Category: Commentary

We had a question from an Office Hours listener about why Crash was created as a separate entity than Praxis. (For those who don’t know, I started the Praxis apprenticeship program 6 years ago, and created the Crash career-launch platform with some Praxis team-members about 6 months ago).

It’s a great question, and one I don’t think I’ve ever formally answered all in one place. Many, many conversations with both teams, investors, and my kitchen cabinet throughout the process, but never a full explanation. As I thought about how I would answer on the podcast, I realized there’s a lot there and it might be worth organizing my thoughts and writing it out.

The Origin

We built Praxis from nothing with no team and no money in 2013 to a kickass, growing, profitable, world-class team, highly effective elite program in five years. Every month, every year as we grew and improved all aspects of the program and company, I looked for ways to take the core of what works so well for Praxians and bring it to millions. Starting about three years in, every six months or so we’d have a little brainstorm retreat for a weekend and play around with different models that could deliver the Praxis special sauce to orders of magnitude more people. We came close, but never quite found a model that made sense. We kept on a strong linear growth path with Praxis, but I couldn’t stop thinking about variations on the model that could be lighter touch but broader reach.

In 2018, I began talking with a world-class tech investor who was impressed with what we’d built. We had some great conversations and he asked me really big, challenging questions about growth potential of the Praxis approach and ideas. I had mostly bootstrapped a non-tech business, he had built and invested in venture-backed tech businesses. But he saw something in our point of view on education and career, and I saw something that had been missing from my other attempts in his view on networks, scale, and the process of building something really big. Our conversations and the books he recommended got me out of my own head just enough to inspire a model I thought could be huge, and one that made more sense as a venture-backed tech play than our current self-funded low-tech growth model. (It took me some time, because I am heavily biased against raising venture capital. I think the default for entrepreneurs should be not to do it, and only rare exceptions with business models and teams that really fit the model should. But that’s another article for another day).

I decided to go for it and pitch him and several other investors on building a career launch platform out of the Praxis components. It was an interesting fundraising process. Some investors were incredibly impressed with what we’d built with Praxis, others didn’t get how it fit with what we were trying to build with the platform. I’d try to focus entirely on the platform and still all the questions would be about the apprenticeship. It wasn’t very clear to them what I was building, and whether it really was a tech platform or some tweaks to an apprenticeship. It probably would’ve been easier to raise for one or the other, but I told an integrated story of how this was the next phase of Praxis and a way to morph it into a platform. Despite the lack of total clarity, we raised a great round from awesome investors.

We hired our lead engineer (actually before we closed the round, because I like risk and I like to put myself into must-win situations) and got to work in late 2018 mapping out this platform. It was going to be part of Praxis and branded and run as such.

It didn’t take long to realize that this was a problem. A single company, brand, and team for two very different processes and approaches caused a lot of stress and confusion. This was a really, really hard time. I did a lot of soul-searching, long walks, and many sleepless nights trying to figure out how to do this. It led to a separate name, brand, identity, and team. I realized to maximize the success of the Praxis program, which has so much more of the world to conquer, and the Crash platform which is barely finding its place, they needed to live independent (though very collaborative) lives.

Here are some of the reasons it made sense to split them.

Tech vs. Non-Tech

Building a non-tech company is very different than building a tech company (I’m early in learning this). The processes, the goals, the workflow, the amount and rate of change, and the importance in level of detail are totally different. In non-tech, you can overcome weaknesses with additional elbow grease and human touch. You can live with them for a while, patch over them, and figure out a solution. It’s not sustainable long-term but necessary. In tech, product or model or market weaknesses will kill you quick so it’s all about finding them ASAP and hunting them down and destroying them. In non-tech you don’t need answers immediately. In tech you do. This creates two very different team styles internally and it’s hard to do both at once.

Pre vs Post Product-Market Fit

Startup people talk about a company achieving Product-Market Fit. It’s a fancy way of saying the company knows what the hell it’s doing. When you have PMF, you know who your customer is, what problem you solve for them, how you solve it, and how you make money in the process. Most startups spend years trying to dial in PMF before they can start to really grow. Praxis has PMF. Crash was in search of it.

