When I met Brian McCullough, I felt like we already knew each other. We didn’t. But I had spent hundreds of hours listening to his voice during my most intimate moments. Rocking babies to sleep. Sitting in the sauna. Walking my dog. He had been in my head (or at…

Why podcasting may have minted its first billionaire, subscription podcasting is the next great business model, and how to join the revolution — In 2005, Howard Stern shocked the world by leaving terrestrial radio and accepting a $500 million dollar deal to move his show to Sirius satellite radio. In 2015, he renewed with a 5-year deal for $90 million per year. People were blown away by the numbers. He was making out…

I was buying a bag of potatoes. A big one. Not because I liked potatoes, but because I wanted to pay my rent. After years of eating every meal out, blowing money on clothes, and ignoring my bank balance, things had changed. A few weeks prior, I had been dreaming…

In the first few years of starting my business, I told myself I’d never let the company get bigger than 10 people. Then 30 people. Then 50 people. I associated more people with more pain. More management headaches. More accounting. More office space. I didn’t want the all the stress. …

How I designed my perfect day by fixating on what I hate — Last year, my business partner Chris and I sat down to think about what we wanted to achieve at Tiny. We thought up all sorts of lofty goals, but when we really got down to it our true goal was actually pretty simple. We wanted to do something many successful…

Charlie Munger on why humans make horrible decisions — Everybody knows about Warren Buffett, but few people outside of the investing world know about his business partner, Charlie Munger. While Buffett’s life has a singular focus on business and investing, Charlie is a Benjamin Franklin styled polymath with interests ranging from architecture (he refused to donate a dormitory to…

Warren Buffett is famous for handshake deals and one-page contracts. He often buys multi-billion-dollar companies after a few phone calls, usually without ever meeting the management team in person or visiting their facilities. Not only that, but he typically pays below market prices and avoids dealing with investment bankers. Despite…

When I first started MetaLab, Dan Cederholm was my hero. Bulletproof Web Design was the first book I read when I was learning the ropes, and I regularly reverse engineered his stylesheets on SimpleBits to learn CSS tricks. …

Building Products The MetaLab Way — “You gave me a PDF full of incoherent garbage about chatbots and wasted months of our time!” I was visiting a client, the CEO of a successful venture backed company, and he wasn’t happy. …