Ten years after founding our venture-backed startup, here are the hard-won lessons, curve-bending moments, and dangerous myths in venture I had to unlearn.
One of the many mechanisms they developed is the "Dynamic Equity Framework" where ownership is designed to be fluid and adaptive. Contributions of work, capital, or other resources translate into ownership stakes in fair, transparent ways, avoiding traditional hierarchical accumulation of power.
This video was posted in an amateur radio community I am in. I was only vaguely aware of Bob's impact on venue design in Rock and Roll. Many Amateur Radio community members were heartbroken he had passed. After watching this video and hearing him speak about his love of music, radio, amplification, satellites and more I understand why. He reminds me of Les Paul and more. Sharing this video because I think others would enjoy this incredibly entertaining (and informative) talk! Things _really_ get rolling around the 15:30 mark (but everything leading up to it is good, too, especially if you're into radio)
The Parabol meeting app makes everybody feel like any meeting was worth the time invested. We're creators of an open-source (https://github.com/ParabolInc/action) retrospective and check-in meeting app that integrates with the tools teams already use, such as GitHub, Slack, and Jira.
– Slack Fund, Haystack and CRV invest $4 million in Parabol: https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/05/slack-fund-haystack-and-crv-invest-4-million-in-parabol-the-meta-meeting-software-toolkit/
- Friday Ship 200: Four Years of Startup Transparency: https://www.parabol.co/blog/friday-ship-200
You know that feeling of "we always complain about the same things, but it never gets any better?" Your question is at the heart of making it possible to escape stagnation and actually evolve the way a team works together.
Sharing knowledge isn't just a matter of tooling, but a matter of principle. Because we want the knowledge we share to not just float out there as a "lesson", we want people to use the lessons and act differently what we're actually talking about here is governance (i.e. law!). This might sound heavy. It's not. It's just a change in orientation from "I'm passively sharing this lesson we learned" to "this lesson we learned changes the way we act."
There are 3 things to do to shift from "lessons learned" to working agreements:
1. Capture knowledge in the pattern "when this happens, our team will act this way"
2. Adopt a workflow for formally adopting a working agreement – could be a majority vote, consensus vote, etc.
3. Keep that knowledge someplace the team can browse, search, and update (e.g. Confluence, Notion, Google Drive, etc.)
If you do this, something magical happens: you'll begin to evolve your knowledge over time.
Have a working agreement that didn't quite cover a corner case? Update it! Have a working agreement that was too restrictive? Nuke it!
It's no less shift in magnitude as when humanity switched from oral tradition to the written word. And guess what? The written word works much better when you're operating remotely.
Our remote team has been operating this way for nearly 5 years at Parabol. It's a common pattern that at the end of every retrospective we have a new working agreement we'd like to adopt. We've even come up with a Slack-based async workflow for adopting them: https://www.parabol.co/blog/async-decision-making-slack
Parabol | REMOTE or Los Angeles, CA | Full-time | https://parabol.co
Parabol is making sure everybody feels like a meeting was worth the time invested. We're creators of an open-source (https://github.com/ParabolInc/action) retrospective and check-in meeting app that integrates with the tools teams already use, such as GitHub, Slack, and Jira.
Parabol | Remote or Los Angeles, CA | Full-time, Remote-OK | https://parabol.co
Parabol is making sure everybody feels like a meeting was worth the time invested. We're creators of an open-source (https://github.com/ParabolInc/action) retrospective and check-in meeting app that integrates with the tools teams already use.
I've been working on a distributed team for 4 years now. I product manage an open-source online retrospective and meeting app and went _way_ deep on researching other distributed teams last year. What I learned about sharing updates is it's as much dictated by culture and ritual as much as it is by a tool.
Zapier is almost 1,000 people now. Here's what I learned they do:
- Every Friday non-managers write a short update of what's changed that week
- Managers read them, extract a few highlights, and roll them up to leaders
- Leaders do the same and roll it up to the CEO
- The CEO writes a blog post and sends it to the entire company
- That post is commented on and questions are asked by everybody
Some folks within Spotify write a daily update answering the same prompts:
- This is what I did today I think you should know about
- This is what I learned and I think you'd find useful
- This is what I need from you
- This is what I am doing next
For our company, we prefer weekly updates to daily updates (we value time autonomy vs. having an always-on culture). Our fully-remote team foes something similar to Zapier and end up posting our company updates publicly at https://focus.parabol.co (if you want to see an example)
I don't think a separate tool is really necessary. Pick your poison between a stand-up bot or something more flexible like missions.ai (at time X create doc, share doc, prompt people to get started...)
One more tip: if you find yourself writing an answer to the prompt "this is what I need from you..." you probably have an item to add to the team's meeting agenda. Full disclosure, we started our company to make capturing items for meetings easy, so, I have a dog in the hunt.
Parabol makes software for distributed organizations. We enable cross-functional collaboration and clarity by syncing teams in a single daily dashboard with a weekly ritual. Our embedded prioritization process improves team transparency, efficiency, and operational growth.
To learn more about who we are, our engineering culture, and whether this is the right place for you, read our Key Values profile: https://www.keyvalues.com/parabol
Tech Stack: Our tech stack is very future-forward and designed to enable Google Docs-like realtime collaboration. From back-to-front: rethinkdb, redis, NodeJS, GraphQL, Relay Modern, React using ES2015+
Parabol makes software for distributed organizations. We enable cross-functional collaboration and clarity by syncing teams in a single daily dashboard with a weekly ritual. Our embedded prioritization process improves team transparency, efficiency, and operational growth.
To learn more about who we are, our engineering culture, and whether this is the right place for you, read our Key Values profile: https://www.keyvalues.com/parabol
Tech Stack: Our tech stack is very future-forward and designed to enable Google Docs-like realtime collaboration. From back-to-front: rethinkdb, redis, NodeJS, GraphQL, Relay Modern, React using ES2015+
