Here’s why you should care about pronouns.

Here’s why we should care about pronouns.

Which sentence made you want to read this essay more?

“There is no I in team.” I learned this adage early. At my first job, I asked my boss what made our Managing Director, let’s call her Jane, good at her job. He said he has never heard Jane use the word “you”. She would say “we are winning in this area” or “can we do better here”, no matter if she’s speaking to her assistant or in front of a large team. She operates with the principle of company before team before me.

Individuals using first-person plural and second-person (such as “we,” “us,” or “you”) ought to demonstrate an outward focus, considering the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of others.

― David Burkus on Pronoun Use Reflects Standings in Social Hierarchies

Indeed, research shows leaders choose pronouns that focuses on their tribe and its members instead of on themselves. Linguist Steven Pinker calls pronouns the “interpersonal dimension” of language: how we think about social relationships and convey power relations, intimacy, and group membership. But the research still leaves me wondering: when do I use “we” vs. “you”?

This question seems simple, but its answer doesn’t come intuitively to me. When my wife saw me writing this essay, she is surprised I have to think about which pronoun to use like I’m dissecting a math formula. She said it’s because my primary mode is thinking mode, whereas hers is feeling mode, based on the Myers–Briggs personality model.

In figuring out what pronoun to use, Jane’s style stuck with me. Surely I can just copy her and use “we” everywhere. “You” sounds pointed to me. I don’t want to confront. I tried Jane’s approach, then feedback rolled in: people told me I’m not clear, I talk in generalities without clear next steps of who does what, and I should developer a stronger sense of urgency.

I decided to dig deeper into the nuances of using “we” vs. “you” in nonfiction writing, and how great authors and orators use them effectively. Finding advice on this is harder than I thought: searching for “when to use we vs. you” revealed tips on how to use pronouns generally, how pronouns affect marketing messaging, and how to remove personal pronouns altogether. Once in a while I’d come across a gem. Here are the notes I collected over the years.

General tips

• Alternate between “we” and “you” to speak broadly and apply to the reader individually. This makes prose more engaging and less artificial.
• When writing in a conversational style, default to “you” and mix in “we” periodically.

When to use “you”

• Talk to the reader, make them feel included, invite them into the story
• Ask a question
• Make reader stop, think and reflect
  • What is most meaningful to you?
• Make something feel relatable, place reader in a particular situation to elicit empathy
  • Have you ever felt overwhelmed by deadlines?
  • If you were suddenly laid off…
  • Imagine you won the lottery
• Give personalized advice / direction / suggestion, make it more immediate, personal and impactful
  • As you analyze the data…
  • You could try a new strategy
• Empower the reader, emphasize accountability
  • You have many options here
  • Ultimately, you must decide what direction to take.
• Address counterarguments, discuss opinions
  • How would you respond to anyone claiming otherwise?
  • Why do you think most companies don’t do it this way?
• In sales and marketing messaging, “you” makes the reader feel 21% more responsible, and 13% more strongly to take action based on research.

Cons of using “you”

• Reader feels talked down at by a preachy, imposing expert
• Accusatory
• Adds distance between you and reader

When to use “we”

• More inclusive: addressing reader and myself. Identify with a group.
  • As engineers, we constantly learn new technologies.
• Make broad generalizations about shared human experiences, acknowledge shared emotions:
  • We all know the frustration of being stuck in traffic.
  • In times like these, we tend to cling to our loved ones.
• Uniting for a common goal / against a common adversary: we’re in this together as peers, encourage us to stand side-by-side to take on our collective responsibility:
  • When we work together, we will achieve this goal.
  • This pandemic has shown we’re all in this fight together.
  • We stand together against discrimination.
• Make universal pronouncements, establish common ground.
  • We believe all people deserve basic human rights.

Cons of using “we”

• Reader may not be clear on who “we” are. For example, you’re just talking about your company or your in-group without including the reader. This leads to fuzzy, impersonal prose.

Comparisons of “we” and “you” in context

Simple usage in short sentences

Advanced, mixed usage in longer prose

Example 1

Example 2

When I became a people manager, suddenly I was the person my team looked to with their “Why?” when change came. At first I gave the most naive response: “don’t worry, that change is no big deal”. It didn’t work: dismissing concerns didn’t ease people’s fears and anxieties. Then I tried to shield them from change so they can focus on doing their best work. But I often couldn’t, not even a CEO can.

