Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Treat customer support as a product.
Don't accept the excuse of complexity.
The team you build is the company you build.
The next thing you do is allocate resources.
You should have a 1-on-1 roughly every 2 weeks.
The real thing you do is you ask a lot of questions.
The job of an editor is to ensure a consistent voice.
Your goal over time is to use less red ink every day.
Delegate completely. Let people make mistakes and learn.
You really need to spend a lot of your time focussing people.
Build a company that idiots could run because eventually they will.
Possibly the most important thing you do is actually edit the team.
The construct of a dashboard, first of all should be drafted by the founder.
I'd actually argue forging a company is far more harder than forging a product
If the Martians took over eBay it would take 6 months for the world to notice.
You want to start with the objective of everything should feel exactly the same.
Basically this is what you want - a high performance machine that idiots can run.
The people that work with you should generally come up with their own initiatives.
I think you must have your own office. I don't believe ever in shared office spaces.
The agenda should be crafted by the employee who reports to the manager not the manager.
Force yourself to simplify every initiative, every product, every marketing, everything you do.
The way you scale that is you create notes for every meeting and send it to the entire company.
You need to simplify the value proposition in the company's metrics for success on a whiteboard.
I walk into a company office and I can tell often whether I'm gonna invest, as soon as I walk in.
The office environment that people work in everyday dictates the culture that you are going to be in.
You kinda want to look for the anomalies. You don't actually want to look for the expected behaviour.
The key metric of whether you've succeeded is what fraction of your employees use that dashboard everyday.
It's easy to shortcut when you get busy explaining the why's of the world, but it's very important to try.
The most important job of an editor is simplify, simplify simplify, and that usually means omitting things.
The companies I have traditionally seen do best over the long term had lead investors for their seed rounds
The office environment that people live in and work in, dictates your culture and how people make decisions.
Where there are low consequences and you have very low confidence in your own opinion, you should absolutely delegate.
Any executive, any CEO should not have 1 management style. Your management style needs to be dictated by your employee.
Usually when you hire more engineers, you actually don't get that much more done, you actually sometimes get less done.
Ultimately, I don't believe that you can build a company without a lot of effort, and that you need to lead by example.
So that's your job too, to clarify and simplify for everybody on your team. The more you simplify the better people will perform.
Create tools that enable people to make decisions at the same level, ideally, of fidelity that that you would make them yourself.
As the company scales, everybody is not going to get invited to every single meeting, but they're gonna want to go to every meeting.
Some people can't learn to play the guitar by reading a book. You have to actually try to manage a bit and you won't do well at first.
What you actually want to do with every single employee, every single day is expand the scope of their responsibilities until it breaks.
Most people would agree that the details matter when it faces the user. But where the real debate is on things that don't face the user.
Transparency people talk a lot about, it's a goal everybody ascribes to but when push comes to shove, very few people actually adhere to it.
You generally know when someone asks you to do something- am I more writing, or am I more editing? The editor is the best metaphor for your job.
It's never a metric, it's where the person is going or not. Metrics are used to make things work better, but don't necessarily make a business better.
You are not going to do most of the work. You shouldn't be doing most of the work... and the way you get out of doing most of the work, is you delegate.
Building a company is basically taking all the irrational people you know... Putting them in one building and then living with them 12 hrs a day at least.
I don't believe ever in shared office spaces. Peter talks a little bit about this, every good startup is a cult. It's very hard to create a cult if you're sharing space with people.
At first when you start a company, everything's gonna feel like a mess and it really should. It should feel like everyday there's a new problem, and what you're doing is fundamentally triaging.
Being a venture capitalist to me is like being more of a psychologist. So if you come to my office we have two chairs with a table in the middle. And we sit down and it's like, Tell me your problems.
When you start a company everything is going to feel like a mess. And it really should. If you have too much process, too much predictability, you are probably not innovating fast enough and creatively enough.