everything from Meta's futuristic avatar-based version of the workplace metaverse to various permutations of gamified work experiences. Most of them come across cartoonish and impractical. But Roam actually feels like a HQ, but in the cloud. It's a viable virtual office.
I fell in love with it for several personal reasons. First and foremost, it mimics a physical office. I can see who is present, who they're meeting with, "knock" on their "doors," and have spontaneous conversations. It's the only thing I've seen that comes close to the in person experience. It's intentionally skeuomorphic, or as Howard describes, a "breakthrough office graphical interface," the same way Apple designed for the iPhone when they were acclimating the world to transitioning from desktop to mobile.
I need to be around people in order to feel energized, productive, and happy. If I ever were to build another company, I'd want to work from home 1-2 days per week and be in an office surrounded by people 3-4 days per week. Roam is the tool that creates a seamless experience transitioning through these modalities, ensuring nobody loses out on the magic of collaboration. It also eliminates roughly 50% of Zoom meeting time by making quick hallway conversations practical - the average meeting time in Roam is ~8 minutes!
The shift to distributed teams, remote work, and an asynchronous cadence has been confusing and hard for most founders and leaders. There's always a creeping suspicion in the back of your mind that people are phoning it in and that you're losing the magical moments that make building things so special and rewarding. And for those who value a performance based culture, the transition to remote or hybrid is a steep learning curve with few best practices. Roam is a happy equilibrium. It's the solution we've been waiting for that needs to exist. It's not that Roam enables managers to surveil, it's that it creates a work setting that enables people to flourish regardless of where they are. Some people and roles will always be able to operate asynchronously and that's great. But that's the exception, not the rule. And Roam empowers different configurations to embrace best practices and develop new ones for a rapidly changing work world.
I believe that Roam will be the platform that enables more magic moments between colleagues and helps us to do even better work together. I'm lucky to be an investor backing Howard and the incredible Roam team. Sign your company up here.
Over the past several years I have noticed a trend that people are starting companies for the sake of starting companies. I am a big proponent of entrepreneurship and believe it is a very positive thing for more people to feel empowered to start companies. It's how we make more progress faster. But I do not think it's a good thing to be a founder simply for the sake of being a founder. And this tweet characterizes how most people who fall into that bucket go about it. Because the gravity of wanting to start something is so strong, people do tons of research across a variety of different problem spaces until they land on something they think may have potential. And they do this without a deep passion and vision for the problem they are trying to solve.
I think this is a sub-optimal and time-wasting path of entrepreneurship. In my experience, the best founders start with a bold vision of how something in the world should work and what the end-state of the problem they are trying to solve looks like. They have a strong product vision and relentlessly pursue it. They are obstinate about what success looks like, but pragmatic enough to know that they may need to modify the course of their journey in order to succeed. Stubborn about vision, strongly opinionated about where to start, and flexible enough to make modifications once learnings are accumulated.
Loading up on research and constantly pivoting based on feedback before taking a first step can be a negative indication that a founder lacks conviction. And it also deprives founding teams of developing the most important muscle they need when getting something from zero to one and beyond: shipping things. Talking to potential customers is important, but shipping is better. Sometimes you need to will something into existence, and there's zero substitute for a strong vision coupled with the ability to ship. No amount of customer research can compensate for a lack of this.
This doesn't just apply to the earliest stages. In companies that have reached product market fit, I have seen customer research become a substitute for vision + shipping. It leads to inertia. Again, research is important, but if you truly have conviction about something, the best way to test it is to build it. There's no right way to build a company, but I have a strong bias towards doing the things that will generate the momentum you need to accomplish ambitious goals.
I need to be around people in order to feel energized, productive, and happy. If I ever were to build another company, I'd want to work from home 1-2 days per week and be in an office surrounded by people 3-4 days per week. Roam is the tool that creates a seamless experience transitioning through these modalities, ensuring nobody loses out on the magic of collaboration. It also eliminates roughly 50% of Zoom meeting time by making quick hallway conversations practical - the average meeting time in Roam is ~8 minutes!
The shift to distributed teams, remote work, and an asynchronous cadence has been confusing and hard for most founders and leaders. There's always a creeping suspicion in the back of your mind that people are phoning it in and that you're losing the magical moments that make building things so special and rewarding. And for those who value a performance based culture, the transition to remote or hybrid is a steep learning curve with few best practices. Roam is a happy equilibrium. It's the solution we've been waiting for that needs to exist. It's not that Roam enables managers to surveil, it's that it creates a work setting that enables people to flourish regardless of where they are. Some people and roles will always be able to operate asynchronously and that's great. But that's the exception, not the rule. And Roam empowers different configurations to embrace best practices and develop new ones for a rapidly changing work world.
I believe that Roam will be the platform that enables more magic moments between colleagues and helps us to do even better work together. I'm lucky to be an investor backing Howard and the incredible Roam team. Sign your company up here.
Over the past several years I have noticed a trend that people are starting companies for the sake of starting companies. I am a big proponent of entrepreneurship and believe it is a very positive thing for more people to feel empowered to start companies. It's how we make more progress faster. But I do not think it's a good thing to be a founder simply for the sake of being a founder. And this tweet characterizes how most people who fall into that bucket go about it. Because the gravity of wanting to start something is so strong, people do tons of research across a variety of different problem spaces until they land on something they think may have potential. And they do this without a deep passion and vision for the problem they are trying to solve.
I think this is a sub-optimal and time-wasting path of entrepreneurship. In my experience, the best founders start with a bold vision of how something in the world should work and what the end-state of the problem they are trying to solve looks like. They have a strong product vision and relentlessly pursue it. They are obstinate about what success looks like, but pragmatic enough to know that they may need to modify the course of their journey in order to succeed. Stubborn about vision, strongly opinionated about where to start, and flexible enough to make modifications once learnings are accumulated.
Loading up on research and constantly pivoting based on feedback before taking a first step can be a negative indication that a founder lacks conviction. And it also deprives founding teams of developing the most important muscle they need when getting something from zero to one and beyond: shipping things. Talking to potential customers is important, but shipping is better. Sometimes you need to will something into existence, and there's zero substitute for a strong vision coupled with the ability to ship. No amount of customer research can compensate for a lack of this.
This doesn't just apply to the earliest stages. In companies that have reached product market fit, I have seen customer research become a substitute for vision + shipping. It leads to inertia. Again, research is important, but if you truly have conviction about something, the best way to test it is to build it. There's no right way to build a company, but I have a strong bias towards doing the things that will generate the momentum you need to accomplish ambitious goals.
