Why Some Startups Win
steveblank.com
Why Some Startups Win
1–10 of 17 posts
Re: Why Some Startups Win
#2Great article. Lots of wisdom
Re: Why Some Startups Win
#3Another reason to consider growing slower and hiring considerately: it's too easy to think scaling fast and hiring a bunch of people is a panacea for success when it may ruin teamwork, morale and culture. There are situations to scale big and fast, but there is no one-sized-fits-all recipe.
Re: Why Some Startups Win
#4> It wasn’t that I had somehow inherited dumb employees. What I was hearing was a failure of management.
Uh, if you've inherited employees that think their job as marketers is to pump out Press Releases, you certainly haven't inherited good ones.
Most people in marketing do not behave like this, any more than developers see their job as 'write lots of lines of code'.
Too many management articles (and Blank is often guilty of it) have the pattern of presenting the 'employee' as an unthinking zombie, and then present 'management' as the answer. 'See, without highly paid consultants like myself, this would all go to shit!'
Most employees would find this kind of micromanagement-in-the-name-of-onboarding intolerable because they are good employees who are capable of autonomous thought.
Re: Why Some Startups Win
#5This is for some of the people like me to let you know you're not alone...
I too am at a startup where everyone wheres many hats. I would love to be CTO and not have to take my turn emptying the dish washer or taking out the trash but we are small so everyone has to do their part.
Our marketing team does SEO, usability testing, graphic design, copywriting... and that's just one person.
I would love to have a dedicated person to do trade shows. Heck, I'd love to be able to afford to go to a trade show.
So for all the people out there who are at startups that haven't raised enough money to do those sort of things... you are not alone.
Re: Why Some Startups Win
#6While I think there is a lot of good advice in there, I can't help thinking this feels like a management type modeled on the army:
Break down work in pieces that can be done independently in small groups, have the people of the small groups engaged by having them believing they're part of a greater mission. And then there is the "no excuse" culture. That seems like a great way of getting rid of people who don't follow.
I'd be interested in a anonymous feedback from their employees...
Also the end of the article really sounds self-congratulatory...
Re: Why Some Startups Win
#7This is for some of the people like me to let you know you're not alone... I too am at a startup where everyone wheres many hats. I would love to be CTO and not have to take my turn emptying the dish washer or taking out the trash but we are small so everyone has to do their part. Our marketing team does SEO, usability testing, graphic design, copywriting... and that's just one person. I would love to have a dedicate…
Sounds all pretty good to me, what's not to like? Emptying the dishwasher and going to trade-shows can contribute to keeping everyone "grounded", wearing many hats is cross-fertilizing all ones skills better and reduces tunnel-eye vision.. I wish more startups were still like that, in fact I see the bulk of them today having super-defined tiny dedicated roles and that's offputting. Dev-ops? CD/CI "engineer"? Really? Back in the day we had coders and admins, with admins doing a fair bit of plumbing coding and devs doing a fair bit of administering sub-systems of an architecture or server farm. And mostly wiring together some scripts, services, and some command-line acrobatics weren't the defining portion of the "engineer" role :D
Ah well, all is fair with changing times.
Re: Why Some Startups Win
#8And majority startups fail; Analogy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant
Re: Why Some Startups Win
#9While I think there is a lot of good advice in there, I can't help thinking this feels like a management type modeled on the army: Break down work in pieces that can be done independently in small groups, have the people of the small groups engaged by having them believing they're part of a greater mission. And then there is the "no excuse" culture. That seems like a great way of getting rid of people who don't follo…
At least he doesn't call employees "subordinates" like some other Silicon Valley hot shots.
Re: Why Some Startups Win
#10This is for some of the people like me to let you know you're not alone... I too am at a startup where everyone wheres many hats. I would love to be CTO and not have to take my turn emptying the dish washer or taking out the trash but we are small so everyone has to do their part. Our marketing team does SEO, usability testing, graphic design, copywriting... and that's just one person. I would love to have a dedicate…
Sounds all pretty good to me, what's not to like? Emptying the dishwasher and going to trade-shows can contribute to keeping everyone "grounded", wearing many hats is cross-fertilizing all ones skills better and reduces tunnel-eye vision.. I wish more startups were still like that, in fact I see the bulk of them today having super-defined tiny dedicated roles and that's offputting. Dev-ops? CD/CI "engineer"? Really?…
Having worked at both kinds of places, one thing I've observed is as the team size grows, the places with many-hats approach end up/or have problems with accountability. For ex: at the end of the day who's responsible for devops (automating things that can be automated, and making sure the data science team doesn't wait for 3 weeks to get a simple security group access etc..) and things like that.
For sure, there'll be problems other way around too. So there's no one-solution fits all problems.