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Any articles about the failure points from $0 to $5M ARR?
It's right on the same site. It is called "part 2" after all. https://tracy.posthaven.com/part-i-founder-led-enterprise-sa...
Next is what I found most people doing differently from my ideal - abstract and refactor base on your existing implementation, not because of some framework doing it, nor because the previous project did it this way. Do you need a data access layer, a library, a folder, to talk to database where the first implementation was just storing things as a variable? You probably need a database and plain SQL. Do you need site reliability engineer to keep your site online while your traffic all comes from friends? Do you need a QA for testing? Or do you need a product manager where, as a founder, the value proposition has yet to be proven? How often do you see a code base spinning up all the folders/empty files because "we may need it". And how often when you hire someone, they spin up various incarnation people * time like teams, sprints, squad, function, BEFORE understanding the current implementation. This is why you hire the wrong people. And you know it only 1 year down the road. Wrong abstraction. Using framework has its appeal, where a cookie cutter solution mostly work. But it also has its limitation, bloat.
Once a wrong abstraction is in place, the more code/people depends on it, the more effort it takes to refactor
Earlier quoted context omitted.
An A player from Google will fail at a 10 person startup. An A player from a 10 person startup will choke on FAANG bureaucracy and fail. Fit matters. You wouldn't hire Jim Carey for a DiCaprio role.
Jim Carey as the protagonist of titanic does sound like a great movie. I’m sure he would have found space on that piece of wood and survived.
https://www.insider.com/james-cameron-had-forensic-analysis-...
I hate this BS about A managers hire A people, B people hire C etc. This is total MBA thinking (I think it comes form GE, or at least they espoused it) on a forum where people routinely mock MBAs. I have been lucky to work in a field where teams frequently work in parallel and success or failure is pretty clear cut. And teams are often stratified based on the priority of project. Many times-- not always -- the "B" te…
An A player from Google will fail at a 10 person startup. An A player from a 10 person startup will choke on FAANG bureaucracy and fail. Fit matters. You wouldn't hire Jim Carey for a DiCaprio role.
I joined my current company when it was 40 people (and around 10 developers). Almost 6 years later we're ~1500 and the engineering org is something like 200-300. I think I was most comfortable around 20 or so developers but that doesn't mean I can't make continue to have meaningful impact now that there's an order of magnitude more people and the org has completely changed.
I've seen folks who were supposedly "A player"s from small start-ups and FAANG join the company at different stages. Some succeed and some fail but I never noticed any correlation between current size of the company they're currently thriving at and our size when they joined.
Fit is never going to be perfect so don't give up on something just because it might be a little uncomfortable. Give up if you've tried to make it work and it's clear you can't find a way to have impact.
I got the impression that the 2022 late stage funding implosion was also the death of ARR as a be-all growth metric. It got Goodhart's Law'd to death after all the companies that went public at huge valuations based on ARR turned out to not be as "recurring" as investors would have liked.
I wonder if you have more context or numbers. What companies are you thinking of. I remember companies like WeWork and Coinbase dropping in valuation but what more traditional Saas companies have run into this sort of hurdle? I'd argue that ARR is still a good measure just not the growth at all costs, w/e it takes to get toe 100M ARR/Unicorn status anymore. After all, sales is sales and if you don't have repeatable s…
> After all, sales is sales and if you don't have repeatable sales you probably don't have much of anything.
That's right, but you're missing the key that it's a necessary, but not sufficient requirement. When the pool of investments is 90% with ARR are honest and straightforward, then it's good to use ARR as a metric. But when the pool changes to 50% or less who are honest (as Goodhart would predict), the metric loses value.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You obviously haven’t seen eternal sunshine of the spotless mind
I have. Pretty sure I've seen every movie he was in, huge fan. He's a great actor, but he hasn't shown the range that other A-listers have. Whether that's because of skill, interest, or typecasting, I couldn't say.
"And remember that A players can recruit other A players, but B players can only recruit C players" In point one they list this. In point 3 he mentions his biggest mistake was hiring someone with starpower from a public company who didn't work. Unless the founder is an A player in terms of recruiting everyone hired would be a C player or less. And in point 3 we learn he is not an A player. How do B players ever get h…
The A player thing is less about how good they are at hiring and more about how strong of a player they are overall. Founders generally need to be A players to be successful founders. An A player will still make hiring mistakes but they have the skills/ability/aura/whatever to convince other A players to come work with them. Many A players won't want to work for/with a B or C player because they won't see this as a g…
It’s not as easy as A and B and C people (or any other labels).
I’ve professionally led a team doing physical labor, and currently a team of teams doing intellectual labor (software development) and several between. They have been excellent, productive and profitable as well as respectful, ethical and honorable.
The reasons behind their success are complicated but always start on the same foundation: respect. Genuine, difficult to come by, and more difficult to maintain, respect. For the customer. For the user. For each other. For other departments. For the community. For the competition.
From there builds trust, and from trust comes ambition and the ability to focus on the purpose of the job (yes, it’s a job in most cases, not a mission or vision).
This is what I see some growth CEOs miss. They lack respect for people outside the “right” mold and don’t hire (or keep) them. Then to their surprise, their teams become dysfunctional.
Many tired anecdotes teach us about this (too many chefs, etc.) yet the same mistake is made with relentless repetition.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Jim Carey as the protagonist of titanic does sound like a great movie. I’m sure he would have found space on that piece of wood and survived.
I saw this over the holiday period last month. James Cameron commissioned a study because he got sick of people yelling at him for killing Jack. https://www.insider.com/james-cameron-had-forensic-analysis-...
This is peak underappreciated stuntpeople.
"And remember that A players can recruit other A players, but B players can only recruit C players" In point one they list this. In point 3 he mentions his biggest mistake was hiring someone with starpower from a public company who didn't work. Unless the founder is an A player in terms of recruiting everyone hired would be a C player or less. And in point 3 we learn he is not an A player. How do B players ever get h…