Tom Lehman

Co-founder, Ethscriptions and Facet · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderexecutiveengineer@dumbnamenumbers ↗ethscriptions.com ↗

Tom Lehman co-founded the crowd-sourced annotation platform Genius in 2009 and served as its long-time CEO until 2021. Known under the moniker Middlemarch, he later developed Ethscriptions and co-founded Facet.

8statements → 0claims → 0claims resolved → 4/5average certainty → 2.5/5average debate potential →

8 insights · every statement was checked. none of them is a claim the record can settle: opinions, insights and disclosures never carry an assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Tom argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

How they sound: speaking style how? →

294 words/min while actually speaking · 10.3 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Tom Lehman: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 4,168 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

What they said8 Episodes1

Everything Tom Lehman said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight

Lehman: Startups should release imperfect projects and refine them in public

“You know, the worst thing is the best thing. Like, the worse the project is, the better it is to get it out there, and then really perfect it in public to the extent it needs to be perfected.”

Tom Lehman Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 5:37 a16z Podcast | Guiding Startup Culture -- The Genius ISMs

Insight

Lehman: Don't execute grand upfront plans; build products incrementally

“It's called Seeing Like a State by Jim Scott, and it basically sort of is a long argument against sort of making a grand plan, And then trying to execute it, and it's just, it's gonna go awry, so don't make a grand plan, do an incremental thing.”

Tom Lehman Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 7:14 a16z Podcast | Guiding Startup Culture -- The Genius ISMs

Insight

Lehman: Feeling comfortable means you are not moving fast enough

“If you are feeling comfortable, you are not moving fast enough, you're not pushing hard enough, and it's kind of a corny, like, cliche at this point, but I think it's very true, and so, you know, if you work here, you shouldn't expect to feel comfortable, but …”

Tom Lehman Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 16:58 a16z Podcast | Guiding Startup Culture -- The Genius ISMs

Insight

Lehman: External experts and investors cannot solve a startup's hardest problems

“Whenever we had a hard problem and we went into a meeting with a lawyer or an investor or a YC partner or some kind of expert thinking, this is the meeting where someone's going to tell us like what to do. And it's so great that we have access to this. It just…”

Tom Lehman Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 20:21 a16z Podcast | Guiding Startup Culture -- The Genius ISMs

Insight

Lehman: Always choose to do the task you least want to do

“Yeah, so run into the spike is basically the idea that whenever you're trying to decide what to do, you should do the thing you don't want to do. So there's always, when you're making a decision, you're like, well, it's this or that, and like, I know what I wa…”

Tom Lehman Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 2:04 a16z Podcast | Guiding Startup Culture -- The Genius ISMs

Insight

Tom Lehman: Incremental software releases must align with a grand vision

“I think the sort of challenge is, when you're thinking about worse is better, you're thinking about doing small things, you don't wanna, there's a reality, which is you don't wanna release some huge, You know, in the software context, some huge feature in whol…”

Tom Lehman Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 18:05 a16z Podcast | Guiding Startup Culture -- The Genius ISMs

Insight

Lehman: New employees should trust their intuition when something seems broken

“Everything you think that's messed up is actually messed up. Like there's a tendency, you come into a place, you see something messed up, you think, oh, it's me, like I'm not seeing the real deal, like I must not know what's up. No, if you think it's messed up…”

Tom Lehman Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 23:16 a16z Podcast | Guiding Startup Culture -- The Genius ISMs

Insight

Lehman: Writing in your natural voice makes business communication more appealing

“And the answer, the actual reality is just trust your normal voice, and that will make you seem more appealing, and that will be just more fun and better. And so it's just write like you would say it.”

Tom Lehman Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 12:17 a16z Podcast | Guiding Startup Culture -- The Genius ISMs

Appearances (1)

Episode	Date	Speaking time
a16z Podcast \| Guiding Startup Culture -- The Genius ISMs	Jan 2, 2019	16m

Tom Lehman

The record, in short

How they sound: speaking style how? →

Appearances (1)

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