- Don't decide what to do first. - First decide who to do it with. - Nobody cares about your brand or your product or your service. - They care about themselves, and how you make them feel. - So, begin with them. - Learn which people and groups you seem to have a powerful effect on. - Categorize them. - From those categories, decide which you want to sell to, and which others you want to work with. - No matter what you do together, that feeling and that power will follow you. - Company first. Business after. For all of human history, life occurred within a tribe. The tribe is given, the task is not. The ultimate task is survival and family. The concrete tasks you and your tribe engage in to do so is not required to be fixed, or decided in advance. --- - [Good to Great](https://www.jimcollins.com/concepts/first-who-then-what.html). --- There is at present no mechanism for skilled professionals to decide who we work with day to day, as long as we remain employees. You deserve to be able to work with the people who make your day most pleasant, most productive, most educational, most efficient. You deserve the ability to act as a CEO of your own distributed enterprise, scale that enterprise as well as your skills allow, and grow those skills over time. We're not remotely close enough to our coworkers because we the workers largely don't get to choose those with whom we spend our days. We beg entrepreneurs for the privilege to be thrown into these manufactured cultures, by people who don't understand our field or its culture. We then proceed to spend our days with a bunch of effectively random people. Those random people are mostly nice. Because people are mostly nice. And over time we learn to love them. We build friendships and those friendships often follow us for years or decades. But we never stop to ask if there's an alternative to all this. There is at present no mechanism on the employee side of a company for deciding who we work with, in order to accomplish the things we get paid for day to day. Except choosing to quit, start a company, and have the people you work for pay your company instead of you. Insert legal definition of what makes an independent contractor vs employee, and how it's all about your autonomy to choose _how_ you accomplish _what_ they want. Two of our first founders used to work at a company together. We found we really enjoyed working together. She was good at all the things he sucked at, and vice-versa. They both learned a ton every day they worked together. When the time came that they decided to leave that job, they realized they had a decision to make. Either we could continue to spend our careers at a series of full time jobs, spending our days working with whatever teams were hired by the people who run our companies. Or they could quit, start a company of their own, and hire their favorite people directly.