[HN Gopher] What we learned in studying the most effective founders
___________________________________________________________________
What we learned in studying the most effective founders
Author : liuxiaopai
Score : 169 points
Date : 2022-06-16 08:56 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.google)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.google)
| resters wrote:
| Here's my list of the traits had by the most effective founders:
|
| - strong will to make the vision a reality
|
| - humility to update the vision when appropriate
|
| - natural ability to motivate people to work toward the vision
|
| - the ability to focus and to keep the team focused
|
| - the ability to explore and to keep the team exploring
|
| - the ability to present and fundraise effectively
|
| - luck
|
| All but the last item are not very scarce characteristics
| (roughly 1 in 200 people has them all in sufficient quantity to
| succeed as a founder).
|
| The last one is where it gets difficult, and at every iteration
| the impact of luck gets amplified, to the point where it is
| actually the signal that everyone is looking for to "pile on" to
| an early stage endeavor.
| leetrout wrote:
| I do not understand "treat people like volunteers".
| honkler wrote:
| pay your employees peanuts
| feelepxyz wrote:
| I think the idea is to treat employees you pay as if they where
| doing it for free. Say you give a boring task that's not
| meaningful to a volunteer they'll just up and leave as they
| won't gain anything from it.
| lmeyerov wrote:
| It's similar to hiring on mission: ensure alignment between
| what the person wants to do and what the company needs done.
| The more out of alignment, the more costly in energy, $,
| time, management, QA, etc. it becomes, and the less likely
| bottom-up innovation happens.
|
| In this case, a volunteer is a nice mission-less proxy. Is
| some work engaging for the owning employee, or do you need to
| get someone else on it, or even switch to outside staff for
| it?
| ALittleLight wrote:
| That seems like a confused idea of both volunteers and
| employees. To whom should boring tasks be given? If I
| volunteer at a place it's because I believe in the mission
| and if I work at a place it's because I want to get paid.
| Either way, if boring work is what's needed, that's what I'll
| do.
| kareemsabri wrote:
| I read it this way as well. That said, sometimes boring work
| needs to be done too. Who does it in this framework?
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| It's about ensuring there's a mix and an opportunity to
| work on different types of work.
|
| It's okay to have boring work. It's challenging to _only_
| have boring work.
| rokhayakebe wrote:
| Preach the Mission, Not the Pension
| rvba wrote:
| I read it as: "Dont pay them the market rate, squeeze them like
| lemons - and make them earn peanuts, for the grand vision of
| getting equity later".
|
| Like in those sweatshops in third world countries. (Although
| sweatshops dont give equity)
|
| So 60-70 hour weeks.
|
| Does this work in Silicon Valley?
| commieplant wrote:
| This is a pretty negative take. Have you done work out of a
| sense of purpose rather than for just a salary?
|
| It's about treating people like they have personal interest
| in the mission of the organization and working towards a
| common purpose. And not to treat them like your personal wage
| servants.
| honkler wrote:
| my sense of purpose is towards my family, co-religionists,
| and god. I'm not delusional enough to wake up at 6AM and
| come to office at 8AM for anything other than money.
| helloworld11 wrote:
| If you're the owner/founder of a startup and have
| employees, there will be little common purpose at a
| fundamental level. Your priority is making the company as
| successful as possible at least reasonable cost, theirs is
| usually extracting as much value from their job for
| themselves at least effort. This doesn't apply in all
| companies absolutely but most of the time talk of "we're a
| family" or "team effort!" is PR drivel, that more often
| than not goes out the window in a hurry when things get
| down to the squeeze. If the owner/founder didn't want to
| have the priority I mentioned above, they could have
| started a sincere nonprofit, not a money making investment
| venture. Likewise for staff.
| rvba wrote:
| Most of my work is done out of sense of purpose. A lot of
| things I do are good, while they could be half-assed (and I
| know that other half ass them - e.g. shoddy work inherited
| from my predecessors). I have situations where I did work
| that is solid and hasnt been reviewed by anyone since they
| trust me (what is probably a bad business practice, but
| that is irrelevant for this discussion).
