One of the things that separates elite from amateur athletes is having the mental strength to tolerate pain. The question is: Can anyone strengthen their mental fortitude? I believe the answer is yes.
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.
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/
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.
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 remember the first Baskin Robbins to come to Saint-Petersburg, Russia. It opened in the mid-90s when I was about seven years old, and was located on Nevsky Prospect, right in the heart of the city. My younger sister and I walked past it at least once a month, and every time, we dreamt of tasting the ice cream there. Particularly, the ice cream cake. Unfortunately, at the time, my family simply couldn't afford it.
I started July with a 30-day challenge to help me reduce stress. You can read my article on completing the challenge here. After the month was done I decided to just keep going. I have not had a drop of alcohol in the last three months and I want to give an update of where I am at.
If you could start your business all over again, what would you do differently? For our third RSR interview, I sat down with Hussein Fazal, founder and CEO of SnapTravel, and previously, AdParlor Inc. (acquired by AdKnowledge in 2011).
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.
I sat down with Bohdan Zabawsky, serial CTO and founder of Fortay.co to unpack transitioning from a startup to a major organization, hiring for success, anticipating problems, and dealing with toxic employees while keeping strong employees motivated — specifically engineers, whether they are destined for leadership or not.
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.
If you are anything like me, you probably have 5 tubs of vitamins hanging out in your cupboard, many of which expired years ago. No matter how often I am told that taking vitamins is good for my long term health, it is just too easy to forget to take them. Why? There are simply no immediate consequences for my not taking them.
On the other hand, if one is suffering from jetlag, the flu, a wild night… no one forgets to cure their splitting headache with an ibuprofen. Unlike vitamins, painkillers are more than “nice to have”, they are an urgent necessity.
Today, I wanted to share the first video interview with Rajesh Uttamchandani, Managing Director and CPO at Zafin. Overseeing an organisation of well over 500 people in size, he provided some amazing insights on what it means to run a company of this calibre and what startups can start doing today to scale their talent strategies.
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!
