Cibi Sounder

founder, lead pm & ex-SWE | past: founder @ nirvana, lead pm @ bld․ai, tpm @ ADP, swe @ faire | UWaterloo CS

[Cibi Sounder @CibiSounder]

@mynameisyahia 100%. but as rewarding as painful.

[Cibi Sounder @CibiSounder]

@deanbloembergen @deanbloembergen love the customer obsession. couldn’t dm you - says your inbox is closed.

[Cibi Sounder @CibiSounder]

The world is malleable.

[Cibi Sounder @CibiSounder]

@aporia9n @borvibe @levelsio what are some examples?

[Cibi Sounder @CibiSounder]

@renagaa1 @naval hope still originates from love for something.

[Naval @naval]

Except for love, the world is empty.

[Cibi Sounder @CibiSounder]

Just watched Jerry Maguire (1996) for the first time. What a movie.

[Cibi Sounder @CibiSounder]

@ansh_chokshi gtm

[justine @justinemach_]

an idiot in motion goes further than a genius at rest

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

Mark Zuckerberg: “Start off trying to make something cool, not build a company.”

In 2005, a 21 year old Mark Zuckerberg offered his former classmates the following advice:

“One cool characteristic of a lot of the companies that end up being really successful… Is that they started off as someone trying to make something cool and not someone trying to make a company.”

He gives Google, Yahoo, and eBay as examples—though he admits, “Amazon was a little more calculated.”

As Mark explains, the same was true of Facebook:

“When it just got started, what I thought was the most interesting thing was just to be able to type in someone’s name and find out information about them. There was hardly any of the stuff that’s there now. There was no groups. There was no messages even.”

It’s a bit counterintuitive, but the biggest companies seem to start really small.

Paul Graham offers similar advice:

“Empirically, the way to do really big things seems to be to start with small things and grow them bigger. Want to dominate microcomputer software for decades? Start by writing a basic interpreter for a machine with a couple thousand users. Want to make the universal website and a giant vacuum for people’s time? Start by building a website where Harvard undergrads can stalk one another.”

Source: @cs50 (Dec 2005)

[Jason Fried @jasonfried]

100% agree with this.

Never understood the failure fetish. Fail early and often? What? Fail often? Really? Fuck that.

Do, learn, do, learn. Move forward.

[Blake Burge @blakeaburge]

Underrated life skill: Letting today be today. Stop dragging yesterday into it and stop borrowing stress from tomorrow. Handle what's in front of you. You'll be surprised how much lighter life feels when you carry one day at a time.

[Gary Vaynerchuk @garyvee]

When you are attached to outcomes, you become vulnerable

[Cibi Sounder @CibiSounder]

@apnmrev true. how did he land his role?

[Cibi Sounder @CibiSounder]

Mindfulness, meditation, and contemplative traditions are some of the best antidotes to the attention economy.

[Prompter @PromptLLM]

Crazy take from Claude

[Cibi Sounder @CibiSounder]

@fahdananta This is both wise and hilarious. It's also why I think mindfulness, meditation, and contemplative traditions are among the best antidotes to the attention economy.

[Naval @naval]

Good marketing is finding different ways to tell the truth.

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

Jeff Bezos: “You don’t understand my audience”

When Charlie Rose asks him if the iPad is a “Kindle killer” in this 2012 interview, Jeff gives an incredible response:

“It’s a very different product, and I can give you an example. If I came to you and said: ‘Charlie, I love your show, but we’ve got to sex it up. We need fast cuts and vicious arguments between your guests.’ You would rightly say to me: ‘Jeff, I love you man, but you don’t understand my audience. We have a cerebral conversation here. It’s what we do, and it’s how we’re differentiated.’”

He continues:

“When people come to me and say: ‘You’ve got to have full-motion video and color on the Kindle.” I say: ‘Why? You think Hemingway is going to pop more in color?’… You don’t understand my audience.”

Jeff explains that his vision for the Kindle is a purpose-build device for reading where no tradeoffs have been made—every single design decision is optimized for reading.

And knowing exactly who his audience is gave him conviction in the Kindle team’s design decisions—even when everyone at the time was saying that the iPad would crush them.