| | | | | | | “We need a front-end developer for Tuesday, but it will take months to find someone in the US.” If you are looking for your next remote hire, Athyna has you covered. From finance and ops, to creative and engineering. | The secret weapon for ambitious startups. No search fees. No activation fees. Just incredible talent, matched with AI precision—at lightning speed. All up up to 70% less than hiring locally. | | | | All the best opportunities I have had recently have come thanks to my personal brand. Investors, advisors, employees, speaking gigs, sponsors. | But some founders are still either: a) time poor, or b) hesitant to find their voice. Playbookz helps founders and execs build ultra-profitable personal brands. | Good news is—readers get $1,000 off the first month building your brand. | | Interested in sponsoring these emails? See our partnership options here. |
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| | HOUSEKEEPING 📨 | Not much housekeeping today. As per usual, I am putting the finishing touches on this email at 10 minutes past two in the morning, a few hours before the piece is set to go live. Some fun, extra reading for you for this week if you like it were the two pieces below. You probably hear me talk about Athyna enough, but these were two cracking pieces I am really glad to be a part of. | | The first is from Tom at Strategy Breakdowns where he interviewed me on creating a meaningful culture. It has the highest open rate in any of his emails for months. And the the other is from Jaryd who writes How They Grow. This one was more of a long breakdown of Athyna and our overall strategy. Hope you like them! |
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| | COLLECTION 👨👩👧👦 | Being a leader can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but the role of a CEO? That’s probably the most difficult job description on the planet. To clear things up, we are going back to a handful of the CEOs, and other executives we have spoken with in the past to break it down for us—no bullshit. If you've ever wondered ‘what the heck do other leaders actually do?’ This one’s for you. | | The role has undoubtedly evolved over time. When we first started, securing a banking sponsor dominated my focus. I interacted with roughly 60 banks, learning how to effectively communicate with them, lawyers, and various stakeholders involved in acquiring a bank sponsor. Subsequently, as I was one of the few front-end engineers, I actively participated in product development given my engineering background. |  | How Mercury CEO Navigated The SVB Bank Failure and What You Need to Know On Banking | NerdWallet |
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| After we had a bigger-than-anticipated launch, my role shifted towards extensive customer support and building foundational customer service and other teams. Right now, my focus has transitioned to a "chief problem solver" approach. With a competent executive team managing key functions, I identify and address critical issues or areas for improvement across the organization. | *To see our full interview with Immad, head over here. | | My role changes every quarter because this job is all about adapting to what's needed. We have specialists in-house for core roles, like engineers building the product, product managers strategizing, and marketing folks promoting it. Most of the time, I lean into whichever part of the company needs extra help or explore new frontiers. | As the company matures, we recognize new skills we need to develop. This means hiring people into those roles and eventually bringing in leaders for them. I often spend time on that frontier, figuring out what these new roles will look like for Convex. Right now, I’m focused on enhancing the developer experience, collaborating with the team on writing and content strategy. When I'm not handling typical CEO tasks like signing contracts and dealing with random requests, I enjoy brainstorming with the team, working to excel in this area for Convex. | *To see our full interview with Jamie, head over here. | | I feel like building a successful business is a little bit like making a movie. If you look at a movie production, it’s typically done on a fixed and short time schedule — there typically is a deadline when they want it to get into cinemas, and there are various preceding dates that represent different stages in that process. So, I view my job as a movie: it requires a lot of sacrifices, commitment, working long hours, but also making sure to hire and retain good people. I think it's not only the front-office people, the ‘actors’, but also the back-office people who are doing the behind-the-scenes stuff, like the ‘special effects’ team, who are crucial as well. |  | How To Build A $12 BILLION Company | Daniel Westgarth |
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| Day-to-day though, we move incredibly quickly at Deel. It’s one of the things that we pride ourselves on. This means we practice a highly iterative work method, so the day always starts with me checking what problems are out there and picking the highest impact one. Then we’ll concentrate on around two to five different problems and solve them in order of priority. | *To see our full interview with Dan, head over here. | | When I was promoted to the CEO role a few years ago, I felt equally excited and scary. As I thought about the role and the associated responsibility, my mind started spiralling into a deep, dark hole. I also pretty quickly realised that I had no idea what ‘being a CEO’ even meant. Fortunately, I have great mentors who helped me on my journey, especially Nick Crocker, Niki Scevak, Rachael Neumann and Robyn Denholm. They guided me on the CEO path, but frankly half the time I still don’t know what I’m doing. | For all CEOs out there, after reading lots and lots of blog posts about what CEOs do, here is my daily reminder on my own to-do list. Firstly, setting the vision and strategy is your core responsibility—how are you changing the world? What are your building blocks to build strength along the way to get there? |
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| However, even the best strategy will only work as long as you have the money to pay for it. It’s the CEO’s job to make sure the strategy brings in the required revenue or fundraise to support the strategy. Then comes hiring—there’s nothing more important than hiring the right team. Making sure they not only fit but add to your culture, are technical superstars and complement the rest of the team. | The emotionally hardest part of the job is to keep yourself and the team focused and accountable to results. This is the hardest, loneliest and can be the most energy-draining part of the job. The only way to make this easier for yourself is to hire and develop absolute superstars and believe in them. | Lastly, communicate and over-communicate your vision so often that you feel sick that you keep repeating the same phrases over and over again. Spread your vision internally with the team and externally with customers, suppliers, investors and frankly anyone who will listen. Practice your one-liner and all the hard questions you inevitably receive every time as you keep repeating yourself.
