Week 6: a day off, #noslides, keyboards, traveling from my desk.
I did a shareholder update using no slides, bought a keyboard for my son and traveled from my desk.
Hey everyone! I am taking a day off today and plan to spend it writing this newsletter, read a bit, take a walk with a friend and cook dinner.
#noslides: Doing an update meeting for shareholders not using slides.
My Co-MD Henric and I had a meeting this week to update our shareholders on how we are doing. Usually, these meetings are prepared with a slide deck and quite a lot of work to gather information, put it indigestible slides, and then a presentation. We usually try to avoid slides as much as we can since the added abstraction level might not be needed when working with tools and systems with a built-in overview/ aggregation level. So what we did was quite simple:
We wrote a script of all the topics we want to touch on and the documents, dashboards, and views we wanted to share with the people in the meeting. The document is a simple, bullet-point list with the main points we wanted to talk about and some color coding representing who would speak and lead the conversation, and some timeline info (how long to spend on each topic). In addition to this, I created a bookmark list of all the links we needed.
The actual meeting we had in a video call where I shared one browser window with all needed tabs open,🏝 and we looked at the respective tab together while presenting or having short discussions on the content we would be looking at.
Preparing and doing the meeting like this I liked a lot because:
We discussed the “real thing” - there was no layer of abstraction. We looked at our actual tools and systems in our daily work when we work on our dealflow, investment decisions, startup updates, planning, and controlling.
We had short and engaging bursts of discussion: people would see the “core” of the information when there were questions. When there were deeper questions on certain topics, we were able to look at the raw data quickly we used to aggregate information on, i.e., how different sources of startups we meet convert into investments. (i.e., are we more likely to invest in a company referred to us by one of our portfolio company founders than in a company that found us via google?)
In my impression, this format increases trust, as what we were looking at is our “truth.” So any discussion we had was not about the “correctness” of our aggregation/ summarization but on what we see and what this tells us.
We were so much faster in preparing for this meeting. And we did not have to involve our colleagues by asking them to help us prepare a deck. My rough estimate is that I spent one hour thinking about what we should talk about and one hour to write the script and prepare the links/ bookmarks.
During the meeting, everything worked. The only challenge sometimes was that as we cannot control the viewers’ video clients' settings, it is helpful to figure out how to size the window you share so that everyone can see everything they want to see. It would be a great feature of video clients to allow for client-side zooming.
There was one interesting “feeling” while preparing the meeting: Usually, these meetings need a lot of preparation, and there was a slight feeling of guilt that this preparation is too easy. This topic I will take up with my sharpist coach on Monday.
The meeting was very constructive and productive, and the feedback was very good. And I hope we can use this setup more often in the future.
⌨️ Keyboards
Last week I wrote about typing fast. My son Lasse asked me for a new keyboard as the gaming keyboard he has been using for the past few years did not work for him anymore. As I have several keyboards, we found an interim solution for him quite fast and then went online to figure out his next “own” keyboard. Of course, we could have just got something from an online store. Still, we had a nice discussion about the fact that you buy a good bed because you sleep on it so much time of your life and buy a good chair and desk because no matter if you are going to school, university or home office/ office you spend quite a lot of your time with them. So why shouldn’t you figure out what your keyboard of choice is?
We went online and did some research together:
This was one of the first videos we watched: Taeha, a custom keyboard builder in action.
One of the many shops we found: KeyCult
A build list in the form of a Google Sheet
While browsing all the possible keyboard sizes, PCBs and Plates, switches and keycaps, and design options, we also saw how beautiful cables could be. And then learned that you could not just go to the site and order them. We expect some shipments of cables and accessories now in q2, q3, and q4 of 2021. #celebrate #nerd
In the end, we ordered a custom-configured Drop CTRL for him because we both are not too deep into soldering and waiting for months for parts to arrive. But I see some cool keyboard builts coming up over the cause of the next months.
We learned from this that it always is a lot of fun to go deep on most topics and that you can discover new strange and in his case also quite fun worlds by just developing a set of skills on where to look for the information and people who really care about a certain topic. In my view, this is one of the excellent effects of the internet.
Traveling from my Desk with Carsten
My friend Carsten moved to the US years ago. Usually, we do a lot to see each other every other year in person and connect digitally. He is also a photographer. I enjoyed following his past road trip along the US Mexican border.
Thank you for reading, have a great week!
Cheers, Joerg