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In my experience in a startup people have no labels/titles associated to them. They are the directors and they have to take out the trash too. Tthe author claims he has much experience in the "startup organization domain" but he misses the point of hard, smart work on turning an idea into business regardless of the labels each member has.

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You couldn't be further off base. I've built two companies from scratch and I did all of the "cleaning the trash" work as did all my team members.

Nevertheless, it takes different skill types to build a technology organization. Some will be super technical while some will be more process driven. Some will be inspired to work on all of the latest technologies but hate doing garden-variety feature coding or bug fixing while some people are great utility players.

My post was silent on the issue of whether people with "titles" should do grunt work. And to imply that I said otherwise is a misrepresentation of the post.

I'll add that titles are useful in terms of making sure every essential function is covered. No reason early on that one person can't have more than one title, and as noted everyone should also have the title of "janitor", I've always put is as "No one should be too proud to sweep the floor".

I'm with ya.

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