in the winter of 2021, i had the crazy idea to build a news aggregation app to bridge the political divide. it failed. bigtime. but i still carry the learnings with me.

these 5 lessons were scrawled in an old college notebook:

1. don't work with close friends unless you trust them well.
   1. i would be working on the project, they'd be sleeping in. this made it difficult to hold folks accountable, and led to some resentment.
2. don't bring on more than one person to start
   1. i decided to bring on 4 friends. this made it difficult to make quick decisions, and slowed the flow of information.
3. agency > smarts
   1. i picked co-founders based on smarts, rather than their willingness to get shit done.
4. be decisive - pick a lane, test, iterate.
   1. i kept thinking if i read one more research paper on polarization, all the dots would connect and i'd have the perfect solution. this lead to indecisiveness, and a perfectionist mindset.
   2. it took us all summer to decide to pivot from an app to a newsletter. by then, we should have shipped 12 posts.
5. build something people want
   1. people don't want to read things they disagree with, but yet i was stuck on the news aggregation idea for far too long.
   2. it would have behooved me to ask 'is there a fun way we can help people be more aware of their cognitive biases?'