Deep in the trenches, May 25th 2021

Good morning everyone,

For new subscribers, I share every two weeks:

1) Resources I've learnt from

2) A tool I'm enjoying

3) 1 thing I've learnt building actiondesk

4) What's on my reading list

Let’s go:

💻 A tool I enjoy: Newsletters to Kindle

If you’ve read this newsletter at least once, you know I read other newsletters and you know I love reading on my Kindle.

For long form newsletters particularly, I prefer reading them on my Kindle as it lets me read without distractions, and without blue light (which is terrible for your sleep if you read in the evening).

I looked for a tool to automatically send my long form newsletters to my Kindle. And I didn’t find any. So my friend Ryan and I decided to build it.

I’ve been using for a few months now and it’s awesome. We’re launching it on Product Hunt today, so head there if you want to check it out and give us an upvote!

Check Newsletters to Kindle

Here are a few newsletters I read regularly on my Kindle:

Stratechery

Not Boring

Trends

📄 Some interesting resources I’ve checked out lately:

1) Single Decisive Reason: decision-making for fast-scaling startups - Article from Rahul Vohra, Superhuman’s CEO

This article introduces a fascinating framework I was not familiar with: The Single Decisive Reason framework
It explains the problem of “Blended reasoning”. As Nassim Taleb explains in Antifragile:

By invoking more than one reason, you are trying to convince yourself to do something. Obvious decisions (robust to error) require no more than a single reason

I definitely can recognize myself here: Oh we should do this because X, and also Y, and Z, yeah we should definitely do it.

Multiple weak reasons can appear compelling but in reality they’re not usually as powerful as one strong reason

I find this idea really interesting, and while there may be limits to it, I’m looking forward to using it as a new way to look at decisions to be made.

2) My first million podcast

I have been aware of this podcast because the two co hosts appear pretty often in my twitter feed. That being said, I never listened to it until recently. Honestly, the title always put me off. It kind of sounds like a podcast with how to get rich quick schemes.

Actually, it’s not that and it’s a great podcast (but a terrible title).

The co hosts Sam Parr and Shaan Puri talks about some existing businesses and analyze what could go wrong, what could go right and also throw some ideas that they themselves have and how they would approach building a company around these ideas.

It’s very conversational and sounds like a discussion you could have with some of your smart friends at a bar. Also, it’s not only tech businesses, it’s pretty wide which is nice.

One thing I’ll highlight from a recent episode:

In this episode, Shaan talks about his experience working at Twitch
- They were launching a new product, and every week he would reassess the strategy because the results were not good enough
- Twitch’s CEO told him to stop reassessing all the time the strategy.
- He told him: “Be impatient with actions, but patient with results”

It’s interesting, although I’m not sure I 100% agree.

When you decide to execute some thing, you probably want to have a certain timeline in mind when you expect results so that you can assess whether this is working or not.

Now, within that timeline, I tend to agree that you may not want to look at results, which could 1/ demotivate you and / or 2/ waste your time trying to find a new strategy when you should be focused on executing the current strategy.

📚 On my reading list

Brad Stone just released his sequel to The Everything Store, his great book about Amazon which I’ve read 5 or 6 years ago when I started working at Jumia, the biggest e-commerce platform in Africa.
I decided to reread The Everything Store, and then I’ll read the sequel called Amazon Unbound.
I highly recommend The Everything Store, it’s part business analysis on Amazon, part Jeff Bezos biography. It’s full of learnings while being an entertaining read.

Anyone has some book recommendations to share?

Deep in the trenches

A framework to make better decisions