Dan Shipper is an entrepreneur, writer, and the co-founder and CEO of Every, a bundle of business-focused newsletters, founded in 2020. Find him on Twitter: @danshipper. This post was co-written by Dan and Kieran O'Hare.
In the 1975 classic 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover Paul Simon croons:
The problem is all inside your head, she said to me
The answer is easy if you take it logically
I'd like to help you in your struggle to be free
There must be fifty ways to leave your lover
For Paul Simon there might be fifty ways to leave your lover, but, for Andrew Wilkinson, there are 50 ways to say no to meetings he doesn’t want to take.
I know, because I’ve seen his templates. He calls them “Let Downs” and he has one for every occasion:
- When a person doesn’t fit into his circle of competence.
- When a person’s business isn’t large enough.
- When a person is trying to build a venture scale business.
And those are just the most common ones.
Andrew is a partner at Tiny where he starts, buys, and invests in internet businesses. Over the last few years he’s built it into a thriving collection of companies — over 30 with about 600 employees collectively.
This interview was originally published on Every, a publication and writer collective focused on business.