Change happens because we learn new information: business strategy changes, our competitors are catching up; economy changes, investors no longer throw money at startups outside a zero interest rate environment; technology changes, AI with large language models today is not the same as AI 2 year ago. We don’t control our environments, but we can control ourselves to adapt. Instead of dismissing or hiding change, I can build a culture where change is normal, easy and rewarding.

It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment.

― Leon Megginson on Darwin’s Origin of Species

So how do you normalize change? Here are some ways I found useful:

Reframe change as experiments and learnings: Turning ambiguous ideas into great products is hard. As an engineer, I honed the skill of making an idea real. Billion-dollar productivity tool? I can build it too! But most of my ideas didn’t turn into great products. Surely if I come up with better ideas I’d have more success, I thought. But even successful startups pivot from their founding idea before they hit a home run. Famously, Instagram pivoted from a social check-in app to a photo-sharing app, and Slack pivoted from a game to a group messaging app. When I worked in Data Science at Shutterfly, we ran so many growth experiments before making a dent in our revenue.

Startups that win are the ones that learn the fastest. For them, everything is an experiment: a product idea, an org design, or even a new hire. They take a portfolio approach like Venture Capitalists: bet on 10 ideas, expect 1 ~ 2 home runs that return 10x their investment, a few break evens, and the rest written off. We can do the same by reframing our day-to-day work:

• Bad: we built a simpler onboarding funnel and it isn’t working
• Good: we ran an experiment to test if simplifying our onboarding will increase account creation. Account creation is up by x% but 7-day retention is down by y%. We learned that users liked entering less data upfront but aren’t as invested to use our product. This trade-off hurts long-term engagement so we’re pivoting.

Silicon Valley births innovation because it celebrates failure. I have plenty of practice and I still get to build! Failure means we learned that our hypothesis was wrong, but there are always others to test. I believe we should reward teams for learnings. For example, I measure Product Manager performance by not just the business impact they create, but also the volume and velocity of experiments they run.

Set expectation early: tell your team that changes are coming, and give them some examples of what changed before. Ideally founders set this expectation from day 0. Psychologists call this technique “priming”. It works because hearing an idea early influences how we see the world, how we behave, and even how well we learn. For example, as part of Product Manager hiring and onboarding, I tell a new team member that we rethink org design at least once a year. Meta’s Year of Efficiency is another example. The company messaged the vision and the why early before making a few rounds of org changes.

Give people a say: as humans, we want to feel a sense of control over our lives. Change at work often comes from the top. Mix it up with bottom-up change by involving people to imagine new ideas, give feedback and help in carrying out the change. Ask them: How efficient is our process? Are we happy with this tool? How can Product better partner with Sales? And a more specific example: I guide teams to define success as a crisp quantitive number or a yes/no:

• Bad: customers like new feature X
• Good: 4 out of 5 customers buy new feature X

By defining their own success, teams feel agency in their work, and we debate less on whether what we learned is good or bad. People clearly see if change is needed.

Find your cadence: companies and teams operate on a cadence: annual kickoffs, quarterly planning, weekly experiment reviews, etc. Piggyback on these events to make changes and ask for feedback. Simply hearing about change regularly, people start to react differently: “oh we’ve been talking about that, and it’s happening now.” Linear has a unique resource allocation cadence that rotates people across projects. It doesn’t need big reorgs, and there’s no drama when people and projects come and go.

Time-box experiments: when experiments drag on without conclusive results, people linger and tech debt piles. At LTSE, we planned every 6 weeks in what we called Pivot vs. Persevere (PvP) cycles. We broke big problems down into smaller experiments that fit within the cycle, then build, ship and collect data at the end. Based on what we learned, we pivot to work on another problem, or persevere by running more and bigger experiments on the same problem. The time-boxed experiments make change easy and normal.

Some of you asked me how I work across languages. For everything on the web - news, government publications, or websites of our industry peers - Chrome and Safari translate everything automatically with their built-in translation feature. They work so well, it’s as if I’m reading native English content.

