71–80 of 103 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Totally agree with that. This will play into your mental health as well. The more weight other people can carry, the less you have to do. Don't underestimate having to feed the brains of 10 people constantly when they can't/won't think for themselves.
This just sounds like someone who can't write good specs
Something obvious I didn't understand at first: the earlier stage you are, the smarter the people you need. They need to be autonomous, flexible, but above all brilliant at what they do. If you get "average" employees who just wants to follow the specs and receive their salary, they will most likely cost you more to manage than they will create value. In early stages, you're probably still trying to answer complex qu…
It seems super weird that you'd literally be in the trenches with 1-2 other people who each have as much equity as 50-100 of you.
Otherwise, I mean, why should someone brilliant work for you instead of a company with much better odds of success?
Clearly, companies do hire founding engineers at these rates so maybe I'm the crazy one. But it just seems wild to me.
Something obvious I didn't understand at first: the earlier stage you are, the smarter the people you need. They need to be autonomous, flexible, but above all brilliant at what they do. If you get "average" employees who just wants to follow the specs and receive their salary, they will most likely cost you more to manage than they will create value. In early stages, you're probably still trying to answer complex qu…
Totally agree with that. This will play into your mental health as well. The more weight other people can carry, the less you have to do. Don't underestimate having to feed the brains of 10 people constantly when they can't/won't think for themselves.
Scale from 0-1 kills so many companies so I'm glad you're asking at this stage. What you need is a 'specialized generalist' someone who knows enough to set you up for success, get the first few hires, get your sales engine going, get your ops infra nailed down.... but doesn't necessarily want to slow you down when you need to scale out the functions you mentioned. This is how I operate basically; I help us get to 1,…
i am kind of in this situation myself. but i primarily need sales partners in regions where i want to sell my services, while the rest is done by people offshore (me included)
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But doesn't doing X for 1 month make you a charlatan? For example, consider you only did frontend/ui/ux for one month. How much rubbish you would pick up over that time by googling for tutorials or watching youtube videos to get you started; and how alien a real front-end veteran would look to you.
Yeah, the whole quote is one of those things that sounds like sage wisdom until you consider it for 30 seconds. Even if startup founders had time to spare spending a month learning how to doing each and every task they needed to hire for (and trading money they have for time they don't is the whole point of hiring) they'd (i) have no time left to focus on the core business (ii) do a really bad job and (iii) having ba…
That’s not to say I disagree with your points in general, but just that hiring is every bit as much of a minefield as doing things yourself. In either case you have to understand what is most crucial for the next stage of growth and prune everything else obsessively.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Totally agree with that. This will play into your mental health as well. The more weight other people can carry, the less you have to do. Don't underestimate having to feed the brains of 10 people constantly when they can't/won't think for themselves.
This just sounds like someone who can't write good specs
Something obvious I didn't understand at first: the earlier stage you are, the smarter the people you need. They need to be autonomous, flexible, but above all brilliant at what they do. If you get "average" employees who just wants to follow the specs and receive their salary, they will most likely cost you more to manage than they will create value. In early stages, you're probably still trying to answer complex qu…
Do you reward these people with more than a fraction of a percent of equity? As someone who likes WLB enough, isn't enough of a gambler to take a 0.001% chance of being a millionaire over a 25-50% chance of getting a nice 6 figure payout from a more established startup, and has too many kids to boot, I never bothered looking at a company that didn't have a health insurance plan and a 401k match. But when I learned it…
I don't think people appreciate how hard it is to go from 0-1. To validate a product/market, get initial customers, before raising, heavily derisks the business and 1% is fair. Sure, you could just start your own startup, but you'll have to go through the brutal glass eating process of doing exactly that, starting a company.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This just sounds like someone who can't write good specs
No it doesn't. How do you write good specs for someone who is meant to own marketing for your business. You don't know marketing. You need someone who does.
For me, generalists with experience (a lot of different specific skills) and have learned how to learn so they can solve problems is key.
A lot of thie hiring in the start, especially self-funded can be a little counter intuitive. The purpose of hiring is to free you up to work on more valuable parts of things, assuming you want to work on those things.
If you focus on hiring people better than you, it will get you more free time.
Some people rather than equity, focus on what folks are really after, payouts. Doing rev or profit share can be easier than dealing with the mess of shares, especially if you don't know if they will be devoted to it long term like you.
For sales roles especially finding someone who can become a better sales person than you, it might involve a rare exception and providing ongoing commission as long as the customer is engaged on the system, and the sales person remains there.
In terms of looking for the talent, if you are looking for fractional assistance before full time, online sites like upwork can help find the people who are ready for something stable.
The book above will give some food for thought and there are others I'm sure too.