NewCo Shift

Sales: Read founding sales by Kazanjy

Management: Read 'the effective manager' book and 'if you want something done right you don't need to do it yourself'

Hiring: Do as little as possible; if something doesn't feel right and it'd be painful to unwind then don't do it. Consider "cell division" hiring (https://medium.com/newco/who-should-a-startup-hire-first-c12b279814aa)

Marketing: talk to your existing customers that came inbound, figure out where they found you, double down on that. basically look for what channels are already working without any effort, and then put effort into them

Mostly it's just - sell more and do the marketing, and then all the hiring and management challenges will be painful but they're more deterministic and will be solved. What I'm trying to say in this last paragraph is that direct all of your effort to the sales and marketing, and the hiring and management stuff will come up when it comes up and is painful, you'll solve it, you'll move on. But without direct effort on the sales and marketing, it won't happen. I.e. the hiring and management is pain driven and will force you to solve it, the sales and marketing won't force you to do it, so put your effort there, because your effort will naturally be pulled to the hiring and management as needed.

And in general, trust your gut. Do what feels right even if it's "weird". You are the expert on what you want, on your business, and so on - so seek info like you're doing but if something tells you…

I think there's a compelling case that it is.

This number is probably the truest measure of a person’s real wealth: What is the largest unexpected financial shock you could sustain without the cost of that to you suddenly becoming ten times the original cost or more? That number isn’t something easy to calculate; it depends on whether you have a family that can help you out, on your income, on whether that shock involves losing your job (and thus your health insurance, if you live in the US), on whether you have access to any other sources of security (including public assistance).

From Yonatan Zunger's "Your 'Financial Shock' Wealth".

https://medium.com/newco/your-financial-shock-wealth-4845e6dc1d2f

Other commentators have similar arguments. Economist Emma Rothschild makes the explicit point that Adam Smith's "liberal philosophy" was one of material liberty, that is, of an abundance of material wealth at the individual level, which allows for a freedom of actions without catastrophic consequence.[1] Several recent modern commentators have noted that the chief characteristic of poverty is a lack of choice: if there's only one way to do things right, without consequence, you have no freedom.

Among Zunger's references is the point that very nearly a majority of US households, 47%, cannot sustain an unexpected $400 expense.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/my-secret-shame/476415/

Whether or not living paycheck-to-paycheck is necessarily a…

Here is a video [0] of him with it on, yeah, nothing like the Apple watch. Also on the topic of cheap Chinese watches I would read the section of this article on the smartwatch [1] and note this was published 2 years ago. That whole article is interesting but the smartwatch and their contact who said it only cost them $6 to make (note they bought the watches for just under $10 each):

> If the factory sold the watches for $7.49, how much could they possibly cost to make? That’s a question that can be awfully hard to get answered. Not really expecting an answer, we asked our friend to ask his friend. She was happy to tell us: $6.

> Six dollars for: a GSM chipset, a CPU, an LCD screen, a battery, a PCB, a metal housing, a molded silicone watch band, a MicroUSB cable, and a box. And the labor to assemble and test all of that.

[0] http://www.xxlmag.com/video/2018/12/soulja-boy-watch-brand-souljawatch/

[1] https://medium.com/newco/what-50-buys-you-at-huaqiangbei-the-worlds-most-fascinating-electronics-market-f0384d9fca32#2216

There is almost no evidence that rent control is the primary, secondary or even tertiary cause of San Francisco's woes. As https://medium.com/newco/a-guy-just-transcribed-30-years-of-for-rent-ads-heres-what-it-taught-us-about-sf-housing-prices-bd61fd0e4ef9#.r7qldtd56 shows, the long-term price curves barely change in 1979 when rent control came into existence.

The three things that matter are the amount of housing, the number of jobs there are, and the total salary paid for those jobs. See the article for the formula. I am sure that a similar formula applies in San Francisco. The result is that having or not having rent control is immaterial. Being unwilling to build housing is a problem.

https://medium.com/newco/a-guy-just-transcribed-30-years-of-for-rent-ads-heres-what-it-taught-us-about-sf-housing-prices-bd61fd0e4ef9#.ufmhx65zw

If the amount that housing costs increase above inflation is mostly determined (in the general area at least) by a combination of the economy and available units, then yes Detroit is evidence of that relationship as well. I do feel as if Portland has generally learned from San Francisco and is more willing to allow for housing development, and to be allowed to build up.