Both in person and over slack- unusually good at connecting with people digitally
You’d be one of my top choices for Alvea cultural role models. Learning + aiming to do good + caring about each other as people
Single-handedly embodying the experimentation culture
Easyness around owning mistakes
“person who everyone I've talked to enjoys working with”
“especially good at being warm and human and approachable over slack, feeling like yourself over slack in a way that some people struggle to” → ” makes it easier for people to get to know you over slack, new people”
“hold down the fort on some of our key cultural values, especially experimentation mindset”
telling people about how internal ops is changing & improving, realising this is pretty much a story about Alex, pretty wild”
2. Thinking
Role model of “Metacognition” (“thinking about your thinking, thinking about your process”)
The deliberateness with which you approach life, thinking, learning, work etc is special
At least in part one of your superpowers: deliberateness in thinking, thinking about thinking up the stack
Claim: this is a distinct superpower from rapid learning abilities
You can learn a bunch of object-level stuff but not be trying to encorporate into all levels of life and thinking
I think its partly whats responsible for the number of times you’ve been able to redefine your responsibilities & ownership successfully
What I notice which is unique to you is how far “up the stack” your self-improvement goes.
Meaning not just trying to get better at some particular subject matter or skill, but being deliberate about improving your approach and way of thinking.
Creative / optimising but at really high level things
Lucidity (mental clarity, ability to make things clear and structured)
Impressive ability to crystallise, structure and organise information
Historically you haven’t celebrated this enough
sounds like you think it’s easy to do this and therefore replace-able, not valuable
Counter-example: the surprise [manager] felt after having a few conversations re: [project] into something very legible, crystallised it
Even has a guy currently working on this with 25 years experience and doesn’t seem to be able to do the job like I could, I would have grok-d more and put it in a more legible format
🚨 🚨 !!!
Therefore this isn't trivial and should be done more!
“You blew my mind a few times with our early collaborations, this was really valuable.”
Learning like a champ
You’re a monster at devouring information lol
Seen this across lots of domains
Talking to you week to week can be disorienting because of how much you’ve been able to learn and adapt your mental models since we spoke the last time. So crazy how fast you get up to speed
“what Alex am I talking to this week”
May have read a big book, devoured some info
3. Productivity
You cope with a super high volume of work
Relative to most in the company, you’ve done a great job keeping yourself oriented to the most important strategy questions
You also seem to have high intentionality with productivity habits. You and [name] stand out on this axis.
I value your recommendations for productivity processes/ tools really highly
seems like you have the jobs of lots of people and you’re doing all of it
also can deal with high volume of work without getting stuck in day-to-day fires and never thinking about most important things
i.e. being able to self-correct when you realise you’ve had a too “in the weeds” day
Misc
Want to remark on craziness of role
Its really hard to drop in with such an abstract mandate and find so many valuable things to do
Very little specificity in what you were supposed to do
Time after time, found increasingly critical areas of own and take care of
Process entirely self-directed, most people would struggle with this