321–330 of 772 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don’t think of people as superstars. Think of them as individuals that are able to pay attention and consistently meet expectations. I’m starting to think paying attention to what is happening is undervalued.
This only works up to a point, if you lack talent. AFAIK Florence Foster Jenkins spent her whole life taking singing lessons, and this was the result: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6ubiUIxbWE
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think there's any reason to believe IC's who follow the "cracked engineer" manifesto would be in the top percentile. It's basically a guideline to make people more manageable and has little to do with engineering talent.
I have no idea what you're talking about. Cracked is just slang for insanely talented, ergo...
I think there's a property which is hard to describe. But i've seen the opposite property countless times at companies. People, and leaders who are building "cool demos". Things that tell a great story, but somehow never materialize into any material revenue for the company. I've seen these guys move up into higher and higher positions, and yet the projects they build are simply great stories. The higher up the org y…
I have done the building in quite a few of these. Often what happens is that the engineering that made it a cool demo in the beginning, is pushed aside, and once funding and a variety of product managers and sales people start chiming in, users and genuine value proposition is forgotten in favor of things that sound huge for the business, in theory. Not seen it materialize in practice yet.
This whole article is written around one key sentence: > There are things founders can do that managers can't, and not doing them feels wrong to founders, because it is. But there are absolutely no examples given of what these things actually are. Paul kinda vibes around that vague statement for 5 more paragraphs, giving absolutely nothing concrete. And to be honest this hn comment section scares me, as it feels like…
It could be that the moral authority stems from having as much of a full picture as a single person can have over the entire lifecycle of the company, but I think a lot is also just the effect of "I got you here."
I'm glad pg named this effect, since I've talked about the related phenomenon for CTOs with many people.
Or maybe, smart engineers who found companies just aren't generally that good at hiring.
This whole article is written around one key sentence: > There are things founders can do that managers can't, and not doing them feels wrong to founders, because it is. But there are absolutely no examples given of what these things actually are. Paul kinda vibes around that vague statement for 5 more paragraphs, giving absolutely nothing concrete. And to be honest this hn comment section scares me, as it feels like…
1. Be the ultimate judge of what excellence means to the company. Enforce this directly, in direct communication with people doing both a good and a bad job, instead of rigidly relying on chain of command. 2. Break the rules if the rules are stupid. Pay excellent people out of band, for example. 3. Directly fire people for incompetence and accept that some of them will sue you. Whatever. Rather pay the settlement tha…
This.
> VP of marketing? Nope, professional money extractor. VP of engineering? Nope, professional money extractor too. Wasn’t this obvious? I’ve been in the software industry for long enough to distinguish people who do actual work from those who don’t. All the VPs I’ve encountered share the following traits: - huge paychecks - they hire others under their supervision to do the actual job - you don’t actually know what th…
I've worked with two amazing VPs of eng, one of which unified our ops and dev teams in purpose and goals, and the other was able to re-focus us from firefighting to sustainable growth in engineering projects. They were worth, literally, their weight in gold to the success of the company. These happened at a hundred person eng dept and a 300 person eng org if I recall. I have also worked with a couple who I am not sur…
That's correct. They do nothing, but when that nothing is actually done well, it shows.
Unfortunately, this is not common.
After two unsuccessful but still alive start-ups, I've come to very similar conclusions. Absolutely every single time I've tried to say to it anyone other than a founder I was met with disbelief that eventually turned into accusations of not knowing how to be a leader. While I do admit that I didn't fire people as quickly as I should have, most of our structural problems came from employees simply doing what was best…
No surprise there. If you can’t align incentives, then you are going to have trouble getting people to do what you want. Blaming the employees for a company failing is like blaming gravity for a building falling.
This whole article is written around one key sentence: > There are things founders can do that managers can't, and not doing them feels wrong to founders, because it is. But there are absolutely no examples given of what these things actually are. Paul kinda vibes around that vague statement for 5 more paragraphs, giving absolutely nothing concrete. And to be honest this hn comment section scares me, as it feels like…
So we tried twice over 3 years with 2 different VP's. Both paid $300-400k and sourced through recruiters who charged $75k in recruiter fees. So we were getting what any VC would consider cream of the crop VP of Sales.
Yet both of them failed spectacularly. We went from closing business every month to (both times) sales stalling and flat lining.
The 2 VP's were smart people and they had seen success at prior companies similar to ours in size and scale and maturity (and deal size, sales cycle length, B2B, etc). So what was the problem?
Simply put, what worked at their prior companies didn't work at our company. And both of the VP's wanted to push us the founders as far away from the sales group as possible so the VP's could retain full autonomy with their team. Onboarding both VP's was a miserable experience because, both times, they clearly weren't interested in internalizing the hundreds of failed lessons (and success stories) that had gotten us to this point. So after a while we saw the whole sales team slide back into old behaviors and tactics that we as founders knew didn't work (because we'd already learned those lessons).
By the time founders get to the point of bringing in outside management, they've probably been running the company for many years. The fatal problem is when founders bring in outside managers who don't bother to understand the tactics the founders used to get the company to the stage its at, and instead they come in wanting to replicate experiences they had a prior companies, because that's what's comfortable for them.
Unfortunately, on the flip side, promoting from within isn't a much better option, either. I've seen it happen multiple times where extremely high performing IC's are promoted into Lead or Manager roles, and the company 1) immediately loses a high performer because they're now focussed on managing people which is usually a totally different skillset than whatever made them a high performing IC, and 2) the manager fizzles out after 1-2 years because they aren't practiced at basic management tactics like delegation, quit, and go back to an IC position at another company.
It's incredibly difficult to convert an IC into a manager. And it's also incredibly challenging to (successfully) bring in a manager who wasn't first an IC at your company.
"Founder Mode" to me is figuring out how to scale your company in a way that doesn't lose the "magic sauce" that got the team to where it is. "Magic sauce" being culture, processes, systems, tactics, lessons, knowledge, etc that founders used to get the company to where it is before needing managers to scale people.
"Founder led sales" ... "Founder led engineering" ... "Founder led marketing" are all dirty words when talking to VC's, PE, potential acquirers, because anything "Founder-led" isn't scalable and relies on the founder working at the company to work. Maybe "Founder mode" is a stage of a company where the focus is figuring out how to scale "Founder led X" beyond what has historically been seen as practical.