Will De Ath

Founding Head of Growth @inth (YC P26) @c15tdev, consent & privacy infrastructure for developers | Previously VC backed Founder | 2x Father

[Will De Ath @willde_ath]

@Sirupsen looks great. you have EU/CCPA users, running analytics and cookies, but no banner --> use https://t.co/ANmR4SOxB8?

npm install @c15t/nextjs

[Will De Ath @willde_ath]

@ionleu https://t.co/FRJp4qrJf9

[Will De Ath @willde_ath]

@bruvimtired Soz, this guy is off the rails

[Will De Ath @willde_ath]

@bruvimtired Dude, I didn’t know this about you, please stop this hobby of yours

[Will De Ath @willde_ath]

This just tells me that Linear is in the hands of sane and stable minded people, the type of people I’d want running the software we use everyday…

[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.

[Will De Ath @willde_ath]

@kaylee_dev Is that where I think it is 🤫

[Will De Ath @willde_ath]

keep seeing posts of people moving from Webflow/Framer to NextJS/React/Vue for their sites because they want performance.

..but actually they're not there yet because there's an old gen cookie banner script feeding on their core web vitals.

If you just moved to a modern stack or still have a banner script on your site, @c15tdev will literally save you so much.

if not, stay with slower speeds, poor UX, and higher ad spend, but you know where we are if you want real performance + happy engineers and agents

[Christopher Burns @BurnedChris]

Most teams add consent at the very end of a launch.

By then, it’s already fighting with performance and UX.

With @c15tdev and @Inth we bring consent into code and back it with managed infrastructure, so it ships with your app instead of after it.

[Will De Ath @willde_ath]

c15t is just about to take top 40 most used cookie banners on @Wappalyzer out of hundreds in just about a year of growth…signal

[c15t @c15tdev]

The banners are climbing 🧗

More than 2,600 c15t consent banners have been tracked by Wappalyzer.

Developers are done with slow, bloated vendor scripts. c15t runs at 89ms, lives in your codebase, and is fast to ship.

[Will De Ath @willde_ath]

@paw_lean @BurnedChris @c15tdev @Inth the boy is gud

[Will De Ath @willde_ath]

up and to the right they say @c15tdev

just about to cross 1m npm downloads for last 30 days, we have 2.7m in total downloads

c15t's growth is just the start, it's crazy the thing we're holding back from the public, ya'll ain't ready for this

[Will De Ath @willde_ath]

@usenotra Context is king 🫡

[Inth (YC P26) @Inth]

https://t.co/OQXvyUOh9s

[Will De Ath @willde_ath]

@dominikkoch @mayvencraft @encodeclub Dude it was on Luma, you can just join events

[Will De Ath @willde_ath]

Killing it as always @mayvencraft

[Will De Ath @willde_ath]

@BurnedChris @rauchg @evilrabbit_ 🫡

[Will De Ath @willde_ath]

@rhs @TfL Outlier, same for Trainline (although not a transport co!)

[Will De Ath @willde_ath]

@mayvencraft 🤝