paulstovell

I call this the "grandpa's keys" problem!

When Grandpa was 20 years old he left the house and forgot to take his keys, so every time he left the house he checked his pockets for his keys.

When he was 24 he left the house and left the stove on. He learned to check the stove before leaving the house.

When he was 28 he left his wallet at home. He learned to check for his wallet.

...

Now Grandpa is 80. His leaving home routine includes: checks for his keys, his phone, his wallet. He ensures the lights are off, the stove is off, the microwave door is closed, the iron is off, the windows are closed in case it rains...

Grandpa has learned from his mistakes so well that it now takes him roughly an hour to leave the house. Also, he finds he doesn't tend to look forward to going out as much as he once did...

Thank you for this, it's brilliant! I have spent days drawing the wiring diagram for a modified 1961 MG MGA using LucidChart. The fonts available just didn't look great. I uploaded Routed Gothic and now it looks very natural and original. Great work on the font!

MG produced the MGA roadster from 1955 to 1962. This site has been operating by one person for 20+ years and has the biggest wealth of information on how to maintain and fix these cars. The tech section alone has over 4,000 pages of information on these cars.

You don’t actually have to pay for your own, but you are taxed an extra 0.5% if you don’t and earn above a certain amount. So in practice rather than pay the additional tax, people get private healthcare. If you then start earning below the threshold you can cancel the private healthcare and go back to the public system.

My hobby is tool collecting and occasionally, my wife makes me do work around the house to justify the tool collecting. So, I really enjoyed your creation here! I was going through it today and ticking off all the categories I own tools for (I got 96) and discovered a bunch of opportunities to expand the collection. Thank you!

> Plus concrete tools, for example, didn’t even make the cut

I must say I was surprised that hammers, fancy hammers, and mallets all got their own categories, while my noisy Husqvarna concrete demolition saw was bundled in the same category as regular circular saws. Now it makes sense!

> That tool bag, valued at $100,000

Must be a Festool!

Fascinating!

Thanks! My DM's are open, or paul at [my HN handle].com, happy to talk to anyone making this transition.

First is the right people - don't hire "Frank" from Paul Kenny's talk.

Second is to join sales calls or watch the recordings (Chorus.ai is great for this). Put yourself in the buyer's shoes and coach based on those recordings - I always listen from the point of view of "If I was the customer, do I think they really care about my problem, and is it credible that they will help me solve it?". Right now I watch 1-2 recordings a week and then chat with the team about what they think went well and where we might improve, and we are figuring it out together. That continuous process is what reinforces the culture. When the CEO is focussed on helping customers, and revenue as a secondary concern, it becomes the culture.

Third is probably for the sales team not to be an island. So get the engineering and product leaders to join the calls or watch the recordings too, so that the tiny features or friction points make their way onto the roadmap eventually.

Thank you for sharing this Kent, I got a tremendously valuable insight from it.

I run a company and I love my work. And I recognise that this puts me in an extremely lucky minority. And my business has been successful enough that I could even quit working, but I enjoy it too much to. I also love my family. But there are never enough hours in the day. I could spend 16 hours a day with my kids and it would not be enough. I could spent it working, and my business would want more. I look back on the last 10 years and feel many regrets about how my time was spent in both directions.

So I feel like a failure constantly. I am not the husband I wish I was, not the CEO I wish I was, not the parent I wish I was. Because they all want 100%. I can’t get this balance right.

The point I took from your post is that this balance is meant to be difficult when you love both sides of the things you attempt to balance. Because giving time to one takes from the other.

I feel a lot more at peace for reading it. Thank you for writing it.

PS:

Lots of the comments here question the “need to work” point or admonish those of us who do derive substantial meaning from our work and wish we had more time for our work. I think that’s missing the point. Replace “work” with something socially acceptable that you love, like I dunno, protecting baby penguins or teaching orphans. You could spend 100% of your time doing that. Now balance it against the other things you love. Don’t feel bad about not getting that balance right, because by giving to one you take from the other, and both would love 100%. If work for you is something to be minimised as much as possible then I don’t think a post about work life balance is particularly relevant to you, because you must have it figured out.

This is an important comment. When a company gets to profitability, the worst-case outcome is the company stops growing, it loses momentum and closes with a tiny payout. There is always an option to do that. By not aiming for profitability first he bet on spending big in pursuit of growth instead, which is the VC model. He was effectively his own VC in this case.

Someone with less funding availability might well write the tweet thread about how they were crushed by the person who had $10m of their own money to spend.

I do think it’s great that he wrote this up and I have to say, as a bootstrapped (profitable) startup founder in a space with heavily VC backed competitors, it made me pause.