Why & How to Harness Young Men: The Sebastian Junger Interview (by Tim Ferriss)

Awesome Awesome Interview with the Author and War Correspondent.  Huge insights into human behaviour - especially into what makes young men tick and why some kind of national service must be made compulsory. Once you listen, you would also understand exactly what Winston Churchill meant when "Never let a good crisis go to waste".

My Favorite segments:

• On striving for political correctness in gender [43:59]
• PTSD, the C-Train, and returning to New York City after being at war [1:08:14]
• On the lonely nature of society [1:12:01]
• On the role of journalists:
• “The point of journalism is to tell the truth. It is not to improve society. There are facts and truths that feel regressive, but that doesn’t matter. The point of journalism isn’t to make everything better; it’s to give people accurate information about how things are.”

How Freshdesk's is Aceing PR, Funding, HR

Chennai, India-based SaaS CRM firm Freshdesk's Founder & CEO Girish Mathrubootham has an engaging interview on Mixergy.

I especially liked the aspects relating to how the company leveraged the HackerNews community to attract and get early customer traction; how it attracted the attention of its first VC investor, Accel Partners (Girish got Angellist founder Naval Ravikant's attention - by saying soemthing nice about him on a HackerNews article, which got them on to AngelList, where Accel noticed them and reached out) and how Freshdesk practices "strengths finder" principles to fit its employees to the right roles.

Quick Links: Matt Mullenweg (Founder of Word Press) with Tim Ferris

A 2-hour conversation that is so easy to consume!

I especially liked Matt's description of

1) How the process of learning music at a young age helped in his programming career that came much later.

He talks about how the person who is practicing new notes which sound awful to someone who might be listening casual  is pushing himself/herself more than someone who sings/plays what might sound good to them (and hence limit expanding their horizons)

2) Hiring based on actual assignments - rather than based on interviews. He in fact insists on text chatting with the interviewee - which is how most work related communications happen (at least in the tech world) -  so as to not let the person's in person / video interviewing "skills" do not prejudice him.

Related link: Matt's HBR article

The "How Many More Days to the Weekend" Employee

In his Mixergy interview, Andy Wilkerson founder of Parallelus, describes why he quit his last job:

I loved work. I didn’t know what having a job was, because I was just doing the things that used to be my hobby and getting paid for them. And as things changed, I started to dread going to work. I was… you know, (getting) stomach pains on Sunday nights, thinking about Monday. I looked forward to Fridays. That had never happened to me before. And it just wasn’t for me anymore.

And so, this is what he has decided for his co-workers at Parallelus:

I used to tell people when I interviewed them that we’re not just looking for the right employee to come work for us, but we want our company to be the right place for them. And if that relationship doesn’t exist, then one of us is in the wrong place, and we need to find the right one.