Trevor McKendrick - Useful and Overlooked Skills

Hi all,

(Sorry about the formatting last week, small hiccup that has now been fixed.)

Fun news: last week I had my lowest weigh-in since October 2021. It’s been fun to see my Manifold prediction market price update in real time as new bets are placed based on my daily weigh-ins.

E.g. YES jumped from 52% to 63% within a few hours of posting my weigh-in on September 10.

Trevor

A Few Little Ideas and Short Stories(Article)

“I once asked a successful author how to market a book. He waved me off and said, “If the book is good you don’t need to market it. If the book is bad, no amount of marketing will help.”

“He was exaggerating: I think his advice is like 80% true. But it’s definitely 80% true. And it applies to almost any product. The best marketing is a good product.” (emphasis added)

The universal truth of all startups: you must absolutely build something people want. If you don’t, you will fail.

At Seis we call this “looking at the Sun” – yes it might hurt your eyes, but you have to be willing to stare directly, unflinchingly at the truth if you’re going to build a successful product. No amount of optimism or hope can make people want your thing.

In some ways this is extremely liberating because it’s so focusing. There’s so many possible distractions in the company-building world (recruiting, fundraising, events, other founders, people management, operations, etc.) – to be able to really focus on just 1 thing, and for it to be the 1 thing that will drive 95% of your eventual success…. how refreshing!

Useful and Overlooked Skills (article)

My personal favorites are “Respectfully interacting with people you disagree with” and “Getting to the point”.

John Carmack on working with Steve Jobs(Facebook post)

All-time great post on what it was actually like to work with Steve Jobs.

Some favorite lines:

“It was often frustrating [working with Steve], because he could talk, with complete confidence, about things he was just plain wrong about, like the price of memory for video cards and the amount of system bandwidth exploitable by the AltiVec extensions.”

“I wound up doing several keynotes with Steve, and it was always a crazy fire drill with not enough time to do things right, and generally requiring heroic effort from many people to make it happen at all. I tend to think this was also a calculated part of his method.

“My first impression of “Keynote Steve” was him berating the poor stage hands over “This Home Depot shit” that was rolling out the display stand with the new Mac, very much not to his satisfaction. His complaints had a valid point, and he improved the quality of the presentation by caring about details, but I wouldn’t have wanted to work for him in that capacity.”

Guy charged by federal prosecutors for collecting $10m in streaming revenue for AI songs played by AI listeners(article)

There’s a line of naughtiness at some point where you cross from a “fun little hack to pay for a coffee” to “committing a crime”. I can see why Spotify & song owners were not pleased.

Dynamic Land(website)

Dynamic Land is a physical computer, created by one of the best UX/UI designers in the world.

Here’s a 6 minute intro. The link above is to their website which covers their entire history.

Entrepreneurship changed the way I think (blog)

Great post from Casey Handmer:

“There is no limit to the quantity of skepticism, paranoia, and pessimism you must brutally apply to your own ideas, particularly your favorite ones. The market will be harsher!”

Full of quick answers, there’s an AMA section too.

Wild stat of the day (tweet)

“OnlyFans creators made more $$ than all NBA players combined last year.”

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