A pre-PMF company operates very differently than a post-PMF company. Pre-PMF is all about testing hypothesis as quickly as possible. With Crash, we knew the high level vision and philosophy. We knew the goals. And we knew some of the necessary parts – that “secret sauce” of helping people launch careers we learned in the Praxis trenches. But we didn’t yet know exactly who the smallest starting market was, what the initial MVP would be and which smallest bite of the problem we would solve first. It’s all about whittling down the unknowns until they stop outnumbering the knowns. Praxis is all about building on the knowns and searching for new unknowns.

When we split off a small chunk of the Praxis team into a “Skunkworks” for the platform, it was immediately clear that the pace we needed wasn’t quite there. We took too much of the Praxis approach with us. Likewise, our relatively messy fast-pace was bleeding into the Praxis team and making them feel like they needed to operate like a development team in a sprint.

Though there’s overlap in product and market, we just weren’t sure enough how much and where and how it would work. We needed the freedom for both entities to be their own.

Brand and Customer Confusion

Crash needed to be totally free to change on a dime. We might offer one thing or try one product for a week or two, then immediately kill it and try a totally different thing. Praxis customers know what they are there for. An intensive bootcamp and apprenticeship. If they kept seeing new Praxis products and approaches go live, then die, they’d start to wonder what the hell they got into. They’d feel like guinea pigs rather than customers. Crash needed guinea pigs, so we did and do often go to the awesome Praxian network and ask them if they want to help us test some stuff, but it’s clear this is a new thing we’re exploring with Crash and not a part of their Praxis experience.

Praxis has made a dent in the universe. It’s still got a long way to go to continue to blow up the status quo and launch more careers, but we have no interest in curbing or slowing it’s kickassery so that this platform can poke around and test stuff out. We don’t want to drag Praxis down with any experiments that fail on Crash, and we don’t want people who aren’t in the market for an apprenticeship to overlook the platform because they confuse the two.

What’s in a Name?

One investor I talked to had an interesting objection to my pitch. He said Praxis is the name given to this business I built over half a decade. It won’t do to just port it over to this new thing I’m trying to create. The Praxis name came to me all at once with the idea. It’s baked into the fabric of the company. It is the philosophy and the identity. There’s magical power in it. To borrow that name would be kinda like slapping your first kid’s name on your second kid.

He told me that a company name has power. It sends a signal into the world. It’s a rallying point for the team, like a flag on a battlefield. It’s a symbolic act to name something, and you only get so many goes at it. To casually slap an existing name with its five years of blood and sweat and hard won success onto a new idea is selling both short.

I was kinda pissed at him at first. I love the name Praxis. I love the logo. I love everything about it. But after he told me, I couldn’t sleep. I knew he was right. We needed a new name for a new platform. The naming process for Praxis was an out of the blue inspiration that came to me after ten years of my subconscious playing with ideas. It was not deliberate. The Crash naming process was a shitton of deliberate work. That’s an entire article itself, suffice to say that it was brutal and necessary. Coming out with a new name, logo, and brand identity was a big symbolic moment and it mattered.

T-Shirts

I love T-shirts and why settle for one cool company T when you can have two? ;-)

 

This is a long post. But this is only scratching the surface when it comes to everything that went into this grueling process. It probably sounds totally dramatic and overblown to an outsider. But ask anyone on the team who helped forge Praxis from nothing, who endured mockery and scolding and predictions of failure, who fought to introduce the world to a better approach than bloated college bureaucracy, who poured themselves into changing the lives of our first few hundred customers. The process of birthing something new out of your work, then splitting in two is a big deal.

It wasn’t easy, but it was good. Both teams are amazing, empowered, and excited about two great paths to two great futures. We fight side by side like siblings, we share a common origin and philosophy, and we work to spur each other on in our respective approaches.

Oh and all you haters? Buckle up. You ain’t seen nothing yet.

Hirers: you really suck at making your jobs appeal to the right people.

Case in point, I saw an entry level posting: “We want someone passionate about conversion rate optimization”.

Wtf.

No entry level person knows what that is, let alone feels passion for it. That’s like, “Passion for stacking bricks”.

No. Paint a picture! You’re building a cathedral!

No one sees themselves in that description. Especially not the best people. Describe THEM, not the role.

Let’s give it a shot…Same job: “Are you the type to play around with likes and comments to get your video to move up the YouTube recommended videos feed? Did you conspire with friends to get more upvotes on your Mario Maker levels? We want YOU to help us build an awesome company!”

The wrong people will not be into it. The right people will say, “Hey, that sounds like me!” They don’t care about conversion rates. But they do care about doing stuff they’re good at and enjoy, which very well may be conversion rate optimization…help them see that!

