Back in late 2016, I started Armory in my garage (pictured above) with my two co-founders. We also applied to Y Combinator. I often have founders ask me if YC is worth it right around now, during YC application season. The short answer is Yes, you should at least apply

One of our Armory crew just asked me: At some point, I’d LOVE to hear how you prioritize your tasks and manage your time. I’ve tried a lot of different methods, but nothing has completely stuck… I've tried many approaches: Zero Inbox. GTD. Workflowy. Sublime/text editors. Personal

I've recently become an advisor to INROADS, a program I went through twenty years ago, to help people from disadvantaged backgrounds succeed in the business world. Here's my INROADS story – if you're also an alum, I'd love for you to post a comment and share yours as well. What is

For the past 15 years, I've been really focused on deepening my personal toolbelt when it comes to understanding and de-escalating highly charged personal interactions, and generally how to improve my own personal ability to understand and live with empathy for the incredible people in my life. Fifteen years might

Back in 2012, when TSLA was $32/share, I wrote this blog titled “I’m Betting on Elon,” and I considered TSLA to be a $1,000/share stock within a decade. Now, just 8 years later, it’s trading above $900 a share, valuing Tesla above VW as the

The deeper Armory goes on our journey to help the world innovate faster by creating an Open Source Culture that empowers our tribe with Roundabouts, not Stoplights so we can productize our cultural values into  Armory's software delivery platform, the more people (especially other founders) look at me wondering what

Armory has more than tripled in size over the past year, and as we've grown, I and my executive team and managers – and indeed the entire company–  have been doing a lot of thinking and evolving on what it means to be a leader within a hypergrowth environment while building

As Armory continues to scale, we're crafting a "Roundabout, not Stoplight" culture because of Conway's law: I spend my days interacting with Global 2,000 CIOs who are trying to figure out how to innovate faster. But the hard truth about unlocking innovation is that: Innovation stems from learning. Learning

I like to do a little exercise when I give a talk (like the one above), which is to ask the room how many golf balls fit in a bath tub. Not because I care about the answer, but because it's interesting to watch the way people answer the question.

I like to make introductions to someone in my network in a specific way. If you've recently asked me for an intro, I may have sent you to this page. Here's the I'd like to ask you to use: 1) Send me an email with something like the following: DROdio,

I've never tried this myself, but I've heard it works extremely well -- and in fact, I'd love for someone to try this and then post a comment on this blog (ideally w/ pics!) describing how it goes: As I've written about in the past, I've learned with Armory about

When Isaac, Ben and I started Armory late last year, I found a lot has changed since starting my last startup, Socialize, in 2008. There's a suite of new tools available to instrument a startup that didn't exist eight years ago, including: Incorporate + AWS Credits + Merchant Acct: We incorporated Armory

I'm going to share a story about the forest vs. the trees. But it's not the story you're expecting to hear. My last blog post was about Doing Less, Better, which is my theme for 2015. A big part of doing less, better is achieving focus. But that very word

There's a great article in the NYTimes about Slack, a new startup that the Valley is buzzing about. Slack is a business messaging & collaboration app, and it's really, really good. The reporter in the article questions whether this year-old company is really worth $2.8 billion. Slack is not

This new startup, Jet.com, is looking to be the Costco of the web, and to undercut Amazon's prices by an average of 10%. They won't focus on speedy 2 day "prime" delivery. Instead, by being a member and paying a $49 annual fee (like you do with Amazon or

Just a quick post to share a decision making pro-tip that I shared with a few people this week. Anytime I need to consider a number of criteria to make a decision on something, I try to suss out what my needs are vs. my wants. (This is a framework