Comment by plinkplonk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by plinkplonk | Hacker News Reader

I really like the fact that this book is explicitly addressed to (CXOs of / senior managers of) companies that have already found a product / market fit, and is now transitioning into a 'BigCo', which means that startup founders who are not going through that stage of company growth can skim the book, (as can people who want to remain engineers). There is a lot of 'managerese' in the book, which is inevitable given its focus. I still can't decide if some of the interviewees are actually insightful, or just happened to be at the right place at the right time, and are now mouthing platitudes.

This book is really meant for people who want to be senior managers in a company that is growing like crazy, and want to take on the people and organizational challenges that result.

Also the book is very explicitly centered around the "SF way" of building companies, and I wonder how much of this advice would apply to, say, a Chinese unicorn. (I think, not very much. e.g: 'diversity' as key focus area for the CEO seems to be a very SF centric (or at least US centric) way of doing things, and reflective of social and political phenomena in the USA. I doubt Chinese or Korean CEOs spend as much time on 'identity politics' flavored 'diversity hiring' as a CEO would in SF)

So if you are scaling up a post product/market fit company in SF/the USA, and are in a senior management position in that company, this book is likely to be of great help.

Even otherwise it is a good roadmap to how you can "live long enough to see yourself become the villain" ;-).

The book has a different focus from many "startup" books and that is refreshing. Overall I liked it, modulo the 'platitude problem' I mentioned above.

I really liked the interview with Patrick Collison, who seems to have his head screwed on right.

>I doubt Chinese or Korean CEOs spend as much time on 'identity politics' flavored 'diversity hiring' as a CEO would in SF

There are many responses to that statement, but one of the most notable ones is that there are significantly more non American users of American software products than non Chinese/Korean users of Chinese/Korean software products.

Building a diverse team that will be able to reason about how your product will be used in a variety of cultural contexts, by people from a wide array of different backgrounds, is therefore much more important in the former situation than the latter.

The issue is that the commonly accepted definition of diversity is always about having different gender, race and sexual orientation represented.

The important thing though is to achieve diversity of thought, which is a positive thing since it brings a larger set of creative ideas to the table.

In the SF Tech Bubble, people look diverse but they all think more or less in the same way as the "Culture" part of hiring will remove anyone not fitting in the same mold. Also as soon as ideas get out of the spectrum of acceptable ideas, people get shamed and learn to shut up or lose their job.

I think that the current conversation going on about diversity completely misses the point. It mainly became a good way for companies/CEO to demonstrate a morale high ground.

I think it is hard to not say that part of Silicon Valleys success is because of diversity and that part of the diversity is as simple as "gender, race and sexual orientation". I isn't a political correct things to say but Japanese, Korean and to some extent Chinese people are generally better organized, harder working and smarter than Americans. But they are also to a large extent also culturally isolated. Which makes their societies full of social rules. We can certainly question how much of a meritocracy the US is, but it certainly is to a large extent compared to the mentioned countries.

It isn't even that diversity itself being new perspectives, it is that non-diversity excludes people. And in highly uncertain activities it is all about how many people you can bring to the starting line. Success is its own filter, if you put a largely arbitrary filter in front you end up with a corresponding decrease in success. Which create a situation similar to the social rules in Asian countries.

If there will be any regret in Silicon Valley in 50 years I don't think it is going to be whatever the current political issue is, but that it didn't acquire a larger share of the global tech market. And that is certainly a factor of competition, equality, diversity and other things that give more people the chance to do just that.

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