Picking Co-Founders the Army Officer Way | Hacker News Reader

Picking Co-Founders the Army Officer Way

sorryspeakup.substack.com

97 pointsChan_Yuk_Chi64 comments

Imagine you sign up to be a startup founder at YC. It’s a salary job, and the pay is low, very low. The promotion schedule is pre-determined, almost invariant of your success. You develop a specialty and your team is assigned to you, rotating once every two years. Most teams only work on one problem, but if you are one of the very best, you get called to work on many small problems. There is almost no requirement for entry into the program except an extremely brutal training that keeps most people out of it. There are only two benefits. First, you get to be part of something that might change the world for everybody else. Secondly, you will gain respect, experience, and trust to start your own business when you get out.

So there you are, on a team with a bunch of people you have never met before. You are now stuck together. If somebody is a problem, you deal with the problem because you can’t get rid of the person. There is a structure, but you’re all on the same path to those roles. All your grievances point to YC and not your team. You’re all getting screwed equally, but no matter how bad it gets, you all chose this, and you all depend on each other.

You get a problem you didn’t choose. You might think it’s stupid. Too bad. Your team owns it now, and they depend on you. You succeed or fail together - nobody cares about praise or blame. Your team makes all the decisions. Nobody is looking over your shoulder. Nobody inserts their suggestions. You report only on a need-to-know basis. Nobody can tell you what to do. If you do something wrong, it will come back to you later in the report out, but not now. The only way to get rid of you is by trial of your peers for an ethical violation.

So what it comes down to, is that you just do your job, and you don’t worry about anything else. You can and must work effectively with almost anybody in that situation.

I'm not sure what your conclusion is. YC should model itself after special operations? You just wanted to post an idealized description of special operations?

No; this is just an elaboration on the author’s concept to give perspective on where it may be apt or lacking.

But what's your point?

The first word of your comment is "Imagine", then a bunch of description, then the last line is a summary of this imagined world. Ok, I imagined, now what?

You've taken a romanticized narrative of the military and then abstracted the terms so they could apply to startups. I can't engage with it as an analogy because it's an imaginary YC on top of an imaginary military. I can't engage with it as a position because you haven't made any claims outside the scope of this world you described.

Ok well, frankly, I wrote this because I didn’t quite get the author’s point. To begin, military officers do not choose their team. I elaborated on the situation in order to highlight the situational differences between choosing startup cofounders and being put on a military team. I may have put this in an idealized form, but I think it is a bit closer to reality than most civilians would expect, at least in combat operations.

P.S. I should also mention that I have zero clue what YC is like in present or past form, so I couldn’t competently draw a direct comparison, instead inviting the reader to make their own.

With your other reply, I think I understand your point better. The situation of the military is super different from startups. Maybe also implied that means that we can't bring over giant lessons. I really agree with this.

I think the more different the context, the more specific the ideas you bring over should be (the trend seems to be the more different, the bigger the idea). So instead of trying to tell me the value of communication, I'd rather know in detail how one unit handles debriefings. Then I can maybe pick up some tips or try the whole thing.

The world you just described is what Hollywood thinks the military is like. The actual military is very different from this.

This is both true and untrue. I hate to say it this way, but, the vast majority of the military doesn’t do anything, so maybe you get a lot of blustering about nothing. The closer you get to combat, the more it is like this. I sat through hundreds of command briefings, and I can’t recall a single instance of tactical spot correction. That could be the basis of a command relief. Orders are superior to any rank.

Right, well, that's very interesting but is entirely made up. The primary factor of the military is the high-risk and discouragement of dropping out and getting discharged. It's not like a job, where if it sucks enough you can just leave and find a new one.

Your comment seems to be a long-winded version of "Why don't we all just work together and get along?"

It's impossibly naive to believe such a mindset possible in capital-oriented businesses.

> It's impossibly naive to believe such a mindset possible in capital-oriented businesses.

That is the perspective I was inviting to the table by writing this; just that it is a very different situation. I have no validated perspective on whether you are right or not, although I do have one experience failing to disprove the above.

> ...the military is ... not like a job, where if it sucks enough you can just leave and find a new one.

For a lot of people it is (once you reach the end of your required period). And if you don't want to advance you can simply bump along -- up-or-out only applies to commissioned officers.

> It's not like a job, where if it sucks enough you can just leave and find a new one.

