Click here to view this email in your web browser

Greetings all,

First up, in this week’s episode of Ventures, my guests Kelly Jo Horton, Sol Cates, and I discuss marketing operations from a startup and enterprise perspective. We dive into Kelly Jo’s story entering the space, the need for a marketing operations expert as early as possible in a startup, how to avoid technical debt with your MarTech stack, why to setup a centralized command center, and how/why to retool a broken MarTech data infrastructure.

Check it out: Marketing operations, building a MarTech stack, and ensuring data visibility and security in a growing startup :: with Kelly Jo Horton and Sol Cates

Six tweet threads better than a college degree

I don’t normally open Twitter in the mornings, especially not weekend mornings, but this past Saturday I stumbled across this tweet containing the following six tweet threads, and I’m glad I did.

1. How to Get Rich (without getting lucky):

This thread is an absolute “classic” now and I study it with my kids. It’s the same thread I linked to in my Reddit post last summer when I turned 40.

2. First principles thinking is a powerful mental model for driving non-linear outcomes. It also requires a willingness to ask difficult, uncomfortable questions.

While Elon, Taleb, et al. have made this kind of thinking more popular recently, it has of course been the key to great thinking/innovation over the ages.

3. Let’s talk about High Agency: an attitude I’ve seen in every successful product manager & leader I’ve known.

Great product managers - and High Agency people in general - are highly underappreciated.

4. If you want to improve your writing, start by becoming a better note-taker.

My colleagues and I are working on a meta todo/task application that I’m excited to share with the world later this year. In general, however, I have a LONG way to go to up my note-taking game, and I appreciate the advice in this thread.

5. 10 Concepts from Build Once, Sell Twice: (thread)

The example of how to move from services, to productized services, to products.... is key

6. I spent the last 6 years researching, writing, and thinking about habits. 

It's impossible to overemphasize this enough.

I'd like to go back to my teenage self and communicate the power of compounding interest. This applies to personal goals, relationships, sports performance, work, finances, etc...

WA state vaccination efforts

I'm profoundly impressed by the creativity, skills, integrity, and overall excitement/optimism amongst my colleagues at Prota to see humans flourish. Every week it feels like a full book of stories are being written, most of which I don’t get to publicly write about.

However, this past week is different. Led by my colleague Walter Thorn, our group was able to play a visible role in helping surface appointment availability via this site that smartly aggregates data and presents an equitable UX to help the right people find appointments near them.

Check out the press release: Vaccine Command and Coordination System (VACCS) leverages unique public-private partnership innovations to help Washingtonians find vaccine appointments 

Well done, Walter & team!

Have a great rest of your week,

~Will