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- Original Google Doc
- Ethan Alley, co-founder of Alvea, Jan 2023
I worked with Alex Large at Alvea, a biotech company I co-founded and co-run, from Jan-Oct 2022. I knew Alex from blog posts he’d shared online about taking atomic notes, which we’d spoken about and compared strategies on. Alvea was less than two weeks old and growing extremely quickly (we were speedrunning a new covid vaccine to clinical trial and expanding the team to take that on). As you might imagine, our digital systems were disorganized and on the verge of falling apart- a major hindrance to a primarily remote company. I was wracking my brain for people to help with this and Alex, the master of structured notetaking, came to mind.
Alex was originally hired to build a knowledge management system for us, but his responsibilities rapidly expanded and changed. Here are a few things he did the first few months of working with us (not exhaustive):
- Discussed key company culture concepts with me, helped crystallize them and presented them in intuitive visual notes (some of which became references for the duration of the company)
- Took primary responsibility for designing our slack channels and digital communication norms (which in our case, were ~all of the norms), among other things creating channels for critiquing our approach and asking “stupid” questions which subsequently were the venue which surfaced several critical mistakes in our strategy.Â
- Following his own instincts/ vision, designed and executed experiments with company adoption of new digital tools for company communication, including visual notes/ collaborative whiteboarding (Miro), video sharing (Loom), structured notetaking (Mem), meeting recording and rewatching (Rewatch) and others. Several of these became core parts of our remote company infrastructure.Â
- Conducted interviews and feedback sessions with every person in the company and synthesized a video snippets from each clustered by theme, which was one of the most information dense and informative things I watched while leading the company
- Juggled urgent business operations requests when the rest of the operations team was under capacity.
- …
I think this gives a flavor of Alex’s adaptability. The projects Alex worked on, like the above, didn’t all fall within areas Alex already knew well. Instead, I remember him working out what skills or domains of knowledge would be required to execute a particular project well, and just sort of figuring those things out. In one instance, I remember meeting him a few days after we’d discussed Product Management as a discipline, only to discover that he’d read several books on the subject. This trait can have a flipside, of forgoing immediate experimental feedback from the world in favor of this type of book understanding, but overall I think Alex is unusually good at figuring out new things. A related strength is in organizing and communicating complex information. Not only can Alex learn things quickly, but he can distill the important bits in an intuitive and user friendly way.
Throughout the time we worked together Alex was managed by me. He had very little direction from me in what he should work on, rather deciding on the above projects based on his own sense of what would move the needle on our internal processes. I think this level of autonomy was made possible by what I might call his “metacognitive emphasis”- he spends a lot of effort and consideration thinking about how to improve and get better at reasoning about aspects of his own thinking and process beyond the object level. For instance, he’s very intentional about his own productivity and figuring out his personal failure modes. Because of this, he’s someone I expect to see growing — by redefining himself and his capabilities— more frequently than others. Just like he experimented with software systems for Alvea to use, Alex seems to take an experimental approach to his own process and approach to work. Seeing what fits, and iterating on that.Â
Another theme in both the projects I shared above and my experience working with him is that Alex is a good person to work with. He’s friendly, thoughtful, funny and attentive. I think he’s particularly good at digital communication, making new folks at Alvea feel quickly welcome and connected without actually meeting them face to face. Many of Alex’s best projects involved thinking about software or internal processes and the interface they have with the people and communities using them. Software / process understanding plus community/culture-orientation.
Overall, I enjoyed working with Alex and would like to work with him again some day. You might like working with him too.