My blog posts about “Uncategorised”

• Screenshot a tweet

  TLDR: Try out my new tweet screenshot tool → Tweets are a great way to capture the sentiment of a group. I’ve often found them useful in presentations to highlight a point or generalise the demands of a herd of people. However, it’s extremely dissatisfying to screenshot Twitter’s representation of a tweet and use that – it’s low resolution, contains…

• Strong culture = less process

  I was reminded of a fascinating quote from Brian Chesky (CEO of Airbnb) recently: Why is culture so important to a business? Here is a simple way to frame it. The stronger the culture, the less corporate process a company needs. When the culture is strong, you can trust everyone to do the right thing. People can be independent and…

• Futurists & realists

  As a kid I was big into science fiction. The allure of imaginary futures and distant planets was irresistible and I devoured every book I could get my hands on, eager to be transported into a world so radically different than ours. When browsing through all the pulp fiction at my local secondhand bookstore, a factor almost as important as…

• Being a good human

  When we were first starting out at Canva I used to read articles about the importance of defining the culture of your startup and laugh. “Why would you ever need to do that? We can just talk to our team over the table at lunchtime and figure out where we want Canva to go!” Now we have 10 lunch tables,…

• The 4 traits of an entrepreneur

  At last week’s Pause Fest, I was lucky enough to be sandwiched between the magnificently giving Jan Owen and the precociously talented Yuma Soerianto on a panel moderated by Mike Butcher that aimed to encourage inter-generational business learnings. One of the themes which I was interested to explore was the nature of entrepreneurialism and ways you could encourage it in…

• Motivation and mentorship

  In Steve Biddulph’s Raising Boys he laments the lack of structured mentorship in modern society – “Mentoring today is mostly unplanned and piecemeal, and lots of young men don’t receive any mentoring at all. Those doing the mentoring – sports coaches, uncles, teachers, and bosses – rarely understand their role and may do it badly.” As in life, so in…

• Joining the resistance

  In my small corner of the digital world it feels like everyone is firing up their blog again. After years of lying dormant, /wp-login.php is getting a few visits and posts are being tapped out. (And – more importantly – being moved from “Draft” to “Published”). With the rising tide of algorithmically-biased pabulum in our social channels, it almost feels…

• Flash is in the pan

  It’s official, Flash is dead. I never quite understood the visceral hatred that Flash inspired in some people. Flash doesn’t make bad experiences, people make bad experiences. But still, there’s no denying that it has always battled a highly tarnished reputation. I was a bit of a latecomer to Flash creation. Sure, I’d inflicted cheesily tweened website intros onto some unfortunate…