Comment by bradfordarner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bradfordarner | Hacker News Reader

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Wow! The quantity of bad advice in these comments is shocking, if not down right disturbing.

If Intel, GE, or Mircosoft hired a consultant to advise them on the right move, the vast majority of people on HN would scream bloody-murder and speak about it as a perfect example of big-business and its stupidity. What hypocrisy!

Ben, the reality is that you clearly have moved past Steve Blank's description of a start-up; you have found a working business model. Now, the challenge is to find out if that business model is something that can last for 5 years or 50. No one on this board has run a successful company for 50 years. Thus, everyone, definitely including myself, is well out of their league.

However, since entering the old school world of finance, I have realized that there are many men and women who are twice our age who would be able to give you great advice. You need adult supervision and that is OK. You don't know how to hire an executive (i.e. adult supervision). Thus, you should first find someone who can help you find adult supervision. A great place to start is in the 'boring' industries: finance and manufacturing. Find a wise advisor who can help you find an executive to lead.

You are no longer a start-up. Running a post-start-up company like a start-up will kill it as quickly as running a start-up like a Fortune 500.

I think that your advice is itself pretty bad advice.

It is theoretically possible to hire someone like what you describe, but it seems vanishingly unlikely and much more likely to cause damage.

As many others have pointed out, each business is unique, and the fact that the OP has reached the level of success they've reached is proof that they have a fairly solid management team already. Most likely, they are falling prey to impostor's syndrome - "one of these days someone will discover I'm a fraud and don't deserve all this success".

The cure for that is not to give in to the impostor's syndrome, but to reject it by observing the simple evidence that someone who builds a $10m business in 2 years is clearly very talented and skilled.

Ultimately, if the OP doesn't want to run this business anymore, they could just sell it. But if they want to keep running it, there's no way to abdicate to some "adult supervision" that will magically make all the problems go away. It will just replace the problems with a different set of problems, specific to the new hire.

A better approach if the OP wants to keep running this company is to build some good relationships with mentors who can help the OP grow into the role.

I disagree. Hiring a executive from one of those areas won't give OP what he needs. It will give him someone with a lot of experience in those disciplines and a lot of life experience, but no direct experience in what he needs. I know, my company did that and the person helped with the day-to-day management of things that we didn't know about, but that's really all. It also created a lot of friction because the person didn't understand our business at all, and really didn't want to either. He was near 60 and had left that "learning new things" phase of life.

I'm in the "the OP needs a mentor" camp. His team is clearly doing a lot right and a mentor can give them the confidence to do the rest of it right.

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