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🥗 Open Sourcing My Content Diet. You are what you eat, and it works the same for your brain. Here is what I eat and why.
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PARTNERS 💫

HOUSEKEEPING 📨

Howdy team. I keep having one of my recent PR pieces for Athyna surface back to me over and over lately. This 'How to build strategy’ piece I did with Bay Area Times seems to have been a real winner for some. I am sharing it below in case you also get some value from it too.

As for today’s piece, we have a collection for you where we dive into what leadership really means for some of the founders, CEOs and execs we’ve interviewed over the last couple of years. Some incredible minds, with even more incredible insights. Hope you enjoy it!

COLLECTION 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦

Immad Akhund - Co-founder and CEO at Mercury

Building a strong company culture is multifaceted. Firstly, establishing clear cultural principles is crucial. In our leadership approach, we emphasize transparency. Alongside transparency, empowering employees with significant responsibility and trust is vital. While this approach doesn't always guarantee success, it fosters individual growth and ownership. I view my role as hiring exceptional individuals and setting high standards, not micromanaging specific tasks.

Also, authentic leadership is key. I strive to be genuine and transparent, avoiding any pretence. People appreciate and respond well to authenticity - they can easily detect insincerity. Therefore, I prioritize being genuine, direct, and setting high expectations while fostering a supportive environment.

_{*To see our full interview with Immad, head over here.}

Michael Batko - CEO at Startmate

I’m all about hiring the hungry not the proven and giving them all the autonomy to grow. My leadership style is very hands-off, providing lots of opportunities to take on more responsibility and grow, but that requires the right culture. We operate in a very high-trust, high-feedback environment with high psychological safety. The team holds each other accountable because we all know the goals we’re working towards and nobody wants to disappoint anyone else.

_{*To see our full interview with Michael, head over here.}

Tony Jamous - Co-Founder & CEO at Oyster

Good leadership starts with human leadership. As leaders, we set the tone for the entire company, and it's our responsibility to empower and motivate our employees. When people feel micromanaged, stressed, and unable to balance their home and work life, that creates a lot of tension and mistrust. It’s our job to create space for our workforce to grow, thrive, and have a sense of fulfilment.

In the early days of Oyster, I would engineer opportunities to connect with employees. This has continued through our monthly all-hands, internal ask leadership Slack channels, and digital internal communities. I also hold monthly Zoom coffee chats with groups of new joiners and those celebrating their one-year anniversaries with Oyster.

It’s important for me to be visible and connected to the people who make Oyster a great place to work.

_{*To see our full interview with Tony, head over here.}

Ross Chaldecott - Co-Founder & CEO at Kinde

At a very high level I think great leadership is just generally giving a shit about people, and then giving them the alignment and autonomy to go and achieve something great. But there’s really a lot of detail behind that so it’s probably worth digging in.

When you look at what a company is, it’s fundamentally just a group of people with a shared mission and values, who are trying to accomplish something together. That’s it. So when you approach it that way, it’s really important that we build a team that is hugely driven by our mission and our vision. At Kinde we spend a whole lot of time making sure our team understand why we do the things that we do. How creating a world with more founders is one of the most profoundly impactful thing that they could invest their time in. Because starting any kind of startup is not an easy thing so you really want people who are in it for the journey.

_{*To see our full interview with Ross, head over here.}

Ajay Prakash - Founder & CEO of EntryLevel

I’ve always liked Quiet Leadership by David Rock which is a leadership style that plays more of a coaching role and helps people come to their own decisions. My grandfather always told the story of Archimedes who sat in a tub and noticed the water rise, discovering the law of buoyancy. According to him, Archimedes was so excited he ran down the streets naked to announce his discovery yelling “Eureka!” There’s the power to decide something yourself. So as much as possible, I want my team to discover what they should do themselves rather than me telling them.

I’ve tried to create more of an idea of meritocracy by being receptive to ideas from all levels of our organisation to the point where I have many non-direct reports sending me essays with amazing ideas or thoughts almost weekly (and I love it!).

_{To see our full interview with Ajay, head over here.}

John Howard - Founder at Slingshot

I lead by showing! I’m a firm believer on going through the pain of a position before handing it off to someone else. I frequently work in the warehouse, run sales calls, provide product feedback, and talk to customers. All of this leads to a better understanding of how it should be done so that when it’s handed off, the framework is easy to understand for everyone who works here.

