I was out with some friends over the summer, one of whom is a college soccer coach, and we were talking about what it is that makes great teams great. I love talking to to coaches and people who have played for great coaches (just ask Ryan about how I always bug him for Coach K stories) -- they always seem to have the best social hacks to get people to work well together.

College teams can be particularly difficult to manage because the tenure is short and there's a lot of player turnover -- so the team dynamic is constantly being reset. It is similar in startups, where teams reshape and reform as they grow.

My coach friend described the process as "Form, Storm, Norm, and Perform". At the time, I took it to be another one of those witty and handy coach-isms, but, alas, it turns out this is an established group performance framework developed by psychology professor Bruce Tuckman back in 1965.

Anyway, I have been thinking about it a lot recently, as I see so many teams going through the various stages. For example, Plaid, which I mentioned last week, was acquired by Visa today for $5.3B -- a great product and from what I hear a really positive and effective team culture. Clearly in the "Perform" phase :-)

What I especially like about the framework is that it acknowledges the importance of, or at least the temporal existence of, the "storm" phase. The storm phase can be hard when you've never been through it before, because it contains conflict and you're not sure if it will end. But it does, and in the best situations, working through that is what enables you, and your team, to norm and perform.

Above all, what the framework reminds me of is that teamwork and success are about chemistry. Chemistry is hard to define, but it has a lot to do with trust. Trust in each other, trust in the vision, and trust in process. It is a beautiful thing when it comes together.

Discuss on Twitter is a WordPress plugin that uses Twitter as the commenting system for your blog.

I've been developing it over the past few weeks along with Fred Wilson and Kirk Love as part of the launch of AVC 3.0 which went up yesterday. It's currently live on this blog, as well as AVC and also USV.com.

The idea is pretty simple: whenever you publish a new post, the post is auto-tweeted to your account. Then, you get a "Discuss on Twitter" button on your post, which will prompt a reply to the auto-tweet, as well as a "View Discussions" button which will link to the Twitter thread.

A few years ago I wrote about one of my favorite product sayings: "Half, Not Half-Assed", which comes from my favorite book on product development & teamwork, Getting Real (from the team behind Basecamp). I actually first got hooked into this thinking when I saw one of the Basecamp founders, Jason Fried, talk at a web design conference back in 2004 and it was a pivotal moment in my career (thanks Jason!).

I was reminded of that idea today, as I was working on a side project (an internal tool for USV). In this particular case, we had built a version of this tool a few years ago, but basically abandoned it because we could not build a good workflow around it. Looking back, the diagnosis on why was that it was overbuilt: too complicated, too much. And implemented in a way such that we just didn't bother to keep up with it. In other words, half-assed, rather than "half".

I was out with some friends over the summer, one of whom is a college soccer coach, and we were talking about what it is that makes great teams great. I love talking to to coaches and people who have played for great coaches (just ask Ryan about how I always bug him for Coach K stories) -- they always seem to have the best social hacks to get people to work well together.

College teams can be particularly difficult to manage because the tenure is short and there's a lot of player turnover -- so the team dynamic is constantly being reset. It is similar in startups, where teams reshape and reform as they grow.

My coach friend described the process as "Form, Storm, Norm, and Perform". At the time, I took it to be another one of those witty and handy coach-isms, but, alas, it turns out this is an established group performance framework developed by psychology professor Bruce Tuckman back in 1965.

Anyway, I have been thinking about it a lot recently, as I see so many teams going through the various stages. For example, Plaid, which I mentioned last week, was acquired by Visa today for $5.3B -- a great product and from what I hear a really positive and effective team culture. Clearly in the "Perform" phase :-)

What I especially like about the framework is that it acknowledges the importance of, or at least the temporal existence of, the "storm" phase. The storm phase can be hard when you've never been through it before, because it contains conflict and you're not sure if it will end. But it does, and in the best situations, working through that is what enables you, and your team, to norm and perform.

Above all, what the framework reminds me of is that teamwork and success are about chemistry. Chemistry is hard to define, but it has a lot to do with trust. Trust in each other, trust in the vision, and trust in process. It is a beautiful thing when it comes together.

Discuss on Twitter is a WordPress plugin that uses Twitter as the commenting system for your blog.

I've been developing it over the past few weeks along with Fred Wilson and Kirk Love as part of the launch of AVC 3.0 which went up yesterday. It's currently live on this blog, as well as AVC and also USV.com.

The idea is pretty simple: whenever you publish a new post, the post is auto-tweeted to your account. Then, you get a "Discuss on Twitter" button on your post, which will prompt a reply to the auto-tweet, as well as a "View Discussions" button which will link to the Twitter thread.

A few years ago I wrote about one of my favorite product sayings: "Half, Not Half-Assed", which comes from my favorite book on product development & teamwork, Getting Real (from the team behind Basecamp). I actually first got hooked into this thinking when I saw one of the Basecamp founders, Jason Fried, talk at a web design conference back in 2004 and it was a pivotal moment in my career (thanks Jason!).

I was reminded of that idea today, as I was working on a side project (an internal tool for USV). In this particular case, we had built a version of this tool a few years ago, but basically abandoned it because we could not build a good workflow around it. Looking back, the diagnosis on why was that it was overbuilt: too complicated, too much. And implemented in a way such that we just didn't bother to keep up with it. In other words, half-assed, rather than "half".