Ting Ting Luo

Asker of good questions. 📣 Head of PMM @clay 💻 fmr VP Marketing @orumhq 🎓 @MIT @Wharton

[Ting Ting Luo @otingtingo]

A thought I've been having lately:

Stoicism drives clarity and focus, while emotion / empathy drives action and progress.

A balance of both is needed to do big things.

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

The fallacy of this is that more creates more. More hours, more hiring, more something.

And it is true in a sense. If you put in more work, more work will happen. But I think for most startups, the leverage is really in how differently you approach the problem, how well you cultivate your team, and the strategy.

Any large company can outspend you on hours. They have thousands or tens of thousands more people, spending more hours. If hours worked were the metric, every large company and government organization would always win and do the best work. More hours, better output.

This thinking is often representative of younger founders, where the startup becomes their identity and life. They have a hard time doing anything else, and cannot understand that your work is not the person that is you. But activities outside of work can grow you as a person too and make you do better work.

I’ve never worked this way. As a designer, I always saw the need to take a step back, to take a break. At times, I might work 12 hours or 16 hours, or whatever amount was needed, but it wasn’t the norm. You just can't grind design, you need inspiration. But taking that step away from the work, would give me more perspective, inspiration and I could approach the problem differently or I could just see the solution.

Grinding is never good for any creative problem, and startups or creating new products are often mostly about creative problem solving. Grinding works ok for email jobs, or where you just executing on very clear playbook.

With Linear, we’ve never worked this way. We work reasonable hours, 5 days a week. All of us founders have families. Many of our employees have families. I personally stop every evening, spend time with the family, cook dinner for the family, eat dinner together, and focus on things outside of work. Sometimes I work in the late evenings or weekends, but to me the pride is that I don’t need to. Company should be succesful without it.

My goal is to build a company that is sustainable in the long term, and doesn’t require heroics or personal sacrifices every single day.

There are times when our team is heroic. Launches, incidents, some other work that just needs to be done. They will work late into the night because they know it is the right thing. But we don’t require that every day or every week, and the more this happens, the more I think it is a failure of our company and leadership. The team and the leaders should always keep a reserve to use when something is needed.

Our thinking was also that quality, which we value, doesn’t emerge from working more or stressing people more. It emerges when you create the conditions for it to emerge. Often it is the appreciation, space, time, and how the person feels. A person who is rested will do better work.

I wouldn’t attribute much of our success to working a lot. The success came from having clear thinking, ideas, and focus to do the right things.

I sometimes wish we could move the culture more toward a Zen master.

Real mastery is not exerting the most effort. It is achieving the outcome with the least necessary effort.

[Ting Ting Luo @otingtingo]

Too many people want to change the world, and not enough want to change it for the better.

[Ting Ting Luo @otingtingo]

happiness is the joy felt moving towards your potential.

[pedram.md @pdrmnvd]

men in their 40s used to have cool midlife crisis but now they just have agentic workflows

[Ting Ting Luo @otingtingo]

@akothari @ivanhzhao @NotionHQ Comments on docs are impossible to follow after the first few. As a result, I find collaborating very challenging.

[Founder Mode @Founder_Mode_]

Peter Thiel: "Do One Thing"

[Ting Ting Luo @otingtingo]

Yes, DNA matters, but so does the environment you build to foster it as a leader.

Does your team have time for hobbies? Do they have space for diff perspectives?
Do you celebrate out of box ideas?

Without these elements, even a “creative” team will lose its magic

[Ting Ting Luo @otingtingo]

Ask marketing leaders how to cultivate creativity inside their teams, and they say things like “hire creative people.”

[TBPN @tbpn]

.@lulumeservey on how founders can break through the noise:

"I looked up the literal definition of 'white noise.' It's basically: maximum intensity, at every frequency, altogether, so that it's mushed into this nothingness. That feels like the information environment that we're in."

"The only way to break through the white noise is: you don't compete on being loud. And competing on temporary intensity is not it. But one, normal volume or quieter note, that is sustained for a long period of time, actually does cut through."

"People love hearing the thing that they are feeling and can't express, articulated into words that they wish they could have thought of."

[Jack Altman @jaltma]

I think this is a brilliant observation from Lulu: people root for you when they think you deserve more than you've got, and root against you when it's the opposite.

It captures an essential element of good comms...how can you help people think you're underrated rather than overrated?

People are very motivated to correct the record in either direction, or as Lulu puts it, "We're all kind of reputational karens."

[Ting Ting Luo @otingtingo]

Sensing our shared humanity and the smallness of the world is one of the best feelings.

[Codie Sanchez @Codie_Sanchez]

Others' Beliefs Become Your Reality

This is called the Pygmalion effect.

If people around you say you'll never grow, you probably never will.

Surround yourself with people who believe in your potential.

[Ting Ting Luo @otingtingo]

have been having too much fun on https://t.co/g7Xe7YNKdv lately, and just vibe coded an art history guessing game, modeled after my college art history class final.

https://t.co/VEgDIccmbt

feedback welcome

[Ting Ting Luo @otingtingo]

@DenisJeliazkov Winamp was amazing.

[James Clear @JamesClear]

It only takes five minutes to break the cycle.

Five minutes of exercise and you are back on the path. Five minutes of writing and the manuscript is moving forward again. Five minutes of conversation and the relationship is restored.

It doesn't take much to feel good again.

[Ting Ting Luo @otingtingo]

@benln hayes valley, SF!

[Ting Ting Luo @otingtingo]

@levie What's the best resource / template you've seen on prompt engineering?

[Ting Ting Luo @otingtingo]

@bran_don_gell @every I really loved this post from the Every team.

Every org wants the outcomes of AI adoption, but few teams are investing in the exploration and experimentation needed to drive adoption from the bottoms up.