Chase the thing that keeps you up at night.
I don't believe in "follow your passion." Passion burns out. Curiosity doesn't. The stuff I've built, I built because I couldn't stop thinking about it. Community, trust, how people decide what's worth their time. That's the itch. I scratch it by building things. My first ever pet was a hamster named Ralph. He was endlessly curious. He got out of a cage dozens of times in dozens of ways. He is still an inspiration to this day.
Build from zero. Repeatedly.
A subreddit with no members. A US team with no people. A company with no customers. I keep starting from nothing and I keep choosing to. There's something about an empty room that makes me want to fill it with the right people. And the beautiful thing is, when those people tell you to take pictures and remember the day, they make for great memories.
Trust is the product.
Every business sells trust whether they know it or not. I just made it literal. If your community changes lives, you should be able to prove it with more than a screenshot of a DM. That belief runs ProveWorth and everything I touch.
Get close to the work.
I could manage from a distance. I don't want to. I code the product. I write the outreach. I read every review. Proximity is how you learn what actually matters. The best ideas come from being in the room. A lesson my father taught me, for which I am eternally grateful. When I told him that building a guitar from scratch would be impossible, he said, "Then how did the first guitar ever come to exist?"
Give more than you take.
I spent years at monday.com building a program to share what we learned with other startups. Now I mentor founders at Antler. ProveWorth gives every community a free profile. The math always works out in the end.
Hone the craft, respect the people.
I was fortunate enough to have interviewed hundreds of our early team members. At one point, the team I managed was 87 people. Over the course of my career, I managed 150 folks and mentored several dozen through our monday mentors program. To this day I sponsor communities to get our premium products and services at no cost. I wouldn't be where I am without the people that have supported me, and I want to do my best to be that for as many people as I can.
Normal is forgettable.
When Red Bull had rejected me twice for a sales job, I decided to show up with chicken wings. Now, in the age of AI, we are able to build anything that we want with just our voice. I try every day to remember that people really only remember the weird.
Grace over perfection.
Everything I've built has been messy in the middle at first. Usually, version 1 was pretty bad. Version 2 was a little less bad, but the lesson was always to keep going. During the tail end of COVID, we didn't stop film production. We just planned far enough ahead with enough systems so that everybody in charge of filming cleared multiple tests in isolation. That way we were able to keep going.
High agency, always.
If the problem doesn't break the laws of physics, it's solvable, and I learn that truth more every day. When I'm stuck, I try to ask myself, "If I had ten times more courage, what would this look like?" Usually the answer is obvious, and that I was scared. It's this reason and more that led me to secure Simon Sinek for our first ever community event.
Improve each other.
The best partnerships, teams, and communities make everyone in them better. I want to build things where that's true. Where showing up makes you sharper, braver, and more honest than you were yesterday. We had an open-door policy. Any customer could come in, look over the numbers and everything that we paid attention to. Many of our peers thought that was crazy, but we ended up learning so much more because we were always deeply in touch with our customers, even as we scaled to a billion dollars of annual revenue.