But what about content beyond the web like Slack messages and PDFs? At first, I started with copying and pasting text into Google Translate. While serviceable, juggling between apps and hunting for the elusive Google Translate tab breaks up my mental flow. Then I remembered Shortcuts, an app that’s built into Apple devices and lets me automate workflows on them. Building a shortcut to translate text to English takes just 5 minutes:

Using the shortcut is easy: highlight text in any app then press a keyboard shortcut (I set mine to Ctrl + T) to get an instant translation. The shortcut even smartly detects the source language! Plus, you can customize the output to any language. My Chinese is OK. I sometimes struggle with domain-specific words like “microservices architecture”, so I built another shortcut for translating text to Chinese.

Another perk of using Shortcuts is that it will never break because another cloud service like Google Translate is down. I configured the shortcut to use dictionaries built into the operation system. Both Macs and iPhones let me download dictionaries for offline translation. This is perfect for working in the cloud without the cloud - when I fly across the globe to visit my team.

A translation shortcut may saves me just a few seconds each time I read content in a different language. These precious seconds add up into hours of time saved every month. Give this translation shortcut a try, I think you’ll find it useful too.

Every month, thousands of founders come to LTSE to operate their companies. They seed their growth from like-minded investors, invest in their employees, and participate in a public market where they are rewarded for doing good.

At LTSE, our vision is to be the capital market infrastructure for the next generation of iconic companies. Building companies is hard - I know, I labored at it for a third of my life. I always wished for smarter tools, more capital to innovate, less busywork, and a market built for founders like me. As Eric puts it, “There must be a better way!” So I joined you, a team of passionate and talented entrepreneurs, to build a better way.

I am so proud of what we shipped. LTSE Equity grew from a better-than-spreadsheet MVP to the largest cap table management platform in the world. 32,000 startups joined us, from two founders in a garage to Series D unicorns. We did crazy things, then made them normal. We drove pricing down by pioneering freemium cap table management - all companies can now have safe cap tables. We made equity data portable by forming the Open Cap Table Coalition - all companies will truly own their data. Because we add more value than we extract, LTSE Equity is now a household name, a preferred partner, and a leading voice in the startup ecosystem. Journalist Dan Primack at Axios called us “Silicon Valley’s most important startup for other startups.” Even though we’re only 6% to our vision, I think we will live up to this honor.

After four plus years at LTSE, I’ve decided to go on a new adventure. What excites me is helping builders to create the future. LTSE taught me how to solve big, hard problems with lean experiments. I loved building tools for developers who are solving new problems with the magic of code. I’m excited to apply what I learned at LTSE to build financial infrastructure and developer tools for an underserved continent. My last day at LTSE is January 7, 2022. After that, I will serve as an Advisor to LTSE.

My friends and family would tell you how I’m always so excited to say that LTSE is the best job I ever had. I find my work meaningful and fun. I get to work with smart and passionate teammates like you. When times have been good, you’ve been humble. When times have been tough, you’ve been strong and supportive. I’m grateful for all the hard work you put in, for all that you’ve taught me, and for believing that capitalism can do good through our work. I am grateful to Eric, Maliz and Tiho for believing in LTSE Equity, and for their mentorship. I am grateful for the company builders who have trusted us, shared feedback, and became our customers.

How companies are built is changing. Anyone in the world can solve any problem with software and remote work. Young companies think bigger with seemingly infinite capital. Yet companies still yield to short-term pressures, and equity is still not equitable. I am confident that LTSE will meet every challenge and opportunity ahead. We have things in the pipeline that will continue to delight. Keep pivoting, keep persevering.

Thanks to Ben Ehrlich for his feedback.

But we’re more than a marketplace for trading shares and listing public companies: The exchange forms part of an ecosystem that supports companies and all their stakeholders who share a long-term vision.

When I joined LTSE as employee number 11 after founding and building tech startups, I asked fellow founders what they found hard about operating startups. Some recounted mistakes like setting up cap tables that left nothing for the team down the road. Others took their companies public and watched their stock price plunge based on a single earnings report, without any material changes to their businesses.

