This article was originally posted on the June blog. I am reposting it here for my own reference. Two years ago we raised a little over $2 million dollars as a seed round from some of the smartest investors in the world. Last week, Louis, our board member asked us to give a presentation to share our learnings with other companies in the Pointnine portfolio. We got great feedback from fellow founders after the presentation - so today I’m sharing our learnings publicly.

As a 13 year old, my dad’s advice on internet presence was: “Everything you post will be used against you in the future. So you should never associate your name with anything on the internet”. As a rebellious teenager my view was the opposite: “Everything you post on the internet will get lost. You should associate your real name with everything you find interesting” I think looking back, this might be the most useful lesson I learned from my high school years.

The only thing that matters is throughput. Becoming the most prolific version of yourself is the most important thing you can do to become proud of your work. Making a group of people become the most prolific version of themselves sounds like a reasonable way to build a great company. So that’s what we’re trying to do. Throughput is the speed of getting to some outputs. The faster you get, the more things you do, and the more you build momentum.

This is an open engineering question at June. If you want to solve problems like this one, please reach out - we’re hiring June allows you to add dynamic traits to your users. For example, if you want to run an analysis only on users that are on your pro plan, you can do that by adding a “plan” trait to your users. The value of these properties is mutable and has no relationship with time.

If you’re working on something new, there are so many directions your work and product can take. The biggest risk is that you build something that is hard to explain and no one wants. A good process minimizes this risk. Helping you move in the direction of building something people want. To build June me and my cofounder Enzo used a very systematic approach. We decided to shared it as you might find useful.

Sometimes I come back home from work, stuck on something, no adults to ask help to and a deadline in the morning. I fall asleep thinking: “Tomorrow is the day I’ll get caught. This will be the one problem I won’t be able to solve. The rest of my life is going to be misery and failure” Every morning though, with more or less pain things get sorted. Anyways here’s what you should do when you’re stuck:

This is the world in the eyes of a dog The poor things have such a cold experience of the world. Our eyes while giving us a richer experience of the world are also a limited mechanical tool. The world doesn’t care though. It stays the same regardless of the tools we use to perceive it - whether it’s the eyes of a dog or my presbyc ones. This sounds like stoner talk, but hear me out.

Most founders in tech will tell you that they’re a contrarian But is being a contrarian an optimal decision? What are the alternatives? Is being a contrarian an advantage? Founders of high growth companies, are making one big high risk high reward bet. If you’re looking for a big win you first have to find something that has high uncertainty. For example, there’s high uncertainty around when VR will become mainstream.

The ability to make friendships through your passions is the best super power that the internet gives us. The best things that happened in my life happened through communities on the internet. Here’s a story of all the places I hanged out on the internet and made friends from. Until the first year of high school I’ve been offline. My experience until then with the internet was running a Blogspot to sell snacks in middle school (with someone who’s still one of my best friends) and having a messenger account on my dad’s computer.

One of the most interesting thought experiments one can do is exploring the history of aesthetics. Human aesthetics change over time in ways that reflect progress. How did people get bored of Greek tragedy? Why did chubby people become unattractive, when did people start liking squares on a canvas? There was a moment when Dante’s books were considered good. When realistic paintings like Church’s Niagara were the pinnacle of art.