With almost 10 years of experience working with early stage startups, a lot of people run their business ideas by me. I love brainstorming and imagining what could be, but one thing that often strikes me is how unnecessarily complicated many business ideas are.

I think a lot of them stem from the mistaken belief that a startup must be unique in order to succeed. In fact, the reverse is usually true - startups that play off existing, proven models tend to succeed more often than unique ones.

🧘‍♂️ I believe that simple business models are typically better than more complicated ones.

For example, it's better to start with a simple productized service instead of a multi-sided marketplace. Similarly, it's easier to launch a product that sells directly to decision-makers than one that requires multiple sign-offs.

Too many would-be founders force themselves to build complex models when simple ones will do just fine.

Interested in this idea? Read more here.

- Karl Hughes

"My responsibility is to treat the company like a product, where employees are the user. Like a product manager, I spend my days thinking about what we should build and improve on, owning the components that make the company's culture and productivity come to life."

"It’s essential to find 1-2 ponds to start from and then expand to the other, larger, and more promising lakes and oceans. Here are a couple, maybe surprising examples, that demonstrate how popular products took off."

"This book is for people as untechnical as my Mom or as technical as my Applied Scientist friends working in big tech. The book is a nice, fun, and inspirational collection of stories. These stories about data should get you thinking about your own life."

"As with any ubiquitous developer tool, the Git user base has a lot of strong and conflicting opinions about the one "correct" way to use it. My goal is simply to introduce a workflow that I've been using and refining for much of my career; take from it what you will."

"For almost all total compensation packages over $250K in the US and €150K in Europe, an increasing chunk of it is equity. Both publicly traded companies in Big Tech and startups frequently issue meaningful stock to software engineers."

"Managers who refuse to learn from successful examples...can and should be replaced. This gets more important the more complex a project gets."

"This is a list of things you’re allowed to do that you thought you couldn’t, or didn’t even know you could. I haven’t tried everything on this list, mainly due to cost. But you’d be surprised how cheap most of the things on this list are."

Being a good manager requires a wide range of skills that often take years to build. After almost a decade of managing marketing and software engineering teams at startups, I have gone through many ups and downs as a manager. Here are my top picks for management books.