#leadership

Lead people with kindness and empathy towards impossibilities; not because you can make them possible, but because you know both that you can and cannot. Smile at the chaos and laugh at the sworling vortex of insanity. Pick out the pinpricks of light buried inside that encompass what humans find worth living and weave them together. That tapestry is the cloth, fixed atop your mast of conviction, that you will use to sail your way through the seas of entropy.

After nearly 10 years, I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon and transferring my ownership of the trademark and other assets to the Mastodon non-profit. Over the course of my time at Mastodon, I have centered myself less and less in our outward communications, and to some degree, this is the culmination of that trend. Mastodon is bigger than me, and though the technology we develop on is itself decentralized—with heaps of alternative fediverse projects demonstrating that participation in this ecosystem is possible without our involvement—it benefits our community to ensure that the project itself which so many people have come to love and depend on remains true to its values. There are too many examples of founder egos sabotaging thriving communities, and while I’d like to think myself an exception, I understand why people would prefer better guardrails.

When I hit publish, I broadcast to Mastodon, Threads, BlueSky, and the Rands Leadership Slack, and I’m looking for straightforward feedback on having devoted ten to fifteen hours of my life. A compliment.

You’re not irrelevant. You’re just operating in a layer that doesn’t clap for itself. And maybe, just maybe, the fact that your team is calm, focused, and shipping, while everything around them is chaotic, is the best evidence of your impact. Even if no one’s naming it out loud.

"One of the unending sources of frustrations of being an experienced engineer in a company full of fresh graduates is having to deal with new tech leads---many engineers fresh out of school are great designers and engineers, but couldn't lead a team out of a paper bag. It didn't help that Google's internal leadership training was derived from team-building exercises for experienced executives, rather than leadership 101 that would have been appropriate in this situation."