Week 34: A Bias for Action

I’ve come upon a post by Tim Ferriss. He mentioned a blog containing a list of 140 questions worth answering.

And since I love questions, I just sat and answered them. Here are the first couple of them.

What are you thinking about these days?Having and raising kids.Life at startup VS scaleups VS big companies.Short term pain (lower salary when starting something new) VS long term gain (freedom of a profitable successful startup.)Working on something I enjoy VS something that’s of benefit to winder audience VS both.Extended off-time to think.What happens to your consciousness when you walk into a teleporter?Stays the same.What’s the most embarrassing cold email you’ve sent?Nothing in mind lately. Which is a worrying sign (not being out of one’s comfort zone is worrying.)I’ve sent many sales/intro/customer-support emails/whatsapp/linkedin messages in my startup days but I don’t think they can qualify as embarrassing.Does time exist?It just did.What do you hate?Outsmarting customers. In pre-PMF product companies, it’s always good to ship something in 2 weeks, test with real users and let them tell you what’s wrong/right than waiting for a full cycle of 1-2 month of conducting research, designing and iterating 5 different versions, and shipping 1 at the end. Nothing beats a user experience delivered in a user hand on a real device with a prod app. This is always turned out to be true VS trying to outsmart the users – trying to design the perfect feature. I’ve seen it failing again and again with startups. Know when to get into action – I love people with a bias for action . And I absolutely detest the approach of “we should iterate on this for another week.” I don’t buy “slow is smooth and smooth is fast.” And again, especially for products pre-PMF. Until a startup reaches PMF, stop trying to be smart. Get your PMF and do whatever you want. Everything changes then.

More to follow in part 2.

One of my favorite books by one of my favorite authors Von Mises. This suits this blog.