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My Last Day at PivotDesk

ktinboulder.com

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Re: My Last Day at PivotDesk

#21

Post by idlewords »

al2o3cr wrote: post #19
lkrubner wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recall what Paul Graham wrote: "Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four. This pays especially well in technology, where you earn a premium for working fast... Remember what a startup is, economically: a way of saying, I want to work faster. Instead of acc…

"Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four." Or, 90% of the time, you run out of money at the end of year four and get to keep doing this nonsense in four-year chunks until you die at your desk.

Exactly. The cited essay is advice from a casino operator to spend all your time playing the slots, so you can cash out and enjoy your life on easy street. It's great advice if you can follow it.

Re: My Last Day at PivotDesk

#22

Post by ChuckMcM »

This captures the fact that what is inside your head is not always in everyone else's head. I struggle with this, when things seem "obvious" to me but are completely missed by others. Sometimes checking in and asking how folks see things is a good way to figure out what the team is seeing versus what you are seeing.

Re: My Last Day at PivotDesk

#23

Post by GuiA »

crazypyro wrote: post #12

I don't understand this blog post at all. It seems to only show the very tip of the situation because, based on the text alone, the story/situation doesn't add up. Especially the part where he says he was doing everything perfectly for the week, yet everyone still wanted him gone. It seems like there was a much deeper personality conflict or something we aren't seeing. Maybe this is my fault, but unfortunately, it al…

I think he basically got fired and then wrote a blog post about it to make it sound like it was his decision.

Re: My Last Day at PivotDesk

#24

Post by beachstartup »

> Letting my week fill up with sales, finance, pr and exec team meetings and not leaving myself enough time for deep product focus.

i would posit that no single person in a company with more than one person should be working on all these things in a primary capacity. they're all over the spectrum in terms of complementary skills. even in a two-person team, you need to split those roles up so that one person "owns" each of those things. there are exceptions to this rule but you don't see it often.

moving further down the timeline, one of the things i learned quickly as a founder is that if you hire someone to do a job, you have to let them do it. you can't do it for them, and you sure as hell can't micromanage them. mistakes will be made, there will be misunderstandings, but that's just part of working on a team. you just have to accept it.

if you are operating with a decent staff (~10+ people), and are a co-founder and find yourself doing all these tasks, the problem is you.

it sounds like this guy just would insist on working on other peoples' workloads, while skipping out on a lot of company meetings, and they eventually started resenting him for it. you can't wipe that away in a week.

Re: My Last Day at PivotDesk

#25

Post by pcurve »

The "No one really knows what you do anymore" is a murmur that follows senior leadership role all the time. And while it CAN mean that you're not doing anything, in this situation I think it was a case of some people struggling to assess the value of all the activities you do through their own lens. More likely than not, you were making valuable contributions to the company; much more so than your employees realized.

So when they weighed their perception of your contribution against their negative feelings towards you, the fulcrum was positioned against your favor.

Departure like this can be a turning point for the company for worse, especially at a small company like this. I hope this isn't the case.

Re: My Last Day at PivotDesk

#27

Post by [deleted] »

pcurve wrote: post #25

The "No one really knows what you do anymore" is a murmur that follows senior leadership role all the time. And while it CAN mean that you're not doing anything, in this situation I think it was a case of some people struggling to assess the value of all the activities you do through their own lens. More likely than not, you were making valuable contributions to the company; much more so than your employees realized.…

[deleted]

Re: My Last Day at PivotDesk

#30

Post by GuiA »

idlewords wrote: post #21
al2o3cr wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four." Or, 90% of the time, you run out of money at the end of year four and get to keep doing this nonsense in four-year chunks until you die at your desk.

Exactly. The cited essay is advice from a casino operator to spend all your time playing the slots, so you can cash out and enjoy your life on easy street. It's great advice if you can follow it.

Well maybe all those other suckers are playing the slots just with their dumb luck, but the operator has a totally infallible system that got him where he is - and you too can use the system to make it to the top!
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