Day 4 - Links
I’m not really sure what to write about today, so here are a few links to things I’ve been thinking about recently, along with a few thoughts from me on each.
Mittelstand / Boring Businesses – I initially learned about this concept when I happened across this post by Neil Thanedar on Hacker News, and it pretty instantly clicked with me. The concept, as I understand it, is that there is a subset of stable, small to medium businesses that have successfully weathered turbulent times due to specific company values and management practices.
Strangely enough, I had a similar thought in recent months that independently popped into my head, which is why Holly and I started Rytāvi Corp with the purpose of building stable “boring” (read: non-technology focused) businesses that we can augment with technology to spin off predictable profits in a manner that also allows us to employ people for the long term and invest in our community while building generational wealth.
Asynchronous Work – This has been banging around my head for years now, but I’ve been reading up on it a lot more lately. Some interesting companies in the space include Almanac and Notion, both software developers that make tools that can support asynchronous work. If you’re interested in learning more about asynchronous work, I’d recommend following Adam Nathan (Almanac CEO) on Twitter.
While this is pretty much the standard for a number of companies now – especially those that are largely distributed companies – we’ll see asynchronous work move to become the default for knowledge workers over the next 5-10 years and companies that don’t embrace it will find themselves left behind their competition.
Every business in the Rytāvi Corp family will be as asynchronous as possible.
Wabi-Sabi – An interesting Japanese concept that focuses on accepting imperfection and acknowledging that the everything in life is transient. “Wabi-sabi nurtures all that is authentic by acknowledging three simple realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect.”
Given my recent experiences, I pretty much immediately embraced the idea and have been considering it daily since.