This seems like a really great thing to try at small scale first. Seems important to have a larger vision but make Little Bets to start, as Peter Sims or Cal Newport would say. You don’t want to start with 30+ people with serious expertise at 90% likelihood of conversion because you want to anneal into a good structure, not bake your early mistakes into the lasting organizational culture. (Maybe you had already planned on this but seems worth clarifying as one of the most common mistakes made by EAs.)
I forget what you told me in our shared car ride a few months ago about why you ended up handing off ALERT, but my naive pattern match is that you didn’t do the thing cflexman suggested and that was a large factor for why it didn’t work out for you. Is that right or am I off?
Nah we were only 5 people plus a list of contacts to the end. Main blocker was trying to solve executive search and funding at the same time when these are coupled problems. And the cause of that is maybe me not having enough pull.
This seems like a really great thing to try at small scale first. Seems important to have a larger vision but make Little Bets to start, as Peter Sims or Cal Newport would say. You don’t want to start with 30+ people with serious expertise at 90% likelihood of conversion because you want to anneal into a good structure, not bake your early mistakes into the lasting organizational culture. (Maybe you had already planned on this but seems worth clarifying as one of the most common mistakes made by EAs.)
Great point. We haven’t made any irreversible decisions: we’re letting the new director (someone with actual ops chops) design the sample path.
I forget what you told me in our shared car ride a few months ago about why you ended up handing off ALERT, but my naive pattern match is that you didn’t do the thing cflexman suggested and that was a large factor for why it didn’t work out for you. Is that right or am I off?
Nah we were only 5 people plus a list of contacts to the end. Main blocker was trying to solve executive search and funding at the same time when these are coupled problems. And the cause of that is maybe me not having enough pull.