Tom Lehman
Co-founder, Ethscriptions and Facet. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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.
1shows
1appearances
8statements
0resolved
0supported
0contradicted
Everything Tom Lehman said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
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.”
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.”
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 …”
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…”
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: 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…”
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…”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Tom's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 a16zLEDGER | Co-founder, Ethscriptions and Facet | 1 | 8 | — | full record on the a16z Podcast → |