Speak to THEM about THEM and what you want about THEM. Not a stupid list of “Must have X degree. Y years experience” and other boring stuff.

Would you go on the dating market the way you try to appeal to new hires? I hope not.

PS – We’re working on both sides of the market at Crash. ‘Cause let’s face it, seekers also suck at showing their skills in relevant ways. Let’s make the job-finding process awesome!

From a Tweetstorm.

Politics
Climate change
Artificial intelligence
Immigration
Aggregate economic data

Notice what they have in common?

I love to work.

Like most humans, I’m driven to build stuff. Grow wealth, opportunity, freedom, and influence. I get excited by building companies, technological growth, and personal growth.

But why?

You could chalk it up to materialism and say it’s a sickness of market culture. I don’t. That’s not why I do stuff. I’m interested in living free, finding truth, and feeling peace and beauty. Those aren’t acquired by worldly success or money. But the things required to move towards them often result in worldly success and money.

To find truth, to live free and feel fully alive, I need growth. Growth happens by overcoming meaningful challenges. Meaningful challenges almost always come from the process of building stuff. Building stuff takes work. That’s why I do it and that’s why I love it.

I build stuff because it’s the path to freedom and truth.

Drawing seems to be more about suppression than invention.

I’ve always been terrible at it, but today I tried to make a realistic face drawing and it came out kinda okay. My friend told me not to draw objects, but to draw shadow starting darkest to lightest.

It was a breakthrough. For the first time, I get drawing. I understand it. It’s not about fine motor skills or amazing imagination. It’s about shutting down the left brain. It’s an exercise in smothering the object oriented completionist in me and drawing only what shades (not objects!) I actually see without trying to make them into something.

The representation emerges from the negative space. It’s a weird breakdown of the way my brain processes the world. It’s hard to suppress the connection making logic that interprets interplay of light as a world of things. It’s like shutting down intelligence and becoming nothing but a lens that doesn’t distinguish what it sees.

Still, it’s ridiculously easy compared to the mystical idea I had of drawing. I’m excited to try some more!

Competition is hard. But it’s harder to not compete.

Competitive environments and mindsets are everywhere. They’re sometimes fun and on a macro scale produce great outcomes. But on the individual level it’s not always best. There are three phases. Phase one is discovery, where competition creates too much pressure and hinders learning. After some discovery and basic mastery, the second phase thrives with competition. It demands it. Leveling up from good to great happens when you can rise to a competitive occasion. But then there’s phase three. This is the ascendant, or innovative phase. This is where better won’t cut it. This is where different is needed. Once you learn to win the game, you’ve gotta learn to create new games.

If you’re trying for phase three, competition is a dangerous distraction. Your familiarity with competitive pressure from phase two will draw you to it. Its siren song will pull your focus away from creating new games and into the reactive challenge mode of trying to win the old games.

It’s here where you’ve got to ignore everyone else. It’s here where you’ve got to get free from any external definition of success or failure. It’s here where you’ve got to conceive games where to create them is to play them and to play them is to win. These are the games that are uniquely you, and by definition, above competition.

There’s an old economist joke that Development Economists are the least developed economists.

I think people deep into personal development are sometimes the least developed persons.

What makes a deep, productive, progressing, valuable, and interesting person seems to be a person who is deeply interested in what they are doing at any time. Whether monotonous labor, a hobby, family life, books, food, fitness, or anything else. People who just find the world interesting – whether because they choose to see uninteresting stuff as interesting, or because they choose to do only stuff they find interesting – are well developed people.

People perpetually in search of ‘professional growth’, and ‘personal development’ because they think it’s good and noble tend to be more flat and boring and less developed than intellectually hedonistic interest seekers.

I find myself more boring when I start studying an area directly related to what I’m doing with the intention of leveling up because I feel I ‘should’. While building a business, the more business books I read the less I enjoy myself and the less interesting and intelligent I become as a business builder. Paradoxical but true for me. When I step back and just consume things that fascinate me, I end up having more fun being more interesting, and building a better business to boot! I see and make novel connections. I’m not just mimicking other stuff, but creating new patterns.

I am a huge fan of investing in myself and becoming a better version every day. But the way I try to do it is by irresponsibly following my interests wherever they lead rather than feeling pressure to study anything in particular or specialize in things directly applicable to what I’m doing.

