Week 17: being human, slides, little things, ownership

Links and thoughts after a packed week.

Hello everyone! I had an exciting week. I hope you too!

My thoughts this week are with my Indian friends and portfolio founders. Some of their families at home in India are suffering badly. I hope that we will be able to overcome the pandemic globally as soon as possible, and I also know that I am complaining about the effects on me on a high level when I do complain.

We went to a museum

Last week Dina bought tickets to the Andreas Gursky show in Leipzig. He is one of our favorite artists, and it was one of the best surprises in a long time. We got tested, drove to Leipzig from Berlin one afternoon, went to see the exhibition, had a snack, and went back to Berlin. Five hours with a significant effect on all of us.

The twins looking at one of the works, April 2021

I miss museums, and I am very much looking forward to the days when I can attend shows as straightforward as it was possible as it was before.

Non-transactional moments

With the continued lockdown, we also closed our office down again and asked everyone to work from home as much as possible. Operationally and technically, we are pretty good at working with each other effectively and efficiently. But we also miss the moments of serendipity and personal interaction. I think this is also because most of the things we do to plan our time is output-oriented. Some of us believe in maker and manager time dimensions, and as much as I think this is important, I also believe we need to think in transactional and social dimensions. Most of the meetings in my calendar are transactional, and there are very few social moments planned in my and our companies calendars. This is also because it usually feels weird to plan for social time.

In normal times this happens collaterally: when you go to get a glass of water, have lunch with each other, run into each other or take a quick break together. These days everything has to be planned.

These days team time has to be planned, and that feels awkward for a lot of people. I also observe that it is not equally important for everyone. But I think a well-working team must have non-transactional time with each other. We have tried multiple paths so far:

• in the first lockdown, we started a discord server that a few of us used for two weeks, and then it got boring, and it fell asleep.

• We tried several virtual offsite formats that we all found exhausting or dull, and although we were motivated to use the opportunities, we did not manage to engage in a way we all enjoyed

• We had to postpone so many of our real-life meetings, offsites, team events that, although I think it is important to plan them, it feels weird to move our booking of Coconat (where we go twice per year) by another six months, again.

What works for us are these formats:

• “Until someone speaks” is a format we have been doing in real life already. Once per month, we book a ninety-minute meeting with the whole team, and we all get in a room. These days we meet in a Google Meet Hangout, and no one speaks until someone speaks. This usually leads to people speaking up who do not speak first usually. Topics can be anything from team- and personal issues to big ideas that need some room to breathe.

• Pub Quizzes with anyone who wants and in groups. As a video call.

• Weekly Check-In: Everybody gets 30-60 seconds or longer if needed to share how they are doing. As we started to do this in an open matter, so far, I think people are actually sharing how they do. Defining the comfort level and allowing people their personal comfort level in a safe environment is key for this to work. I have the feeling this works well at APX. But I also see that people are getting tired over the past few weeks.

• Slack Channels: In our #resonator slack channel, we all post what inspires us. Links to posts, pages, sites, videos, business-related or not. Always great to have a look. In our #bestof channel, we share conversations and encounters we have that sometimes are quite hilarious. For example, this week, one of the founders of one of the companies we are thinking about investing in gave his cell phone to his mother. My colleague who wanted to talk to him had an unplanned, quite nice, and fun reference call with his mother.

Slides in a board meeting?

We had our shareholders update meeting this morning. We have started to screen share the actual spreadsheets with our shareholders and use slides only as a framework to guide us all through the meeting. Sometimes we use a text document instead of slides. We share a set of PDF documents with everyone a few days before the actual meeting. This has several effects:

• It’s a lot faster to prepare since we are showing the actual tools we are working with. Not an abstraction.

• Truth and trust are also looked at from a different angle. When everyone is looking at the “core” information, there are more questions about the “what are we seeing here” or which patterns do we see than around: is this the truth? What is your abstraction based on?

• It’s more enjoyable for everyone since the people who do not deal with us every day see how we work. They can inspire us, and we sometimes inspire them with how we use spreadsheets, scripts, and other tools to build our data tools.

We also like to invite our colleagues to present the results of their work rather than us doing it. Finding the balance here is essential. We try not to rip too many of us out of our actual work to participate in a board meeting, but it is great to bring two people along in our experience. With everything being virtual right now, this worked easy today. And the best: preparing a board meeting is so much quicker. We had some work gathering all the information and links and updating some graphs, but everything we shared was content we need anyway to work.

Things: Soap

I love LeLabo Hinoki handsoap. I like the smell of it, and I also like how it feels to use it. I put bottles of it at all relevant places at home. It’s another little thing that makes life a little bit more liveable. (Especially when you have to wash your hands so often.)

Things: Fresh French fries

This week I got freshly deep-fried fries at a booth when I ran some errands I could not do online. And I immediately ate them. This sounds like nothing special, but I figured that I did not have decent and “fresh” fries in more than a year. We do not do them at home, and I would not order them as delivery food. It’s the little things.

What I read and watched this week:

• The brain “rotates” memories to save them from new sensations.

• Jeder Mensch: I read Ferdinand von Schirach’s short book recommended to me by several friends. When I first read the articles, I found them super naive and started with thoughts: this is impossible, this is not doable in a connected world, or I don’t think there will be majorities. But after thinking about it for some more time, I think it is a great idea to think and come up with the most basic set of fundamental rights.

• Does running suck? One of my favorite YouTubers on running. And motivation. I love it.

• Taking photos on film in LA: Grainydays on using Silbersalz film from Germany and shooting and processing it. Also, watchable when you are not into film photography. (I think)

• Jack Conte (Ceo and founder of Patreon) taking ownership:

Thank you for reading! I hope there was something for you in this mail.

Have a great weekend and best

Joerg