|
| I had to write this long introduction because you started
| name calling. Apparently everyone who doesnt want to work
| in sweatshop like conditions only works for a salary. Maybe
| this is news for you, but most people want an easy job that
| treats them well. But treating employees well (e.g. fancy
| office in trendy part of town, cool company swag with
| logos) is not really aligned with the priorities of a cash
| starved startup. The startup probably should try to cut its
| expenses to the bone and focus on necessities - by for
| example running first from a garage, or a home. It is very
| likely that the startup will pivot its business model few
| times before it becomes cash positive, so it should try to
| limit cash outflows as much as possible (even just to
| survive for the next round). Yes, there are startups that
| become cash positive fast (what is probably great way of
| doing business), but it is relatively rare. Most start ups
| need to survive few lean years. Although there are
| obviously companies made to grow as much as possible and
| sell the bag (of shit) to some bagholders - their CEOs
| focus most on marketing than building a product that
| actually works. Every start-up is after all a promise - we
| need your cash now, that we will translate into a
| successful equity later.
|
| But coming back to the alignment between what
| companies/start-ups wand and what employees want - they
| want different things. Companies mostly want to generate
| cash (or the owners want to sell the bag to someone else if
| they cannot generate cash), while employees want a nice
| salary. Yeah, some want to do impressive stuff, but most
| people dont. Those people who want a salary probably dont
| fit the start-up crowd anyway, but can you really tell?
| Squeezing some fresh grads like lemons in a start-up
| happens all the time. They just dont know better and accept
| the biggest sin of sweatshop-like companies: overtime.
|
| Startups are known for overtime. If the leader can get some
| cult-like group who will sit 70 hours per week, then there
| is a bigger possibility of success than a start-up where
| workers work 40 hours. Although this is not an easy
| subject, because hours spent probably not always translate
| to effective hours. Someone can do 30 effective hours out
| of a 40 hour work week, while someone can have 50 hours out
| of 70. It is also possible that someone has 10 out of 70.
| But generally the overtime is sort of productive, even if
| this leads to burnt out employees, as I wrote before -
| those fresh grads are fueled by enthusiasm and dont know
| better. So a sociopath who will exploit them makes a great
| leader.
|
| And mission of the organization is just to earn as much
| cash as possible for its owners and employees. Most
| companies dont have any real vision, it is some marketing
| bullshit (for start-ups), or something done by consultants
| on a corporate retreat. Even in a startup most employees
| probably dont know the vision. Or they are smart enough to
| know it, but do they believe in it? If your start-up is
| rewriting Excel pivot tables in Rust, is there really some
| grand vision? "We are building revolutionary product that
| will ease up lives of many people". Seriously, take the
| vision of one company and apply it into another - often it
| works. And I dont say that lack of vision is bad. But most
| companies just want to make the top product that is the
| first choice for customers. This means happy customers and
| money for the company. Rest of this is just marketing
| trying to build some sort of a cult. Unless your startup
| plants trees in Amazon or cures cancer, the vision is just
| to be a successful company. Obviously you cannot tell that
| to people, a good CEO is supposed to do the dance and
| create a whole brand (preferably out of nothing - because
| there is no money for marketing). Probably easier to sell
| bullshit if you believe in it, but at the end of the day is
| still bullshit. I also have to sell bullshit from time to
| time (everyone who manages people does), but at least I
| know that it is bullshit. And yeah, I know the mission of
| my organization, it actually makes a lot of sense, but
| still it is just bullshit used to hide the real reason why
| the company operates - to earn cash for owners and (to some
| degree) employees. If you earn doing something that is
| good, then even better, but come on - how many Jupiter
| notebooks can you rewrite in Go and will your C++ uber for
| pets will be really revolutionary?
|
| If you take CEO A, who builds this hypothetical uber for
| pets and sells some bull that makes the employees work 70
| hours per week and compare to CEO B, who makes them work 40
| hours, the first one will probably be more successful. At
| the few year time frames (life before a start-up succeeds
| or fails), the employees from company A will probably not
| burn out, while company B can burn out its cash reserves
| and have no product.
