Fareed Mosavat @far33d Twitter profile | Pikagi

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Fareed Mosavat

@far33d

11,861

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1,800

Following

526

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18,224

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Host @ Unsolicited Feedback. Did some importantish stuff at Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Runkeeper, Zynga, and Pixar.

Berkeley, CA

Joined March 2007

Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

5 months

This week, we convinced @nabeel to come on Unsolicited Feedback and kicked off by asking him why he and the other folks at @sparkcapital have been so successful identifying and betting on companies in new markets. TL; DR - it's all about incentives and org structure. From…

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

4 years

I’ve worked for at least 3 billionaires.... more if you count paper earnings and investors. None of them did any of these things. All of them have helped create amazing new things in our world that didn’t exist before and employed thousands of people.

@RBReich

Robert Reich

4 years

There are basically 5 ways to accumulate a billion dollars in America: 1) Profiting from a monopoly 2) Insider-trading 3) Political payoffs 4) Fraud 5) Inheritance None of these has anything to do with being successful in the supposed free market.

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

3 years

Two skills that can make you stand out at basically any role at any startup between 50-1000 employees: Get good enough at SQL to do a basic join. Learn to build, understand, and analyze cohort models.

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

9 months

Never let the truth get in the way of a good story

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@0zne

Enzo Avigo

9 months

Do we still need Product Managers? @stripe ’s zero-PM strategy lean toward a « no » ❌ Enters Engineering-Driven Development ↓

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

4 years

Billion dollar product idea: Let me see someone else’s IG ads so I know what to buy them for Christmas.

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

4 years

Layoffs always suck, but there's a good way and a bad way, and this is about as good as it gets from Carta.

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Fareed Mosavat

6 years

@jack All bots, gone.

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

3 years

As a non-founder I like to think of exit success as: 1) everyone gets a job. 2) everyone can buy a car. 3) everyone can buy a house. 4) everyone can buy a house for cash. 5) everyone can retire.

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

4 years

I bet Airbnb Experiences will become a massive business. I've done a handful and each has been fun. Great way to travel alone, meet some people, and do unique things in a new city.

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

5 years

SQL is a superpower and career accelerator, especially for non-engineers in a startup environment. Immediately transforms you into a person with answers instead of only questions.

@teej_m

» teej

5 years

I won’t stop beating this drum - SQL is a critical skill and an important programming language.

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

1 year

Had brunch in Hayes Valley with family today. Overheard some spectacularly awful startup advice being dished out by a 25 year old, delivered with extreme confidence. SF is back.

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

5 years

@inthesedeserts This whole thread and not a single person has pointed out how incredibly awful the Doors are. They’re just mediocre high school poetry set to organ music.

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

5 years

Product leadership as a series of questions: Before you build: What's the problem we are solving? How does this fit into our broader strategy? How do you know it's a problem? How will we know we’ve solved the problem? What will we learn?

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

4 years

1/ Experimentation is a critical tool to move your business and your understanding of customers forward. Unfortunately, most experiments are bad. What’s the difference between a good experiment and a bad experiment? [credit to @bhorowitz for the style]

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The Importance of Product Trial: Good vs Bad Experiments — Reforge

Fareed Mosavat outlines the 12 lessons he has learned about what sets Good Experiments apart from Bad Experiments.

www.reforge.com

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

6 years

@jack Not just the russian ones and the nazi ones and the spammy ones. All of them.

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

5 years

I have a thesis about Zoom / bottoms-up adoption in the enterprise. Over time, incumbents move up-market, charge more, fail to improve end-user UX and abandon their self-serve products. This leaves the door open for an equivalent product with modern UX to win SMBs...

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

4 years

1,190 days @SlackHQ ✌🏼❤️ Stay tuned.

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Fareed Mosavat

3 years

Dear Notion, Do not underestimate Microsoft's ability to ruthlessly copy what works, move fast, and leverage unique strategic assets to dominate the market you created.

@Suhail

Suhail

3 years

Microsoft does not hold back. A full Notion clone:

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Fareed Mosavat

4 years

@naval It’s not really aim when the target stands up and says “I don’t believe bullets are dangerous”

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

4 years

I find reductionist / simplistic bullshit like this so frustrating. There are good and bad billionaires. Let’s talk about what makes the bad ones bad instead of creating new categories of demonization.

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

7 years

New hot take: Trump fired Comey because he didn't like the @NateSilver538 article that gave coney credit for the election win.

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

5 years

I opened the window in our Paris Airbnb to hear the sounds of a new city and instead all I hear is a guy talking loudly on the phone in English about his startup.

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

4 years

1/ Even if you've already found product-market fit, it's hard to build a sustainable, compounding growth strategy. Today, we're launching Reforge Partners, designed to help founders break through and transform great products into great companies.

