Interview with Sam Altman from the High Growth Handbook

There should be a way that startups can just automatically give people a raise every two weeks, so that way they make the same amount of money over the course of a year but their compensation is always equidistant from a projected fair market rate.

Then for the employees you'd just need to give them a tool so they could see how much money is going to hit their bank accounts every two weeks.

Outside the Valley and specific centres, this isn't quite so much an issue.

Inside, it's an intractable problem ...

Though your point might be valid from the Dev's perspective, consider the other side for a moment and you see how tough it is - i.e. to have the expectations of ever increasing normalized outflows.

So we need to look at this kind of objectively (i.e. not from just Exec/Dev perspective) to figure out how to deal with the situation.

I know we're small, but I absolutely agree that compensation is super important from the very beginning. Like company values.

It's like a seed. A big tree will come out of it, one day. How you plant the seed, and what seed it is, is super important.

https://qbix.com/blog/2016/11/17/properly-valuing-contributi...

The book does get into some of the other issues you mention in other sections. There are only a few pages about "managing in a downturn" (which is literally the name of a section later in the book).

I think when we finally end this long bull market run we have been in, there will be lots of pain (and lots of articles and blogs about what to do now that the sky is falling).

Thanks again for taking a look!

Yeah I'm gonna disagree with you there. These are some of the things he's said over the years

"I realized I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing than in San Francisco"

"This is uncomfortable, but it’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about gay people if we want them to be able to say novel things about physics."

http://blog.samaltman.com/e-pur-si-muove

"US growth has stagnated while Chinese growth has continued to do pretty well. The US has become less competitive globally"

"The current business model of the US requires the dollar to be the world reserve currency, though the Chinese currency is rapidly becoming a viable alternative"

"The other stark contrast is how much harder people in China seem to work than people here, and how working hard is considered a good thing, not a bad thing."

https://blog.samaltman.com/china

For most tech companies, the right long-term strategy is to spend heavily on R&D and growth, using up all profits and some investor money to do so.

The exception is established companies in a declining industry, where the right answer is to cut R&D and growth to nothing and try to extract as much profit as possible in the remaining years.

While come technology companies (or retail, or other companies) are profitable from day 1, many instead chose to invest in growth early on to go for market share and win the market. They then hike prices, cross-sell product, or drop costs at scale and then spin off a ton of cash. In Silicon Valley these companies are usually funded by VCs. In other industries, they may have different types of loans or in some cases private equity, VC, or friends and family money.

In either case, the companies will share common issues - How do I add executives in functions I have never dealt with? E.g. a CFO or GC? How does my role as CEO evolve as the team grows and I am no longer needed to do the things I used to do when we were 5 people? Etc.

This book definitely has a Silicon Valley Tech bias, as that is what I know best. Anecdotally, I have been told by people in non-tech industries who saw an early copy that some of the "people-centric" chapters are more broadly relevant. But rapidly scaling technology companies will definitely benefit the most from it.

In terms of growing revenue and profits, I think a number of books focus on that. E.g. how to build a sales org, or compensate them, or different channel strategies. Those are really valuable topics but I felt they were better covered than some of the topics I focus on.

Thanks for taking a look! :)

Outside of financing and M&A, most of the topics in the book are core to most fast growing companies - Silicon Valley or not. They key is whether the company needs to grow rapidly, or is a rapidly growing division of a company. "Grow rapidly" means "scaling revenue (and if the right time for the company, profits), and growing headcount and organizational complexity". If it is a 12 person org that is not going to grow, only a smaller subset of topics apply.

Key topics include things like hiring and managing an executive team, your role as CEO, organizational topics (re-orgs, choosing what executive owns what etc.), marketing and PR, product management, managing your board, building a recruiting pipeline and recruiting organization. Many of these are reasonably universal topics. To your point, what I know best is silicon valley technology companies, and the book reflects that experience (versus that of an industrial company).

Thanks again for taking a look!

https://www.amazon.co.uk/High-Growth-Handbook-Elad-Gil-ebook...

You can still order via Amazon - as of now it will just take a few extra days to ship. So not a huge delay if you are willing to wait.

I think two sections might be most generically interesting or useful:

1. The interviews. There are 14 interviews with Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, Patrick Collison, Joelle Emerson, Erin Fors, Reid Hoffman, Claire Hughes Johnson, Aaron Levie, Mariam Naficy, Keith Rabois, Naval Ravikant, Ruchi Sanghvi, Shannon Stubo Brayton, Hemant Taneja.

In some cases, their advice is at odds with my own. So I think the richness of perspectives and experiences are valuable.

2. The sections on executives, recruiting, people, onboarding, re-orgs, etc.

Startups are a team sport, and getting the right team together and helping them be effective is really the key (assuming you already have product/market fit).

A big part of that is also the role of the CEO, and the CEO managing their own psychology, not burning out, etc.