Everyone agrees that companies built to last are built that way from the start. That from their earliest days, they put in place tools and practices that will create resiliency and support their growth over time. It’s what we hear most from the 45,000 startups who rely on LTSE’s software to get off the ground, scale their businesses, align with employees, and build bonds with long-term investors who believe in them. It’s what my team and I are excited to build for the next generation of founders each day.

The launch of the Long-Term Stock Exchange marks a milestone in our work on behalf of company builders. Now there’s a place in the public markets built to help companies thrive.

Thanks to Brian Browdie for his feedback.

Summary: you came here looking for this. Keep scrolling to see why I build it.

FIGURE GOES HERE

Why build yet another unicorn IPO tracker?

Always up-to-date

It’s 2020, a good leader board should contain all the latest unicorn IPOs, and with up-to-date performance data. I see found a few unicorn IPO charts and infographics being passed around, like this popular one from Howmuch. It’s supposed to be “The Hottest IPOs in 2019”, yet it was published in July 2019 with data from June 2019. Never mind that Snap IPO’ed in 2017. Sure a jpeg is easy to share, but this completely defeats the purpose of publishing on the web.

International IPOs

An IPO leader board isn’t complete if it only contains American unicorns. Half of the current top 10 decacorns, unicorns with more than $10 billion valuation, are Chinese. A wave of Indian unicorns like Paytm and OYO are joining the herd. We in America are increasingly impacted by international tech unicorns like Bytedance with its TikTok app. Also, why not keep an eye on other fast-growing markets and companies that I can put my money in? It’s so much easier to make international investments nowadays.

Apple-to-apple time comparisons

Folks on Wall Street like to talk about the “IPO pop”, the difference between the IPO price and the day-one closing price. It’s a good gauge of how well the IPO pricing process went. Company management and bankers spend weeks narrowing down the IPO price range based on select investor feedback, then the market with its scale and efficiency shows how right they are.

The other important milestone is when the lock-up period runs out 90 ~ 180 days after the IPO. This means the company insiders are allowed to sell their stock. If things aren’t going well with the company, you bet they’ll be doing that ASAP. By the end of the lock-up period, the greenshoe options used to stabilize the stock price also ran out. Without these artificial impacts to the supply and demand, the market more efficiently reflect the company’s true worth through its stock price.

Public market valuations, certainly after a stock has traded for a material amount of time and lockups have come off, are much more rational.

― Fred Wilson, The Great Public Market Reckoning

To compare unicorn IPOs with an apple-to-apple time scale, the Leader Board shows stock price performance at 1-day and 1-year. By then, the lock-up period is over, the company has a few quarters of performance numbers under its belt, and the stock price is more stable. For IPOs that haven’t traded for a year, it shows the latest price performance. Another benefit of looking at the 1-year mark is that this is when you pay the much lower capital gains tax, not the income tax, after you sell.

This tech IPO tracker from Recode contains up-to-date performance data, but still suffers from not having an apple-to-apple time scale. You can’t compare a 5-year old IPO’s current performance to that of a 5-day old.

Know whether an unicorn is just riding the bull market

If you got into the Spotify direct listing at $132 a share, you may be grinning a year later at it’s 9% return. It’s no Netflix, but at least it’s better than Pandora. Did you know that if you were to put your money in S&P 500, you would’ve been even better off with a 10% return?

The Unicorn IPO Leader Board uses a simple solution: subtract the market (S&P 500) return out of a stock’s price return. Even Chinese companies are adjusted for S&P 500. For U.S. investors like me, S&P 500 is an easy way to invest. If I invest in a foreign unicorn, I’m usually interested in that specific company, not looking for a way to park my money in a different international market. So if that unicorn doesn’t perform as well as the U.S. market, I’d just move my money back home.

The most the stock market moves by in a year is about -10% to 20%, apart from rare events like the 2008 Great Recession. Because of this, taking out the gap between stock performance and market performance is the most meaningful to those unicorn stocks straddling the break even line.

What IPOs are tracked on The Unicorn IPO Leader Board?

To be on the Leader Board, companies need to be valued at 1 billion U.S. dollars, usually determined by the last funding round before the IPO. Some “undercorns” with valuations dipping below $1B during the IPO pricing process are also included. Casper is a good example.