| anon2020dot00 wrote:
| Hacker News is backed by YC so expected that Hacker News
| community will be more biased towards start-up culture
| while your initial posts and subsequent comment just
| seems unbalanced towards negativity.
|
| Not all start-ups are made equally; some probably have
| the abusive culture that you describe while others are
| more fair to their employees and have a more win-win
| outcome.
| cyborgx7 wrote:
| >I read it as: "Dont pay them the market rate, squeeze them
| like lemons - and make them earn peanuts, for the grand
| vision of getting equity later".
|
| In what context are volunteers treated like that?
| rvba wrote:
| Volunteers work for free also usually there are too few of
| them (there can be lots of "volunteers" but only few are
| contributing, so they are overworked).
| rq1 wrote:
| As in "like volunteers, not like slaves".
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| We try to practice this on my team. Essentially, it comes down
| to aligning people with their interests. We've found it's far
| better to optimize interest against projects than it is to
| optimize skillset. We've found people working on the problems
| they prefer tend to dive in more deeply, care more, and
| generally produce better results for our customers. Once people
| feel like they're just being dragged through the motions, they
| tend to put only the minimal effort in to collect a check.
| mromanuk wrote:
| > What we learned in studying the most effective founders
|
| Probably the meaning of survivorship bias.
| Chris86 wrote:
| Is it really 'learning' if there's literally nothing new
| uncovered? -\\_(tsu)_/-
| alanlammiman wrote:
| Tldr - Effective leaders do x, y and z. Ok, how do you know they
| do those things? We ask people. How do you know they're effective
| leaders? We ask (presumably the same) people. What's the sample?
| Startups that people have selected to be in our accelerator
| (presumably based on, among other things, whether the leaders
| were deemed to be effective by our people). So many issues with
| the analysis that its hard to tease out anything of value. This
| from a company that hires a gazillion phds. Sigh.
| dahart wrote:
| > This observation aligns with what is known as the Dunning-
| Kruger effect, where overconfidence at the start of the journey
| helps founders get started, but discouragement and self-doubt set
| in soon after
|
| It's refreshing to see mention of the DK effect linked to a more
| recent paper, one where the original authors are amending
| (contradicting) their original work. But I have never ever seen
| the DK effect mentioned in a context where it actually works as a
| reasonable explanation of human behavior, this post included. For
| example, if we take these papers at face value, one of the few
| things they actually do show is that there is a positive
| correlation between confidence and what they call "performance";
| the more confident someone is in themselves, the more likely they
| are to be right about it. The most common (mis)conception of DK
| is the opposite of that. Being confident and then having reality
| set in is not what DK measured. Really, the only use DK has is a
| way for the speaker/author to position themselves as smart &
| authoritative by citing their awareness of it, often as if
| knowing of it helps you avoid it.
|
| The original paper just did not measure anything even remotely
| close to startup success by founders, and thus it's conclusions
| simply do not carry into this context. The paper did not measure
| any kind of job performance by any professionals. It didn't
| measure complex tasks either. The tasks were basic and academic,
| e.g., a little grammar, ability to get a joke (seriously!), and
| the primary statistics they gathered were based on people ranking
| themselves against others whose performance they didn't know, not
| primarily on isolated or objective self-evaluation. The sample of
| people was a tiny(!) set of Cornell undergrads(!) volunteering(!)
| for extra credit. There are just _so_ many things wrong with
| assuming this work represents real human behavior, and the paper
| was misleading and is so completely misunderstood that I wish
| references to it would just stop: they're never correct and never
| useful.
| hartator wrote:
| Don't "Protect the team from distractions." and "Invite
| disagreement." contradict a bit each other?
