The quote that stood out to me from that transcript was (at 42:38):
"And that's mainly my overarching philosophy that I try to install at Founders is there is no such thing as like this part of the organization that doesn't get valued and measured and tied to core strategy.If so we shouldn't be doing it. If that's true, you shouldn't be doing it because there's other things to do with your resource expansion.
So you need to fuse everything together to be holistic. And that's, you know, that was probably the art of my role at PayPal is tying pieces that were probably a little bit too loosely affiliated with Peter's top level goals and making them incredibly tightly aligned."
It's funny how blindingly obvious these things sound, until you drop into an actual company and find entire teams and departments who are so far off in the weeds that everyone has forgotten why or how their work is important for the company's success.
It's a particularly difficult growing pain for leaders who go too deep into delegating everything. Delegation is important for scaling, but delegating something doesn't mean it's completely hands-off. Leaders still need to deep dive into teams every once in a while and make sure everyone understands what the goals are and what's being done to reach those goals.
I wonder if, these days, the truly "contrarian" thing for a VC to do is to NOT be contrarian.
After all so many top investors made their name going against the grain that now "going against the grain" in some superficial way is the norm, and the radical and bold thing might be to buy conventional wisdom.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 22.4 ms ] thread"And that's mainly my overarching philosophy that I try to install at Founders is there is no such thing as like this part of the organization that doesn't get valued and measured and tied to core strategy.If so we shouldn't be doing it. If that's true, you shouldn't be doing it because there's other things to do with your resource expansion.
So you need to fuse everything together to be holistic. And that's, you know, that was probably the art of my role at PayPal is tying pieces that were probably a little bit too loosely affiliated with Peter's top level goals and making them incredibly tightly aligned."
It's a particularly difficult growing pain for leaders who go too deep into delegating everything. Delegation is important for scaling, but delegating something doesn't mean it's completely hands-off. Leaders still need to deep dive into teams every once in a while and make sure everyone understands what the goals are and what's being done to reach those goals.
After all so many top investors made their name going against the grain that now "going against the grain" in some superficial way is the norm, and the radical and bold thing might be to buy conventional wisdom.