I believe that behavioral science, correctly applied, can change the world. But, as with any emerging discipline, there is a period of self-definition in which people fight (with varying amounts of actual animosity) about who can claim what title and where the borders of the field are.
Personally, I’ve largely…
Jason Fried, the CEO of Basecamp, has been making some changes at the org and decided that they “deserve an announcement”. While worth reading in their entirety, the changes are geared around taking the challenges of leading a company and addressing them by promoting monoculture (in the veil of individualism…
Recently, I accepted a new job offer. And I was excited, as so many folks are when they find meaningful work. It felt like such a great gig: my entire reporting line would be women! It would be global in scope! It would be spreading behavioral science among Fortune 500…
Over the weekend, Fast’s CEO Domm Holland posted a short Twitter thread about growing from 2 to 120+ people in 18 months while maintaining “an exceptionally high talent bar” and offered some tips based on Fast’s hiring process. But as I was reading the thread, I was struck by how…
The tech and VC worlds, like the world at large, are facing a reckoning over their history and practice of exclusionary bias. And while bias is incredibly complex and we have a long way to go, there are plenty of systemic changes that aren’t complex at all, like changing who…
Almost seven years ago, I gave a TEDx talk that would prove to be prophetic. The focus was on trying to resolve two seemingly irreconcilable facts: that many new college graduates were unemployed and yet there were abundant job openings for college graduates with no experience. My explanation was one…
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Spice Girls. Cowboy Bebop. Epic squads make for great storytelling. But the reason they’re compelling is essentially the same: optimum distinctiveness.
When we think about identity, everyone is trying to find a balance between uniqueness and belonging. Good squad-based narratives play on this by balancing a…
(I’m vocal in my support of the work First Round Capital has done to help the entire entrepreneurial ecosystem and the First Round Review is a big part of that. …
(I was talking with a mentee about her sister’s admissions essay for college and she asked if I would share mine. And so I’m doing that publicly, because the world is better with transparency. For context, this was written for Swarthmore College, which I ultimately attended.)
I do not know…
(This is a post primarily about the results of an experiment, but I did build a tool as part of it that you can use to gather behavioral feedback from former coworkers; you can go directly to WorkWithMeAgain.com …
Matt Wallaert
Behavioral scientist & author of Start At The End. bit.ly/MattWallaertMeet for call slots (URM prioritized). ex-: academia, startups, Microsoft, Clover Health