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| Can you expand further on why you think these are
| contradictions?
|
| In my book, you can actively have both. Protecting from
| distractions often means helping the team feel like they can
| say no to anything that isn't the most critical work. Inviting
| disagreement simply means that you tell your team you want
| dissenting opinions.
|
| For example, if you feel like the team is working on a few
| unnecessary projects, you can help them say "no" (protect from
| distractions). However, you shouldn't just do it blinding. That
| project may actually be valuable, but not in the way you
| anticipated on the surface.
| hartator wrote:
| There is obvious distractions. For a random SaaS: e.g.,
| "Let's make our own coin on the blockchain" and there is
| obvious healthy disagreements. e.g., "Let's be very
| aggressive on pricing."
|
| And I think it's already pretty obvious what to do.
|
| But what it's difficult is always the grey area. "Let's
| support Bitcoin as payment gateway". And this two tenets
| become contradictory.
| diob wrote:
| I'm honestly more interested in studying the most ineffective
| founders.
|
| We spend too much time focusing on survivors, when I feel like
| the best learning comes from looking at failure.
|
| I'd be willing to be there's a lot of failed / failing companies
| out there doing the exact same thing as the "most effective
| founders", so what makes them different? I'd be interested to
| know.
| theptip wrote:
| My intuition is that there are an infinite number of ways to
| fail, and the number of ways to succeed are much more scarce.
| So it's good to study both, but studying success is often more
| informative. You definitely want to be intimately aware of the
| common failure modes.
|
| I'd be very surprised if lots of failing companies are doing
| the _exact_ same as the most successful ones. Maybe cargo-
| culting all of the things, or actually doing _most_ of the same
| things but missing one necessary thing. There is an element of
| luck to it for sure, but the intangibles like business
| strategy, product market fit iterative discovery, hiring,
| managing, developing people, are all quite hard to pin down in
| pithy summaries. The best startups get these right either by
| meta-level luck of happening to have the right skill set for
| the problems they ended up facing (vs. rolling a natural 20 on
| a skill check with the same stats as other founders) or by
| actually working harder on acquiring the skills that they most
| need to develop. But doing these (hard, time-consuming) things
| well is uncommon.
| [deleted]
| boringg wrote:
| I'd bet it's fundamentally misunderstanding the market that
| they go into. So many companies/founders rip the same playbook
| and go headstrong into a market without understanding all the
| nuances. That's obviously a gross oversimplification but if I
| was to choose the number 1 reason that's my guess.
| aleksiy123 wrote:
| Probably a good point.
|
| Like that anecdote about the studying the WW2 planes that went
| down vs the ones that made it back to see where to add more
| armour.
| theptip wrote:
| To be fair, in that anecdote you are extracting meaningful
| information just from observing the literal survivors, which
| sort of points in the opposite direction to the GP's point.
|
| I'd say examining survivors is useful and can provide
| information, but you need to be careful to correct for
| survivorship bias. But that's not to say you cannot gain any
| information from examining cohorts of survivors.
|
| I think most people probably under-correct for survivorship
| bias so it's good general advice to highlight it.
| ip26 wrote:
| The insight of the plane story is turning it around,
| though, to indirectly study the failures (which were not
| available for study)
|
| "What is it the successful planes do? Well, they _didn't_
| get shot here (points)"
| binbag wrote:
| They looked at both and compared them.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Maybe not the most ineffective but it would probably be good to
| rank factors by most likely to sink your business.
| bko wrote:
| I don't think that's why lists like this aren't useful. A
| simple test would be imagine the reverse were true. For
| instance, here is the effective traits from the article.
|
| - Treat people like volunteers vs treat people like paid
| employees
|
| - Protect the team from distractions vs distract your team
|
| - Minimize unnecessary micromanagement vs introduce unnecessary
| micromanagement
|
| - Invite disagreement vs squash all disagreement
|
| - Preserve interpersonal equity vs treat people arbitrarily
|
| - Keep pace with expertise vs ignore whats going on around you
|
| - Overcome discouragement vs succumb to discouragement
|
| The ineffective founds list would probably be something
| similar, like "be a dick", "ignore your colleagues", "be
| volatile", etc.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| "Treat people like volunteers" is such a double-edged concept
| though. Many of the catastrophic founders I've seen treat
| people like volunteers - in that they think passion will
| overcome piss-poor retribution and working conditions. It's
| easy to think about "treating people like volunteers" when
| you've sorted out how to pay them at least close to market
| rates. Then yea, seek how to inspire them... But first, you
| may be better served if you treat them like professionals.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| I am 100% sure plenty of failed founders do all this and much
| more. I understand the logic and emotions where this wish
| list comes from, but reality tends to be more complex.
| People, and companies change.
|
| Ie being a dick at right moment may allow you to push through
| situation that would make weaker / more moral ones fail. And
| about gazillions of other possible examples that may be
| counterintuitive.
| zh3 wrote:
| This is a great technnique, and is particularly effective
| when working out if someone (especially a politician) is
| saying something meaningful.
|
| "We will strive to make people happier and more productive".
|
| Who would say they strive for the opposite?
