Top 3: Stripe & YCombinator, 11 years of side projects and cost of attrition

Hello my friends.

Here's what I picked this week, enjoy!

1. Cost of Attrition🔥

TL;DR: What is the real cost of one employee leaving.

I’m really excited about this article, as I’m in the process of absorbing knowledge about the complex systems. And the author uses graphs and systems to show how much it costs an employee to leave.

When someone leaves, the company loses all the relationships that that employee had with their team and other teams. And if there is a team of 5 people and one team member leaves, we lose not 20% in the team’s ability to achieve goals, as you might immediately think, but somewhere around 40%. Because all of that person’s connections and domain knowledge will disappear and have to be restored to the other team members.

Plus, other teams that were tied to the employee will also lose in their productivity until they gain new connections.

2. Reflecting on 11 years of side projects​

TL;DR: Lessons after 11 years of creating side projects.

My notes:

1. A project without a clear goal is a road to nowhere. Motivation “to do something cool” is enough only in the beginning. And then the project will get bored and you will either close it or it will die without any understanding of why I am doing it.
2. The best products aren’t created in a vacuum. A product is a thing that solves someone’s problem. If there is no problem, there is no product. That’s why so many products invented under the slogan “this is a cool idea!” die. They don’t solve anyone’s problem. Advice: conduct interviews with potential users before creating the product.
3. MVP should be released as soon as it is able to test a hypothesis. Not later. Even if it’s just a form in google forms.

After creating a couple of side projects these lessons seem trivial, but how I wish I had read them in 2016 and not made so many mistakes.

3. Stripe and YCombinator, the Mob Bosses of Silicon Valley​

TL;DR: The founder of Bolt (fintech) tweeted about how Stripe prevented them from raising investments.

The thread hit HN and judging from the comments, there is some truth to it. Although it is silly to assume that Stripe won’t use all of its influence to defeat its competitors by any means necessary.

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That's all for this week, take care and have a great one!

– Nick