Well the funny thing is we did indeed have a larger team previously (before the end of 2018) and we actually are moving faster now after we did our team resizing. It seems counter intuitive to what people would believe. It was so eye opening to us how much a small elite team can accomplish. I think there was a podcast episode of Reed Hastings talking about finding a similar thing after they did a big layoff at Netflix. If I find it again, I will link to it.
My plan was to talk to lots of people and get inspired by seeing what they are working on. The best route was to start angel investing and finding founders at their earliest stages. The checks I wrote weren’t big but I learned so much. The second thing was I really wanted to solve the problem of personal productivity beyond email, specifically around understanding what makes some people a lot more productive than others and how they find flow and how they fight procrastination. In a way, I joke that our whole life has been trying to make ourselves more productive and stop procrastinating. And I wanted to travel quite a bit while doing that. Each week, I allocated one day to attend meetings and guide the team at Boomerang, 2 days for angel investing and 1 day for productivity consulting and 1 day for exploring new tools, reading research papers. I had a lot of fun that year!