Contracts

When starting any engagement or client work, it’s best to have a contract. This is to protect both parties by being clear about what each person will do.

Seth Godin wrote a great post on this. In fact, you should probably just read everything Seth has ever written. Chances are he’s covered every topic you need when starting a business, running a business, and launching a product.

Seth’s point is there is no reason contracts have to be written in legalese. He recommends including a clear piece of text to simplify things if the project goes south:

"Any disagreements over the interpretation of this agreement will be resolved through binding, informal arbitration. Both of us agree to hire a non-involved attorney, submit up to five pages of material to state our case, and abide by her decision."

This is so simple, but so smart. This ensures both sides are heard, both sides can trust an impartial party will a decision, and both sides have a small, equal cap on legal expenses. Brilliant.

Mini Obsession: Commuter Skateboard

I tend to have mini-obsessions from time to time where I hyperfoucs on one topic until I know enough to satisfy my urge. This time it was skateboards.

I don’t skate. In fact, I’ve never skated. However, I walk a mile to the train station, each way, to head into work. One day it hit me—I could skate this! Now, can I? That remains to be seen, but, I’ve found the right equipment if I decide to give this a go.

Goal: What’s the best skateboard for a city commuter, who’s never actually touched a skateboard?

Skateboard Anatomy

Before we go any further, we should sort out the basic board anatomy and terms

• Deck—the board itself
• Wheels—self explanatory
• Trucks—the T-shaped metal hardware that controls steering and mounts the wheels to the board
• Bearings—a component of the wheel that has a major effect on speed. Almost everyone says to just get Bones Reds; or Bones Super Reds for a slightly quieter ride.

Terms

• Wheelbite—Where the wheel grinds on the board when turning
• Carving—Pivoting your body at the waist separating legs and torso, and leaning back and forth, shifting the board left to right. This is a way to turn, as well as propelling yourself other than push-kick.
• Sliding— A trick where the skateboarder slides sideways on the wheels, typically when going downhill.
• Push or Push-kick—While standing on the board with one foot, use your other foot to push yourself to gain speed.

Intro to Board Types

With that out of the way, let’s dive into the basic types of skateboards.

Regular or ‘pencil’ skateboard decks are the typical boards you see. Round on both sides and kicktails on each side. These boards have smaller, hard wheels that stay out of the way when doing tricks. Trick skateboards also tend to be more narrower (7”-8”) to make them easier to flip and maneuver. I include freestyle and pool/ramp boards in this category as they’re best for tricks.

Cruiser boards are a mixed bag. These boards are typically 30” to 36” and have a variety of shapes and kicktail arrangements. Typically what makes a board a cruiser board is the wheels—they tend to be bigger (55mm-65mm) and softer (70a-95a) to absorb bumps and vibration.

Longboards are typically longer than 32”, 8” to 10” wide, and designed for smoother distance skating. A normal longboard is typically 40” to 50”+, and a short longboard (yep!) is typically 32” to 39”. These boards are great for distance skating and particularly good at carving (pushing back and forth) to manage speed. Typical longboards will have 65mm-75mm wheels and will be quite soft.

One subtype of longboards has wheel cutouts that give the deck a nose at each end, like the picture above. This is done to avoid wheelbite; if you’re a heavier person, you’ll want this.

And of course, within these groups of boards there are several subgroups that break into categories like distance skating, downhills, types of tricks, etc. But regular, cruiser, and longboards seem to be the most common groupings.

Wait… did you think I forgot about electric skateboards? Of course not. However, the electric skateboard market is still quite young, with better boards coming out every month. The market leader right now is definitely Boosted Board with generative breaking. However the Stary Board is as thin as a traditional board and doesn’t quite scream ‘steal me’ (until they see you riding it). Electric skateboards typically go 20+/- miles per hour with a 15+ range and cost upwards of $1,000. The high-end boards ones even have brakes, which is really appealing to a non-skater! This would be my first choice if it weren’t for the price. Instead, I’m opting to get an old-fashion manual board first to see if commuting by board is a realistic option.

Wheels

Wheels also vary based on the type of skating you want to do. Two things affect your ride experience: wheel diameter and softness. If you want a smooth ride, then you want a larger and softer wheel. If you want to do tricks, you want a smaller and harder wheel.

Shopping for Boards

Skateboards are sold in who ways: ‘complete’ and piecemeal. Complete skateboards are fully assembled and ready to roll. These boards save you hassle of knowing which pieces to order and assembling, but the tradeoff is that the hardware is average. Alternatively, you can mix and match the perfect hardware to build the board of your dreams, though you should likely know what you’re doing.

So, What Board Should You Get?