Direct listings like Spotify and Slack are also included. Companies on the Leader Board don’t need to trade on an U.S. exchange.

I take out companies that were acquired, went private, or shut down. An example is Pivotal. VMware bought it a year and a half after its IPO.

Please reach out if you find anything missing.

Top 10 unicorn IPOs to look forward to in 2020 & beyond

The new decade just started and is already full of excitements, with the Australian fires, the drone strike that thankfully didn’t start World War III, the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak, and Brexit finalized. And we have an U.S. presidential election coming up that’ll cause many in the markets to take a wait-and-see approach. It’ll be interesting to watch when and how the next wave of unicorns go out, like these top 10 decacorns:

1. Ant Financial 蚂蚁金服 $150B
2. Bytedance 字节跳动 (parent company of TikTok 抖音) $75B
3. Didi Chuxing 滴滴出行 $57B
4. Stripe $35B
5. SpaceX $33B
6. Airbnb $31B
7. Kuaishou 快手 $28B
8. JD Digits 京东数字科技 $27B
9. Palantir $20B
10. JUUL $20B

Data sources & further reading

Public market data come from SEC filings and Google Finance. The latest valuation data come from Pitchbook.

Here are 2 alternatives to the Unicorn IPO Leader Board. To me they’re either TMI, or suffer from problems like not actively updated. If you want to make your own, I’d use your favorite portfolio tracker / watch list tool instead.

• The Hottest IPOs in 2019: What if You had Invested $1,000 When They Went Public by Howmuch
• How the tech unicorns of 2019 are doing on the stock market by Vox

Here are 2 sources to track pre-IPO unicorns:

• The Billion Dollar Startup Club by The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones VentureSource: this is a good public and up-to-date source of unicorns that haven’t IPO’ed yet. The opposite of this Leader Board.
• The Prime Unicorn Index: an equally-weighted price return index that measures the share price performance of U.S. private companies valued at $500 million or more.

Scary disclosure: I write about things I may invest in. You should also do your own research before investing.

Photo of the Børsen spire by Pierre Châtel-Innocenti.

• What stocks did I look at?
• You really are better off putting your cash in a savings account
• The market is often wrong about companies during a recession
• Not all best performers in a recession do well during recovery
• Need cash? Buy top dividend payers
• Pick a industry, not a stock
• For a housing crisis, REITs performed better than you’d think
• More companies that made most of their revenue in the U.S. outperformed the market
• Can’t repeat your success from the last time
• Your turn: find hidden gems in the complete raw data
• References and data sources

What stocks did I look at?

We’re talking about the Great Recession that wiped out a decade of growth, caused by the financial crisis of 2007–2008. I analyzed stock and company performance data spanning December 2007 to March 2009 ¹. I also analyzed the same companies’ performance during the 5-year period after the recession. Obviously this is assuming best and worst case scenarios. In real life, no one can accurately time the market, knowing exactly when the stock market will bottom, and the market can do so well for so long after a recession.

I analyzed 1,363 U.S. mid-cap and above stocks that traded during this time. I’m using S&P MidCap 400’s definition here: companies with market caps of $1.5 billion and above at the start of the recession. Unless I have a strong investment thesis, I avoid smaller companies during a recession. They have higher volatility and limited liquidity - both dangerous attributes when everyone else is selling and I’m trying to do the same.

You really are better off putting your cash in a savings account

Before and during a recession, professional investors move their money out of stocks and into cash, even negative-yielding bonds that pay less than their cost. But why? During the recession, S&P 500 dropped -45% a year. That’s really not a bar you want to measure your investment to. Half of the companies outperformed the S&P 500 during the recession, but only 32 (2%) companies had a return above zero. You likely would’ve done a lot better if you also sold your stocks for cash, and cash gives you buying power to scoop up undervalued stocks too.

Here are all 32 companies that had positive total returns ² during the recession:

The market is often wrong about companies during a recession

A stock’s price is supposed to be based on the company’s future earnings, except when it isn’t. Investor confidence tanks during a recession, so they sell stocks, causing stock prices to drop, and this further weakens confidence. It’s a vicious cycle that’s often broken by governments stepping in.