Remember that even though you’ve said the same sentence a million times, your audience is hearing it for the first time. Evangelise as if it’s day one, every day. | *To see our full interview with Michael, head over here. | | My main job is to be ahead of the company at all times. I’ve hired very talented leaders to execute the strategy we have aligned upon, and I trust them to do so. | In the meantime, I need to analyze everything that is going on in the market, in the company, and with our customers and anticipate what Oyster should be doing to maximize our mission impact and business success. And, of course, I need to influence my team to take the right direction based on my findings. | *To see our full interview with Tony, head over here. | | Being a relatively small company, everyone at Kinde wears a lot of hats. I’m no different. That’s part of the fun of the job. My primary role is as CEO and the job involves three key things: culture and storytelling, team building and hiring, and vision and strategy. | And, of course, making sure we have the money to deliver on those—but I really see that as a function of the others. Having the right team, the right minds, and the right skills in place ultimately leads to the necessary revenue growth and financial control to keep things running smoothly. | | Any one of those things slips and we’re not going to be an effective company. What it really comes down to is spending a lot of time with the team and removing blockers to enable them to be most effective. I make sure I create space for the team to take ownership and make sure they have all the information they need to make smart decisions autonomously.
As a product company, a typical day will almost always involve some kind of design, strategy or review session with one of our teams. | Product and marketing are our two big focus areas right now so I spend a lot of time with those teams. And this is where those other hats come in. To some extent I also play the role of CMO, CPO and Head of Design.
Typically we’ll deep dive into whatever the team is working through at any one time, going deep into details and making sure we’re all on the same page. A lot of the job is actually alignment and making sure everyone is largely saying the same thing. |
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| We’re a heavily design driven company so we’re pretty ruthless about peeling back the layers of everything we put out there to make sure we get to something that’s elegant, beautiful and effective. This takes a lot more work than I think people realise, but hopefully if you’ve tried our product or seen any of our marketing you’ll feel the love that’s gone into it. | We try to be pretty conscious of how much we try to do at any one time. We’ve found as a company that there is a finite amount of projects we should be working on at any one time if we want to deliver really great results. So we keep it limited. I think like most great companies there is always more we want to do than we can possibly accomplish, so we try to be pretty strict about prioritizing and only doing as much as we can all realistically hold in our heads as a team. | This means saying no to a lot of things, but it also means doing really well at a handful of small things—but making sure they are really amazing. | *To see our full interview with Ross, head over here. | | We’re a tiny startup so my day to day involves tons of marketing, through Twitter mostly, product direction—I’m a designer by trade—and dealing with any customer sales needs.
My background is design and user-experience so I live in Figma. I have tons of iterative cycles we go through to get to what our customers see. |  | Designs for days in Figma. |
| *To see our full interview with John, head over here. | | As CEO, my job boils down to a few key things that I spend the most time thinking about, first, is setting the short term and long term vision and mission for the company as a whole. Next is for me to sell that vision to customers, investor, and our team. While also, helping drive that tactically by supporting key projects across product, marketing, or sales. | The job of CEO is also to step into any role that needs a leader. For me today, that leadership role is sales. Spending time first as both the only seller at Pocus and now sales leader to four Account Executives I deeply understand what it takes to be in this role and better understand the ideal candidate to replace myself.
My calendar day-to-day looks like a lot of meetings with some carved out focus time to think about the important strategic questions. |
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| I try and block my days to minimize context switching, for example, I do all my calls with direct reports on the same day back to back.
