Pitfalls of Startup Team Building

All this stuff is kind of MBA 101, but much of it has been very useful for me in practice.

Some companies in my region have the "inside joke, work hard play hard, let's party after work" "culture" the slides mentioned, and it has zero bearing on the trajectory of the company. I'm sure everyone's having fun, but god forbid you're 30-something with kids who wants to make a real impact.

Interestingly, cultures like the above tend to come from the employees themselves, despite the CEO's intentions. I'm a firm believer that your culture is what your employees say about your company, not what you, the founder, says.

The performance + values quadrant is probably the most important thing to keep in mind when it comes to building a team. That, and "hire slow, fire fast"

The title is misleading, it should be: Pitfalls of startup team building [slides]

Rule 5 is "there's no such thing as 10X engineers". Then to back it up, some faux data about Marketers is given? This was weak, IMO.

The reality is that there are 10x engineers. They likely won't come work for you though.

And in the seo space as my seo director said they dont really value deep technical skills that can analyse a 10 year old 10 million page site with major problems - and come up with an action plan to fix it.

Slide #10: "How can I have influence" is naive. It's a great concept, and I hope everyone follows that link of thinking. It's the equivalent of "dress for the job you want, not the one you have." And I've found that most people gravitate to this mentality, too.

But the key to this is that companies need to support this from the top down, and frankly most don't. Seniority-based hierarchies abound, and influence is nearly always associated with title. The people who have the most to gain from the notion of influence-in-spite-of-role tend to report to the people who have the most to lose from it.