Hi everyone,

Greetings from sunny Singapore! I made a spontaneous trip back to see the people I've missed for the past 2+ years. 

This week we're digging into lessons from great businesses, the real story behind Pixar, how to own less stuff, and a manifesto for small teams doing important work.

Cheers,
Janel

A Manifesto For Small Teams Doing Important Work

Classic read for small teams!

• Make mistakes, own them, fix them, share the learning
• Overcommunicate
• If you can’t make a date, tell us early and often. Plan B well prepared is a better strategy than hope.
• Lock in the things that must be locked in, leave the implementation loose until you figure out how it can get done.

The Real Story of Pixar
Pixar started out as a failing hardware company. Learn about the real story before the string of movie hits.

10 Lessons From Great Businesses
Read about tactics from Stripe, FTX, Tiger Global, OpenSea, and other exceptional organizations. My favorites

• Obsess over your customer: Coupang takes extraordinary measures to improve the customer experience, which is rewarded with stronger customer affinity and better retention.
• Find your counter-positioning: Telegram entered an already competitive social media and messaging space, but made sure to define what they are not, which helped expose the incumbent's weaknesses
• Maximise deep work time: High impact work requires concentration, often for hours at a time. Minimize meetings and run as much as possible asynchronously to get the most out of your time

How To Own Less Stuff
We find comfort in our possessions, but sometimes owning less stuff is better: for us, for the environment and for our wallets. If you're looking to decrease the amount of things you purchase, this will be a useful read. A useful thought train to hop onto is to ask yourself why you buy and keep of things you do not use, and create rules around how you engage with your items.

How To Raise A Seed Round
Compilation of resources by Elizabeth Yin with actionable tips on how to raise a seed round.

Week Number - Handy tool that tells you what week of the year we're in

Streak - CRM for Gmail. Makes sending emails to a large list of people so easy with Mail Merge function. You can schedule emails, send custom links to people in your pipeline. I use this so often at work. It's amazing.

Privnote - Send private notes that will self-destruct after being read. Useful for the moments where you want to share passwords.

Line Graph Maker - Make line graphs for free - includes bar chart, donut chart, and pie chart options too!

Visual Capitalist - Incredible website with infographics on all kinds of topics, e.g. Global happiness levels, how automaker logos have evolved over the years, the carbon cost of transportation

Clover Cities -  Create your very own Web 1.0 homepage. Remember Geocities, glittery graphics and 90's style rainbow text? Reminisce with your very own page.