At what point do you start calling people direct reports? I find this turn of phrase really jarring
When you are managing people that manage other people, so not everyone _direct_ly reports to you.
How my role as CTO has changed as we've grown from 1 to 100 engineers
41–50 of 142 posts
Re: How my role as CTO has changed as we've grown from 1 to 100 engineers
#42it's refreshing to see someone who actually successfully scaled a company write an article about "here's how we did it", instead of bunch of failed entrepreneurs who write medium posts about why they think their startups failed to either feel better about themselves or to capitalize on their failure with the attention they get from the blog post (answer: they don't know why they feailed, and that's why they failed. T…
"...instead of bunch of failed entrepreneurs who write medium posts about why they think their startups failed to either feel better about themselves or to capitalize on their failure with the attention they get from the blog post" That's really cynical. For a long time, people were complaining about the opposite on HN: you never heard about the failures, which leads to a massive selection bias. I've always felt that…
you're right i'm being cynical, because i genuinely believe you have not much to learn from people who have failed but haven't succeeded yet.
That said, there are PLENTY of successful people who used to be a failure. In fact 99% of the successful people have been a failure at some point in their life. THESE are the people you listen to.
The things you read in the media about a genius who got it right on their first attempt are very exceptional cases, which means they were not only talented but also very lucky. And you're right that there's a selection bias when it comes to these people and they may be totally out of touch because they don't understand why they succeeded.
But like I said, the vast majority of accomplished people in the world were once failures. They just kept trying and made it happen. Which is why these people are worth listening to. They are the ones who actually learned from their past failures, applied it to their life, and finally succeeded.
But you don't deserve to tell others what you think is the right thing when only thing you've achieved in life is failure. You gotta earn it by taking the lessons you learned and applying it to come to a true success. These people are worth listening to.
From what I see, there are too many people who've never tasted success but just use their failures as an opportunity to get more attention for the sake of getting attention. Most of the times when you read their posts, they're full of "failure biases", which is much worse than success bias. And I think most of the "lessons" they learned are shit, and most of the times demonstrates exactly why they failed--because they were out of touch (which is why they think they understand why they failed)
So my point is, you should listen to people who have failed AND succeeded. There are many people like this.
Re: How my role as CTO has changed as we've grown from 1 to 100 engineers
#43If you’re now focusing on the people and management, whose responsibility is technical strategy and execution?
Re: How my role as CTO has changed as we've grown from 1 to 100 engineers
#44If you’re now focusing on the people and management, whose responsibility is technical strategy and execution?
Hopefully you've hired solid technical VPs/leads/senior developers who don't need C-level babysitting
Re: How my role as CTO has changed as we've grown from 1 to 100 engineers
#45How did you maintain compliance and security before you could have someone full time on it? How did you deal with audits? Did you hire an engineer full-time dedicated to this, outsource it, or do it yourself? (I ask because I do this now but at 8 people it's starting to take up too much of my time as CTO) How does it work at your size now?
I think either of your options would work. If you have in-house skills (yourself and/or another engineer), exploit them. If you have a trusted third party who can help, spend some time and money on them. If neither of those work and you feel you need to hire someone, do that (although I’d go with the other two options first). Also, as you undertake these audits, keep a solid record of documentation (questions and answers) as most due dil exercises will be made up of many of the same questions. Stock answers go a long way.
Re: How my role as CTO has changed as we've grown from 1 to 100 engineers
#46Re: How my role as CTO has changed as we've grown from 1 to 100 engineers
#47it's refreshing to see someone who actually successfully scaled a company write an article about "here's how we did it", instead of bunch of failed entrepreneurs who write medium posts about why they think their startups failed to either feel better about themselves or to capitalize on their failure with the attention they get from the blog post (answer: they don't know why they feailed, and that's why they failed. T…
That would be great, but there's a structural limit: people running successful startups don't have time to write about it, while people who have wound down their companies do. When a company is going strong and HN sees a post like this, it's usually because they're hiring :)
>>people running successful startups don't have time to write about it
This is both offensive and incorrect. Offensive because it implies that if someone manages to find the time to write about how they are running their company they probably aren’t successful. Incorrect because the startup world is in fact full of leaders who do manage to find the time to write about how they run their companies (kalzameus comes to mind).
Re: How my role as CTO has changed as we've grown from 1 to 100 engineers
#48At what point do you start calling people direct reports? I find this turn of phrase really jarring
Reporting hierarchy is there for a good reason. If you report to multiple people, you're the one that's going to have a bad time when they're not aligned with each other, each trying to give you a different list of priorities.
Why don't they know what's important and what's not?
Re: How my role as CTO has changed as we've grown from 1 to 100 engineers
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
"...instead of bunch of failed entrepreneurs who write medium posts about why they think their startups failed to either feel better about themselves or to capitalize on their failure with the attention they get from the blog post" That's really cynical. For a long time, people were complaining about the opposite on HN: you never heard about the failures, which leads to a massive selection bias. I've always felt that…
you're right i'm being cynical, because i genuinely believe you have not much to learn from people who have failed but haven't succeeded yet. That said, there are PLENTY of successful people who used to be a failure. In fact 99% of the successful people have been a failure at some point in their life. THESE are the people you listen to. The things you read in the media about a genius who got it right on their first a…
"But you don't deserve to tell others what you think is the right thing when only thing you've achieved in life is failure. You gotta earn it by taking the lessons you learned and applying it to come to a true success. These people are worth listening to."
I am mostly neutral on what you wrote, but this is just wrong. If you think that only "successful" people have valuable stories, you're drawing a very bright-line definition of success (i.e. how successful do I have to be before you'll deign to listen to my advice?), but you're also entirely discounting the value of experience. For example, I have failed at two startups now, but I could give you volumes of practical advice on how to avoid the mistakes I made. It would take you years to learn the same lessons from scratch, and some of the advice I'd give you is stuff that a "successful" entrepreneur in another field couldn't possibly know. Does this information suddenly only become useful if I have a successful startup on my Nth try?
If most of success is learning from failure, you should be trying to make that process as efficient as you can. How do you do that? By listening to the people who have failed before.
Re: How my role as CTO has changed as we've grown from 1 to 100 engineers
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
That would be great, but there's a structural limit: people running successful startups don't have time to write about it, while people who have wound down their companies do. When a company is going strong and HN sees a post like this, it's usually because they're hiring :)
>>people running successful startups don't have time to write about it This is both offensive and incorrect. Offensive because it implies that if someone manages to find the time to write about how they are running their company they probably aren’t successful. Incorrect because the startup world is in fact full of leaders who do manage to find the time to write about how they run their companies (kalzameus comes to…
Patrick works at Stripe.
Before that, he consulted and ran a bingo card creator.
I love the dude and his advice has been invaluable to me--but it has been invaluable because he is not a guy who has run startups, he's a guy who's had to make a buck.