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**Gerhard Lazu:** Yes. That is on my list. Still on my list. |
**Marcos Nils:** Take it for granted. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Alright, Marcos, see you in the next episode. |
**Marcos Nils:** Always a pleasure. Take care. |
• Small Bets: working on projects with fixed time limits to minimize uncertainty and maximize motivation |
• Basecamp's approach: building flagship products using small bets over 20 years, abandoning failed projects, and iterating |
• Slack in the system: intentionally leaving room for unexpected opportunities and inspiration, avoiding over-optimization |
• Role of randomness and bias of survival in business and life decisions |
• Lifestyle design: prioritizing flexibility and autonomy to adapt to changing circumstances |
• Small Bets course success: 21 cohorts with 2,000 members, resonating ideas on uncertainty management and prudent decision-making |
• The speaker discusses the limitations of human lifetimes and the potential risks of pursuing extremely ambitious goals. |
• The importance of finding attainable and sustainable success in entrepreneurship, rather than relying solely on speculative high-risk strategies. |
• The benefits of "treating ideas like cattle" and investing time and effort in multiple small projects, rather than putting all eggs in one basket. |
• Parallels between individual decision-making and the strategies used by industries such as book publishing and venture capital. |
• The need to manage time effectively and invest it wisely in projects that have a reasonable chance of success. |
• The importance of having selection criteria for ideas and projects |
• Building a portfolio of small, safe-to-fail ideas to accumulate knowledge, assets, and reputation |
• Recognizing when an idea meets the selection criteria and has a fighting chance of working |
• Knowing when to start or wind down a project based on its potential payoff and costs |
• The value of small wins in accumulating lessons, skills, and relationships |
• Avoiding costly projects that require significant investment without a clear payoff |
• The speaker's background in social media and how they gained experience quickly |
• The importance of not restricting oneself with predetermined labels or skills |
• Examples of people in the Small Bets community who have had success with side projects |
• Measuring success beyond just financial gain, including personal satisfaction and learning |
• The value of having a support network for sharing ideas and receiving feedback |
• The speaker's own transition from being a software engineer at AWS to pursuing self-employment |
• The challenges and considerations that led the speaker to leave their corporate job. |
• Considering an all-in venture capital approach to making software and its potential drawbacks |
• Recognizing one's own personality and preferences regarding work arrangements |
• The limitations and negative aspects of full-time employment |
• The importance of being honest with oneself about one's true preferences and treating full-time employment as temporary |
• Transitioning from full-time employment to freelancing or other flexible arrangements |
• Embracing change and uncertainty in the modern world, and not taking changes as personal failures |
• The importance of being prepared for unexpected changes and disruptions in life |
• Using negative visualization techniques to think about worst-case scenarios and plan accordingly |
• Embracing multiple skills and abilities beyond one's primary job or profession |
• Thinking about oneself as a generalist rather than being labeled by a specific role or skill |
• Daniel Vassallo's experience working part-time at Gumroad as a product manager, and how he got the job through a casual conversation on Twitter |
• Importance of dedicating specific time to a single activity |
• Discussion on tech stack and simplicity in choosing tools (e.g. Gumroad) |
• Focusing on attention-building strategies over technical aspects |
• Importance of building credibility and trust with potential customers |
• Daniel Vassallo's approach to 2023: maintaining current lifestyle, staying open-minded, and adapting to changes |
• The importance of openness and flexibility in career and business goals, and how specific visions can limit opportunities |
• The benefits of broad, general goals that allow for multiple paths to success |
• The difference between predictable and unpredictable environments (e.g. full-time jobs vs. entrepreneurship) |
• The need for a different approach in uncertain activities, such as tinker-and-experiment versus optimizing and hard work |
• The importance of risk-taking, reducing efforts, and negative visualization in navigating uncertainty |
• The distinction between playing in the "predictable world" versus the "stochastic world" |
• Recognizing whether you are operating in a predictable or unpredictable environment to adjust your approach accordingly |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Today you shared something on the Small Bets Discord general channel that caught my attention. "The only small better who shared the podium with Fernando Alonso." So first of all, what is a small better? |
**Daniel Vassallo:** Well, I think it's somebody who sees work as a series of small bets, I like to call them, which is basically just a very time-boxed effort towards something rather than an indefinite project. So I think it's one way to tame the uncertainty of doing something speculative, to some degree, and I think... |
I think there are some people who figured out a better way of doing it. I mentioned in that Discord channel the people behind Basecamp, the company, have been advocating this type of work for probably 20 years or more. Timeboxed budgets \[unintelligible 00:02:45.02\] is small for you or for your company, depending on c... |
