One Year at the Rectangle Factory

When I worked for myself it felt like being on an extended road trip. Untethered from the system, always adrfit, always seeing new vantage points, but also disconnected from the safety net and comforts of “regular” life.

Today is one year since I pulled over from my road trip of indie consulting and settled down into a full time role. Inspired by Behzod’s 30 days at the triangle factory I’m naming this series one year at the rectangle factory.

Why the rectangle factory? Well so far the two defining logics of full time employment are ad rectangles and zoom rectangles.

What does it feel like to have a full time job? I’ll get to that. First a few highlights.

Rectangles not Cubicles

Working mostly remote, with a few days in the office the defining characteristic of “office work” is not the cubicle but the rectangle.

Meanwhile, working at Raptive the majority of our revenue comes from advertising.

More Work Travel Than Before

Why Raptive?

• People
• Betting on the web
• Customer obsessed -

Meetings, Energy, Time

The days are busier working a full time job, and yet I’ve worked fewer nights and weekends. A smoother, more predictable everyday busy-ness vs the spiky unpredictable nature of indie consulting.

After I got over the initial crazy period of setting up a new team from scratch, since the start of the year I’ve been exercising more predictably.

• Averaging 130 hours of meetings / month
• 19 weeks had > 30 hours of meetings
• 5 weeks had > 40 hours of meetings

That’s a heavy load and, frankly unsustainable. Yes, building a new team and function has been busy and stressful. Did it need that many meetings? No. This is a classic failure of management - needing to be in all the meetings, not delegating effectively, biting off too much.

But stress != time != energy. My favorite metaphor for headspace is that it’s non-euclidian space. It behaves in strange ways and doesn’t “fill up” in ways you’d expect. Headspace isn’t a function of how busy you are, it’s a function of how overloaded you are. There are some weeks that are very busy, but I’m not overwhelmed and I’m able to put down work at the end of the day.

Operations, the third leg of the stool

Input metrics, ops,

Reinforce your goals everywhere. Constantly restate the goal and how it maps to your vision and strategy. Ask how every initiative contributes. The first order effect is to make sure your team is working on the most important things. But the second order effect is to ensure your team is applying the goal to the thousand invisible decisions that will happen in the course of their work. Put the one line goal at the top of every doc.

Learning and growing is the key metric. How much am I able to grow and stretch myself?

AI Search & the Future of the Web

One of the most rewarding pieces of working at Raptive is the idea that we’re supporting ads are good actually https://x.com/krishnanrohit/status/1458712566402887680

Google is grounded.

Writing?

My biggest regret from the last time I took a job was taking two years off from writing. I’m determined not to do that. I didn’t write a lot in year 1 but at least a few pieces came out.

Google is grounded Little Futures.

Room for more honest, playful writing?