Google Maps co-creator Bret Taylor explains why startup founders should write more

I find writing to be a very clarifying mechanism. To test your theories, we would write a letter to our board, rather than having a deck for our board, and we'd share it with the whole company. In the past quarter, here's what we did, and here's where we are in our strategy, how we're thinking about things. To actually write that was interesting. We'd often write something that we thought and then we'd sort of call our own BS because when you write it down and you're writing it and you know it's going to go out to your whole company and you have trouble, like, you know, believing what you just wrote, you're like, yeah, maybe that's not true anymore. And I find that to be very therapeutic. It's really using a PowerPoint deck or in a graph to kind of lie to yourself. And I find that really clarifying. And I think it's why companies like Amazon are very devoted to the craft of writing rather than decks. I just find tactics like that where you can hold yourself honest and accountable and do it with your employees and your board members and people who have a vested interest in calling you on your BS if there is some BS in there. And also it creates a culture of transparency, which I think is also really nice.