Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Humans: Always trying to fool the boss.
More like humouring the delusions of people who don't know how to measure productivity.
Eh, tomato tomato.
Founder to CEO: How to build a great company from the ground up
201–210 of 253 posts
Re: Founder to CEO: How to build a great company from the ground up
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
lol they’re not wrong. People seem to forget the facts about HN. It’s hosted by a incubator/VC company that uses it to promote discussion and the company itself. Which is fine and makes sense. Yeah, there’s other stuff here too. But there’s a huge bias towards startups compared to the rest of the world.
But there’s a huge bias towards startups compared to the rest of the world. Of course. That's not the point of contention here. HN is mostly about startups. The post I replied to suggested that there's a "pro-VC / anti-bootstrapping" slant on HN. That's what I think is wrong. Many people who post here are sensible enough to understand that both approaches have their own advantages and disadvantages. People don't gene…
just curious if you can give examples of other (online) startup communities so that I can follow them too
Re: Founder to CEO: How to build a great company from the ground up
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you are just an employee and your company hasn't employed this you can do it on your own. Simply build a consensus by meeting people 1:1 before the meeting. When you do this you are no longer as dependent on your in-meeting performance.
So 10x 1:1s plus a discussion meeting plus a decision meeting... Sounds like a slippery slope to meeting hell.
Yeah...at a startup, doing this many 1:1s doesn't make too much sense. Doing a bunch of 1:1 to get people going the same direction means they weren't already in the same direction...means you're burning resources. At BigCo it makes perfect sense since there's 1000 things going on and no one cares about your thing until you show them why.
(hi!)
Re: Founder to CEO: How to build a great company from the ground up
#204Parts of this book feel like a secret playbook that has been shared. Thanks for that.
Re: Founder to CEO: How to build a great company from the ground up
#205Requiring proposals and updates written down is a good idea. If you allow people to bring up an issue or proposal that they have not already written up in the meeting, someone always comes up with idea on the spot, and tries argue it as something well thought. If they are clever people they can throw the whole meeting off. For the loudest voice in the room problem, speaking order that starts from the most junior and…
The junior to senior ordering makes so much sense. I didn't realize it until now how affective it is, and how I try to always encourage that in my teams. How do you handle situations when you see a need for this but don't want to step on the toes of others? From my experience, some people react poorly to hearing that type of feedback or approach, and while I try my best to avoid those working environments it does hap…
The opening opinion in a discussion is almost always the hardest to come by, so you’ll want someone confident with having a bad idea sink in public to make it, and that is almost never your junior employees.
If you need a junior to senior round, to make sure your juniors speak their own opinion, you frankly have really big issues in my eyes.
The key is to make an environment where people will share ideas and work on improving them as a team or a unit regardless of their status/position. At least if that is your goal.
You do this by using honesty, assertion and openness. If there are parts of the decision making that aren’t up for discussion, then you make sure everyone understands that and then you let them discuss the rest while making sure everyone understands that being polite and affirming is required for good team work, even if someone thinks an idea or opinion is bad.
I realize tech companies are notoriously bad at this. The army reference, and the fact that it’s getting any sort of traction here is a good example of this. The junior to senior strategy makes a lot of sense in the army, but that is an environment where you own 100% of the decision making as a XO, and you’re not using the method to make a decision, because you’ve already made it, you are simply asking your crew for opinions to make sure there isn’t an angle you have missed. Not only that, but you’ll often be asking people who come from different teams and may not know each other very well, in an environment where you’re under a lot of pressure. That’s almost the exact opposite of what you are doing in any private sector meeting.
If you’re a CEO who’ve gathered all your middle managers to figure out how to trim the staff by 20%, by all means go junior to senior, but if you’re trying to brainstorm something with a team of developers, just don’t.
Disclaimer: I’m Scandinavian, management may be more authoritative in America than it is here.
Re: Founder to CEO: How to build a great company from the ground up
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In addition, if people are working less than 8-10 productive hours per day, then they are clearly not being as productive as they could be. Yep, very insightful. I hope I never work for this guy
8 productive hours per day is normal and expected. Are you working part-time or getting paid to browse Reddit?
> 8-10
Not sure why you bring up Reddit
Re: Founder to CEO: How to build a great company from the ground up
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is an important comment. I used to be a late night worker but family and other commitments has made that impossible. I wake at 5AM to get a few solid hours of brain work in before the family stirs. This has been the best approach to retaining the 'late night work hours' and balancing family.
Second this. Morning is the best for clear thinking. Late night work is less productive.
I tried to delude myself for years, telling myself that I'm not a "morning person". It was just an excuse to stay up late and watch garbage on the TV or scroll endlessly through Reddit.
Since I've forced myself to go to sleep no later than 11, I've realized that hey, I actually am a morning person.
Re: Founder to CEO: How to build a great company from the ground up
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
I track my productivity very assiduously. For some tasks, such as writing, it is next to impossible to be productive for more than 5-6 hours/day. Your brain gives up after a while.
How do you track it?
A combination of Toggl, Spreadsheets, and good old paper and pen. I keep a calendar that I mark every day as either green or red depending on whether I've met my threshold for a productive day (>6 hours of actual productive time - tracked using Toggl)
Re: Founder to CEO: How to build a great company from the ground up
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amen. I’ve been converting folks back to Firefox and helping them setup containers for Facebook and LinkedIn. I hope Firefox integrates social media containers in by default in future releases.
Any good tutorials on that "setup containers for Facebook and LinkedIn." part you can recommend? Am a Firefox User myself and very interested in getting this to work.
Install this and it contains Facebook: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-cont...
Install this and it contains LinkedIn: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/linkedin-cont...
It'd be great if Firefox were to integrate this into their out of the box build of Firefox.
Re: Founder to CEO: How to build a great company from the ground up
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's what startup originally means. The term is watered down, but startup = growth and big failure rate. Startup is not same as new company or new tech company. http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html > A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of "ex…
The OED keeps track of original usage. Here's the entry: orig. U.S. A business or enterprise that is in the process of starting up, or that has just been established; a startup company, venture, etc. They cite these early usages in print: 1975 Chicago Defender 20 Sept. 23/1 The many problems faced by any new start up, but most assuredly by a black financial institution. 1986 Your Business Mar. 11/3 There are the smal…
There is difference of start-up and start-up company.
Start-up company in the modern sense was first used in 70's