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

5 years

If you’ve ever thought “but that market is too small”, an in-product survey company just sold for $8b.

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

6 years

There’s nothing like some user testing to remind you that you don’t know anything.

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Fareed Mosavat

5 years

Holy shit, EU cookie and GDPR warnings make the internet unbearable on a mobile phone. When it’s on EVERY WEBSITE it becomes clear how absurd the whole thing is.

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

5 years

1/ So.. I take that back. This is actually a really big deal. Let's talk about the 85k customers number. Two years ago, it wasn't clear this was possible. It would have been easy to say "we are an enterprise company now, let's focus 100% on those large customers".

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Fareed Mosavat

3 years

Some "personal" news alongside the fundraise: I'm joining Reforge full-time to help lead programming, content, and executive community. After the past year at Reforge as an EIR, it was clear to me that Reforge was the perfect fit for three reasons. 🧵👇🏼

@bbalfour

Brian Balfour

3 years

😃 I'm excited to announce @reforge has raised $21M from @andrewchen and @illscience at @a16z along with a group of product, eng, marketing, data, and design leaders... Full Story -> 🧵 On where we've been and what is next 👇

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Fareed Mosavat

4 years

PM tries to explain away bad experiment results using analysis he doesn’t understand.

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

4 years

I had a product management joke, but what problem does it really solve?

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

5 years

@educationpalmer @altschool Let me rewrite this for you... While we disagreed on approach and strategy to fix education, I’m disappointed to see AltSchool fail. I wish their employees well. Let me know if we can help any of them find new roles at any of our companies.

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Fareed Mosavat

4 years

In 2025, when we look back at the most successful startup founded in 2020.... My bet is that the founders and early employees (say, up to first 10 ppl) found a way to be co-located the majority of the time.

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

2 years

The craziest thing about SF is the complete lack of humans under 20 or over 45.

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

4 years

The skills of a great product leader are different than the skills you've worked so hard to develop as a great PM. In our latest Reforge post, @onecaseman and I dig in on the new skills you need to build to cross the Product Leader Canyon.

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Fareed Mosavat

3 years

I absolutely HATE this trend. It makes stock comp basically equivalent to cash, with no upside to employees for taking risks or increasing enterprise value. It relegates stock comp to an accounting trick.

@pitdesi

Sheel Mohnot

3 years

Wow. Lyft & Stripe moving to 1-year stock awards instead of a 4yr vest This is BAD for employees; growing startups increase in value, so a $ denominated annual award will mean less stock than before. Early-stage companies should not follow their lead.

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Fareed Mosavat

4 years

The ways he outlines this as “basically 5 ways” leaves out the way most US billionaires made their wealth: creating companies in highly competitive industries.

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

4 years

Old money: Get your name on a museum wing. New money: Personally lead a Series C.

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

5 years

How about we all declare LinkedIn bankruptcy at the same time, delete all of our connections, and then start over with only people we really know.

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Fareed Mosavat

5 years

8/ We don't "growth hack". One of our mantras is "focus on value creation, not value extraction" and everything we build is centered on this principle. Help customers connect with the value your product provides.

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Fareed Mosavat

4 years

Thought exercise: what private companies have a reasonable probability (>5%) of growing to a $100b+ valuation in the next decade? My current list is Discord, Figma, maybe Instacart.. Who is on your list?

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Fareed Mosavat

5 years

NBD.

@SlackHQ

Slack

5 years

Ten in five! Just ahead of our 5th birthday, we’ve crossed more than 10 million Daily Active Users, in 150+ countries. A big thanks to our customers in every kind of team and organization.

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Fareed Mosavat

6 years

100% this. Many early career PMs and new managers conflate creating a great final product with only reviewing final products. This results in a high cost of iteration and makes you more defensive to feedback. Review early. Review often.

@BrianNorgard

Norgard

6 years

One of the hardest things for a young designer or product manager to do is show off unfinished work Learn how to do this, it will quickly become an invaluable part of your growth process

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Fareed Mosavat

6 years

Once again, I'm in the midst of reading dozens of resumes for a new PM role we just opened. Some advice if you want to try and get a job through the front door without a referral:

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

5 years

A random walk down Wall Street.

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Fareed Mosavat

3 years

It's not stat sig but it's directionally positive🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩

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Fareed Mosavat

6 years

@jonfavs Sanctions aren't effective. Only thoughts and prayers are strong enough to stop this.

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

3 years

Apparently dog content does well on this website.

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

5 years

9/ Our other mantra is "experimentation is a tool of humility not decision making". We don't use our customers as test subjects and try out a million things. We build experiences we believe in and use data to check if we were right and learn from mistakes.

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

4 years

“This particular behavior helped me make a gagillion dollars but I wouldn’t suggest it for you”

@BillGates

Bill Gates

4 years

Back in my early Microsoft days, I routinely pulled all-nighters when we had to deliver a piece of software. I even stayed up two nights in a row on occasion–I don’t recommend that. This book taught me a lot about the importance of a better night's sleep.

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Fareed Mosavat

6 years

coworker: "I've never really used twitter" me: "It's just like facebook, but with more anger and fewer photos"

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

3 years

@seanrose @zebulgar How is this any different than wanting to be a baseball player or whatever kids wanted to be a generation ago? Kids are attracted to fame, and YT is fame today.

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

3 years

Spiegel’s Law: the quality of a company’s execution is inversely proportional to how long it takes for it to release a Stories clone.

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Fareed Mosavat

5 years

Maybe you don’t have to be 10x better. You just have to start by being 2x better for customers the incumbents have stopped caring about.

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Fareed Mosavat

3 years

Harvard, 1975 vs. 2021. Endowment $1B -> $40B Freshman class 1,500->2,000

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Fareed Mosavat

4 years

In a 5-paragraph essay on why his screen time should be increased, the 10-yr-old titled one of the paragraphs "A Pandemic of the Mind" in case you were wondering how things were going over here.

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Fareed Mosavat

5 years

From a great conversation with @andrewchen last night: One of the biggest differences he’s seen b/w operating and investing is focusing more on the “outcome if successful” part of the expected value equation instead of “probability of success”.

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Fareed Mosavat

3 years

Need to do capacity modeling as an engineer? (sql + cohorts) Understand the impact of retention on revenue? (sql + cohorts) Measure the LTV of a marketing campaign (sql + cohorts) The list goes on and on

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Fareed Mosavat

3 years

I for one welcome our new CRM overlords.

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

6 years

Skills that will amplify your effectiveness in nearly any startup job: - clear written communication - calm confidence under pressure or uncertainty - SQL and data literacy

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Fareed Mosavat

4 years

Marin Circle came to party

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

6 years

I've been working on a thing and it's finally done.

@SlackHQ

Slack

6 years

We’re taking a big step in our partnership with @Atlassian to improve the experiences of hundreds of thousands of teams who use our products together. We’re also officially welcoming Hipchat and Stride users to Slack - glad you’re here!

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Fareed Mosavat

4 years

In tech, all eyes were on Amazon / Whole Foods while Walmart built out a 50% share in grocery delivery and Instacart nearly doubled.

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Fareed Mosavat

4 years

You know what I miss the most about working in an office? Everything that has nothing to do with productivity. Lunch. Bullshitting about stuff. Learning about people’s lives.

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

5 years

Slack is hosting a growth meetup. Reasons you should come: 1) A diverse lineup of talented design and engineering speakers (and me). 2) Learn about our unique approach to growth. 3) Meet other smart and interesting people from the industry. 4) Cookies.

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Fareed Mosavat

5 years

7/ Even with all this experience ~30% of our monetization experiments show positive results. If you are on an experiment-driven team, get used to, at best, 70% of your work being thrown away. Build your processes accordingly.

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

4 years

Dearest friends on growth teams, Don’t do this shit. Hacking the metric instead of the underlying user problems is the fastest path to brand destruction.

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

6 years

Come work with me on Slack's onboarding and new user experience. I promise rewarding work, talented and creative teammates, and an opportunity to do both deep product work and data-driven experimentation.

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

4 years

@ibringtraffic The biggest secret in silicon valley is that everyone is actually doing waterfall.

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

3 years

🔥"Difficulty prioritizing is often a strategy issue, not an execution issue." - @ravi_mehta @zainabg85

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

6 years

The weirdest thing about enterprise software is that you can read a website for hours and still have no idea what the product is. For example, Mulesoft.

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

4 years

6 years since launch and :emoji: syntax still doesn’t work outside @SlackHQ . 🙄

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

4 years

Skip b-school. Take the @reforge Advanced Growth Series instead, which could alternatively be called “leveraging aggregation theory and loops”. As a bonus, the instructors and guest lecturers are people who have put the lessons into practice.

@sriramk

Sriram Krishnan - sriramk.eth

4 years

Two schools of thought in tech strategy I think are fundamentally new, as impactful as ‘crossing the chasm’ or ‘Porter’s six forces’ and will probably be taught in B-schools in future. 1. @benthompson on “aggregation theory” 2. @kevinakwok on “loops”

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Fareed Mosavat

3 years

@benjamingreeley the best I could find quickly

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Fareed Mosavat

4 years

One of the most common questions I get from pre-launch teams is “should we have a free version?” Every case is unique, but there are 5 question I start with to help them decide.

