4. Have a single day, e.g. Tuesday, that’s the “meeting day”, where people are expected to schedule any miscellaneous, external meetings (e.g. giving someone career advice, or grabbing coffee with a contact).
12. Have a “team_transparency@companyname” email address, which is such that when someone CC’s it on an email, the email gets forwarded to a designated slack channel
17. Have regular 1-1s with the people you work with. Some considerations only get verbalised via meandering, verbal conversation. Don’t kill it with process or time-bounds.
Things I’m very unsure about:
8. Use a real-time chat platform like Slack to communicate (except for in-person communication). For god’s sake, never use email within the team.
I actually often wonder whether Slack (or in our case, Discord) optimizes for writeability at the cost of readability. Meaning, something more asynchronous like Notion, or maybe the LessWrong forum/Manifold site, would be a better system of documenting decisions and conversations—chat is really easy to reach for and addictive, but does a terrible job of exposing history for people who aren’t immediately reading along. In contrast, Manifold’s standup and meeting calendar helps organize and spread info across the team in a way that’s much more manageable than Discord channels.
14. Everyone on your team should be full-time
Definitely agree that 40h is much more than 2x 20h, but also sometimes we just don’t have that much of certain kinds of work, slash really good people have other things to do with their lives?
Things we don’t do at all
5. No remote work.
Not sure how a hypothetical Manifold that was fully in-person would perform—it’s very unclear if our company could even have existed, given that the cofounders are split across two cities haha. Being remote forces us to add processes (like a daily hour-long sync) that an in-person team can squeak by without, but also I think has led to a much better online community of Manifold users because we dogfood the remote nature of work so heavily.
Finally: could you describe some impressive things that Lightcone has accomplished using this methodology? I wonder if this is suited to particular kinds of work (eg ops, events, facilities) and less so others (software engineering, eg LessWrong doesn’t seem to do this as much?)
Really appreciate this list!
Things I very much agree with:
Things I’m very unsure about:
I actually often wonder whether Slack (or in our case, Discord) optimizes for writeability at the cost of readability. Meaning, something more asynchronous like Notion, or maybe the LessWrong forum/Manifold site, would be a better system of documenting decisions and conversations—chat is really easy to reach for and addictive, but does a terrible job of exposing history for people who aren’t immediately reading along. In contrast, Manifold’s standup and meeting calendar helps organize and spread info across the team in a way that’s much more manageable than Discord channels.
Definitely agree that 40h is much more than 2x 20h, but also sometimes we just don’t have that much of certain kinds of work, slash really good people have other things to do with their lives?
Things we don’t do at all
Not sure how a hypothetical Manifold that was fully in-person would perform—it’s very unclear if our company could even have existed, given that the cofounders are split across two cities haha. Being remote forces us to add processes (like a daily hour-long sync) that an in-person team can squeak by without, but also I think has led to a much better online community of Manifold users because we dogfood the remote nature of work so heavily.
Finally: could you describe some impressive things that Lightcone has accomplished using this methodology? I wonder if this is suited to particular kinds of work (eg ops, events, facilities) and less so others (software engineering, eg LessWrong doesn’t seem to do this as much?)