And then, once you put it on the market, you have no obligation, but you have the option to make another small bet on the same project. People behind Basecamp have been building their flagship product this way, again, for 20 years or more. But they've abandoned many things along the way. In fact, at one point five or s... |
So I've been very much inspired by people like them, and as many others, even outside of software and tech, and my industry, and I think there's lots to learn from it, again. And I think it's a learning of -- there's no recipe for success in business, but I think it's a recipe for taming the uncertainty, making things ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Wow, you mentioned a lot of great things. I promised our listeners that we will unpack them soon. Back to the post that you shared. That was David's "Glorious days like these." We will put the link in the show notes. When you go to the post, and even if you don't, the one thing which will strike you i... |
**Daniel Vassallo:** Yeah, it's something that is very highly underrated in productivity advice nowadays in the modern world. It's mostly focused on trying to squeeze every second out of the day, and pack as much as possible, creating habits and systems and techniques, calendars, tools to try to be even more optimized.... |
\[06:11\] I think sometimes we're lucky, we get into these serendipitous situations, we bump into great opportunities, but we're not able to benefit from them, because we don't recognize them, or we don't have the capacity to recognize them. I think when we have a very busy calendar, I think subconsciously, we'll put t... |
So I'm a big believer in trying to arrange our life/work arrangements as much as possible to intentionally create slack in the system, which will look like wasted time when you look at them individually. You might look like "I didn't do anything meaningful, day after day after day", but then sort of the big things tend... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** This resonates with me deeply, because I realized, having been part of your course, and having had that time to reevaluate a few things, I realized that I have no slack in the system. My system was 110%, 120%. I was trying to cram more things than work hours. And that usually takes from family time, i... |
So when I reached out to you about recording this episode, I mentioned that our conversation will be a good follow-up to episode 77. And I'm really enjoying this coincidence, because the last episode, 77, was with DHH. |
**Daniel Vassallo:** Oh, interesting. Fascinating. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Exactly. So you are the follow-up right to that conversation. It just so happened. So I'm really enjoying this coincidence; serendipity, as you mentioned it. That's the one word which comes to my mind. |
**Daniel Vassallo:** Yeah. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. I really enjoyed being part of the course, of the Small Bets course, and there are a few ideas that resonated with me deeply. First of all, slack in the system, but also the role of randomness, bias of survival, and lifestyle design. And these happen to be the titles, with the various sessions t... |
**Daniel Vassallo:** 21 cohorts of far. Yeah, starting the 22nd in February. Yeah, so we have 2,000 members in our community, so it's been quite successful. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Why do you think these ideas resonated with people? Do you have a theory as to that? |
**Daniel Vassallo:** I believe that subconsciously -- I think there's something in our DNA. This is my speculation, that this is a more prudent way of dealing with the uncertainty of life and business in general. I think we've been, again, in the modern world we've been almost brainwashed by venture capitalists and the... |
\[10:14\] So I think, again, it's just our subconscious - it's there to try to protect us, and when we see a different way of operating, I think we realize it's a better bargain to almost shoot for the middle, where things are much more attainable, much more sustainable, there's less risk of hidden downsides than with ... |
This is basically like if you want to make money from writing - you could try to aim to become the next J.K. Rowling and sell a billion dollars in books, which is of course possible, because it was done, and this probably will be done in the future... But we all know, it's unlikely. But there's other ways if you want t... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah. These ideas have been around for a long time, for sure. Do you remember the moment when you realized, "I believe in this so much that I'm going to do something about it"? |
**Daniel Vassallo:** I think it was almost an existential crisis. I quit my job; I had a good, a reasonably cushy, well-paying job at Amazon until the beginning of 2019. I quit because I realized a career as a full-time employee was probably not the ideal one for me. We can talk more about that. But I quit thinking tha... |
\[14:05\] When I was working at Amazon, my boss gave me a project, I worked hard on it, and if I showed that I worked hard for it, I would be okay; I will get promoted maybe, or at the very least keep my job. That's how I worked before. But in the outside world, that wasn't enough - putting in hard work, putting in lot... |
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