If you’re looking for the easiest board to learn on and don’t have to worry about storage, then a longboard is the best bet. They’ll provide the smoothest ride and the most stable platform. The downside is they’re kind of big, so storing them when not in use can be challenging. The Arbor Axis Premium Longboard seems to be the perfect learning or traveling board. It’s a great mix of quality equipment, good hardware, and a wide platform.

Most people commuting by skateboard need to store the board when not in use. If this matters to you, then the BoardUp folding skateboard is likely your best option. Its ingenious design enables the board to lock flat while skating, and fold when not it use for easy storage. And on top of that, the ride is pretty good and not gimmicky at all.

If you want a smooth ride and easy maneuvering around the city, then a cruiser is a good option. The shorter board and kicktail makes it easier to quickly navigate city streets or zip around pedestrians. This board will be slightly harder to learn on given the shorter wheelbase. The Globe Chromantic or Arbor Pilsner are two of the best (and most attractive) cruisers out there.

Happy skating.

Stages of Learning

Typically a person has two stages of learning: lectures and experiencing. One phase is passive, depending on listening and remembering. The other phase depends on exploring, trying and failing.

Lecture-based Learning

Lecture-based learning most often occurs in grade-school and college consists. In class there is a professor speaking at you, listing of dates and events, summarizing theories and intrepretations. Later you have papers and excersizes that effectily measure you note-taking and research abilities. This is typically low-pressure (except perhaps when finals time rolls around), giving you moderate time to study, get tutoring or do additional research.

Experience-based Learning

Next you graduate and enter your field—welcome to the experience phase. Most of your life is this phase—you learn by watching others on your team and other teams or by blindly making it up as you go.

Learning in front of others might be one of the scariest things you do in life. Learning is something most prefer to do from observance or in solitude, afterall not-knowing can be frustrating or embarrasing.

Though often, when you’re thrown into the middle of something scary and you must pioneer your own path, you often learn more and retain it longer. Then hopefully you end up being quite proud of the experience and what you’ve created.

Improvising

Improvising is often activly learning in context. No one knows what they’re doing all the time.

Confidence

A key to experience-based learning is confidence. That doesn’t mean you pretend to you know everything, stop listening, do everything wrong and cause chaos. No, the confidence I speak of is acknowledging that you’re learning and going to make mistakes. Be confident in the fact you have areas to improve in, and cherrish people that want to help you along the way.

Mistakes

Mistakes are often the hardest part of learning; no one likes to fail. But at each failure is an opportunity to understand what went wrong and what you should do next time.

Keep Learning

The most important thing is to keep learning. It keeps you young. Keeps you energetic. Most importantly, it keeps you relevant.

Startups Must Have Passion

“You can’t have a startup culture if you are ok with Meh” ~ Melissa Perri (@lissijean), Lean Agile Scotland 2016

Startups are all about passion. Passionate about making something better, passionate about the medium you’re working in, passionate about results. Without passion, everything you touch will fail… or worse yet, be mediocre.

The startup culture mindset is in full swing. Even Fortune 10's are big proponents of startup culture, Lean Startup, FastWorks, etc. But none of these philosophies matter without passion in what you’re doing.

In fact, passion is the number one criteria I look for when hiring a new team member. Above the hard skills they actually need to do the job. You can't teach passion.

So, how do you get passion?

1. Hire passionate people. These are people that get carried away when talking about their portfolio or past work; or the ones that have 5 different pairs of headphones depending on their use; or the ones that measure their coffee down to the ounce. These people fall in love with their craft and gaining knowledge, and demand results above all. Cherish these people.
2. Take breaks. No one is passionate 24-7. Passion is the first thing to dim when approaching burn-out. Be sure to take the time to unwind; explore hobbies, peek into other industries or cultures, and most importantly, rest. Inspiration is everywhere.
3. Seek it out. Everyone is passionate about something. If you have team members that aren’t passionate about the mission at hand, try to find a way to align it to their passions and interest, at least tangentially.
4. Remove dead weight. Some people are just not interested for a number of reasons. If that's the case, re-assign or release them—this will save you time and headache in the long run. Disinterest can spread like a bad cold.

Passion can pop up organically, but you have to work at keeping it alive. Without regular maintenance, passion will dwindle and results will follow.

Building A Team: Stop Making All the Decisions

When a question pops up on my team, they typically come to me, explain the situation, then I’d make a decision and it was implemented. This was great since everything was done just the way I wanted. But then I noticed that the issues were getting smaller and smaller, and they kept coming to me for the answer. This won't scale.

This didn’t feel very productive. More and more, when questions were asked, I’d find myself thinking “They should know this”.

And so, I tried something new. When they came with a question, I helped them explain the various options, weigh each one, then choose the best one for the situation. We discuss, they implement.

This helps build analytical skills, and empowers the team to become more autonomous. It's a simple shift, but builds the right foundation for a more productive team.