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Remote Companies Hire for Impact, Not for Potential
> Credit is due to Rodolphe [https://twitter.com/rdutel] from Remotive [https://remotive.io/] for the title of this post. I immediately wrote this line down when he said it in his workshop at DNX Global [https://www.dnxglobal.com/] in Lisbon last month. In this post, I'
Psychological Safety
When Google studied their internal teams [https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html?_r=0] to learn why some succeeded and some failed, they found 5 key norms for successful teams. > 1. Teams to need believe that their work is important. 2. Teams need to feel
There Is No "Best" Company Culture
> There is no perfect company to work for. Many 24 year old graduates of high powered competitive universities seek demanding workplaces. I did when I was that age. I did not want work/life balance. And I did not want to work with people who didn’t share my
The Intersection of "Helpful to Others" and "Interesting to You"
Solving for the Wrong Problem When responding to tweets about my post, If Your Business is a Secret, It's Probably Bullshit [https://www.fredperrotta.com/bullshit-businesses/], I realized a core problem of these businesses: founders start them to solve their own problems. Problems like hating their jobs or
Decentralized Decision Making
> Like I Fucked Up [https://www.fredperrotta.com/i-fucked-up/], this post is the actual text of an email that I sent to the Tortuga team recently. I'm sharing it publicly because this is an important part of how Tortuga works and, in my view, most companies get
The Remote Work Buyer's Guide
Last Updated: 1/13/20 Before the pandemic, most people's image of remote work was someone sitting on the couch in their pajamas with a laptop on their lap. When the pandemic forced office workers to work from home, they learned that just because you aren't
Why the Turtle is Our Spirit Animal
🐢 Jeremy and I were inspired to start Tortuga [http://www.tortugabackpacks.com] on a backpacking trip to Eastern Europe. We talked about our dream luggage on long train rides from Frankfurt to Prague to Budapest to Split and back. By the end of the trip, we were already thinking of
The Magnifying Glass
The highest leverage work a leader can do is to focus the efforts of his/her team on a single goal or priority. The usual analogy is of a boat where the leader's job is to get the right people in the right seats and all rowing in
How to Fund Your Bootstrapped Business
Bootstrapping any business is hard. Bootstrapping a physical product business is really hard. Today, money is cheap. You can get favorable interest rates from banks... if you have two years of profit to show. If you're making money, you can get more. The hard part is making first
Perception (of Success) Isn't Reality
This graphic from a recent CB Insights [https://www.cbinsights.com] newsletter shows the numbers behind three online mattress companies. Can you guess which is which? Casper (#1), which seems omnipresent, is losing money and "is a fundamentally inferior company to two of its competitors." Only 11% of