I've given it time. I've let it settle. I’m still so disappointed in my country.

Was it inflation? the Democratic party’s arrogance? White women? Latinos? Young men? Misinformation? First order thinking? I don’t know man.

All I know is the billionaires got their way, basic decency is out the window, and I’m afraid of a incoming authoritarian regime that wants to remove checks to its power and send us back to the 1950’s.

We’ve had had nine years to take Trump's full measure: his breathtaking cruelty, his sexual assaults, his conviction for corruption by a jury of his peers, his bigotry, and his pathological need to lie. We've heard the warnings from the most senior people who worked with him. And chose him anyway.

This isn't the end of the world, but this time feels worse and I don’t yet know what to do about it.

(Forest Gump voice) That’s all I have to say about that.

Move fast and break things that can be fixed

“Move fast and break things” gets a bad rap these days.

When Mark Zuckerberg first uttered these words in the early 2000s, the tech industry ate it up. Facebook and others were in hyper growth mode. Ethical considerations and long-term consequences were thrown to the wind in favor of short-term gain.

But we all know how that ended.

Data breaches, fake news, harassment and hate, racism, service outages, legal battles, and bans gradually gave way to the “Move slow and fix things” era. Facebook, Twitter, Uber, Robinhood, TikTok, Instagram, Google, so many of the tech giants that once championed this “growth at any cost” mentality began shifting their thinking.

And that’s a generally good thing.

But we still need to move fast and break things. We just need to be careful that what we break can be fixed.

“Someone needs to bring the site back up right now!”

I recently listened to Joel Lewenstein tell a story about how we brought down the Quora website a few weeks after joining the company:

I love this. This is the vibe I try to bring to my own team. I often say “Relax, it’s only computers.”

Now I work in a non-regulated industry where decisions are not life and death. This approach doesn’t work in industries like healthcare, finance, or government. YMMV.

For the rest of us with this privilege, we shouldn’t waste it. Move fast. Try things. Bend the rules. Learn from failures. Ask forgiveness, not permission.

Of course, there are a few exceptions.

We all need to slow down and be more deliberate sometimes. Being able to identify when is the key.

I’m coaching my team through this: Knowing which decisions we can make quickly and undo if we’re wrong vs. which decisions we should take more time to thoroughly consider.

Being able to tell the difference is a superpower. It allows us to move quickly when we can while avoiding mistakes of the “move fast and break things” era.

The site’s back up

After Joel took down the Quora website, someone got it back up pretty quickly. Did they lose some money because of the outage? Probably. Was their reputation dented? Maybe a little. Were people ruined financially? Did anyone die? Surely not.

The outage was short-lived and reversible. Quora continued to move quickly without too much process or overhead. That’s what I want for my team.

Relax, it’s only computers.

🧶 Stray Links

What a Trump presidency could mean for climate tech. We're likely entering a period of increased skepticism toward climate initiatives, coupled with challenging market conditions which weren’t great to begin with.

Dookie Remastered. Green Day’s 1994 album, all 15 tracks “de-mastered” in 15 formats such as a Game Boy cartridge, Teddy Ruxpin, or an answering machine. Give me “Basket Case” as sung by a Big Mouth Billie Bass. Simply incredible.

Charity Majors wrote about how hard an employer should work to retain an employee. A thorough piece that approaches this issue from so many different angles.

I’ve been seeing a lot of product people raving about last month’s Lenny’s Summit. I enjoyed Rian van der Merwe’s writeup in particular.

10 things new startup design leaders should do. Yes it’s a listicle, but it’s a thoughtful one.

🏛️ From the Archives

A favorite article I periodically re-read.

Reading Charity’s piece above reminded me of her 2019 post 17 Reasons NOT To Be A Manager. It was a great chaser to all the “17 Reasons To Be A Manager” posts I’d been reading at the time as I considered my own move into management.

Thanks for reading ✌️
- Ted (@tedgoas)