Kindling Week 5: The Writing Guy

Welcome to Edition №5 of the Kindling Weekly

Gratitude to our newsletter enthusiasts! 🙏

For those just joining us, you’ll find this week’s edition both delightful and enlightening. 📚

Week 5. Startup life is extremely unpredictable. One day you’re feeling ridiculously optimistic, and the next day you feel down in the dumps.

That’s how we’ve been feeling lately, and it feels especially true in media.

I’m writing now from a place of great optimism, but we’re increasingly valuing the principles of Stoicism as we build.

We’re moving at speed, pushing out extensive content and running numerous experiments all at the same time.

When feeling overwhelmed, it's always crucial to reflect on whether we're genuinely moving the needle forward.

With optimism and resolve.

— Adam

(Podcasting) David Perell

Instead of sticking to interviewing top Australian tech leaders, we decided to take a bet and bring the world's best minds to our audience.

This week, we had the privilege of interviewing someone we greatly admire: David Perell. We've been following his work for years, and he is highly respected in the tech community.

With over 400k followers on Twitter, David has built an enormous online presence and penned seminal pieces highly regarded by Silicon Valley.

Watch the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.

His podcast features luminaries like Marc Andreessen, Lulu Cheng Meservey, Chamath Palihapitiya, and Shaan Puri, showcasing his wide-reaching influence and deep connections.

He is, without a doubt, one of the sharpest thinkers we've ever had the pleasure of chatting with, especially on topics like meaning, writing, religion, and relationships.

Our conversation with David on The Sachin and Adam Show is, hands down, one of our favourite conversations of all time.

Time Poor? Here are our Top 10 Insights!

1. Accept your natural laziness instead of fighting it. Lazy people can be clever and efficient, finding the easiest path from A to B. The most hardworking people often have trouble prioritising, and are extremely poor strategists.

2. Lies and deception are significant problems. To align with the truth of your soul, dig deep to understand your true nature and maintain awareness. David encourages questions like: “How do I align with the truth of my soul rather than trying to fight it and pursue that?”

3. Every relationship consists of three components: person A, person B, and the shared entity C. A relationship is a collaborative creation, and clarity on mutual desires is essential. To quote David, “It's a shared dance of both people's creation.”

4. Focus on Talent, Organization, and Passion (TOP). Spend time at the intersection of these three areas because, if you have talent and organization but little passion, you'll get burned out.

5. Love equals truth without judgment. Practice discernment — and we are called to be discerning — but not judgment. Judgment has an attack element to it. Instead, maintain truthful and supportive friendships.

6. Being overly data-driven can lead to homogenization. Strive for quality and avoid shortcuts that lead to mediocrity, even as output is getting shorter and shorter, cheaper and cheaper.

7. Develop, define, and maintain high standards. Recognize what quality looks like and refuse to accept "good enough." There is low-hanging fruit for quality all over the place. And once you start looking, you realize there's so much opportunity.

8. Sometimes the most impactful communication is a pause or a short, clear statement. David Perell says, “Often, the best way to speak the loudest is by not saying anything at all. A pause, a short sentence, and it's a tool in your toolkit.”

9. Micro-ambition is healthier than macro-ambition. Macro ambition is “I want to be successful,” and that tends to be unhealthy and creates anxiety. But then there's micro-ambition which is “I want to solve that problem_, and I feel called to be doing that.”

10. Live with open-handed faith, surrendering to God’s will instead of exerting control over reality. The opposite of stretched-out hands is a tight, white-knuckle grip that holds on to reality purely out of self-reliance.

Life Behind the Scenes

Founder’s Life: Episode #3

We released Episode Three of our Founder’s Life vlog! Come take a look behind the scenes at the preparation it took to interview former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

Build in Public: Episode #3

Episode Three of our Build in Public series is also up. It’s a candid podcast chronicling our journey of building a tech company as best friends. Join us as we dive into the highs, lows, insights, and the funny moments in between.

The Week That Was

What’s On Our Mind 🧠 

• Content Quality 📚: How can we consistently produce a large volume of exceptionally high-quality content?

• Social Media 📱: What strategies can we employ to grow our social media presence for greater brand awareness?

• The Future of Media 🎥: Where is the media industry headed, particularly with YouTube and podcasting?

• Team Building 🤝: How can we streamline our operations to ensure everything runs seamlessly?

Coming Up

Next week, we are releasing our incredible podcast with Georgia Vidler of Human Health! 🏥 Georgia and her co-founder, Kate Lambridis, have secured the largest pre-seed investment in Australian history for an all-female startup. 🔥

This episode is extra special, filmed at the Human Health office, we shared Georgia’s inspiring journey and her mission to tackle a crucial problem in a massive market.

We’ve been making lots of new content, and we want to double down on what you love. We’d love it if you could give us feedback 💯.

Liked what you read? We’ll spend more time on it. Help us grow by sharing! ❤️

Ensuring that everyone can achieve a world-class tech education for free.

Written by Adam Miller, and our wonderful intern, Anastasia Kim.