Mathias Meyer's Blog, page 3

Taking Care of Business, Taking Care of Yourself

About a year ago, while hanging out with people from a friendly company in San Francisco, one of their junior people asked me a seemingly simple question: What do you do for fun?

I was stunned, and I didnt have an answer. I didnt know what I did for fun, and I almost panicked from not being able to come up with something beyond hanging out and spending time with my friends and family outside of work.

Back in the real world and at home, I continued pondering this question, and happiness and th...

Always Improve, Never Stop, Never Pause, Never Appreciate

Building out a company and a business has been my greatest challenge so far. The companys mission is built around continuous integration and continuous improvement, the constant drive of always getting better at what you do.

As engineers, were trained to fix bugs, to build out new features, to hold postmortems where we analyze what didnt work and how we can improve things.

As founders, we follow a similar pattern. We have a ton of ideas on what we want to improve, where we want to get better,...

Why Hiring for "Culture Fit" Hurts Your Culture

There's a term which in the sense of hiring (and firing), is more loaded than anything else. I'm talking about the culture fit.

A recent post on the Lighthouse blog (a product I'm actively using and that I'm a big fan of, by the way!) states that not checking for culture fit is one of the eight interview mistakes that cost you great candidates.

The post brings up the most peculiar example in this regard, a company culture of drinking (disclaimer: I've been a non-drinker fo...

An Alternate Reality for Startups

A reality where success isn't measured in the amount of funding rounds or size of acquisitions but in terms of monthly revenue and positive cash flow.

A reality where a startup's impact isn't measured with a hockey stick, but based on the impact it has on its community, its people and its customers.

A reality where startups acknowledge their own survivor bias and realize that not everything they've done has lead them to where they are now, but that they're here in spite of...

Why I Don't Read Email in the Morning

Early mornings are pristine, they're my favorite time of the day. As the sun keeps coming up earlier and earlier, I find myself waking up at 6. Rather than do anything else, I either go for a run or skate, or I grab a book and a cup of coffee and read.

Mornings are usually my most creative time. I have a clear head that allows me to think freely and focus on the kind of work that requires attention and creative thinking. That means I write, or work on strategic topics relevant to the comp...

How to do Vacation Right: All It Takes is to Flip a Switch

A recent post on a change in our vacation
policy
has caused a response that I'd have never have imagined. Culture, especially in
the US, seems to have a very different idea on vacation days and what you should
be doing during a vacation.

Last year, I took a long vacation myself, and I want to talk about a few things
that I did to get as much as possible out of it.

In the previous article on vacations, I argued that switching off is an
important part of taking time off, and it's probably the h...

Giving Back: Travis CI's Charitable Giving in 2014

One of my core beliefs is that a business needs to care about more than just
their customers and their people. They need to care for the local environment
they work in, and they need to care about people (in their local area if
possible) less fortunate than them. It's part of being an ethical
business.
A healthy business shouldn't be about hoarding money, it should be about doing
good with it.

At Travis CI we started a program a last year. Each of
our employees gets to choose a charity where...

Reading List 2014

2014 has been a good year of reading for me, and below is the list of books
I've read and a bit of commentary on each. As you'll notice, I've been focusing
on leadership, management and the likes a lot, the area where I still have so
much to learn and where I'm thankful for some of the books that shed light on
how other companies have handled the hard bits of building and growing a
business.

Thinking, Fast and Slow

One of the best books I've read in 2014. Consider it an introduct...

From Open (Unlimited) to Minimum Vacation Policy

When Travis CI turned into a business with employees, one of our ideas was to
not constrain people in how much time they take off for vacations. We didn't
track the days people were taking off, and as the people running the company, we
didn't actively encourage people to take times off. In short, we had an open
vacation policy.

The cause was intended to be noble, as we didn't want to get into the way of
people taking time off as much time as they need to recharge. I myself am a big
fan o...

Review of my Personal Goals at Travis CI

I posted this on our company-internal blog at Travis CI
to share progress on goals I've set myself over the past couple of months with my team.

They include some reflection on our development as a business and on what I got
done and what I didn't manage to finish.

I figured I might as well publish these here as a public commitment to
improving and to give some more insight as to how our company works.

Transparency and openness are some of the goals we aim for, and this fits in
well with thes...