May 2024
Friends, Partners, Lovers
For the past couple of years I was witnessing different team dynamics: founders with co-founders, managers and employees, managers to other managers, recruiters and potential hires, investors and funding-seekers…
Most of the time people are “jumping” into imitating the role of how they perceive it. Once they smell a more “powerful position”, it can immediately shape the whole conversation in a skewed way. But was it skewed really, if everyone acted and reacted organically to that particular moment?
I will never stop thinking about this, because even invention of brain-to-brain interface is not immune to our ability to confuse ourselves first, and then confuse everyone around too. Unconsciously. Communication is my life-long theme to research.
Progress:
Studio faced super growth, we’re building a lot of new collaborations with funds and offer bundled services. My proudest moment is that quality didn’t suffer and I can claim that it’s even growing with size. It took ~15 tries and efforts.
Whenever people ask what I do for fun, the answer is simple — tennis and driving car. I just fell in love with the tennis, but cautious at buying any gear now due to Zendaya-inspired price surge at the moment. Car experienced couple of great trips across England and I’m planning another car trip to Germany soon.
Going to host new event in London. The space is secured, working on content now to make sure everyone is included and it’s fun for silent conversations. Sign up here!
Bootstrapping couple of new projects:
CRM system for busy people.
Networking course (it’s LIVE and has huge pre-release discount)
Job Board of the Future.
Small AI verticals.
Looking for partners in tech, marketing, who want to build/test/launch startups together (bootstrapped, highly automated, part time). Focus in money.
Challenges:
Focusing on multiple things. (intentionally wrong statement) I chose a multi-generalist-purpose path. But I used to get only benefits until this year. I used to benefit from having multiple streams of income, more exposure to people and problems. I think this year is the first one, where I discovered there are downsides! Some projects are probably impossible to do without that kind of focus. And I have to say “no” more often, even though I really-really want and believe in some of them.
Finding right partners. I use to think partners are being identified by two traits: skills and communication. Now I feel different about it. There are so many traits: attitude, resilience, flexibility, vibe and other patterns came into play and now I realise how many times I was settling for “wrong” partners when they were really powerful people in their own world, but not the “right” people specifically to me.
Automation doesn’t work. Internet is fragmented as ever. Filing taxes is hell. Basically once a quarter I have to go through all the purchases I had, find invoice, if not found — request it, define if they have VAT inside them, match them in accounting software and multiply that by ~800 transactions. Like what the hell? Right now I’m building automation to resolve this for small businesses in UK. Looking for early testers, who file VAT returns in UK.
I need to share more from conversations that I have. I just published “How to speak with Magic” about invention of new languages to provide better responses, that can’t imagine yet. I hope you like it.
Seasonal inspiration photos:
