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Comment by subfay | Hacker News Reader

You learn by doing and putting skin into game not by watching or listening random CEO advice.

The only thing you will learn is that if your friend could create a $25M company you can do this too. This is how we grow--by imitating our closest peers and we start as babies imitating our parents and siblings. Creating a $25m company is btw not that hard, creating a multibillion company is.

Everything else, stuff you will see and his advices won't help you because once you are in the situation yourself you won't be able to use that stuff. Long story, I'll tell why another time.

Found a company yourself now and let him coach you/make intros to investors and let him check your overall pitch. If you don't have any ideas for a business ask him. This will be your first mission.

Shadowing a CEO without having a clear mission is douchy.

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I would completely disregard this advice.

> "Everything else, stuff you will see and his advices won't help you because once you are in the situation yourself you won't be able to use that stuff. Long story, I'll tell why another time."

How could you know for certain it wouldn't help him?

Moreover, humans have mirror neurons which respond to actions that we observe in others. These mirror neurons fire in the same way when we actually recreate that action ourselves.

So if the student observes with intent, then his brain could subconsciously 'download' the CEO's behaviors.

>"I would completely disregard this advice"

Much to the opposite, au contraire, I would say this is the best of all advices written here, as it goes to the point as if the OP wants to open a company of his own or just procrastinate, to use a less mild tone, as in your comment.

"You learn by doing and putting skin into game not by watching or listening random CEO advice." Perhaps you meant: "you learn MOST by doing and putting skin into game, COMPARED TO JUST watching or listening random CEO advice."

I did this kind of shadowing as part of an MBA and it was super useful. Senior managers are often flattered that someone would want to do this, and they often find the discussions (including naive questions) with the "shadow" useful in providing an alternative perspective. So it's not only beneficial to the "shadow". One of the tasks we were asked to complete, in addition to general observation, was to make a note every 5 minutes or so on what kind of task was being performed, and (of possible to judge), the level of the task e.g tactical (day-to-day / week-to-week) concerns vs strategic (months - years). Tabulating that and writing a short report for the CEO afterwards is helpful for the shadow in order to consolidate and organize what you learned, and very helpful to the CEO, who almost always end up spending most of their time on tactical issues ("firefighting") rather than strategic issues, even though they know they should probably be spending more time on the latter than they currently are.

Yeah, we find each new hire pretty valuable in the first few months because they provide a perspective on pain points that we may have internalized and disregarded.

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