Patrick Collison on thinking for yourself: "Nobody is going to teach you to think for yourself. A large fraction of what people around you believe is mistaken. Internalize this and practice coming up with your own worldview. The correlation between it and those around you shouldn't be too strong unless you think you were especially lucky in your initial conditions."

"Advice I'd Give Past Me" by Patrick Collison

Max Levchin on leadership: "The most important skill of a leader is getting people to be their absolute best... At PayPal, I remember always being blown away by the ability of my co-founder, Peter Thiel’s, ability to extract stellar results from people who were often dismissed by others as “too hard to work with” or “too weird” by zeroing in on their unique abilities very quickly and putting them in situations where that very ability had maximum leverage attached to it."

"The Most Important Skill of a Leader" by @mlevchin

RT @StartupArchive_: "I think the right initial metric is “do any users love our product so much they spontaneously tell other people to us…

First time I’m reading this. Feels like an essential field guide for any builder, not just PMs.

I think the most interesting part of this is Brian taking the time to explain to a new PM what great looks like. Straight out of Andy Grove's High Output Management: "A manager generally has two ways to raise the level of individual performance of his subordinates: by increasing motivation, the desire of each person to do his job well, and by increasing individual capability, which is where training comes in. It is generally accepted that motivating employees is a key task of all managers, one that can’t be delegated to someone else. Why shouldn’t the same be true for the other principal means at a manager’s disposal for increasing output? Training is, quite simply, one of the highest-leverage activities a manager can perform."

"You should be using time series data to give you insight into what people are doing with the product and see if the changes you are making are improving things. If you haven’t instrumented the app and chosen a metric you want to improve, you are just guessing" - Brian Armstrong

"Letter to a New Product Manager" by Brian Armstrong

"People naturally resist focus because they can’t decide what is important. Therein lies a problem: people can typically tell you after some deliberation what their top three priorities are, but they struggle to decide on just one." - Frank Slootman