A typical slate of calls every week might include; meetings with leads and prospects, catching up with with existing customers, internal team calls, Pocus community events and some investors relations. A typical Friday is back to back and usually includes at least one scheduling conflict. | *To see our full interview with Alexa, head over here. | | I am still on the floor with the team while setting the vision and direction of Goterra. Identifying our opportunities, talent gaps, setting our goals and guidance for the team to get us there. | Every day, I focus on building an autonomous team of leaders to deliver on our ambitious goals. I drive the teams to be focusing on execution across all facets of their work. At the moment this means documentation, process and leading our commitment to each other and the task at hand. | *To see our full interview with Olympia, head over here. |
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| | OUR BEST STUFF 🥑 | Founders, investors & leaders in tech, that read Open Source CEO outperform their competition. These are our best tools. |  | “I came for the newsletter, I stay for the resources.” - A made up reader. |
| Business is hard. We want to build the tools we wish we had. Check them out here. | |
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| | My job as an investor is to meet with founders, make investment decisions, and support our existing portfolio companies as they scale. I also have broader leadership responsibilities across Airtree as one of seven Partners. I love that there's a lot of context-switching in my day-to-day job. It’s impossible to get bored. Technology is ever-changing, and our portfolio and Airtree ourselves are constantly growing and evolving. |  | Elicia, pictured right. |
| I have a few set meetings every week, including our Partner meeting on Monday to discuss firm-wide leadership matters and our Investment Committee meeting on Tuesdays to discuss potential investments. I'll generally meet a couple of new prospective founders each day while also running diligence processes alongside an Investment Manager for any startups progressing through the investment pipeline. We work as a deal team to write an investment memo, which includes everything from customer calls to an analysis of a startup's financial model. Once we decide to invest, we work alongside those founders for up to 10 years, so my day-to-day job often involves supporting my portfolio companies. This is a mixture of board meetings, regular catch-ups, and generally being available for any ad-hoc support they may need. | *To see our full interview with Elicia, head over here. | | At Sidebar, our entire team wants to accelerate our member’s careers. That is winning for us. That is the lens through which I look through everything at Sidebar. In every meeting, we are thinking about - what are the ways we can help people be more impactful at work.
My role in each meeting is to unblock each member of the team so they can fly. If I am doing my job well, our team consistently moves faster and faster and our members feel that speed in the product experience. | *To see our full interview with Lexy, head over here. | | I'll spend about half and half between continuing working with the team at Up, and working on the family office at Euphemia. I've been working on a strategy for the next 25 years to enhance our digital capabilities at Up, bringing them into the community sphere for social good. Bendigo has been strong and passionate in this area for 25 years, and now we're reflecting on those achievements. We're asking ourselves, what have we accomplished, and how can we amplify, accelerate, and scale that impact using technology over the next 25 years? | That's where most of my brain power goes—thinking about how to scale this initiative. It's a multi-billion-dollar effort, reaching millions of customers and affecting the lives of many Australians. I also spend time with various teams—product, design, home loans, sales, engineering, support—helping steer the ship, offering guidance and advice, and providing input wherever I can. | | I do a lot of testing, trying out new features and products, and giving feedback to the team to create a constant feedback loop as an early alpha user. Additionally, I answer a lot of customer questions. Every day, I respond to customers on social media and through our internal messaging systems, probably handling around 100 queries a day between meetings and other tasks.
For me, having the co-founder or senior executives stay connected to customers is crucial. It helps us gauge current issues, track our progress on our mission and vision, monitor the team's well-being, address any conflicts with customers, and ensure we're aligned with our financial literacy mission. Staying connected to customers and answering their questions daily is like a secret superpower for maintaining that connection and alignment. | *To see our full interview with Dom, head over here. | | I think in the early-stage, all that counts is building and selling. So, I usually split my time across product, marketing, sales, setting the strategic direction and enabling my team can do their best work. | As a founder, I wear multiple hats—creating content, testing product features, calls with investors … the list is endless. | I am using David Allen’s Getting Things Done to organize my work. Each day, I scan through my inbox to see any actions that require my input.
Any action that takes longer than two minutes, I place in one of the following lists: Next Actions, Waiting For, Someday, Agenda of my regular meetings. |
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| *To see our full interview with Jennifer, head over here. | | The job of a startup COO is constantly evolving and adapting to the needs of the business. We’re a small team of 11 so everyone wears many hats. We also operate in a regulated space which requires that everything we ship, market and produce is within guidelines. All this to say no two days are the same. | In the early days on the company the focus was primarily on hiring, speaking with customers and working with our partners and the SEC to ensure a smooth launch. Over the past 18 months as we’ve evolved into a ‘real’ company, post-product-market-fit and monetization. Now the role has evolved to encompass a lot more. Growth strategy, oversight of our support team, budgeting and financial analysis, compliance and regulatory matters, HR and more.
