I find most meetings to be a waste. But there’s one each quarter I genuinely look forward to: leadership offsite. It’s a meeting that costs the business tens of thousands of dollars in time, but could make the company tens of millions in revenue. After each offsite, I reflect on what I learned/observed. Here’s the list from yesterday’s Q2 offsite: 1) Scarcity truly is the best pressure cooker for creativity and ruthless prioritization. Going through the intellectual gauntlet as we tried to stretch a dollar was both painful and satisfying once we came out the other side. No matter how big and flush with cash the company gets I want us to always balance an abundance mindset (where cash is viewed as an offensive weapon) with the bootstrappers mentality (where every unit of value whether time or money is treated like a precious metal) 2) Wandering is a really unnatural feeling for humans and we experienced that during the middle part of the offsite. The top of the meeting cleanly flowed through pre-reads, VTO, and IDS/rock lists, but then we hit the big ugly problem (how the fuck do we hire so many people) and the process of solving it felt messy and meandering at times. I think that’s exactly how it should feel. The movies romanticize strokes of genius, but that's not how life works. The hardest questions to answer and hardest problems to solve require the discomfort of not knowing where you're headed and the self-belief to stay the course. 3) Sharp writing has a higher premium than ever before. Friction is one of the greatest gifts that AI took away from writing. We used to have to earn each word we wrote. It was painful but forced intention and clear thinking. And the preread docs we all created, even if ai-assisted, reminded me how artificially creating friction in your writing in a post-AI world is necessary to do your best work. 4) “Am I dumb?” There were times during the meeting where I was listening to the group reason through an idea or decision and my first reaction was embarrassment. Am I not smart enough to keep up? Are they just smarter than me? Old Alex wouldn't have been able to handle it. But once I separated stimulus from response, I thought “what an incredible gift it is to be surrounded by such smart and generative people who I get to learn from each day.” Nothing feels more assuring as co-founder than going into proverbial battle with people who are the absolute best at what they do. 5) We spent 8 hours baking in a 8x15 conference room together. But at no point did I dread being in that meeting with you. In fact, for those 8 hours there's nowhere I would have rather been. It has little to do with what was discussed and how you made me feel. We felt like a unit. We laughed a ton. We got serious, we got silly, we got sappy. I'll remember those interactions and those emotions far longer than I'll remember the way in which we divvied up opex. 6) That was our most costly meeting of the quarter. Literally cost the business thousands. But the ROI on the meeting will literally be tens of millions of dollars. It's why being well prepped for it was so important. It's why keeping it on track was so important. And it's why viewing the meeting as a starting point for all of the work to be done is so important. We were the architectural team finalizing the blueprint today and now the work begins. Foundation to be laid. Support beams to be added. That's the extent of my home construction knowledge. 7) What stands between us and hitting every one of the goals we set during the meeting? It's actually quite simple, just not easy to execute. It's an OODA (observe-orient-decide-act) loop that each of us and each of our teammates keeps spinning throughout the quarter. And anytime we get off track, the loop has become imbalanced. Maybe we didn't observe the situation properly or gather all the necessary info. Or perhaps we haven't oriented the current context to the ultimate goal. It could be that we made the wrong decision or didn't make a necessary decision at all. And similarly we may have acted poorly or suffered from inaction. Let’s have a banner Q3.