Prices are information. They provide both info and incentive for individual actors to help them determine how to allocate resources. I love prices and the way they emerge.

But on a massive scale and when aggregated, they can get pretty wild. You can see anything you want in the info they convey. Especially in nascent markets.

There’s another crypto bull run going on, after a long ‘crypto winter’. No one really knows why the prices are climbing, though everyone will do their best to figure it out and tell you. There’s nothing that has really changed since the last big run up and dip. In fact, the brand leader BTC has arguably gotten technologically less feasible since then. No major advancements or breakthroughs in usage, tech, or adoption. (Yes, I know, fans of each coin will list 100 things that have happened. My point is that none of these are clear and compelling to general audience sufficient to explain the price spike). The only big happening is Facebook announcing the creation of their own coin. This could either be a threat to BTC and others, or a boon. Or nothing at all. It’s hard to tell. You would expect those betting on each of these three outcomes to more or less cancel each other out, rather than the bulls to dominate the market and drive up price.

I love massive run-ups. I also love massive dips. Not so much for the financial outcome (though I hold some crypto and have benefited from low buying prices and high selling prices at times). I love them because they are entertaining and revealing. People can’t help but show their feelings in a massive bull or bear market. You learn a lot about the state of crypto fans, traders, and doubters in the big swings. Mostly what I learn is that vocal crypto fans are almost entirely fans for gambling purposes. Very few care or know about anything but price. There’s a small cluster behind each coin that cares about use cases and development, and a small spread of agnostics who are interested in the crypto market’s overall real world application. Otherwise it’s 90% speculators. Speculators are wildly entertaining and overreact to everything in every direction. They make sports fans seem sane by comparison.

So what do the recent price spikes mean? Beats me, but I’ll have my popcorn and Twitter feed ready.

If you want to be free you have to change.

When you get into a particular groove, eventually it gets into you. It can begin to hem you in. It may be a pleasant chamber, but you lose a little freedom every day. To stay free, you have to cut loose old ties, leave behind previous eras, and grow. It’s bittersweet. Goodbyes are a necessary part of being free.

If everything was fully optimized so there was no paying for unused capacity, things would be ridiculously expensive.

Take employees. To really optimize for efficient resource use, you’d negotiate pay with them by the hour every hour. Or by the outcome every outcome. This would ensure each unit of labor was allocated with maximum efficiency.

The problem is it’s too expensive to do this. Not because you’d end up paying more for labor. You’d almost assuredly end up paying less. But because each renegotiation takes time to prepare for and conduct. The price shopping and info gathering to test the market, the back and forth. All the resources used to optimally allocate resources mean you aren’t using that time for something else that could be more lucrative. Adding 10 hours a week of employee negotiations removes 10 hours a week of fundraising or selling or product development.

So people buy in chunks to reduce the transaction costs. This is why you see people hired and fired in lumpy ways. An under-performer almost never gets a pay cut. They get fired. Because you’ve got to get your employee negotiations down to a reasonable transaction cost. Constant renegotiation is costly.

This applies everywhere. Especially in a world of limitless apps, life-hacks, and software tools. There are now SaaS products just to help you measure your use of other SaaS products, and others to compare the SaaS measurement products.

Can be great, but just remember that information and optimization aren’t free.

Plans for success are

Biased by confirmation

Plan for fun instead

In the early days of my company Praxis, I said yes a lot.

Interns, contractors, and employees had ideas. I said go ahead and try them. Why not? It was fast-paced, wild, experimental. I love saying yes to people acting on their ideas.

I’ve found myself in phases where I can’t say yes as freely, and I have to be involved in a lot more back and forth before action is taken. I hate it. Recently, I’m back in a place where it’s easy to say yes.

I started thinking about the factors that enable saying yes. It requires a clear vision. If the vision is muddy or badly articulated, every idea will just sort of miss the mark enough to warrant discussion. The mark hasn’t been made clear enough to allow various paths to it to be freely tried.

It also requires excellent teammates. To let someone free to chase down their ideas requires people who tend to have ideas worth chasing and tend to be able to execute on them. At times when hiring outpaces acculturating, you get phases where you can’t green light as much.

It requires a sense of urgency and pace where growth is prized over stability. If you’re protecting what you have, you’ll say no a lot. If you’re boldly moving into the unknown anyway, what the heck, let’s try some stuff! This mindset must be maintained even if you have stuff to lose. Growth should be prized more than loss is feared if you want to be able to say yes often.