A big part of the last year has also been spent working with our external legal counsel to obtain registration as a broker-dealer. The process took close to a year but is now complete and opens up a ton of new business opportunities for expansion. | *To see our full interview with Ananda, head over here. | | Truly no two days are the same, but I’d say there are constant themes to where I spend the majority of my time. First, I focus on new products and features. I want to understand what’s working and what’s not with our users, identifying how our product can improve, see where we’re losing to competitors, and spot where the biggest opportunities are. Then I will work with the team to build product requirements and mockups, and prioritize and re-prioritize the dozens of initiatives on our plates so the engineering team can address accordingly.
Another major part of my day revolves around growth initiatives. We look into how we can scale the business more quickly and efficiently, all while reducing churn. We evaluate our current campaigns, our social media efforts, and where we can invest more time and effort to see a stronger ROI on growth. | Lastly, a significant portion of my time goes into people management. I meet with my reports to unblock them and provide whatever they need to grow, contribute, and succeed, assessing where we are lacking bandwidth or skills and prioritizing new hires accordingly.
All that being said, we move extremely fast and there’s constantly shifting priorities based on a multitude of factors on any given day. |
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| *To see our full interview with Tyler, head over here. | | It's hard really. Some days I don't really know what my job is. There are periods in which I feel lost and redundant and then there are other stretches when I have the work on three people of my plate. I've not worked in any other startup—or company in general—outside of my own so I've had to craft my own philosophy.
I have a screen saver on my desktop that reminds me of my role, which I think it strategy, financing, recruitment, communications and holding people accountable. |  | Custom House Stark background. |
| Operationally, I try to make sure we are heading in the right direction ay all times. I meet with my direct reports bi-weekly to be able to troubleshoot and help them unlock wherever they are stuck. Once a month we do a 50 minute call and then two weeks later we do a shorter call we call our ‘Walk & Talk’, where we chat with less of an agenda. The Walk & Talks are great because we give ourselves the option to be outside walking the dog or a quick phone call while one of us is out and about.
To be honest though, I think my number one job and the thing that I am conscious of every day is to lead. Which means going out and setting a great example to our team. Whatever that looks like every day, every week, every month. | *To see our full interview with me, head over here. | In sum | Being a CEO is hardly a walk in the park. It's a daily grind of strategic maneuvering, relentless team-building, and constant communication—all while keeping a pulse on the market’s heartbeat.
So remember to wear that responsibility with pride and maybe, just maybe, a hint of grace under pressure. Keep your head up and your spirits high; your team's vibe and the company's culture ride on it. | And that’s it! You can also find all of our original interviews with all the founders and leaders above here. |
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| | BRAIN FOOD 🧠 | Just watched this short episode of The Startup Podcast where they were unpacking whether the small, consistent changes in Apple’s new iPhone are enough to maintain its market lead. The question on the table: is it better for startups to chase incremental gains or should they aim for bold, disruptive innovations? |  | Insiders Predict Apple's iPhone 16 Announcements (Clip) |
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| Chris and Yaniv dive into this with Yuhki Yamashita, CPO at Figma. It's a great listen for anyone interested in leveraging AI to enhance efficiency and the user experience in product design. |
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| | TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 | *Mental models edition, haha. |  | Katelyn Bourgoin 🧠 @KateBour |  |
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Marketing is applied psychology Changing just one word or image can have a massive impact Here are the top 16 concepts marketers need to know: | | | 2:34 PM • Jan 17, 2023 | | | | | | 1.12K Likes 240 Retweets | 53 Replies |
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|  | Compounding Quality @QCompounding | |
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Charlie Munger has the best 30-second mind in the world But how is he able to think so quickly and precisely? Here are 15 mental models everyone should use: | |  | | | 1:30 PM • Jan 12, 2024 | | | | | | 701 Likes 145 Retweets | 15 Replies |
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|  | Bill Kerr @bill_kerrrrr | |
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I spent 40+ hours diving deep into Sam Altman's (@sama) journey to success. What I found? A unique blueprint for success. Here are the 8 secrets to his groundbreaking achievements: | |  | | | 4:44 PM • Aug 31, 2023 | | | | | | 80 Likes 17 Retweets | 8 Replies |
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| | TOOLS WE USE 🛠️ | Every week we highlight tools we actually use inside of our business and give them an honest review. Today we are highlighting Attio—powerful, flexible and data-driven, the exact CRM your business needs. | PostHog: We use PostHog product analytics, A/B testing and more.
Apollo: We use Apollo to automate a large part of our 1.2M weekly outbound emails.
Taplio: We use Taplio to grow and manage my online presence. |
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| See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here. |
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| | | | | | P.S. Want to work together? | | | That’s it from me. See you next week, Doc 🫡
P.P.S. Let’s connect on LinkedIn and Twitter. |
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