TLDR Too Long Didn't Read 📖> Emotional fitness for founders 🍎- Learning from scaling ✈️- Media keeps innovating 🆕- The art of brevity 🏃🏻♀️- FrenchTech news 🦄 (Doctolib & BlaBlaCar)
Founder life is similar to being a professional athlete competing at a high level
Episode #56. Hey Sunday reader!
You receive this newsletter because no matter how intense is your week, you think it is crucial to keep reading and learning. Get ready for a new series of summaries that can help you get a better weekend, a more productive workweek or raise your skills to the next level.
#1. Healthy Founders
TLDR From Healthy leaders, healthy returns: emotional fitness for founders, an article published on the OnDeck blog on March 29, 2022.
"Founder life is similar to being a professional athlete competing at a high level. Athletes must train constantly to be in peak physical condition, while also giving themselves the time to heal, repair, and nourish so they can perform at their best."
“Starting a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss.” - Elon Musk
A large part of having an emotional founder fitness is making sure the founder is surrounded by the right people: coworkers, investors, friends, family, coach... because they provide an external viewpoint and a different perspective back to you.
Improving a founders mental health does consist in building better relationships with others not with oneself.
Working on these relationships can be done with weekly check-ins with your team about what is being done well and not so well. Always keeping in mind that conflict is often a good recipie for healthy growth.
"It’s never too late to invest in yourself and your relationships by shoring up your emotional fitness. A key part of this growth is about how well you’re able to tolerate being uncomfortable." Be comfortable with being uncomfortable.
You can work on your emotional fitness in 2 modes:
Long term consistent routines (meditation or journaling) or
Short emotional push ups (celebrating a win, asking for feedback, saying thank you…).
Emotional fitness is important for everyone, but even more so for founders, who are nearly three times as likely to suffer from mental health issues than the average population.
For curious minds, here are the 7 traits of emotional fitness that foster successful leadership:
#2. Learning from scaling
TLDR From 23 tactical company building lessons learned from scaling Stripe & Notion, an article published on the First Round Review in March 2022.
If you want to learn as much as possible at a startup, you have to be proactive about your own growth.
“Sign up for the “side jobs” of standing up new teams, helping to start new functions, or leading a company initiative. It was the projects I worked on outside of my day-to-day work that gave me the biggest opportunities.”
“Stripe sent out thank-you cards to our earliest customers. This eventually shifted to celebrating our customers when they hit their own milestones, such as sending them a nice gift when they hit $1M in ARR. Or when one of our customers had a huge outage, we'd send their team cupcakes to commiserate.”
#3. Media keeps innovating
TLDR From Innovation in media: Reinventing how ideas and culture spread, a blog post written by Rex Woodbury and published on March 23, 2022.
For those who think media is not evolving, this article is a true eye opener:
Movies and TV production has been constantly growing with streaming. “Streaming has led to an explosion in content. “Peak TV” is reaching higher and higher heights: after a pandemic-related decline in 2020, the number of scripted shows on air hit another record in 2021.”
Books have known a record year in 2020. “Print books had their best sales year of the decade in 2020.” Many businesses are starting off the ground trying to reinvent the industry. Riding on micro contents or tokenization, authors have now many new options to take off. And never forget that JKR got rejected 12 times for Harry Potter.
“Gaming is bigger than the box office, streaming video, and recorded music industries combined—and growing much faster.” And this is now the biggest media Industry of all.
#4. The art of brevity
TLDW From The art of smart brevity - Write less, say more / Jim VandeHei, a Youtube video published on Jan 24, 2022. Takeaways from Patrick Kervern.
Jim VandeHei, founder of Axios, ex WSJ and Washington Post journalist shares his insights on smart brevity.
Almost nobody reads most of what you write.
Even if something is interesting you give it an average of 26 seconds.
Most stories shared on social media have not been read.
Nobody is a good multitasker. If you are distracted by something it takes you 20 minutes to fully refocus.
Axios was built on Smart Brevity and the rules of smart brevity are:
Rule n°1: Stop being selfish. Think of the people reading you.
Rule n° 2 : Wether you are writing an email or tweet or an article: grab me !
Rule n° 3 : Keep it simple. One sentence is better than two. One paragraph better than 2. Use simple, strong words.
Rule n° 4 : Be Human. Write like a human. You think people think you’re smart when you are using big terms. They don’t.
Rule 5 : Just Stop. The greatest gift you can give people in this cluttered word is their time back.
#5. Unicorn stories
TLDR From French Tech news: Doctolib soars, BlaBlaCar detours and Act.io ICOs, an article published in The French Tech Journal by Chris O’Brien on March 22, 2022.
10days ago, Doctolib raised €500m and became the most valuable French startup: €5.8B company valuation. Interestingly they made no press release to share the news that Eurazeo, General Atlantic and BPI France joined this round. This new money will be used to finance recruitments in France, Germany and Italy.
Blablacar announced they are putting an end to investments in Russia, which is Blabla’s biggest market. This is an undisclosed financial impact on the company's finance. However, oil prices rocketing has triggered a +227% rise in seats being offered on the platform.
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See you next Sunday!