Manifolds

Founder

Invert

Head of Growth

Checksum.ai

Growth

super{set}

Growth Lead

Stanza

Director of Product, Interim Head of Growth

Mini Exhibitions

Mini Exhibitions is a virtual events provider for remote teams. 

We offer virtual experiences, games and classes like art tours, clay modeling, lockpicking, live trivia, and mixology. We customize events for your team, ship materials to attendees, manage calendars, and help you with internal marketing. Our happy clients include Amazon, Stripe, Spotify, and Y Combinator.

Interested in a Mini Exhibition for your remote team? Check us out at miniexhibitions.com.

Art in Res (YC W20)

Art in Res is a marketplace for fine art by independent, working artists. It was acquired in 2023.

We let you buy art you really want in manageable installment payments. Instead of buying a generic, disposable decoration from a home goods store, buy a real work of art that you'll cherish forever. And support a talented working artist in the process!

Every month, you pay off a little bit of your artwork.  And every month, an artist gets the money they need to keep creating.

Karani Asset Management

Fundamental analysis of global listed equities for a long term-oriented, long-only equity strategy, with an emphasis on corporate culture as a competitive advantage.

Equity Analyst

LAGODA INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT, LP

U.S. Trust

Fundamental analysis of global listed equities through a value investing lens, for the firm's best performing equity strategy with over $2bn AUM.

Portfolio Management Analyst

Portfolio Management Assistant

growth @ super{set} · 2x founder · yc alum 🍊 · ex-wall st

I work on product & growth.

I previously ran Mini Exhibitions (miniexhibitions.com) and Art in Res (artinres.com) with my cofounder John Friel.

More about me at my personal website (johnsillings.com).

Some thoughts on 996 (the 9AM to 9PM, 6-days-a-week schedule meme).

I'm pretty hardcore when it comes to my working hours. I have been since 2017, when I started my first startup.

The "hard work beats talent" premise also seems right to me. That could be my bias talking; I think my tenacity is my edge.

But all that said, I find 996 amusing because I think it misses the point. In startups, the really interesting thing is outputs, not inputs.

Investors (like I used to be) refer to these as "fundamentals."

Some of these show up directly in financial statements: revenue and revenue growth, profitability, cash flow, and so on. Others are slightly more subtle, but still important: competitive position, regulatory position, brand strength, and so on.

That's the thing to optimize for: the ability to drive outsized results.

Work inputs are certainly part of the equation. Working insane hours, ceteris paribus, probably helps.

But there's a lot more going on – and ceteris paribus (holding other things equal) just isn't reality. You also need to make good decisions, stay disciplined, and not give up. Eventually, you start running into tradeoffs where being sleep deprived impacts your ability to do those things.

There's a much more straightforward test here. A surprisingly high number of startups don't actually do this:

Define a few metrics that are important to you, e.g. revenue growth, user growth, retention. Measure them. Work to improve them every week.

If you're going to hire, hire people who have a demonstrated ability to move those metrics. If they have a strong track record, chances are they work hard – and do a lot of other things right, too.

John Sillings

building manifolds · 3x founder · 4x growth · yc alum 🍊 · ex-wall st

Some thoughts on how to disagree.

Back in the day, I was on my school's debate team.

It was basically a sport for nerds. (In hindsight, my friend group did a lot of "sports for nerds" activities: chess, quiz bowl, competitive gaming, etc.)

Anyway, back to the debate team. We trained for it and attended competitions. We exploited our opponents' weaknesses. It was a lot of fun – but we really wanted to win.

A stronger, better-researched, more clearly articulated argument was the big key to winning (duh). But there were lots of other ways to score points: by flustering your opponent with a hard question, catching them off-guard, pointing out something silly they said, and so on.

This is how most people think about debating, whether it's on social media or between political candidates. It is eristic (about "winning"). 

Obviously, this is a popular form of entertainment. We enjoy the drama. We like seeing other people (particularly those we disagree with) get "owned" / "dunked on" / "destroyed" / [insert synonym here].

What sucks about this is how shallow it is. Mostly in academic circles, there is a less popular and considerably less entertaining form of debate. It is dialectic (about learning through disagreement).

The ground-rules are different:

You are charitable. You interpret your opponent's argument in a strong way, not a weak way.

You look for common ground. If you find yourself agreeing on something – however small – you build from there.

You put your ego aside. Being wrong is not a bad thing; it means you're learning something new.

In a narrow, self-serving sense, there's obviously a lot of value in being persuasive. But in aggregate, it's a lot more exciting to actually be right vs. simply being perceived that way.

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