The best LinkedIn Posts

Work life balance is not a debate.
It's contextual to everyone's ambitions in life.

In my opinion, you should work hard in your 20s beyond the obvious reasons of having the time, the energy, and few responsibilities.

You should work hard because it’s easier to get ahead than it is to catch up and it compounds like money. A little more now gives way more later.

The promotion felt like a win.
Then you walked into Monday morning
and something felt off.

The people you used to sit with got quieter.

The group chat slowed down.

You told yourself it would pass.
It didn’t.

What nobody explains about internal promotions is this:

You don’t just gain authority.
You lose belonging.

And most senior leaders try to solve that the wrong way.

They lean harder into old relationships.

Keep the same tone.

Act like nothing’s changed.

But your team doesn’t need the old version of you anymore.

They need clarity.
Distance.
And new structure.

And until you step into that,
the tension doesn’t go away - it spreads, and goes deeper.

This is where a lot of senior leaders quietly lose the room.

Not because they’re incompetent.

Because they’re trying to keep something that no longer exists.

If you’ve felt that shift, you already know:

The hardest part of leadership isn’t stepping up.

It’s letting go of who you were before.

Going to Forbes 30 Under 30 this year ✨

And I’m trying something different AKA actually planning who I meet before I get there.

If you’re going, drop a comment.

Would love to connect with:
• founders
• engineers building in AI
• anyone doing something a little unconventional!

Also just feeling really grateful to be in rooms like this lately. Still slightly crazy to me.

For everyone not going, I’ll be sharing lots from inside. Stay tuned :)

Who’s going?

Excited to meet y’all! Morgan Young Simi Shah Alexandra York Aimen Moten Jugal Bhatt Anjali Zoya Howie Liu Zach Yadegari Marc Jeffery L.

insecurity is louder than competence.

The problem is that some people see kindness as a weakness. They confuse it with being passive or being a pushover.

The truth is, people who view kindness as a negative are just insecure themselves.

You can only be kind if you feel that you’re coming from a place of leverage.
That’s why I see kindness as a massive advantage, not a passive trait — especially if you’re a naturally “tough” person.

As I go through my own life, I’m realizing more and more how kindness is such a big part of the equation. It’s not just about sales and negotiation. It’s not just about doing what you love.

That’s why It breaks my heart that so many people think “nice guys finish last.”

You hit the big goal.

Now what?

That's the question that very few people think about in their entrepreneurial journey.

I've spent the last (nearly) two decades of my life waking up with:

A sales team to train.
A revenue goal at a startup.
A business to grow from zero.

Every single morning had a specific purpose that required problem-solving.

And I was pretty good at it.
It sort of became my "whole thing."

Then I figured a lot of it out...

Trained the team.
Hit the revenue targets.
Grew the business to my goals.

That sounds awesome (and it can be, for sure).

But when you start solving problems, you don't just lose the problem itself.

You start to lose purpose.

What do I do today?
What should I spend my time on?
What's next in this journey of life?

And that's a weird place to be in.

A few weeks ago, a friend asked me one question over dinner that got me thinking about that question.

Tomorrow's newsletter is about that conversation and what it made me realize about this weird, wonderful journey.

If you've ever hit a goal and felt a little more lost than before you started, this issue will likely resonate.

Sign up to get it here: https://buff.ly/fpKsukt

It goes out tomorrow morning and may change the way you think about your big goals...

Most .NET apps are one Redis crash away from teaching you that “it works on my machine” is not a monitoring strategy.

You do not need a big observability stack to get basic uptime monitoring in place.

Uptime Kuma gives you a simple way to monitor:

- Your websites
- Your APIs
- Your health check endpoints
- Your public status pages
- Incidents and scheduled maintenance

In my setup, I use it to monitor a .NET API health endpoint that also reflects the state of dependencies like Postgres and Redis.

That means you are not just checking whether the API responds.
You are checking whether the system is actually healthy.

A few practical things this setup gives you:

- A quick self-hosted monitoring dashboard
- Alerts when services go down
- Status pages you can share
- A simple way to validate your health check flow
- Better visibility into your app without another paid tool

I also cover one Docker networking detail that can easily trip you up when monitoring a local .NET app from inside a container.

If you want a lightweight and practical way to monitor your .NET APIs and microservices, I break the full setup down here: https://lnkd.in/dNV_FT_s

Most enterprises are making too many AI bets.

Travelers is doing the opposite. And it’s working.

Instead of chasing 100+ pilots, their CTO is doubling down on a few that actually scale.

𝗛𝗲𝗿𝗲’𝘀 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗹𝗼𝗼𝗸𝘀 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲 𝗮𝗰𝗿𝗼𝘀𝘀 𝟯𝟬𝗞+ 𝗲𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗼𝘆𝗲𝗲𝘀: 
- One centralized AI accelerator team across the enterprise, not scattered pilots by department.
- Every employee gets access to their internal agentic platform TravAI, but only after completing training.
- Two strategic model partners, not ten.
- 3 clear measurement tracks tied directly to budgets: claims resolution speed, engineering efficiency, and employee adoption.

Every AI initiative maps to one of those three.

𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲 𝗶𝘀 𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗔𝗜 𝗥𝗢𝗜 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘃𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗲.
And value isn't about how many use cases you launch. It's about which ones you operationalize.

💭 𝗖𝘂𝗿𝗶𝗼𝘂𝘀 - What are you seeing in your org or ones you work with: too many pilots or focused bets?

🔗 Link to the Fortune article in comments.