@briannekimmel

Bri Kimmel

4 years

The 5 criteria for freemium by Slack's @far33d : 1. Do you have low-cost distribution? 2. Is there a fast activation path? 3. Does your product have growth loops? 4. Does your user have purchasing power? 5. Is there a clear value metric? 📽️

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Fareed Mosavat

4 years

If this MSFT / TikTok thing happens, substack is going to grow like a billion % WoW from all the takes.

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Fareed Mosavat

3 years

Goodbye $WORK

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

8 months

Some news! Even with product-market fit, many companies die because they fail to build scalable, repeatable growth. @harris and I created Shortcut Labs to help seed stage companies identify and build the growth they need to raise a great Series A.

Announcing Shortcut Labs

theshortcutlab.com

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

5 years

I’m like 3 months into angel investing more. what tools / duct tape do y’all use to keep track of all of this stuff? Pipeline Meeting notes Docs Valuations Tax stuff... I’m trying to keep track of everything (even passes) so I can improve over time.. and it’s a mess

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

5 years

A mental framework for monetization growth in freemium businesses.

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Fareed Mosavat

4 years

The most effective way to really learn a subject is to teach others. This spring, I'm excited to teach what I've learned building growth and product teams alongside @ElenaVerna , @iambangaly , @bbalfour and the rest of the Reforge team.

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Fareed Mosavat

3 years

Today is the day I admit on the internet that I've never really cared about Bitcoin or gotten excited about it and missing the boat on it is probably the worst financial decision I've ever made. Oh well!

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

3 years

The weirdest thing about getting a dog is how friendly strangers suddenly become.

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

2 years

No matter what your OKRs say, the number one goal in startups (and life?) is "don't run out of money".

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

5 years

3/ In the early days, we started with deep-dive qualitative and analytical research. Why do people pay for Slack? Who are our buyers? When do they decide to purchase? Don't skip the research. You have to know where to start.

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

4 years

What companies have awesome systems for training brand new PMs? This was one thing Zynga excelled at. What scaling startups are doing this today?

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

3 years

@cjc OKRs are bad for most product organizations.

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

4 years

So much of my personal professional aggravation would be eliminated if everyone communicated like this.

@david_perell

David Perell

4 years

These Amazon writing tips are fantastic. 👏

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Fareed Mosavat

6 years

There are no passengers on a rocket ship. Get to work!

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

4 years

Dreamforce should be a week-long holiday for anyone working in SOMA.

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

6 years

Leaders always underestimate how often they need to repeat things to keep everyone on the same page and motivated toward the same goals.

@firstround

First Round

6 years

Leaders always underestimate how often they need to repeat things to keep everyone on the same page and motivated toward the same goals. Find opportunities to repeat yourself:

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Fareed Mosavat

5 years

@hunterwalk Important to remember it only works in #general

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Fareed Mosavat

3 years

PM: Hey I did a quick wireframe...

@figma

Figma

3 years

Boo 👻. What's the scariest thing you can say to a designer?

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Fareed Mosavat

5 years

@lpolovets Talking to a few of ex-google employees, I think there is a significant blind spot around hangouts internally. They all think it’s better than Zoom. Apparently it works *great* inside google. Very little understanding of quality for actual customers.

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

6 years

The check that funded the best startup of 1986.

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Fareed Mosavat

4 years

This is the most blatant platform flex since FB launched Stories across every property.

@sbyrnes

Sean Byrnes 🇺🇸

4 years

If you're curious about why the Google Meet button in Google Calendar so large now, it's because the Zoom extension inserts a button itself and they wanted to be a slight bigger:

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Fareed Mosavat

5 years

Today on BART a man was standing very close and yelling obscenities at a woman with her baby. I wasn’t sure what to do. This one very brave and awesome dude casually moved, put his backpack down, and stood between them to create space. Now I know what to do next time.

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

4 years

@sarthakgh A shitty UI on top of a database.

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

4 years

I started spending a lot more time with founders this year - angel investing, advising, and mentoring. As an @indievc scout, I’d like to help founders who don’t think traditional VC is a fit for their company. Bonus: I get more excuses to hang out with @bryce .

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

5 years

"You haven't PM'd until you've sighed and declared 'I'm fucked'" is a perfect description of what this job feels like most of the time.

@BrandonMChu

Brandon Chu

5 years

4. Constant Anxiety Imagine your whole job is having ultimate accountability for the output and zero direct control on the input. Couple that with "go faster" from #2 above and constant "no" from #3 . You haven't PM'd until you've sighed and declared "I'm fucked."

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Fareed Mosavat

5 years

5/ You have to have patience and give teams time to build their understanding before pulling the plug. We talk a lot about moving fast, iterating, etc in the growth world, but people rarely talk about how much time there is between successes. There's a lot of waiting.

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@far33d

Fareed Mosavat

4 years

@patio11 Not to mention that every single feature you've ever created will require maintenance, upgrades, feature requests, bug fixes.... forever.

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