When the market is wrong, it’s a great opportunity to pick up undervalued stocks. You also get a “margin of safety” - if you’re wrong, the low price you paid gives you a buffer to offset how wrong you were.

Margin of safety — never overpaying, no matter how exciting an investment seems to be — can you minimize your odds of being wrong.

― Benjamin Graham, The Intelligent Investor

Amazon is a great example: sales and earnings actually went up by double digits during the recession. This makes sense - back in 2007 Amazon had much lower prices than brick and mortar stores, and discount retailers do well during recessions. But its stock price was down by -26% anyway.

Another interesting sector to look at here is Finance and Insurance. These companies are closely related to what triggered the recession in the first place: the U.S. housing market. Yet the government didn’t allow the likes of AIG to die, and they thrived during the recovery. Just keep in mind that what caused the last recession probably won’t cause the next one.

Here are 20 extreme examples: the bottom 20 worst performers during the recession that outperformed the market during the recovery. Their recovery performance more than made up for their recession losses.

Not all best performers in a recession do well during recovery

Be careful with these. They may look OK during the recession, just know that you can’t time the end of the recession. For example, H&R Block often appears on the recession best-of list. Nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes, right? Not when the software is eating your world and you’re down when the market is up 25% a year.

There are 53 (4%) companies that had above market returns during the recession, but negative returns during the recovery. Here are the top 20:

Need cash? Buy top dividend payers

802 (59%) of companies paid dividends during the recession. Most companies don’t pay more than bonds or CDs do ³. If your goal is to live off of just dividends, say if you lose your job during a recession, you must hold a lot of shares in a lot of stocks that pay dividends.

But dividends rarely make a bad buy good. If your goal is growth, focus on how the company will grow. Companies use dividends to reassure you that the profits you’re seeing today are here to stay. Or that they just ran out of ideas of what to do with their cash piles - Apple did when its cash hit $100 billion in 2012.

Here’s a list of the top 20 dividend payers that had above market returns during the recession. There are a lot of traditional industries that are great at generating cash, but they’re not exactly hotbeds of innovation.

Pick a industry, not a stock

Picking a recession-proof stock isn’t sufficient, because not everyone in a recession-proof industry do well. For example, the Pharmaceutical and Medicine Manufacturing industry did well during the last recession, and includes some of the top performers. But Merck, one of the biggest names in the business, returned -49% annually, below the already abysmal S&P 500 benchmark.

Here are the top and bottom performing Pharmaceutical and Medicine Manufacturing companies:

For a housing crisis, REITs performed better than you’d think

There were 71 (5%) publicly traded Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) during the last recession. No REIT had a positive return, but 27 (38%) out of all REITS performed above market.

This is a classic case of not every recession being created equal. If the next recession is caused by something not related to real estate, say U.S.-China trade, give REITs a look as a place to park your money. The high dividends this asset class pays can help you get through a cash crunch.

Here are the top 20 performing REITs:

More companies that made most of their revenue in the U.S. outperformed the market

Since the Great Recession was caused by the U.S., I thought the 77% of the companies that made most of their revenue in the U.S. would’ve done worse. I was wrong. Slightly more of them outperformed the market than the companies with more international revenue.

There are some surprising names in the list of companies with more international revenue, including classic all-American brands like McDonald’s and IBM. For a closer look, here are the top 20 performers with more international revenue:

Can’t repeat your success from the last time

496 (36%) stocks are no longer around, including 1/3 of the ones that had a positive return. They were either acquired, went bankrupt, or simply decided that it’s not worth being a public traded company anymore ⁴.

If your strategy is to buy and hold, stick to mid cap or larger stocks, or buy funds that re-balance for you (in exchange for a small fee). The higher volatility and churn that come with smaller companies requires your higher attention to maximize returns - something you may not want to spend time on.

Your turn: find hidden gems in the complete raw data

Here’s the complete list of stocks that traded during the 2008 Great Recession, their performance during the recession and the post-recession recovery. I’d love to hear what other insights you find in the raw data.

References and data sources

My data sources include SEC filings and tier 1 data vendors used by everyone on Wall Street, via IEX, the Investors Exchange.

Thanks to Snigdha Kumar for her feedback.

Scary disclosure: I write about things I may invest in. You should also do your own research before investing.