There's timing issues in some cases (and more issues during an emergency with stop-loss in effect) but otherwise if you are enlisted, you can not reup after your period of enlistment. If you are commissioned you can resign your commission. And you can almost certainly get another job, on favorable terms, because most public and many private employers apply hiring preference for veterans.

The primary point they are making is that the military is unlike a civilian job where you can quit and not show up tomorrow, the time remaining on your contract determines how long until your ETS date.

If you get sick of the green weenie in year two of your standard 4 year contract, you still have the threat of a less-than honorable discharge/UCMJ action forcing you to show up and put in a minimal effort.

Job satisfaction is huge civilian side, but is almost a foreign concept in the military--all until your retention counseling and you opt to renew your vows or chase that smart, young, DD214 hottie that just moved into town.

This doesn't resemble how startups or YC work in any way. In fact, I believe this comment has the fun property that literally every sentence is wrong.

Being a startup founder is not a "job at YC", your team isn't "assigned" to you, founders are not specialists, it's not a "salary job", you choose the problem you're working on, you decide who's hired (and fired), usually they're people you've met before, and so on. But here's the best part:

> trust to start your own business when you get out

You've already started your own business. That's what 'founder' means!

Edit: but from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28279288 I think your point was that being a startup founder is not like being in the military, in which case...good point :)

Right, my interpretation of reading GP's comment was that it, in great detail, explains how it works in the military. Just, using startup terms.

I didn't read it as them implying that's how startups actually work.

And then, reading between the lines, it seems like a very fair critique that the article doesn't jive with the reality of the military.

I wonder how the reverse (YC version of Army/GWOT) would look in your imagination.

Little background: long ago I was involved with the founding of SOFWERX, which was a small experiment with ideas of this sort. Also involved with TF Palladin / JIEDDO down range, which might be more relevant actually.

I think your experiences are super interesting and make great contributions to HN, if you want to share more about them.

I was a US Army Officer for 8 years, worked in heavy armored units commanding tanks, and I upvoted this. I understand exactly what you're saying. This may be an "idealized" view of the military, but it's accurate in the broad details. You don't get to choose your team, you don't get to choose your mission, you can't quit, and you get no financial reward for excellence. It's very different from running a startup.

That said, the writer of this article does seem to recognize this, and I think his aphorisms are correct. Form a team that all trust each other, one way or another, have well-defined duties but be prepared to do each other's jobs when necessary, be ready for a quick change of mission and focus.

I think the analogy falls down in that you really need technical specialists in business. I don't think the Army way of taking someone broadly trained and experienced in "leadership" and putting them in charge whether they know the domain or not is your best bet. We do that in the Army because we don't have a choice and we have a ton of auxiliary staff in the form of senior NCOs and warrant officers and even civilian contractors who are technical experts and can help you with all that. If you have the runway to splurge on that kind of technical support staff to your senior leadership at a startup (and they'll actually listen and not get hurt egos), go for it, but I don't think most do and the founders need to understand the domain they're trying to work in.

This reminded me of this scene from Saving Private Ryan:

Private Reiben : Oh, that's brilliant, bumpkin. Hey, so, Captain, what about you? I mean, you don't gripe at all?

Captain Miller : I don't gripe to you, Reiben. I'm a captain. There's a chain of command. Gripes go up, not down. Always up. You gripe to me, I gripe to my superior officer, so on, so on, and so on. I don't gripe to you. I don't gripe in front of you. You should know that as a Ranger.

Private Reiben : I'm sorry, sir, but uh... let's say you weren't a captain, or maybe I was a major. What would you say then?

Captain Miller : Well, in that case... I'd say, "This is an excellent mission, sir, with an extremely valuable objective, sir, worthy of my best efforts, sir. Moreover... I feel heartfelt sorrow for the mother of Private James Ryan and am willing to lay down my life and the lives of my men - especially you, Reiben - to ease her suffering."

Mellish : [chuckles] He's good.

Private Caparzo : I love him.

I don't have experience with the US military, but in Canada officers are very different from NCOs in terms of the individuals, their training and their roles. It feels like you're comparing start-up founder with regular enlisted, which isn't really the point the OP was trying to make.

The author goes out of his way (and I think it was a good call), not to call out "army things" that make for good co-founders, but to frame it as "these are qualities of good choices that were made obvious to me in an army context". Specifically:

* Trustworthy

* Professional

* Competency

What other (non-business) contexts could we frame this type of article as? I suspect team-sports will stick out as an example, but where else?

For all of the flack that artists get, the "workaday" side of the arts (think orchestra members, studio musicians, professional theater casts and crews, film and cartoon studios) emphasize this like crazy. Talent can get you through an audition, but showing up reliably and on time, being comprehensively prepared, and performing at a consistently high level will keep you employed.

Team-sports actually was an example I used in an initial draft re: professionalism (the idea that you leave everything on the field when the game ends) but I ultimately dropped it because I was stacking one analogy on top of another.

I’ve found many parallels between combat leadership and business/leadership/dev/ops

The principles of good leadership in “open ended” problem spaces seem to apply no matter the other variables.

Too often personal emotional reactions to the military or war (often misconceptions) overshadow the lessons and they are dismissed.

I’ve had people smugly dismiss these ideas because of where the lessons were learned.

Precisely this. I wrote this as a rebuke of assertions that lessons in the military are only valid in the military, and that they aren't useful elsewhere because "this isn't the Army."

I've seen, and read many, many of these kind of articles on how to evaluate potential co-founders (they're mostly generated as part of a shutdown, and I get it, there were a lot of feelings involved). I put forth the problem, that evaluation is actually the -relatively- easier part; finding startup cofounders who both operate at sufficiently high levels of competence, at skills that are complimentary to yours, and can operate a startup (ie operating under conditions of knightian uncertainty/Goal ambiguity/Isotropy) is the very, very difficult challenge.

Co Founders are already quite often reasonably gung-ho risk takers.

I think what's often lacking are attributes like empathy - I'm not sure trying to further militarise startups helps that.

From the Article:

What I actually learned is that if something is right, it’s right. Context makes a slight difference but fundamental principles hold true. There are laws of nature.

The article isn't suggesting militarizing start ups - it's providing some context on which elements of the military officer selection process are transferable to the start up co-founder selection process.

edit: clarity

Empathy is addressed as a negative:

> ...the overfamiliarity problem. That one founder will become too comfortable, start taking liberties with the others that they would never dare to do in any other context, by virtue of the fact that ‘they’re all friends’.

Dealing with our own and others immaturity, or lack of professionalism, in a caring and sympathetic way seems like a fundamental difference between the military and private life. The military kicks you out or keeps you down, and non-military groups try to help everyone grow while tolerating problems. I wonder what the military attitude would be to the common business idea of growing into the job, or learning on the job? (Or the Dilbert principle.)

I feel like we should separate professionalism (i.e. the spectrum of familiarity to over-familiarity) from empathy.

To me, how I want to see empathy applied in a military context, is nothing to do with familiarity or chumminess, and everything to do with the idea that, if you are my commander and you order me to battle, to fight and to die, that you do so carrying the full weight of that responsibility, that you understand my life and my worth as a human being, and that you empathize with the gravity and danger of what you are asking me to undertake, and that you won't spend my life in vain.

That is the real root of empathy, in the military, for leaders to really truly understand the both mundane and yet impossible weight of what they are asking their soliders to do. If you cannot empathize with the human condition at that level, then you should not be fit for military leadership (naive of me, I know).

Not naive at all. This is an accurate picture of how we were taught to approach decisions - that every soldier was someone's child, someone's sibling, someone's loved one. As leaders, our decisions didn't carry just the burden of their lives, but the lives of everyone else who would be affected.

> If you cannot empathize with the human condition at that level, then you should not be fit for military leadership (naive of me, I know).

And you are absolutely right. I knew officers who didn't care about their soldiers and saw them solely as underlings. If I had my way, they would have never seen the privilege of command.

this comment is getting down voted, but I think it's correct. The author later states:

> "professionalism means being able to knuckle down and shift your mindset into one focused on working, one aimed at achieving an objective or mission success"

Which explicitly removes dealing with "the whole person" from the definition of professionalism. If a co-worker's spouse died last night, the professional thing to do is compartmentalize. This is the opposite of empathy

That was not my experience in the military.

Sure, in tough (particularly time sensitive) situations you’re taught to compartmentalize to get the job done. You don’t want someone lost in thought about a cheating spouse when bullets are flying. But in general, people were treated as complex individuals.

From the OP: >The military kicks you out or keeps you down, and non-military groups try to help everyone grow while tolerating problems.

The military puts a premium on training and accountability. Are you physically unfit? Your fire team or squad leader will take time away from their own family to train you. Have a substance abuse problem? The military will often try multiple times to help you overcome it. If your spouse dies, I can all but guarantee you your military unit will be checking on you regularly and helping to make sure you have the resources to deal with it. I’ve never seen that type of effort in the private sector from the organization level. I wonder if people are confusing a “tough” or “accountable” culture with an uncaring one.

Oops. My brain parsed that last part as an email signature and I didn't read it. I meant to support the claim that the author describes empathy as a negative.

I wasn't in a military, but just a "basic training" is far more than I ever got at work, so I've always assumed cultural emphasis on training was much higher in military orgs

This is a much more accurate reflection of how the military handles empathy. Empathy is in no means antithetical to professionalism.

If anything, empathy is a key trait for effective leadership because it engenders trust between leaders and subordinates. Soldiers are neither robots nor imperial stormtroopers. We don't shun basic expressions of humanity for the sake of it, and certainly not as a general rule.

> I wonder if people are confusing a “tough” or “accountable” culture with an uncaring one.

And this is EXACTLY what I meant in my article when I said people frequently misunderstand the concept of professionalism.

You seem to be conflating abuse with empathy, perhaps by misunderstanding "overfamiliarity".

I do thinl there is an element of empathy that has been stripped away from the military as it has modernized. The same is true for startups as they have modernised.

Before, the commander was the first in and last man out of battle (the article's "lead by example") now we have smooth talking presidents sending young men to die in a suit and tie. Napoleon would have none of that.

Likewise, whereas before startups genuinely tried to do good (google "dont be evil", staying out of China, game devs creating worlds like 2nd life etc); nowadays startups actively find ways to treat you as the product, to be sold to the highest bidder and you are just a number on some dashboard, that must be enticed to engage. See Google, Zynga, FB, etc .

Empathy has gone missing and this is not a particular problem for startups or military.

There are too many degrees of separation between the ruler and the ruled. Between the doer and the consumer. As that distance increases, we also lose connection to what matters.

The incompetent are shmoozing themselves into power, and this phenomena is not specific to 1 part of society

I agree with the OP that trustworthyness is a key requirement for building a successful co-founder relationship.

What I can't work out is how you would measure trustworthyness or (perhaps more importantly) how you would establish if you are good at measuring trustworthyness.

Wondered if it was going to suggest this [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchase_of_commissions_in_the...

I'm sorry. What?

> "In basic training, we had to shout everything and repeat every instruction we were given." ... "So that one day, if we’re getting shot at or shelled, we’d repeat instructions we were given clearly so that the message could be passed down the line without the individuals passing it on having to think about it."

The reason for repeating is maybe someday help a dude pass along a shout ... as opposed to confirming the accurate receipt and understanding of the order? Maybe the shout thing is a nice side benefit, but in no way is it the primary reason

Repetition helps generate accurate receipt and understanding.

Since the author is using his Singaporean military service as the analogy, Singaporean-Malays need not apply. Their faith supposedly makes them an inherent risk, so they’re likely only eligible for low-level software developer positions, or maybe DevOps since that’s where most of the firefighting is.

I personally served with plenty of Singaporean-Malays. My first Officer Commanding was Malay. The idea that their faith renders them a risk is not a view we hold.

I suppose you are correct in pointing to their faith not being an issue, but their allegiances are still questioned by some. Why do Malays disproportionately make up the bulk of police/SCDF during NS?

https://www.quora.com/Why-are-there-no-Muslims-in-some-secto...

This would carry a lot more weight if this "startup" at least had a functioning website. Or indeed if work in startups was anything like the army (which it is not - I've been through this). It's weird: I freelance now, and work almost exclusively with startups, and I observe that a nontrivial fraction of people are in it for the "allure". Such folks tend to write a lot of articles on Medium and Substack, post a lot on Twitter, too, and then... nothing. Case in point: one of my clients is currently busy discussing _OKRs_ even though they haven't raised the seed round yet, have no prototype, and what little code they do have is so thoroughly busted I can't even start working on it. No shortage of social media posts tho.

I'm sure the US military is a formidable force; but despite this, the US as a country loses many (most?) wars it engages in. So the lesson to learn may not just be, how to build a good team on the ground, but: how to pick your battles wisely.

A startup CEO isn't just a platoon leader: they are also a politician and a strategist. That's what makes it so difficult.

> I'm sure the US military

I don't think this post is about the US military though. Uniforms look Singaporean.

From the author's bio, "Space Lawyer and Founder. Former Singapore Army officer. Sci-fi author in general." Though I suspect the uniforms in the third and fifth pictures aren't Singaporean or American.

The fifth picture, from its source attribution, is (Scottish, I think) Highland Territorials in a trench in France in 1914.

The post is about how we should learn about leadership from the military. The US army is the mightiest military force in the world. But that's not enough to win wars. Winning wars seems more interesting than having great teams.

> But that's not enough to win wars.

The blog post never says it is.

> Winning wars seems more interesting than having great teams.

It's ok to write blog posts about a variety of things, even if you think there's something potentially more interesting elsewhere.

Sure, but it's not like those things "elsewhere" are completely unrelated. It's implied that building great teams "military style" are a great solution to many problems, and are applicable to the corporate world.

I would like to point out that having a great military force is not enough for what's important -- many times, it's not even needed!

This isn't an article about winning wars, and I'm not advocating that building great teams is a guarantor of success.

This is a guide for those who have decided on their own that they want to focus on building a great team, because their personal assessment is that a great team is what they need to succeed.

> A startup CEO isn't just a platoon leader: they are also a politician and a strategist. That's what makes it so difficult.

In the US, the head of the military is a politician (the US president). As a side effect of that the majority of high ranking officers are politicians as well, albeit playing a different game since it's the politicians they are trying to impress rather than the people.

When you have the opportunity to train with non-US militaries one quickly learns a bit of gratefulness. Our officer and non-commissioned officers are far more professional, and our junior enlisted are far better trained. There are some exceptions. British Royal Marines and SAS really impressed me.

So why does the US lose wars? Because we don’t let the military fight them to win. How else does a 21st century military lose to someone living in the sixth century?

The officer corp spends 10x more time restraining soldiers than gassing them up. It’s difficult to fathom what we’re capable of (even with the law of armed conflict).

I was never actually in the "armed" forces, but I did serve in the military, and I don't think the issue was lack of military force in Afghanistan. The problem was that we started off with overwhelming force, destroying civilian lives, and giving every opportunity for the taliban to generate anti-american sentiment in the process. It required a nuanced approach from day 1 and we didn't start that approach until day 300 (philosophically speaking). We needed to win the trust of the civilian population and we did nothing to secure that trust.

Exactly. This weird 21st century idea of military as gracious nation building conquerer is weird and we are not good at that.

Note that, conversely, force on force "wars" are won very quickly. We should have left Afghanistan in 2002.

The US didn't lose the war in Afghanistan, it won that remarkably quickly. It lost the peace - temporarily at least.

But personally I wouldn't be quite so quick to write off 20 years of somewhat liberalism, and widespread internet access, in terms of that nation's development.

> How else does a 21st century military lose to someone living in the sixth century?

Part of the reason is this type of chronic underestimation of the enemy. The Taliban may hold some socially outdated ideas, but their use of digital communications and machine guns is absolutely not "from the sixth century". Rule 1 of warfare is to never underestimate your opponent.

The main problem the US had was that from basically day 2 (day 1 being spent winning the conventional war) they were looking for a way to leave the country again and everybody there knew it. If you are not looking to annex the conquered territory indefinitely (which is extremely unpopular in western countries for PR reasons) then eventually you will have to leave and so your opponents only need to find a way to survive until then.

> The Taliban may hold some socially outdated ideas, but their use of digital communications and machine guns is absolutely not "from the sixth century

Of course it's not. And the US should know that. They trained the Taliban in he 80's to fight the Russians.

Hannibal is famous for never losing a battle, over a decade campaigning on foreign soil.

And he lost the war.

Because of political forces outside his control

Well he did eventually lose at Zama to Scipio, but I get your point.

> So why does the US lose wars? Because we don’t let the military fight them to win. How else does a 21st century military lose to someone living in the sixth century?

I mean, yes. If the US goal was to "win" by which you mean wipe out the Taliban (and with it the entire population of Afghanistan), that could have been accomplished in very short order with no loss of US lives on Sept. 12th 2001.

The US loses wars because most people in the US (and worldwide) don't want to live in a country that indiscriminately wipes out entire populations.

A FRENCH SOLDIER'S VIEW OF US SOLDIERS IN AFGHANISTAN

https://warriorlodge.com/blogs/news/16298760-a-french-soldie...

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