Sander's Newsletter, Issue 3
Holding our identities dearly, TechCrunch trolls, drawing blood
Hi there, and welcome to my newsletter — about all things future of work, company-building, and operating.
I’ve been building companies for 15 years, starting with Thumbtack (local services) and now Scaled (startup recruiting) and GroomBuggy (dog grooming). I’m motivated to get jobs for people as tech accelerates. This newsletter chronicles my birds-eye view on the workforce and my journey in creating jobs for the future.
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What the world wants from you
The world wants something from you.
Your parents want you to get good grades and a good job.
Your friends like the old you.
Your partner wants stability.
You find solace in your identity.
Change is hard.
We are punished for being different.
The world mocks or ignores failure.
We’ve built our relationships on our past selves.
It’s scary to change the stories we tell ourselves about who we are.
Breaking free. Not easy.
In 2010 I had a high paying job at a prestigious law firm.
I was on the verge of leaving the firm and joining Thumbtack.
This was a leap. Nobody would hear of Thumbtack for at least another half decade. I was married with a young kid and needed an income, which Thumbtack wouldn’t really provide for a few years. My friends and identity were in DC politics.
I shared my plans in a comment thread on TechCrunch.
I was met with silence.
Except for two responses:
“Your decision to leave a high paying Wall Street law firm was foolhardy”
“I’m not sure how much of a future a traditional website like thumbtack.com has”
The world doesn’t want you to change.
What you want from the world
You want to make a difference.
You want to create new things.
You want to live a happy life.
To do these things, you need to change based on new information.
To do these things, you need to be independent.
To do these things, you need to share your dreams.
All of these come with a cost.
Changing your behavior changes your relationships.
Acting independently means you’re often wrong.
Sharing your dreams is met with silence or questions.
It’s all hard work.
Swimming upstream. 🐟
Many of us hold our identities dear. “I believe X.” “I’m the type of person who would never Y.” “I’m happiest when Z.”
The stories we tell ourselves are powerful when focusing but obstacles when exploring.
This month I read a book called Range. The book’s point is that instead of holding our identities dear, we should flirt with many possible selves. We all change over time. What makes sense for us to work on today is different than what we worked on in the past or should work on in the future. The world moves fast. Avoid fixed plans. Trying many things is the answer to finding your talent. Sample, explore.
Achieving your potential requires you to sometimes reject what the world wants from you.
I’ve found my own career follows a pattern.
Explore.
Focus.
Explore.
Focus.
Building great things requires focus.
Identifying great things requires exploration.
Each cycle has required me to refresh my identity and reject pieces of what the world wanted from me.
Refreshing my identity has helped me bridge what the world wants from me with what I want from the world.
Is it time to refresh yours?
🎨 Business updates
Scaled
Scaled launched a new product this month: recruiting as a service. We source, screen, and schedule candidates for most any role at a startup. This is powered by the sourcing engine we’ve built. We’re pricing the product to be very affordable for most people.
Turns out at Scaled I have committed the cardinal sin of the builder: I haven’t spent enough time on marketing. Too many builders think “If you build it, they will come.” That couldn’t be further from the truth. Marketing should be just as much of a focus as product for any growth-seeking company. Don’t neglect marketing.
Reply to this newsletter if you — or a startup you know? — might need help recruiting.
Thumbtack
This month we launched a new product experience which included a homepage refresh and a new TV ad campaign.
Good Morning America was the soundtrack to my mornings growing up. My mom sent me a video last week of the Thumbtack ad airing during GMA.
We are transitioning Thumbtack from a home services marketplace to a full home care platform. I used to think branding wasn’t very important. I’ve changed my mind. Excited about this one. 🤞
GroomBuggy
GroomBuggy is the Bay Area’s premier mobile dog grooming service.
Number of 1-star reviews: 0
Number of 2-star reviews: 0
Number of 3-star reviews: 0
Number of 4-star reviews: 0
🎯
🎒 Grab bag
🩸 Blood draw of the month. Did you know you can order your own blood labs from any Labcorp whenever you want? I do it annually. I use Own Your Labs. Each time I order so many labs that it requires them to draw like eight vials of blood and I pass out. I did that last Friday. I do it because a friend who got sick told me I should get bloodwork done regularly so you have a baseline when something goes wrong. Annually is probably too often, I’m OCD though. Perhaps worth a try.
📖 Book of the month. Literature is the best place to learn about how to build businesses. Literature is about the human condition, just the thing you need to know when building. I was taken by A Swim in the Pond in the Rain. It is authored by George Saunders, one of America’s great short story writers, and is about the creative process of writing literature. His experience in writing short stories — and his explanation of how Chekhov, Tolstoy, Gogol and other greats did it — reminded me of how I’ve seen the best business builders do it. A lot of boring day-to-day rote work that over a long time produced something beyond themselves. In creative work we become so much more than we are in person. The mundane becomes the divine.
🥅 Parenting win of the month. Last Thursday we accidentally dropped our 11-year-old son and his teammate off at the wrong soccer field for practice. 90 minutes later the kids showed up at our house. Turns out — they decided to walk home once they realized the mistake. Walking home was 2.5 miles across much of San Francisco through major highway interchanges, commercial corridors and places they had never been. They navigated by landmarks. We quickly called the teammate’s parents, their reaction was: “Huh, maybe we should get him a phone sooner than we thought.” Our reaction was the opposite: turns out kids are good at working things out for themselves. 💪
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See you next month!
👋 Sander
Why is Scaled just for startups? Big established businesses need to hire talent too. Love those TechCrunch responses. Probably more fun to read today than at the time.