I love pitching a vision, rallying a great team around it, and then saying yes to everything they come up with. That’s when I’m in the zone. I don’t like getting into the weeds and trying to tweak people’s ideas. But I can’t just avoid it any more than I can ignore throbbing pain in my body. It’s a symptom that reveals a problem. If I’m not finding it easy to say yes, it means the vision isn’t clear enough or not communicated well enough, the team isn’t right, or the loss aversion is too strong.

Take care of those, and I get to start saying yes and watching the magic happen.

I’m starting to believe that success is all about getting the story right.

How you talk about your product to your customers, or your company to investors, or your skills to employers. These are stories. If you have them right, stuff is easy. When you don’t quite have them right (which is most of the time), stuff is hard.

What’s funny is it’s easier to get other people’s stories right than your own. I love hearing people pitch. I always get excited because I see a way in which they could tweak their story for far more impact. But they don’t see it. They are too close to it.

And I’m too close to mine. The most important story is the one you tell yourself about your own life. All the other stories flow out of that. And that’s the hardest to get right. Even when you do, you find it changes on you and you can’t just tack on a new chapter. Each change requires a reworking of the whole arc from the beginning.

When you just feel off, like you’re running into a wall over and over, it means somewhere your story went wrong. The one you tell yourself about yourself. Get that right and the rest tends to follow.

I’ve developed a new strong opinion, though very weakly held.

I hate chatbots.

Yes, I know. We use them on the Crash site. And they are effective. And some people like them. And maybe they are a good thing, and the next step in business to consumer interaction online.

But my current hatred stems from two things.

1. I don’t like them on sites I’m visiting, especially on mobile. They are a little annoying and clumsy.
2. I feel like they reveal a flaw in the product or website or both.

If a website’s job is to help a customer experience a journey from their problem to your product, a chat bot is like adding pop-ups during a movie that interrupt the dialogue and ask, “Hey there! Having trouble understanding the story arc? What’s the main benefit you want from this movie? Can I help you learn to apply this story to your own life?”

If people aren’t taking the intended action on your site, maybe your product, market, or site design are flawed. Adding a chat bot as a second layer on top feels like slapping an instruction sticker on an iPad. If it’s designed well and used by the intended user, it should explain itself.

There are several compelling counter-arguments, and my colleagues presented some good discussion on the pros and cons earlier today. As I said, this is an opinion I’m entertaining more than one I’m committed to.

But I can’t help but wonder if slapping a chat bot on a site to help customers get what they want makes it harder for companies to work through and discover how to make their product, market, or presentation tighter, more intuitive, more human at the foundation.

If I decided to really spend some time making this site something unique, here’s what I’d do.

Make the entire site a maximally searchable, sortable, tag-able library of all posts, and a build-your-own book tool.

Anyone could select whatever posts they want, put them in whatever order they want, and it would generate a table of contents and put it into digital or paperback book format. You could choose a cover design or make your own. You could add a personalized introduction, making it easy to gift to anyone.

This would mean you could own or give away a truly one of a kind book. Your curated collection of posts with your own intro, title, and cover.

Now imagine this tool available not just for this website, but everywhere. Any author who publicly blogs or otherwise gives permission could have their content added to a book that you create. As you browse the web and find articles and authors you like, you can add them to your book outline with a plugin like you add articles to read later apps. You could create books around themes of your choice, arrange them into unique collections to make print or eBooks.

Remember mixtapes? Or Spotify playlists? It’s that, but for written content. I have several friends who would be amazing at putting together the perfect collection of works by a certain author or on certain topics that I would read over any publisher chosen book.

With a tool like this, imagine the secondary markets. You’d have authors (with a big increase in possibility of ‘one hit wonders’ and long-tail rare finds), but you’d also have a new form of literary expertise in curators. “Oh, that guy always puts out awesome collections!” The market for cover designers, formatting templates, and custom intros, bibliographies, titles, and appendixes would also emerge.

People do this now with email lists, but imagine upping the game a bit and being able to buy a beautifully bound book collection?

There are stupid copyright implications of course, but you could begin with just bloggers who openly allow such content sharing as long as it’s attributed. You could potentially have some form of royalty payment system if it got big enough.

The main thing is a simple drag and drop tool for turning articles into chapters of a book.

So, if I had the gumption, I’d try to figure it out for my own site first and let readers create books from the 1,400 odd posts here as a pilot of the democratized book curation tool.