Michael O'Connor

I'll say it bluntly that running a business is not as easy as it is presented on the Internet. You have to come up with a good and useful idea, and even then, you don't win.

You can only see the results after a long time. Not everyone can do it for a long time. To do it, you need to have a strong motive. For some people, it may be a family tradition, for some, money.

All of you who are building a personal brand, I guess, keeping up with the onslaught of notifications is not the easiest thing to do. I personally open some notifications after a month (like today on Bluesky, Substack and Twitter), not to mention that I reply to some messages after months. It helps me keep my sanity. But it took me almost 4 hours to handle these today.

On the other hand, I manage ProductHunt and LinkedIn quite regularly.

Hey everyone, I m Michael.

I ve spent most of my career in tech, across startups and big companies, but the thing I ve become most obsessed with isn t the tech itself.

It s how organisations work (or often don t).

At a large tech company, I had a front-row seat to how even the smartest, most well-resourced teams can struggle to work together. My role supporting an exec had me trying to drive collaboration across divisions with enormous talent, but who were often more interested in protecting their turf than in collaborating.