SWLW #396: Reflections on being a female founder, Leading virtually and more...

I hope that you and your family are doing well, and you are able to find a new rhythm in this hard situation.

As always, below you can read my best findings for the week -
 

This Week's Favorite

​​Reflections on Being a Female Founder
6 minutes read.

"I want to see a world where men and women, who make up equal halves of humanity, also make up equal halves of leadership. When that happens, I wholeheartedly believe that the entire world will benefit. We owe it to our sons and daughters to work hard to get there." -- what an incredible read by Tracy Young, sharing her struggles as a female CEO of PlanGrid. Being a father of a 4 months-old baby girl, I do wish Tracy's wish would come true.

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.

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Culture

Learning Web Development Be Like...
1 minute read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face, even in this difficult time.

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Remote First at Quora (Yet It's Not Right for All Companies)
6 minutes read.

Adam D'Angelo shares the reasoning and analysis behind Quora's decision to be a "remote-first" company. They picked a few interesting constraints that would make synchronous coordination possible (choosing 9 am to 3 pm Pacific Time) and having the entire leadership team working remotely (reduce HQ impact). I wonder what would be the impact on employee retention and for generating momentum on big projects that require a lot of coordination.

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How Tech Can Build
8 minutes read.

Ben Thompson (if you're not subscribed to Stratechery, now is the time) respond to Marc Andreessen's post "It’s Time to Build" with concrete ideas for where we should invest as an industry. I think this idea is critical, yet the hardest to follow as SaaS multipliers are so attractive: "The possibilties, at least once you let go of the requirement for 90% gross margins, are endless."

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Written Communication Is Remote Work Super Power
5 minutes read.

Snir David with good points on why and how to leverage async communication to improve working remotely. Following Snir's advice will make the way you a better communicator (async or not), so worth following regardless.

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Peopleware

How to Get Worse at StarCraft II (One Weird Trick to Master Anything)
7 minutes read.

This is one of my favorite posts to learn how to get better at things: "I feel like this is some kind of rule of improvement: in order to get better, you must feel uncomfortable. And if you get to a point where you feel comfortable, you need to force yourself out of that situation."

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
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What’s Your Favorite Mental Model / Framework for Self Development? (Thread)
4 minutes read.

Interesting insights shared in this thread Hiten Shah started. I'd go for "nurture habits for life" -- have an exercise plan you can do forever, develop a career (and side projects) you can do for life (why limit yourself to retirement), etc.

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Leading Virtually
5 minutes read.

Fred Wilson shares tips for nurturing connections with your teammates while working remotely. Click on the "View Discussion" button at the end of the post to get more ideas people shared with him on Twitter. This is an area I know I need to do a better job at, so I took a few notes and planning on acting on them. What would you add? How do you cope with the current situation?

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.

And finally, inspiring tweets...

@david_perell: Writing shows you how little you know about topics you thought you were an expert on

@chetanp: Just learned today that it's only low code/ no code if it comes from the Excel region of France. Otherwise, it's just enterprise software.



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Keep reading, keep learning.
-- Oren Ellenbogen.