Cofounder management
aaronkharris.com
aaronkharris.com
Part of the reason why management is so tough is that you can't always solve problems by simply working more. When it comes to team dynamics, a lot depends on catching problems in the moment and communicating clearly the first time. You can't just brute-force your way through problems like you can in most other areas. It takes intuition and understanding that is innate to a few folks and earned through experience by everybody else.
Think about this situation from the article: "We did, however, realize (a bit later than we should have) that disappearing from a tiny office too frequently during the day was a bad idea and hurt morale for the rest of the company." There was no way for them to fix this by working harder, they had to find an intuitive sense for how much time away from the office was too much.
Managing people is a fundamental skill for founders and one of the areas where intense effort often doesn't make a difference at all.
You absolutely can brute force with management. You can always pay people more, or give up some of your equity to someone who will work harder.
> "We did, however, realize (a bit later than we should have) that disappearing from a tiny office too frequently during the day was a bad idea and hurt morale for the rest of the company." There was no way for them to fix this by working harder.
Being present longer and taking fewer breaks is superficially working harder. More abstractly, you can work harder until you make redundant people who complain about coffee breaks, if you so choose.
That's not remotely 'brute forcing management'. That's just giving people different financial incentives. If you had a management problem before handing over cash/equity, you're still going to have one after.
Offering more money/equity will allow you to pick from a bigger pool of possible employees. If you know what you're doing, you can use that to hire better performing people. It's really hard to keep good people, though, because they can generally find another high-paying job when they get fed up with you.
I can think of three situations where a company can survive bad management:
-Companies that are growing ridiculously fast can keep great employees, at least as long as the growth keeps going. If everything else is going great, employees can overlook a manager who doesn't know what he's doing. That means everything is great--pay and benefits, opportunities for advancement, ability to have an impact, enjoyable coworkers, great location, etc. Happily for startups, this can give you breathing room to figure out how to be a good manager. The growth can't last forever, though. When it slows, the best performers tend to leave first since they're the most confident in their ability to find a similar position elsewhere.
-Companies that are the only game in town can keep great employees. This is sort of the inverse of the last one. If there are no other good opportunities, either because of geographic, economic, or political issues, employees will stay rather than being unemployed. If the economy gets better or the employee decides to move, the company is out of luck. Plus, the limited pool tends to work both ways--fewer good people look for jobs in these situations.
-Companies that can offer lottery-level payouts and craps-level odds. When I was in college in the mid-90's, Microsoft seemed to have their choice of any college grad in the western U.S. The reason was simple: there was a pretty good chance you could work there for three years and come out a millionaire. This obviously isn't a model that very many companies can follow, but lot of startups will try to make similar promises. (I'm not saying that Microsoft was poorly managed in the 90's, it's just an example.)
>> Being present longer and taking fewer breaks is superficially working harder. More abstractly, you can work harder until you make redundant people who complain about coffee breaks, if you so choose.
It appeared to me that they were heading off site to work out issues between founders, not because they were taking breaks. Whenever the bosses disappear together, I think smart employees will assume that something is up.
Hmmm, with personal experience, most people are not ever trained to do this. I'd say the majority are content to let things fester away, sometimes literally. Not that it is necessarily a bad thing, in most people's lives, things pass and they are the same, maybe a little poorer and wiser.
"...why management is so tough is that you can't always solve problems by simply working more." Yes, you can work your way through management. In fact, I'd say thats the best kind of management: leadership. Look at good leadership role models: Drill Sergeants. They march every step of the way and set the bar for their recruits. Yes, there are MANY differences, but as far as a role model for managing, the military has a lot to look at, and from Major on down, they live and breathe the working management style.
"hey had to find an intuitive sense for how much time away from the office was too much" Or, just talk to the folks and see what was up. Any time not spent in front of the people trading their time for your money is not good. They need to know why, almost reflexively, why the boss is out playing golf with clients and drinking at 2pm. It's not a matter of not working, its a matter of communication, which is work.
Not to say that you are not correct a lot of the time though. Management is a skill just as any other, and it takes a lot of mistakes and time to learn it. Though the MBA is reviled almost in the Valley, it does give an initial survey of how to deal with these issues, if used as it is intended.
This fellow talks about it too -> http://www.marshallgoldsmithlibrary.com/cim/What-Got-You-Her...
Boy is that scary.
You kind of have to top from bottom sometimes.
This might be true if you're talking about a startup run by a bunch of 20-somethings with no experience. These are certainly en vogue in Silicon Valley today, but hardly represent all startups.
> Cofounders often think they don't need management because they're all on the same team, working towards the same goals.
This is a sign of an inexperienced, naive founder. No entrepreneur worth teaming up with believes management is unnecessary.
> Startups are high pressure, and pressure makes people make bad decisions and lose their tempers.
Notwithstanding the fact that if your startup is a pressure cooker, you're doing it wrong, it's dangerous to believe that all people react the same way to pressure and stress. Pressure and stress lead some people to anger and poor decision making. Start a company with these people at your own risk.
> Deciding to start a company from scratch with the goal of building a billion dollar business takes ego.
Most successful businesses aren't started by people who are focused on building a billion-dollar company. If that's your overriding goal, clashing egos will hardly be your biggest problem.
Incidentally, while it obviously wasn't the intent, this post demonstrates some of the advantages of founding a company solo. It worked for Sam Walton, Ralph Lauren, Richard Branson, Sara Blakely, Jeff Bezos, Pierre Omidyar, Michael Dell, Ross Perot and countless others.
Investors like YC don't look on solo founders favorably and have helped create a narrative that has deterred some entrepreneurs from taking this path (and created the inane "seeking co-founder" environment), but entrepreneurs should understand that investors have motives for wanting multiple founders that are not necessarily aligned with their interests.
For seed stage investors particularly, multiple founders is a derisking mechanism. For instance, there are a lot of smart, talented folks out there, but it's still hard to find exceptional founders capable of competently wearing multiple hats. On the flip side, hiring exceptional employees is expensive. A company with just $120,000 in funding can't hire a good developer, product manager and sales or bizdev person. This creates significant risks for seed stage investors. The solution: seek companies with multiple founders who split key roles. Since founders at this stage essentially work for ramen and equity, having multiple founders is like a cheap insurance policy for resource risk.
a) worked in a professional setting (e.g. a large corporation) b) managed other people c) been married d) been alive since before 1980
At 15, I was living in a small village in Chile, without parents. There were 2 English speakers in this town, and we learned to work together to learn a new language, adopt a new culture, reconcile differences, and more.
Those experiences have shaped my outlook on everything from relationship management to problem solving to effective communications.
IMHO, a great way to become an effective entrepreneur is to immerse yourself in high stress, difficult situations that require on-the-fly problem solving over and over again.
Your marriage is more important to your long-term success than your start-up is, too.
A person is simply the culmination of ones experiences, training and beliefs. For some, it takes 40 years to build those things and for others it takes 20 years.
Although age and maturity usually correlate directly, it's not always true. We've all met people in their 40s that act like they're 18, and 18 (ok, maybe 25) year olds that act like they're 40.
Disclaimer: I'm in my 20s
The older you get the more your perception of time changes. I think this is part of the reason that there are so few 20-something leaders of huge companies. Partly it takes time to prove yourself to enough people to get a shot. Partly because it takes a long time to be patient enough to where you can be effective at the job.
I think I'm definitely not the same person now as I was at 24, or even 29. The thing is, I wasn't the same person at 29 as I was at 24 either, and I doubt I'll be the same person at 40. In other words, the process of change and growth doesn't stop - ever. Probably that's the biggest lesson I learned in my 30s.
I think the biggest mistake many 30 and 40-somethings make is to fit everything into an overarching narrative of growth and maturation. "I was young and foolish then, now I'm older and wiser." Because the narrative doesn't actually stop - we are still young and foolish, hopefully - and trying to fit yourself to it just ensures that you remain stagnant at wherever you were at 30. Instead of a narrative of growth and experience, it's really one of adaptation, of recognizing progressively more subtle distinctions in the environment and changing yourself in response to them. And in that narrative, it makes sense to listen to everybody, even to young people, so you can pick out the parts of their experience that are new and unfamiliar to you.
Story time: My grandfather was a soft-spoken old cowboy, but you should have seen him charm and intimidate cattle buyers. At 70 years old, he could hold his own with the slick-talking young buyers because he had gone through that same negotiation 100 times and there was no trick they could pull that he hadn't seen.
Disclaimer: I'm 39.
Yes, it goes against what PG preaches, but you don't downvote people that have intelligent well thought out comment just because it runs against the zeitgeist of SV.
In addition, an important piece of advice on marriage that almost certainly applies to cofounders as well is not to contradict your partner or have disagreements in public.
It gets weird and it gets awkward! Where I'm at, there's clearly a 'his team' and 'her team'.
Unfortunately, I'm not in Texas and just refinanced my house, so won't be moving anytime soon.
Learning to communicate (inc. listening) is a valuable skill that is often neglected.
So I agree that open and honest communication is super important. I just wanted to note that difficulties in communication may happen even with the best intentions.
Even when there are open/honest comms, there's still the additional effort needed to understand what's being said (which I think is what you're referring to). To reach that level, you must first have been able to listen. Not every decision can be made using hard facts but it should be possible to explore the drivers behind viewpoints - assuming of course, that you trust the people you're discussing with. Taken to an extreme, it's almost like a form of counselling.
The challenge is commonly in the implementation which is difficult - and that it's not actually as much of a "universal truth" as you might expect.
Mostly, when people complain about communication it's because there are challenges and they feel that those are not being addressed properly. In my experience the 'implementation' issue is that people experience situations very differently - that's why people feel that no-one is listening - it's literally because the two sides don't manage to explore/find a common ground so then can't really work to solutions. For an obvious extreme, consider how the Founder of something like Google experiences their company, versus a newly-minted developer. As a manager you'll probably spend a life-time trying to learn the nuances of understanding how other people are experiencing situations.
Management has many aspects, some if it is to "make the group productive", but some of it is to "make the organisation successful". Those two are not always the same, and there can be conflict. What's good for the company and what's good for the individual employee are not always the same. Imagine if your start-up is about to run out of money, and is pitching for a big deal: as a 'manager' would you be comfortable telling everyone that if we don't win this job then we won't be making payroll in two months? On the one hand, people will say that they want to know, on the other you may watch everyone immediately send out their CV's ... the risk/benefit is not always straightforward.
Open communication isn't just about checking in frequently, and talking doesn't guarantee that each person will feel listened to.
Communication is much more than just setting aside time to talk.
I would have much preferred if the author gave specific strategies for listening and being more effective at communication rather than high level generic advice.
My advice for co-founders that are serious about being better at communication: hire a marriage and/or relationship counselor to help you with your communication.