Company Building

I've been focused on getting Buffer through this period as unscathed as possible. One debt I believe is building in companies right now is burnout. To lessen that impact at Buffer, we'll try a 4-day workweek (at full pay) for May.

One of the most challenging exercises for early stage companies is defining your initial GTM strategy. Shares his playbook as the first Head of Sales & Customer Success at Typeform and Notion.

You probably have not heard the names of 90% of Lockheed Martins suppliers. Never ignore the small shops in middle America. They are the defense industrial base. >$6.9B/year goes to 7,100+ small businesses alone >Lockheed won the SBA's Dwight D. Eisenhower Award for Excellence, the most prestigious honor for large prime contractors working with small businesses >$36B/year flows to 13,000+ suppliers across all 50 states >93% of those suppliers are American >The F-35 has 2,100+ suppliers. Nearly half are small businesses >Lockheed's Orion spacecraft: 2,900 suppliers. 50% small business >These aren't subcontractors in name only. These are machine shops in PA, ceramics labs in LA, precision engineers in MA, painting companies in AR, castings foundries in NH >One small shop in Cleveland runs the only 50,000-ton forging press on earth. Makes F-35 bulkheads in a single piece of titanium >Every F-35 carries 920 lbs of rare earths. China refines 90% of the global supply >The Pentagon once discovered Chinese alloys in the F-35 through a 4-layer game of telephone: Lockheed > Honeywell > pump supplier > magnet supplier > "that's from China" >There's a 2027 deadline to eliminate Chinese rare earths from all US weapons systems