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Simple science: you need a control group.
|
| The whole "25 things that successful people do" completely
| ignores the entire question of whether unsuccessful people also
| do those things, and therefore whether those things have
| anything to do with success.
|
| Survivor bias is so prevalent in any thinking about "what makes
| someone successful?" that yes, it would be much more effective
| at this point to consider "what makes someone unsuccessful".
|
| I'm willing to bet that the things we consider to be signs of
| success are actually table-stakes, in that both successful and
| unsuccessful founders do them, and the thing that actually
| marks the difference between successful and unsuccessful
| founders is luck.
| emaginniss wrote:
| "We have found that 100% of successful people breathe at
| least once a minute"
| christkv wrote:
| I'm betting a ton read those books and articles and try to do
| the 25 things and still fail.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I'm gonna go even further and say that using statistics and
| quantifying any of this is a futile effort. There are too
| many variables and noise-factors to make any sense in
| statistics.
|
| Every company is unique and problems are different and in
| different domains at different external conditions.
|
| Statistics would just be a sample size of 1 and std dev of
| infinity.
| time_to_smile wrote:
| > Simple science: you need a control group.
|
| While controlled experiments are the ideal for hypothesis
| testing, as someone who does stats for a living it's worth
| point out _observational studies do exist_.
|
| Entire fields, such as anthropology, depend entirely on
| observational statistics. The field has also come a
| tremendously long way in recent years with lots of very
| useful tools coming out of the Bayesian community (applying
| proper priors, multi-level modeling, inference on more
| complex models) and the causal inference community.
|
| McElreath's _Statistical Rethinking_ is a great text that
| deals mostly with what I would consider the current state of
| the art in observational techniques. Highly recommended if
| isn 't already on your bookshelf.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I get that, but just studying one sample of the population,
| deliberately ignoring any other grouping in that
| population, and then drawing conclusions for the entire
| population, is still ludicrous.
| somethoughts wrote:
| My hunch is that there would be an audience for this stuff. I
| think the key to this is the go to market model for such
| content.
|
| There's a pretty established model regarding successful
| founders who then write books about themselves. The audience
| seems to be well known and if not presumably a successful
| founder could self-publish their way to success.
|
| The model for mediocre founders talking about their failures
| is probably a tough sell to backers as the audience size is
| unknown and if the founder is unsuccessful they won't be able
| to self publish.
|
| The best format would probably be a free podcast and where
| some host would invite other moderately/less than successful
| founders to talk about their ups and downs. The best bet for
| the host would be some VC funded moderately successful
| founder who's startup only 1.5x'd instead of 10x'd snd had to
| sell the company and now had free time.
| andreilys wrote:
| _"All Happy families /founders resemble one another, but each
| unhappy family/founder is unhappy in its own way."_
| omarhaneef wrote:
| Looking at the data, they seem to compare what effective[1]
| founders do more frequently than ineffective founders, so they
| do compare the two. The study sort of includes these % gaps in
| practices of most and least effective founders.
|
| [1] effective here is subjective and reported. They have a
| discussion of why they don't use other metrics like company
| valuations and it boils down to that data is harder to collect
| I think
| mdorazio wrote:
| Kind of a click bait title from Google, which is disappointing.
| This is really about characteristics of effective leaders, and
| has little to do with effective entrepreneurship, sales, hiring,
| engineering, etc. The points they suggest are also pretty
| generically applicable (and have been recommended for decades) to
| managers in general, so it's not clear to me what's different
| about founders specifically here.