I also love reading. Some books that have shaped me as a leader are Good To Great by Jim Collins, Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek and Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink & Leif Babin.

_{*To see our full interview with John, head over here.}

Elicia McDonald - Partner at Airtree

I'm a big believer in leading by example, demonstrating empathy and vulnerability and being authentic. I hate the idea of ‘this is how it was for me, so others need to experience it too.’ I saw that a lot when I was in banking, and it means things never change, and you never make progress. As a leader, I reflect on how I wanted to be treated in my early career and what made me feel valued, motivated and engaged. I aspire to create the kind of work environment that draws out the best in people and helps them achieve their full potential.

I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from the book The Fives Dysfunctions of a Team which made me think a lot about how you cultivate relationships and teams with a high level of trust, accountability, commitment and care for collective goals.

I love working with hard-working, capable people with a great attitude. I put a lot of trust in my colleagues and give them autonomy to decide the best way to achieve an outcome. I have zero desire—and frankly, time—to micromanage! I would prefer to hold people accountable to their outputs vs trying to manipulate the inputs.

_{*To see our full interview with Elicia, head over here.}

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Dom Pym - Co-Founder at Up & Founder at Euphemia

Well, first off, I'd probably say leadership is a collaborative effort. It's not something that any one individual can do particularly well in my view. It's great to be able to inspire people and set a 30,000-foot vision or mission. And it's also great to be able to surround yourself with the best people you know, to create something that's almost impenetrable in terms of fulfilling that mission. If you get those kinds of people around you, then you create a leadership culture. And the leadership culture, I think, drives the organization more than any individual leader.

There are certain roles like co-founder, CEO, head of product, or chief technology officer that make a material difference depending on that person's skills, capability, experience, and ethic. Their moral positions and all that do make an impact as an individual. But I would say it's the leadership culture we try to create that makes the real difference.

In terms of myself, my co-founder, Tomo, and I started the business with very complementary skill sets. He's 20 years older than me and has a different outlook, perspective, and background, but we're aiming for the same thing.

_{*Co-founder, Grant ’Tomo’ Thomas, was one of the most respected coaching in the AFL (Australian Rules).}

So I talk about the moral compass, alignment with the North Star, the mission, or the expectation that we're aiming in the same direction, and supporting each other no matter what. We'll still debate, argue, and transition to the best outcome. Instead of thinking that as a single individual can drive the ship, we focus more collectively on creating a culture of leadership. That culture can then bring everyone in the organization along with it.

_{*To see our full interview with Dom, head over here.}

Jennifer Phan - Co-Founder and CEO at Passionfroot

As a leader, I think it’s important to create an environment where everyone feels like they are able to openly challenge, ask questions, raise concerns, test and fail. One key is to give frequent, candid feedback to magnify the speed and effectiveness of our team. That way everyone can say exactly what they really think, but with positive intent and to help each other succeed. This brings diverging, with everyone available and listening to one another.

I think it’s also important to lead with context not control. At Passionfroot, we want everyone to think like founders. This means, providing all the context and transparency to allow team members to make good decisions. People need to be able to make their own decisions if we want people to own their work. So, as leaders, we define the ‘what’ and ‘when’, but it is up to each employee to define the ‘how’ of any given task. And lastly, I like our team to place bets & own decisions.

As a team, we want to encourage our team members to place bets and own decisions. This means employees are encouraged to pursue new initiatives to help the company, as long as it does not detract from our top level goals. And when some of those bets don’t pay off we just fix the problems that arise as quickly as possible and discuss what we’ve learned—rapid recovery is the best model.

_{*To see our full interview with Jennifer, head over here.}

Side note: A tool we built to help leaders lead

If you're a leader hungry for wisdom, a manager eager to sharpen your edge, or a tech enthusiast aiming to stand on the shoulders of giants, prepare to be enlightened.

We've curated an exhaustive database of the top 100 business books of all time, as voted by legends like Steve Jobs, Warren Buffet, Jeff Bezos, and more. And guess what? We've seamlessly it into a trackable Notion checklist.

