Having been a founder of a bootstrapped company and constantly fighting uphill battles for 4 years (it like going to the gym for hard workouts for 4 years, now very little can wind you out — but its insanely painful) — these are my picks
Resonated the most: Make quick product decisions / get the product out quick and keep the momentum / speed and agility to move really fast on product is critical. Product! Product! Product! that’s the war cry and be very agile on it. [by product I do not mean a list of features but iterating towards something which is used at high frequency even if its only by a small niche group at the beginning]
Surprised me the most: Sam’s advice on hiring slow and investing tons of time making people decisions (hiring, firing or any other internal decisions including c0-founder fights). I often thought failing fast is preferred over failing cheap —
but Sam made me realise that graph of number of employees [“n”] & people issues a start-up will face is not a linear graph but an exponential one (n^n complexities).
[ I think this can hold through till ‘n’ is small but might start taking a linear shape as n grows very large as organisation build capabilities to work with massive no. of people. So for “family” stage — its exponential]
I know he didn’t explain it that way — but when he said that with even 10 employees — paperwork, career trajectories, people dynamics, inability to change directions fast, communication flow etc. gets more complex. — I think thats what he meant. Never thought of it this way, but looking back at my journey — this is definitely true.
The hard part for has been putting my mind to how do I take these few crystals of knowledge and apply them to my life/business and ingrain them in our company ethos.
And here’s how I would articulate it for me and my team and any future members who will join the journey
a. Product and people are our most important assets — always prioritise them over all other issues — any issue not making your product better or solving a critical people problem in the company should be dealt with at the last and with least effort.
b. With people: Remember the complexity graph is exponential. So hire slow, fire fast. So firing one bad employee will have exponential benefit and hiring is going to have its set of complexities — so every new hire must outweigh that. If founder do this for their first 10 employees and as company scales every team leader does this while building their 6–8 member team — we should be running a very efficient people system.
c. Product: Spend as much of your time on the product. (another reason why less people is better at family stage — less time spent on the other important issue: people). The culture to spend a lot of time on product and user feedback and making it no.1 priority over any and everything else as a habit. Reid Hoffman spoke about it, Sam Altman spoke about it, and my personal experience has taught me that even 10 days of prioritising anything else will start showing up in your user feedback and will affect love, adoption, referral — everything.
I think this will be my takeaway from the lectures so far. I will keep visiting them often to remind myself of our top priorities and will come in handy while making tough decisions.
I am Rish, Co-founder/CEO of Letsintern. My company is one the world’s largest student-organization platforms. I am a hard working adrenaline loving technology junkie. An Ironman triathlete, certified scuba diver, football enthusiast, an avid traveller, marathon runner who reads, writes and codes in spare time. Follow me on Twitter :www.twitter.com/rish_says or Connect with me on Linkedin: in.linkedin.com/in/profilerish/
.
