A case study in early-stage startup execution
wave.com
wave.com
And that's the major caveat: this really only works at the very early stages.
In my experience (5 years at a startup that has gone from 30 to now 300 people) and with a heavy bent toward pragmatism, simply put, this doesn't scale.
If growth of the team is imperative for growth of the business (which in most cases, it is), then the shape of the team will change and the culture of the business will evolve away from openness and flexibility out of necessity.
You will get silos, whether you want them or not. If you know you want to scale, not prep'ing for that is akin to burying one's head in the proverbial sand.
Be transparent, but configure for partitioning.
Be flexible, but prepare to have some deadlines start to appear.
Keep prioritisation as simple as possible, but assume that it will get more complex and you will need people who can/want to manage that.
When you move from planning the next few sprints to strategising the next few years, you have to start anticipating problems before they arise across many fronts, not just the tech.
It doesn't mean spending an inordinate amount of time and money on getting that TechCrunch article, but when knowing your runway ends in 6 months, it would be extremely shortsighted not to be laying the groundwork for an investment round by everyone just going heads-down on product development.
Almost anything can scale, with the right leadership and incentives. That part is exceedingly hard to get right. Generally I find from experience that the culture mirrors the leadership more than anything. A leader who cannot delegate, trust, or make decisions as a group builds silos, intentionally or unintentionally. Leaders who are humble, defer to others, trust but verify, and are open and transparent themselves are more than capable of building similar orgs.
Be ever vigilant in eliminating cognitive dissonance, for it is the culture killer.
Again, pragmatism
If you're suggesting that there are very few people who can genuinely care, then I don't know what to tell you beyond: I'm truly sorry? I hope you work with less terrible people in the future.
Making them work together is the key, and we want to make sure everyone has the big picture, but they are not inherently bad, they are inherently good.
Give people trust and agency and you'd be surprised, by the sounds of it, at what they can accomplish.
The only leaders who promote silos are paranoid egotistical sociopaths, at least to some degree
Google, Stripe, AirBnB - and every other company is made up mostly of 'Silos'.
Some communicate better than others.
'Give people trust and agency' has nothing to do with 'Silos' I can only imagine what kind of Twitter/Fast Company 'pop business management' one would have to be consuming to conflate these issues.
And FYI people get as much 'trust and agency' as their competency, skill, maturity, and the situational context implies, it's not an inherent quality of any social system.
Comments about 'egotistical sociopaths' is stupidly offensive.
The common quality in the best leaders that I've worked with is trust, real trust, down to the most junior IC. I've seen 3000 people orgs have a tighter social web, where press leaks don't happen, where teams aren't worried about getting stabbed in the back by other teams, than in 10 person or 30 person or 100 person orgs. There is nothing in the industry that necessitates keeping our plans secret from one another when all our business cards share a common logo.
Instead of being controlled by fear -- of distraction, sabotage, whatever -- be liberated by the trust that bad actors will be weeded out swiftly.
It's anecdotal, sure,but doesn't seem fair to label as an ideolog.
Not decrying anyones first-hand experience, just stating that my first-hand experience is slightly different.
I understand that was not your intention. Still, I judged the article as giving a lot of value to the experiences leading to the conclusions. Anecdotal, sure, but still I wouldn't say it's a good example of an ideolog...
The dev team kept in the lurch on a every little marketing program and tactic, and visa versa, is not helpful.
Making mid-level managers explain their stuff to a wider audience I think is super helpful.
This way, people have an idea of the direction they are headed, and what it is that they are trying to do.
Honestly, I think that's 80% of inter group 'transparency'.
The other things, like salary transparency etc. is a bit more complicated but I generally don't think it's necessary.
> The dev team kept in the lurch on a every little marketing program and tactic, and visa versa, is not helpful.
Maybe. Is it harmful? If so, Why?
> Making mid-level managers explain their stuff to a wider audience I think is super helpful.
Why is this a manager's responsibility? Why not, as a mid-level manager, ask folks from your teams to explain their stuff to a wider audience? That's what transparency is really all about.
They pay pretty well too.
> For this role, depending on your experience and location, we offer a salary range of 138,400 -200,100 USD (or local equivalent), plus equity targeted to be worth 3-4x your salary.
[1] They added a year in the last week. Standards are going up.
Not including all of the Bay Area is definitely an interesting choice…
> we will ensure that all applicants are treated fairly regardless of age, disability, ethnicity, marital status, sexual orientation, religion or belief.
> ...
> What is your ethnic identity? (check as many boxes as apply to you)
>
> What is your gender identity? (Select one)
This is both weird and creepy.
I hate filling those things out, too, but I wonder if I'm ultimately doing a disservice by not completing them.
Also, there's a hefty amount of BS. Like "updating beliefs" and "don't do BS," which seem difficult to do and impossible to prove.
It's almost as if people are trying to publish self-help material because it's profitable . . .
Ok. I will join your cult . . . for money . . . what must I believe . . . now?
And I don't think this stuff is BS; "updating beliefs" is important, as many business decisions are made based on a belief - especially if your product has not gone to market yet. "Updating beliefs" is also reflective of an openness to change, and being able to cope with being wrong at times - people find it hard to find out (or be told) that they are wrong - their ego is hurt, they fight back.
"Don't do BS," specifically the documentation side of things, strikes a particular chord with me, as it's something that I've had to do recently, it goes against everything I know about writing software, so I am 100% happy to see it being spouted here!
All of the points made in the document are about execution, but they're about executing as a business, and not a "how to make your engineers perform better" guide. That said, these practices will _probably_ have your engineers performing better anyway, but you'd need to dig into how each change affects the psychology of those doing following these practices in order to understand how/why.
That's pretty amazing, wonder if that applies to equity too. Most startups that are transparent about their metrics still don't share comp. If they did, I'm sure many people would be shocked at the variance: https://topstartups.io/startup-salary-equity-database/
Wave, if you're reading this, keep it up! Some of these principles will unfortunately break under the strain of a bigger company but stay nimble as long as you can
In my experience, really gifted people don’t put up with environments like this. But I guess you don’t want that in employees if you’re trying to setup a grind farm.
And they usually win too, because they’re thinking far beyond “solve the problem in front of you”. While you’re making your tape player meet market KPIs, they’re inventing DVDs.
When Wave launched in Senegal, our average transfer would have cost 3-5x more if done via the largest existing mobile money system. Multiplied by our millions of monthly active users, that comes out to a savings of over $200 million every year, directly in our customers’ pockets, for them to spend on school fees, feeding their family, or whatever else is important to them.
That’s not a small amount—in fact, it’s around 1% of Senegal’s GDP. Few things are more awesome than being able to measure your success in terms of noticeably increasing an entire country’s GDP.
Working at Wave is an extremely effective way to improve the world
This requires building trust (real trust) and showing vulnerability.
> We trust that people are doing their best and they shouldn’t feel like they need to overwork to hit some arbitrary deadline.
This is, in my mind, the opposite of a "grind farm."
Yeah... I read the article thinking, "these guys have no R&D".
It’s relatively rare for an SWE to create $20M/yr in value every year. It’s quite common for one to make more than $200K in salary, with total cost being higher.