| togaen wrote:
| Banal drivel.
| cokeandpepsi wrote:
| Do good founders eat breakfast?
| throwaway2016a wrote:
| While there is some decent leadership advice in this article, I
| can't help but to wonder: all these articles seem to focus on
| personal leadership qualities, does anyone recommend good
| articles that focus on other things like socioeconomic status,
| college/degree level, age, etc? It seems intuitive that @$$hole
| founders fail, but all things considered equal I intuition also
| tells me these other factors are equality if not more impactful.
|
| Edit: Couple minor typos.
| tinco wrote:
| I really liked the book "Super Founders" by Ali Tamaseb. It has
| the information you're looking for at least, as well as a lot
| of other interesting stuff.
|
| Most significant property of billion dollar startup founders is
| that they're more likely to have founded a multi million dollar
| startup before. That doesn't necessarily mean that they're
| super talented, but more that they've got the good qualities as
| well as the required experience. Anyway the book has loads of
| great insights.
| dc-programmer wrote:
| There were some articles over the last few years about
| successful founders skewing older. Looks like the average age
| for billion dollar companies is 34 but I remember seeing over
| 40 for some thresholds.
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/05/27/super-founders-median-ag...
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| This book explains all: https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-
| Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po...
| krm01 wrote:
| I've worked with managers from big co's as well as directly with
| many startup founders. Helping mainly B2B SaaS teams with Product
| Design [1]
|
| This article is written from a corporate pov, judging founders
| and founding teams, which are fundamentally different animals,
| from the wrong angle.
|
| The pattern I've seen all effective founders had in common from
| my experience were 2
|
| 1. Building something people want. Usually they started with
| something crappy, focussing on product market fit first. Almost
| always have paying customers.
|
| Then
|
| 2. Tirelessly working 24/7 on product & telling more people about
| their product.
|
| All the managerial things mentioned in the article are important
| at some point. But it's not what will make or break a startup.
|
| [1] https://www.fairpixels.pro
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| 1. Mitigate risk
|
| 2. Corollary of #1: never take a client providing over 10% of
| your annual revenue, or table personal assets to grow
|
| 3. keep your legal positions clear: talk with contract, copyright
| and trademark lawyers early
|
| 4. keep your tax strategy clear: talk with regional corporate
| accountants, and customs brokers early
|
| 5. Prioritize revenue: without a profit-mode your project is not
| a business
|
| 6. Corollary of #5: provide _paying_ customers value they are
| happy with, or cull the project
|
| 7. Manage or be managed: you are running a business, and not a
| charity. There are several styles for doing this, and no way is
| perfect. Often hiring friends is a mistake, as when serious money
| starts to flow people often revert to their primordial rodent
| brains.
|
| 8. Marketing: your conversion rate is below 1.7% ? than
| adapt/cull the project...
|
| 9. low hanging fruit is usually rotten: if it is something some
| kids can _appear_ to copy to make a quick buck, than the market
| will quickly fragment. a.k.a. "chasing the long tail" of market
| distributions is financial suicide
|
| 10. admit you can't know every scam, and accept as a business
| there are always losses. As a small entity you are vulnerable to
| all sorts of legal, technological, and personal attacks.
| Technical people often think being smart somehow immunizes them
| from cons some sociopaths mastered... it doesn't... talk with
| people, and you will see this is a very common bias.
|
| 11. With shareholders one must acknowledge the structures of
| power: https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-
| Po...
|
| 12. post failed projects on your website as bait, so when the
| business-intelligence people show-up looking for soft-targets...
| they too can enjoy the losses... nothing more enjoyable than
| watching irrationally competitive opportunists go bankrupt
| pumping money into something you wisely abandoned. ;-)
|
| I wouldn't call my entities successful by "startup" standards,
| but they have remained profitable for over 14 years... and they
| are mine.
| dgb23 wrote:
| I would have expected stuff like:
|
| - expertise or at least competency related to the domain
|
| - social currency, ability to influence/convince people
|
| - stamina and fortitude
|
| Most of the points in the very short article are about "don't be
| an asshole to your employees", which is certainly a good thing
| and what people should be doing. But I can think of quite a few
| outrageously successful founders who have been insufferable
| dickheads.
