It's very difficult question to answer. How do you judge a leader? Is it financial success? The loyalty they engender? Their ability to inspire? There are war-time leaders and peace-time leaders. Leaders may be understated or zealous. I'm not sure we'll ever be able to say definitively what constitutes a great leader. Regardless, we all want to improve our ability to lead, whether it's a small team or a Fortune 500.
Over the weekend, the NY Times interviewed a classmate of mine from Dartmouth and fellow oarsman on the freshman crew team, Cal Newport, about his book and his idea, Deep Work. Here's the crux of the idea: Deep work is my term for the activity of focusing without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It describes, in other words, when you're really locked into doing something hard with your mind…In order for a session to count as deep work there must be zero distractions.
I first met Elad Gil when I became an associate product manager at Google. Back then, he had an unusual habit I noticed right away. Most people carry their laptop in the same way. The laptop is closed, in hand, between the hand and the hip. Elad carries his laptop open, powered on and by the top or bottom corner. He's so smart and has so much cognitive bandwidth, he simply doesn't have time to wait for the computer to wake from sleep.
Over the weekend, I read Tien Tzuo's book, Subscribed. Tien is the founder and CEO of Zuora, and former CSO/CMO at Salesforce, where he started in 1999. He has been working in SaaS for nearly 20 years. He's a thought leader in the world of subscriptions, and I learned a tremendous amount from his book. There were three key themes that resonated with me. First, the shift to a subscription business model reinforces customer centricity.
At Redpoint's annual investor meeting earlier this year, I quipped, "The day-trading taxi drivers of the dotcom era have been replaced by crypto-trading Uber drivers." But over the weekend, a grizzled Uber driver with a mane of grey hair and wind-and-sunburnt cheeks asked me about crypto. "Can you explain to me why public key/private key technology is important on the Blockchain?" He pointed out the Bitcoin ATM that charges 10% from his cigarette-infused Prius.
"Don't be so hard on yourself when things go badly and don't be so proud of yourself when they go well." I think this is one of the hardest pieces of advice to follow. Chance is an important contributor to any outcome. sometimes we just get lucky. That recent crypto trade in which you made 25% in an hour. The time you met your significant other for the first time.
When a startup takes form, the first weeks and months and years are spent furiously. The team assembles itself. The lightbulb illuminates. It is formed and reformed again and again as customers supply feedback. Eventually the team hews the right product. The startup raises capital. Then the team returns focus to hiring, evolving the product, and closing customers. However, continuing this way isn't the path to huge scale. There's a critical step missing.
"My goal is to make you love rowing." That's how my first rowing started. I had never picked up an oar or stepped into a racing shell before. With 100 other freshman men, I had assembled at the boathouse along the maple and conifer lined Connecticut River. I'll never forget those words. I had played many sports before. In every other case, the focus, the mission, the motivation had always been to win.
How Quickly Does Headcount Scale in the Fastest Growing Software Businesses?
How quickly do the fastest growing software companies build their teams? The answer is incredibly quickly. In fact, this data bolsters the notion that management team's top priority is recruiting, especially after the business has reached product market fit and capitalized itself well. Above, I've charted the headcount growth rate for 10 of the fastest growing software companies in recent history. I've normalized the years for when all the businesses were roughly at the same headcount - fewer than 50 people.
How do you help someone when that person knows substantially more about the question than you do? This is one of the most fundamental and frequent questions in management. I came across it first as a product manager. Then as a manager of teams. And last as a board member. In each of these situations, have interacted with people who knew substantially more about their area of expertise. There are lots of pitfalls when answering the question, "what do you think?
One of the hardest things for me is to admit is when I'm wrong. It's hard first to admit it to myself. But harder yet is to admit the error to others. It could be my wife or my colleagues. Most challenging of all is owning the error in a public forum. But admitting mistakes is a key defining attribute of a leader. Owning the mistake accomplishes one critical thing.
Should You Consider Emotional Intelligence When Hiring Your Startup's Team?
How important is hiring for emotional intelligence? EQ or EI was introduced in 1964 by Michael Beldoch and popularized by Daniel Goleman in 1995. I hear EQ uttered in nearly every job interview and evaluations, and assumed that high EQ correlated to higher job performance. But I read two articles recently that changed my perception of emotional intelligence. Professor Adam Grant wrote Emotional Intelligence is Overrated in 2010. Professor Grant teaches at Wharton.
In the Wide Lens, Dartmouth Entrepreneurship professor Ron Adner explores the risks associated with innovation. Execution risk is the obvious one. Then there's co-innovation risk, what might be called chained technology risk. For example, to build a new ML focused microchip, a startup relies on the chip fabrication plant to develop 7nm equipment. But the most interesting of the three is Adoption Chain Risk. Adoption Chain Risk is "the extent to which partners will need to adopt your innovation before end consumers have a chance to assess the full value proposition.
I am most grateful for my work experiences that were apprenticeships. Whether it was Philip who taught me how to write a proper Java function (10 lines or less), or Kim and Scott who are great managers, or the partners at Redpoint who invested a huge amount of time to educate me, those collections of experiences have taught me far more than I could've expected. Worklife is nuanced. Reading a blog article here or in HBR article there, a business book or an academic paper only goes so far because these summaries of knowledge lack one key ingredient.
The New Zealand All Blacks are the most successful athletic team perhaps of all time. A rugby outfit whose name originates from the solid black uniforms, they have won 79% of their international matches spanning 68 years. James Kerr followed the All Blacks, interviewed them and distilled his learnings into a book, Legacy. Kerr organizes the book into 15 life lessons, three of which stood out to me. Humility is the first.