Our full suite of tools have been downloaded thousands of times now and this is one of our better ones. If you use it—I hope you enjoy it!

Ananda Aisola - COO and Co-Founder of Composer

As a small, remote-first company we can’t afford to do a lot of handholding and formal training. My philosophy on leadership has adapted to make sure we succeed as a decentralized company.

I think to leaders should provide as much context as possible. Specifically business context that impacts the product roadmap. Every decision we make comes with trade-offs and it is important to explain to the team why we are choosing to make the decision. This allows the team to use their collective intelligence to tackle the biggest issues with a shared understanding, instead of people trying to solve problems in silos.

For example at the start of 2023 we made the decision to become registered as a broker-dealer. This wasn’t an obvious choice because it significantly increased our operating costs and regulatory burden, at a time when the majority of companies were looking for ways to cut costs. However, as leaders we knew that going down this path would open up many opportunities for growth. This decision also impacted our product roadmap for 2023. Instead of just telling employees this is what we’d decided we held a all-hands to explain to them the thinking behind the decision and why going down this path would make us a better business. With the team’s buy-in we were able to frantically execute on the roadmap with the goal of hitting our companies targets.

In my opinion leaders need to be able to strategize at a 10,000ft level and then immediately be able to context switch to sweat the details. This is especially true at an early stage where one day you might be working on your 12 month goals/roadmap and the next you’re beta testing the latest version of the app or reviewing the granular details of monthly ad spend or branding assets.

And lastly, kill the shit sandwich. When there are wins—celebrate them. When things are not working directly address the root cause and don’t couch the issue in feel good platitudes.

_{*To see our full interview with Ananda, head over here.}

Tyler Denk - Co-Founder & CEO at Beehiiv

I can probably summarize my philosophy on leadership based on three core principles. Transparency and communication are key—I share everything with the team, investors, and more or less the public. This includes our milestones, what’s working, what’s not working, our revenue and costs, etc. With this approach, everyone operates with a full understanding of what’s going on in the business, so everyone can share the urgency of what needs to be improved. I've even written a post on building in public to elaborate on this point.

Autonomy is another principle I strongly adhere to. I don’t burden my team with tons of meetings and oversight. Building on the transparency, everyone knows the core objectives and are expected to execute and take initiative on their own. We hire people who are self-starters and are constantly looking for ways to provide value.

Finally, being results-driven is crucial. At the end of the day, everyone is graded on their effectiveness and how well they were able to accomplish the goals they set out to accomplish with their managers and team. We’re not a charity; they’re employed to drive results.

_{*To see our full interview with Tyler, head over here.}

Emmanuel Nataf - Co-Founder & CEO at Reedsy

Reedsy is a fully remote company and we try and hire people who are fairly autonomous and independent. We’re trying to build a structure where people come to us, the founders, and make suggestions as to what they should be working on next, as opposed to a traditional top-down approach. We value people who will take initiative and create opportunities for the company.

The goal is something along the lines of what Steve Jobs said; “It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”

We’re about 45 at the moment and don’t want to grow the team massively—we like it small with everyone able to own large projects. I see myself as the person who can take a step back and help give orientation. I also try to inject some creativity to make sure we never fall into the ‘business as usual.’

_{To see our full interview with Yaniv, head over here.}

Niki Scevak - Co-Founder & Partner at Blackbird

We have three philosophies we live by at Blackbird. First one is hungry not proven since we hire people who we believe have a learn-it-all mindset, not those with the strongest resume. The second is bottoms-up, not top-down; we try to empower people to come up with their own ideas and work with a high level of autonomy, rather than set in-depth tactics and meticulously follow each metric of success.

The third key idea is ‘founders helping founders.’ The best people to help founders are fellow founders, and there is greater value in connecting those people or creating ways for them to build community with each other rather than the more paternalistic, “we know best” attitude to founder support.

_{To see our full interview with Niki, head over here.}

Lexy Franklin - CEO at Sidebar

I try to bring empathy, collaboration, and focus to the team. My team makes me better, and I learn from them every day. This type of collaboration is within Sidebar the company but also the product we’re building—a service for leaders. The magic starts when the right people come together. I just want to learn. That is what it comes down to the most. I am honored to be in the room with people as brilliant as our team. I want to do my part, move as fast as possible, and keep up.