|
| I think my second point above might be the single most important
| one. I have no data to back it up, but I feel like if you can
| just make people do what you want in some way or another (and
| that includes customers, workers, partners etc.) then you're set
| up for success. At least short or midterm (a few years).
|
| I think this is a bad thing because it is quite arbitrary and
| stupid. I say that in a loving way. I wish we (humans) were not
| that dumb.
| rgbrenner wrote:
| Your points are all correct.. but this article isn't written
| for startups.
|
| When you work at trillion dollar company that likes to think of
| itself as a small nimble startup, you write articles like
| this... the point isn't to help startups, it's to influence
| people in the organization to behave in a certain way by
| attributing the behavior you want to another group you admire.
|
| Google doesn't care about creating a successful startup.. they
| do care about how their employees work together.
|
| A slightly less cynical take is that when Google "studies"
| startups, they dont recognize problems like you describe
| because creating a startup isnt a problem they are faced with.
| But cultural issues exist everywhere, and so those are the
| problems that the person sees and addresses in their writeup.
|
| The result is the same either way. You're not going to get
| startup lessons from one of the largest companies in the world.
| itronitron wrote:
| I'd love it if people would just do what _they_ say they are
| going to do, and I think a lot of companies would be great
| places to work at if that turned out to be the case.
| yaseer wrote:
| This reads more like a generic SEO page, stating platitudes,
| rather than a novel analysis by one of the largest, most
| influential companies in the world.
|
| If Google considers this quality content, is it really surprising
| their search results increasingly return non substantive answers
| to questions?
| akeck wrote:
| Re this type of study, I highly recommend the book, "The Halo
| Effect" by Phil Rosenzweig.
| karlhughes wrote:
| > The most effective founders are not nearly as confident as the
| least effective founders are...If that's you, remember it is
| likely a signal of growth, and not of inevitable failure.
|
| This was good to know. I constantly feel that imposter syndrome,
| especially as we grow and I am trying to keep my leadership
| skills at pace with our team size.
| zcw100 wrote:
| Self help pablum for aspiring founders. I'll just highlight a
| couple of the ridiculous things in there. "Minimize unnecessary
| micromanagement". There's just a ton in there. First,
| micromanagement already has a negative connotation so
| recommending to minimize it rather than eliminate it is just an
| obnoxious hedge. Then it doubles down on recommending minimizing
| only "unnecessary" micromanagement. You just go right ahead
| micromanaging those losers who deserve to be micromanaged. How
| else are you going to drive out the undesirables?
|
| "Invite disagreement". All hedge. "some studies have shown", "in
| tern it _could_ mean more innovative and inclusive products ".
| Not because you want to show respect for the opinions of others
| or that you listen to what people have to say but because it
| _could_ lead to more innovative and inclusive products ie. "I
| don't really care what you have to say other than how it hits my
| bottom line but go on talking. I'll let you know if I think you
| say something worthwhile"
|
| "Keep pace with expertise" This was nice until you get to the
| bottom of the actual report and find out that Josh has an
| undergraduate degree in Biology and an MBA. I'm not sure how that
| shows any expertise in what is being written about but please go
| on nor how that could possibly qualify you as Chief of Staff at
| Google Research but there it is.
|
| I think what's more interesting about stuff like this is not what
| they're saying but what they're selling. I can only guess that
| the real research Google did was that they needed more startups
| to get started using their products and that they would continue
| to use and expand their use of Google services as they grow.
| omarhaneef wrote:
| What would you propose as an alternative?
|
| In an alternative universe, ZCW101 is complaining that they
| said "eliminate micromanagement" and that person is arguing
| that sometimes you _simply have to_ micromanage and eliminating
| it is unrealistic but they should have said something about
| minimizing it. And then someone complains that some is
| necessary and you should only minimize the unnecessary parts.
|
| Anyway, my real point is that the summary necessarily only
| captures the data in an inexact manner and if you are
| interested you can dive in. The real point is that some % of
| people feel micromanaged and it is a large point.