In Bias Against Creativity, a team of researchers at Cornell discuss the bias against creativity they revealed in their study. Originally published in 2010, the article resurfaced yesterday on Hacker News. It raises the question of how to evaluate creative ideas and how to engender internal incentives to support creativity. From the Cornell paper: People often reject creative ideas even when espousing creativity as a desired goal. To explain this paradox, we propose that people can hold a bias against creativity that is not necessarily overt, and which is activated when people experience a motivation to reduce uncertainty.
At a recent board meeting, a CEO said, "This experiment will cost $250,000 to run. After three months, we will know whether our new go-to-market strategy is viable." There's a brilliance this type of framing. By quantifying the cost of the experiment, the CEO frames company prioritization as asset allocation. What is asset allocation? Asset allocation is a strategy that aims to balance risk and reward by apportioning a startup's assets according to a company's goals and risk tolerance.
There are four lies managers tell themselves to avoid one of the hardest conversations in business. Things will improve. Someone in the seat is better than no one in the seat. Let's transfer the person to another team where things might improve. The termination will hurt morale in the company or the team. I've told myself all of these in the past. What's the best way to move past these and execute the difficult task of letting someone go?
In 1967, Harvard Business Review rejected a paper submitted by Mel Conway. A year later, Conway's thesis would eventually be dubbed Conway's Law. Conway graduated from Caltech with a Masters in physics and from Case Western Reserve with PhD in math. He worked on the Pascal compiler among other notable software projects. Over the course of his career, Conway observed a phenomenon. The products software teams created reflected their organizational structure.
A senior executive described her management philosophy as heavily influenced by Daniel Pink's book Drive. In his 20 minute TED talk, Pink argues traditional incentive structures like bonuses and raises don't work for knowledge workers. Instead, autonomy, mastery and purpose motivate them best. Autonomy grants employees the flexibility to achieve their goals as they see fit. Purpose means serving a goal larger than the self. Mastery provides employees the opportunities to continuously improve their skills.
Suppose you've been selected to participate in a game show. The game show host asks you to pick one of three doors. Behind one, the grand prize awaits. Behind the other two are goats. You choose Door 1. Then the hosts opens Door 3, revealing a goat. The host prompts you again, "Would you like to select Door 2?" Should you choose it? This statistics question rose to fame in 1990 when Marilyn Vos Savant asked it in Parade Magazine.
As a startup scales and surpasses its first organizational breaking point of 8 employees, it's time to start thinking about organizational design. The strategy a startup chooses in their market should determine their organizational design. In the First Round Review profile of Paul Arnold , the Head of Operations at AppDirect, Paul shares the challenges the initial organizational structure created as the company grew 5x in less than a year.
Customer pull is an amazing feeling for a startup. Because the customer demand is visceral, everything seems to move quickly: sales is booking deals quicker than can be on-boarded; product and engineering are rushing to build the features customers request; marketing's efforts to raise awareness of the business are magnified by word of mouth; and recruiting is doing all they can to fill the looming vacancies. At seed, the first signs of strong customer pull are the quality of pilot and trial interest.
In a book called The Outsiders - Eight Unconventional CEOs and their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success, the author William Thorndike asks the question, who have been the best CEOs ever? And what metric should be used to gauge them? Thorndike doesn't choose Jobs or Welch or Gates. Instead, he selects the 8 CEOs whose company's share price appreciated the most compared to the S&P 500. While Welch grew GE share price at 20% compounded, he did so when the S&P 500 grew at 14% annually.
Founders often ask, when is the right time to expand geographically, add a second product or pursue another customer segment? Most of the time, the answer is not yet, not until the company is quite large, perhaps in the hundreds of employees and the main challenges and questions for the business have been answered well. When a startup pursues a new major initiative, the company divides all its key teams by two.
Of late, I've been having lots of conversations with founders about setting goals. It's a really important topic for many founders, because it's the way that management teams align incentives and focus an organization on a few important areas. It's their focus that enables startups to move quickly, one of their key competitive advantages in the market. But, what is the optimal way of setting goals? I first learned about goal setting at Google, which employs the OKR (Objective and Key Result) that Andy Grove developed at Intel.
Orbiting the Giant Hairball is one of the most unusual business books I've read. It's irreverent, full of drawings, and completely chaotic in the most wonderful way. Gordon MacKenzie, the author of the book, worked at Hallmark cards for 30 years to the day. He started initially in the creative department imagining greeting cards and ultimately found himself with the title Creative Paradox. In his book, he described the way he injected creativity into his working life.
My first major negotiation was a potential advertising agreement between Google and Facebook. I was PM on the social advertising team at the time. There was a call scheduled at 2pm one afternoon, and I had been told that morning about it. I'm wasn't an experienced negotiator, so I panicked. I didn't know how these conversations worked. I called some a few other product managers I knew inside Google, and asked their advice.
Performance reviews tax organizations, managers and employees to such an extent that some companies have abolished them outright. Reviews are emotionally complex conversations. Positive and negative feedback are intertwined with conversations about career progression, raises and equity grants. These meetings are emotional powder kegs; and it's no wonder they stress us. In Work Rules, Google's Chief People Officer Laszlo Bock, argues for a different type of performance review: a split review.
See also: Innovator's Solution for SaaS Startups There's a familiar path now to SaaS companies that start in the SMB (small-to-medium business) part of the market. Over time, they seem to inevitably begin serving larger customers. Box, Hubspot, Zendesk and among many others have exhibited this pattern. Why does this happen? I believe we're seeing Clay Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma at play. In short, new startups leverage a distribution advantage to acquire SMB customers at scale.
In 2011, a team of researchers from Stanford and Harvard led by Teresa Amabile collected daily work journals from more than 250 people at large and small companies in a variety of roles. In each journal entry, an employee described one work event that stood out that day. Over the course of a few months, the study received more than 12,000 responses. From all this data, the team revealed a critical ingredient to be a great manager: managing for progress.