Welcome to my new weekly series for founders and ambitious professionals. In its current stage, it includes one great tool you should use, one startup that I find interesting, and one piece of content that founders should read.
Tool of the week
Vimcal. I love having perfect control over my time and calendar. Vimcal makes it very easy for me to have that. It is a browser-based calendar app that I use instead of Google Calendar. I have been using them for years and it has saved me a tremendous amount of time and hassle. I can specifically recommend their precise scheduling feature that makes it extremely easy to send personalized times to people you want to talk to. It makes it very simple for me to schedule customer or investor meetings at exactly the times I want them to be since I can individually pick time slots and get them in a format that I can copy into an email. Since I deal with people in many different time zones I In the early days, I used to DM their CEO with feedback and he always responded quickly and fixed the issues quickly or personally messaged me when new features launched that helped my workflow. I love this LinkedIn post of his where he talks about how a 5k check saved vimcal from death. For perfect control over my time, I combine vimcal with cal.com for team scheduling and general scheduling infrastructure in my company. I will talk about them in more detail in a future episode.
Startup to watch
Synonym Bio. It is easy to stay in the software and AI bubble. However, most people work outside of it and many of the most important breakthroughs we will make will require interacting with physical matter. Synonym has realized that and develops infrastructure for the bioeconomy. Their platform enables companies in the bioeconomy (those that create fermented lipids, proteins, enzymes, etc.) to model, design, fund, construct and build their manufacturing capacities. These processes are a more climate-friendly alternative to synthetic processes of producing raw materials (plastics, paper and textiles), chemicals to develop soaps and detergents, food fortification, and more. The company is led by co-founders Edward Shenderovich who built Knotel before and Joshua Lachter who was a VP at AI-innovation leader ASAPP before. I love the big mission and the tremendous opportunity to change the world for the better. This is a hard problem to solve but ticks all the boxes for a potentially massive company. If you want to read a longer piece about them, you can do so here.
Blog-Article to read
1000 true fans by Kevin Kelly. This is a timeless classic that I've revisited numerous times. While primarily aimed at artists, the core principle is equally relevant to startups: it's better to have a small group of users who absolutely love your product than a larger group who just kind of like your product. I recommend every founder to read this one but also send it to every artist you know.
This is it for noteworthy things for Founders (and ambitious professionals) this week. It is a new format that I am trying so feel free to send me feedback about what I should include or change about it.
Share this post