|
| By the way, even _that_ point is a summary.
| https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/startup.google.co...
| zcw100 wrote:
| When you need to project into an alternate universe you know
| you've got a weak argument. Micromanagement is a negative
| thing regardless of if you think the person needs and
| deserves it. You're not going to find anyone out there that
| says, "They really let me down. I mean I didn't want a lot of
| it but I didn't even get a little micromanagement. I'm really
| looking for this goldilocks micromanagement. Not too much,
| not too little, but just the right amount".
| omarhaneef wrote:
| Well, I think this is what they call a semantic argument.
|
| All of us want the right "resolution" of management. Some
| people might say the right level of micromanagement (in
| your example, the goldilocks micromanagement). You may say
| anything that is "too detailed" is "micromanagement" by
| definition.
|
| I am not saying you are wrong, but I am saying that as long
| as we agree on the underlying reality, I don't much care
| what you call it.
| antiverse wrote:
| >I think what's more interesting about stuff like this is not
| what they're saying but what they're selling. I can only guess
| that the real research Google did was that they needed more
| startups to get started using their products and that they
| would continue to use and expand their use of Google services
| as they grow.
|
| Could have said that and left out the rest. Most tech blogs I
| come across are thinly veiled sales pitches, and the trope is
| to take some more or less obvious subject and put a TEDx style
| spin on it.
| CapmCrackaWaka wrote:
| > This was nice until you get to the bottom of the actual
| report and find out that Josh has an undergraduate degree in
| Biology and an MBA. I'm not sure how that shows any expertise
| in what is being written about but please go on nor how that
| could possibly qualify you as Chief of Staff at Google Research
| but there it is.
|
| I was with you until this comment. Unnecessary ad-hominem, as
| well as a misguided premise. It looks like Josh has worked
| specifically in the "startup success" space for several years
| now. A lack of formal education does not preclude someone from
| being an expert. Not even sure what a formal education in this
| context would entail.
| stult wrote:
| > Not even sure what a formal education in this context would
| entail.
|
| An MBA. This is exactly the sort of material MBAs study and
| there really isn't any other formal educational credential
| that qualifies someone to evaluate strategies for making a
| business succeed. Making this particular ad hominem criticism
| especially ridiculous.
| csee wrote:
| I was with you until you started with the credentialism stuff.
| titanomachy wrote:
| I agree. Google shouldn't staff their positions based on who
| has the most PhDs.
| d23 wrote:
| I need a shower after reading this comment. This is HN cynicism
| at its worst. This article is pretty pro-worker; I'd have to do
| somersaults to twist it as being secretly in favor of negative
| boss behaviors like micromanagement.
| adwn wrote:
| > _[...] ie. "I don't really care what you have to say other
| than how it hits my bottom line but go on talking. I'll let you
| know if I think you say something worthwhile"_
|
| The article is about "effective founders", not about "nice
| persons". If being an insensitive cunt made you a better
| founder, then that would be an important datapoint worth
| knowing about. So I don't know why you're criticizing this part
| of the article.
| nebulousthree wrote:
| This is the software/IT industry where everyone talks about how
| you can be self made and degrees don't matter as much as skill
| and experience, right? Yet here you are dismissing this guy for
| whatever he studied in school.
|
| Other than that I completely agree with you
| gopher_space wrote:
| > This is the software/IT industry where everyone talks about
| how you can be self made and degrees don't matter as much as
| skill and experience, right? Yet here you are dismissing this
| guy for whatever he studied in school.
|
| I'd pay for a reputation mapping service with a specific
| point of view. I'd pay for several of them if they were
| different enough.
| andsoitis wrote:
| The qualities / behaviors highlighted just seem like good people
| leadership skills, period.
|
| I do not see it being specific to founders or startups.
| TehShrike wrote:
| My first thought on seeing the title was "ooh, which founders of
| the United States were most effective? That sounds interesting"
| >_<
| alephnan wrote:
| Does Google's VC fund outperform the average VC fund?
|
| Has anything big come out of Google's Area120 incubator?
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