I have found that 90% of the time, I generally know what to do at work and in my job. If I am in a role where I am going fast, 10% of the time, I am doing something that is new and I am not 100% sure of exactly what to do next. These challenges are harder. I have questions and I am strategizing through my answers.

When you consider that means 90% of the time, I feel good about where I'm at, that's okay. But the 10% can feel much bigger than it actually is—especially if I want to make a positive difference in a billion people’s lives in my lifetime, which is my personal goal. That 10% has taught me something important; everyone needs people in their life to authentically talk through the 10% and unblock. To blast through it.

_{To see our full interview with Lexy, head over here.}

Jamie Bunn - Executive Coach

Leadership, from a coaching perspective, is the art of guiding people towards their full potential. It is a blend of strategic thinking, effective communication, and emotional intelligence. And a strong leader has a good understanding of human behavior and motivation. For me, leadership isn't only holding a position of authority, but inspiring and empowering others to excel. It's using your own strengths, leading by example, and helping foster growth of those around you. This approach aligns with Transformational Leadership Theory. The act of inspiring and elevating the performance of your team through a shared vision and purpose.

Training leadership involves integrating both self-awareness and skill development. By improving self-awareness, leaders get insights into their strengths, weaknesses, values, and leadership style. This self-awareness, influenced by Buddhism, is the foundation for authentic and compassionate leadership.

To train leadership, I use models like Situational Leadership Theory and Primal Leadership Model. I focus on improving communication to convey vision, fostering empathy to build strong relationships, and building resilience to navigate challenges. Mindfulness practices, again from Buddhism, also play a role making sure leaders remain present and able them to make balanced decisions. My training is unique to each leader's context and aspirations. I use experiential learning, interactive exercises, and real-life case studies, simulating real-world of leadership.

Nutrition also influences my training. There is a strong connection between physical well-being and leadership effectiveness. Neuroscience research also. I encourage leaders to embrace a growth mindset, adopting continuous learning and adapting to evolving challenges. Leadership to me is simple. Strategy, emotional intelligence, self-awareness, and a dedication to guiding others towards excellence.

_{To see our full interview with Jamie, head over here.}

Jamie Turner - CEO at Convex

It might sound cliché, but I'm definitely in the camp of giving people almost too much agency. I like to find folks who are going to drive themselves very hard to grow, and then I trust them and give them a lot of freedom to find their way. My control is usually getting in the trenches with them, doing it together, and learning together. I’m a big believer in agency, so my evaluations are more about whether I have the right person in the job rather than if they’re doing the right work.

As a leader, if you're frequently feeling the need to override your team, then you might not have the right people in place. What I do is give them lots of freedom, act as a sounding board for their ideas, let them own their decisions, and together we learn what works and what doesn’t. As long as there is growth and we're continuously getting better, and the level of excellence is what Convex needs as we mature, I'm happy. That's how I view leadership.

I worked for a really great leader at Dropbox, Akhil Gupta. I learned a ton from him, which shaped a lot of my thoughts on giving agency. He showed me that leadership is more about psychology and understanding what people want, aligning that with what the organization needs. There’s very little that beats the experience of working for a great boss.

Books wise, I’ve read a lot, but many leadership books end up saying similar things through different stories or analogies. However, they do emphasize the importance of understanding human psychology and what motivates people, which is crucial for creating a place where talented people can thrive and feel rewarded

_{*To see our full interview with Jamie, head over here.}

And that’s it! You can also find all of our original interviews with all the founders and leaders above here.

COMMUNITY THREAD 🏡

Question: How do you think about leadership?

Answer in the comments so we can all learn from each other and get better together.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

Just watched this cool episode from the Startup Podcast called 15 Reasons Why Your Product Sucks. It’s basically hosts Chris and Yaniv talking about what it takes to make a product really stand out. Essentially how the small things a lot of us don’t do at the start are gonna cost us long-term. Something I wish I watched back in the day. You should definitely give it a go.

HIRING ZONE 👀 

Today we are highlighting AI talent available through, Athyna. If you are looking for the best bespoke tech talent, these stars are ready to work with you—today! Reach out here if we can make an introduction to these talents and get $1,000 discount on behalf of us.

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

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.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