A thought-provoking old Twitter thread from my friend Ben Mathes.

A thought-provoking old Twitter thread from my friend Ben Mathes. (A lightly edited version of the thread follows)

"2 key ingredients behind every good situation I've ever been in: Shared Fate and Slack.

Shared Fate examples:

equity ownership + long lockup period means that to individually succeed the thing you all have shared ownership in must succeed

family genetic lineage

people with mutually-assured blackmail

and so on…

Slack to adjust to uncertainty is harder to define. Examples:

a VC where one in 20 meetings needs to run 2x as long as you deep dive, so they schedule in hour breaks between each hour meeting

enough financial cushion that you can enable your employees to retrain to a changing strategy

enough savings and low cost of living so you can move cities easily and not need to work for several months as you get your feet on the ground

The more uncertain the domain, the more you need slack and shared fate."

My own reflections:

Shared fate creates the need for deep, non-transactional trust.

Slack allows room for experimentation and growth.