A great chat with Aydin Mirzaee from Fellow.app about my transitioning into the role of CEO, leadership lessons, new mental models, and more.
Listen here: https://fellow.app/supermanagers/vitaly-pecherskiy-stackadapt/
When your brother was born I wrote him a letter. I didn’t hold back any insights because after the dramatic, bombshell experience of having our first child, your mother and I were pretty sure he would be our only one… until he wasn’t, and now we have you :) Everything I said to him then and what I want to tell you now applies to you both.
Years ago my two co-workers at StackAdapt did half-Ironman, which greatly inspired me. This year, I finally achieved a milestone of my own by completing my first Olympic Triathlon. During my preparation, I went online seeking advice for enhancing running speed and endurance, I stumbled upon a video featuring a runner.
Written 2500 years ago, The Art of War originally served as a military treatise addressing a host of skills related to military strategy and tactics. Today, a quick internet search revealed that its insights have been revived and repurposed to find new applications in the world of business. The chapter, and specifically a paragraph, that I would like to discuss is on the subject of Momentum.
Last year was the first time my wife brought up the consideration that flying was contributing to our carbon footprint. While over the past few years we had been actively trying to reduce our footprint by buying local, using less packaging, and cutting out meat from our diet, I struggled with imagining a world in which we flew less.
This article originally appeared on BetaKit. In this interview I spoke to Peter Reitano, CEO of Abacus, an “ad tech/agency” focused on growing startups and helping big brands solve their marketing problems. We talked about the agency model of the future, how technology empowers and automates creative, and the concept of the “ego-less” marketer which I found very interesting.
I’ve always wondered how people seemingly become fully functioning, responsible adults overnight. But during my last 3 months of destressing I’ve come to realize that this is not the case. Even if success appears to be instantaneous, for yourself and others, a series of many conscious (and often not the most pleasant) choices are what get people there.
Product managers and their teams are often at risk of being pulled in eighteen different directions at once. For our latest RSR interview, I sat down with Adam Jarczyn, SVP Operations and Product at #Paid to learn how to cut the distractions and make your product team part of your competitive advantage.
When we started StackAdapt four years ago, our onboarding process was much like many other startups’: Bring your own laptop… Here is your desk… Please shadow this guy.” It wasn’t until a couple of years in that we realized we were doing it wrong. Of course, employee onboarding, like many things, is always work-in-progress, but here are some tips for avoiding the mistakes we made in the early days of welcoming and educating new staff.
Finding product-market fit should be #1 priority for every startup. It's a race against time to find it before you run out of money. Pivots are an inevitable part of it, and as a founder, you should get comfortable with changing and moving very fast. Surprisingly, aside from Andreessen Horowitz, very few people talk about these topics. That's what makes this video so special.
It all started four years ago in my kitchen. Fast forward five (five!) offices later and we occupy a 9,000 sq. ft. office in the heart of Toronto’s startup hub. And, believe it or not, we are moving into a 16,000 sq. ft. space in 3 months. What have I learned from moving offices six times? A lot. In the spirit of paying it forward, here is everything I’ve learned about business real estate.
Some things change, some things stay the same. This simple idea can help you build your startup into something that will stick. At StackAdapt, two fundamental concepts help us uncover opportunities and decide our company’s direction. Differentiating between and acknowledging finite trends and universal truths will impact how you view your product, industry, and customers and help decided the direction of your business.
Thank you for stopping by!
I hope you learned something new. If you want to get updated next time I post content, you can follow me on LinkedIn here.
Cheers!