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In today's newsletter:
Latest Podcasts: What You Missed
What Can You Learn from 22 Microteam Success Stories? (…Plus 1) - Real microteams, real results, and the repeatable patterns behind outsized growth with tiny teams… and one notable failure.
Interview with Wade Foster, CEO of Zapier - How Zapier scaled with leverage, automation, and focus instead of hiring and organizational bloat.
Interview with Fabian Veit, CEO of Make - How advanced automation helps microteams remove busywork and scale faster without added headcount.
Async Standup Protocol: Status Without Sync Meetings
Every morning at 9am, your team drops everything for a "quick" 15-minute standup.
Except it's never 15 minutes. Someone rambles. Questions derail the agenda. By 9:35, you're finally back to actual work—but your flow is broken.
Multiply that by 5 days a week, and you've burned 2.5+ hours in status meetings. Hours you could've spent shipping product, closing deals, or solving real problems.
Meanwhile, your async-first competitor has zero standups. Their team posts updates in Slack, reads them when convenient, and stays in flow all morning.
Daily standups aren't bad. Synchronous daily standups are.
The Team That Quit Standup (And Got Faster)
Let me tell you about Maya, founder of a remote 6-person dev shop building SaaS products.
Maya's team did daily standups at 9am PST. Standard practice, right?
The problem? Her team was spread across 3 time zones. For the East Coast developer, 9am PST was noon, right in the middle of his most productive hours. For the London contractor, it was 5pm… end of day.
Everyone showed up. But nobody was happy.
One week, Maya's internet died. She couldn't host the standup. So she asked the team to post updates in Slack instead.
What happened?
Updates were clearer (people wrote thoughtfully instead of speaking off the cuff)
No interruptions (everyone read updates when convenient)
Faster (reading 6 updates took 3 minutes vs. 25-minute meetings)
Better async collaboration (people replied with help/suggestions in threads)
When Maya's internet came back, the team voted: "Let's keep the async format."
Result: 2 hours/week saved per person = 12 hours/week total for the team. Zero loss in alignment.
"We realized the standup wasn't about synchronous discussion. It was about visibility. And async gave us better visibility with zero coordination tax."
Why Sync Standups Are Broken
Traditional standups fail because they prioritize presence over productivity.
The theory:
Quick sync to align the team
15 minutes, no deep dives
Everyone knows what everyone's working on
The reality:
25+ minutes because people ramble or ask tangential questions
Interrupts flow (especially for makers)
Same info could've been shared in writing in 2 minutes
Time zone pain for remote teams
People zone out if the update isn't relevant to them
Think of sync standups like forcing everyone to gather in the town square to hear announcements.
Async standups are like posting the announcements on a bulletin board where people read them when it makes sense.
Same information. Zero coordination overhead.
The Async Standup Framework
Here's how to replace daily sync standups with async updates: