If nothing else, this interview shows that massive venture funding and hiring bonanzas are not the only way to build a successful company. I feel like that message gets lost too often in the startup sphere.
No but it's much harder to compete when your competitors are fueled by nearly unlimited VC money. They can pay better compensation, hire more people, have lower prices and so on.
Yeah 20 years ago shortly after .com blowup. Try that today and it will be more difficult for many reasons, namely there now exist VCs that will look to fund your competitors. There would be no Jira. There would be some better product made by amazon that everyone is using.
These are noteworthy articles because of how rare it is - akin to articles of Silicon Valley titans that didn't complete college. We point to their experience as novelty, not as practical advice to ourselves or others.
The issue here is that we have the evaluate the impact of boiling that ocean. Is it a robust, punt of an appropriate learning? Should we reach out and leverage that decision to ensure we're giving 110% before we sent it over the wall? Best practice, the bleeding edge of best practice, is to empower employees. There are far too many moving parts to avoid the low-hanging fruit. One of our core competencies is leveraging out of pocket individuals to avoid jumping the shark, because as we all know, when it's time to make hay, make hay. Just some blue sky thinking from our last thought shower is to drill down into our core values before sending the key takeaways over to our tiger team. That way, the S.W.A.T. team can make sure we're not moving the goalposts. What we really need is the bandwidth to gain traction on this aha moment ensuring this becomes a game changer, not just short term. We need to bring to the table any mission critical silver bullets, while keeping our stakeholders in the loop. In the end, we should consider trimming the fat, hard stop.
I hate business lingo, and it's everywhere. Constant.
I have many coworkers with English as their next languages. I feel terrible for them when they use phrases like these, innocently assuming they're becoming more sophisticated in their usage of English.
"Findings" can sometimes be more appropriate as well if the context is the result of research. I agree with you that "learnings" isn't ever the best word to use, but its replacement can vary.
you have to fight forest fires when you see the camper dropping the butt. Smokey says, hit 'em hard at birth, they don't re-offend within reaching distance.
Can we watch the feedback course Wade teaches? This is an important topic that I’ve found varies greatly from manager to manager and would appreciate a framework.
Zapier. Brilliant when it started and good for small integrations today. I say that as a heavy user. Not brilliant and torturous with complex integrations due to the linear zap creation UI in my view. Doesn't handle failed connections well in my opinion. Integromat's object UI is much easier to work with (but also far from perfect).
These types of blog posts/articles always make me curious:
How were these people able to transition from founders of a tiny company to successfully running and managing large (people or revenue) companies? Many of them had never done this before so how did they figure out what to do and how to do it?
I often think of Zuckerberg or the Collison brothers as examples.
They hadn't done anything like this before so how did it work out for them?
- Is it survivor bias?
- Were the ideas and the execution so good at the beginning that once the company was up and running it didn't matter if they made mistakes?
- Did they have excellent advisors/mentors? If so, how did they know who to listen to? (I think of the scene in The Social Network where Justin Timberlake advises Jesse Eisenberg to go in wearing pyjamas to a VC meeting)
- First mover advantage? (not the case for FB or Stripe as far as I can tell)
In it, Andrew Mason talks about how Groupon "followed the data" into offering more and more deals to the point that they imploded the company. He, like Zuck and the Collisons, had never done this before and seemed intelligent and was acting in good faith. Yet things went south for him.
Once you have even a small amount (say $500k) of perceived success you find yourself meeting "helpers" constantly, people who want to mentor you, people who want to be your friend, and magically all these people want something from you.
As your perceived worth goes up you start meeting more "interesting" people who want to help more, and of course they ultimately want something more from you.
So you eventually have a big network through this process, and at a certain level its not even about trading favors, but trading the potential for a favor. And with this support group you can answer almost any question, market trends, merger opportunities, fund raising access, its all there for you.
As someone who has also successfully done this, I think it is a matter of experience. You make mistakes and learn from them. Lots of BSers get hired into executive positions, it's best to simply do it and learn yourself along the way.
Critically thinking and not being afraid of getting it wrong.
1. You can't move from a small company to running a large company without being able to identify (eventually) where it works in one but not the other, so you must think critically.
2. Not being afraid to get it wrong also means not shying away from an admission that you need to improve and then doing so.
I think where a lot of people get it wrong is more static thinking. Applying what worked for you at the small company to the large and expecting it to work.
---
As an aside, I see this all the time, it's not just a founder problem. I'm of the opinion that the reason agile mostly doesn't work is because well-meaning people don't actually know what good software dev looks like and reach out to prescriptions such as scrum. They form the belief that's the right way to do it and hang onto it, when in actuality if they'd make a few non-agile adjustments they may find themselves with a lot more success.
>How were these people able to transition from founders of a tiny company to successfully running and managing large (people or revenue) companies? Many of them had never done this before so how did they figure out what to do and how to do it?
lots of mentorship from investors and others with experience. Even the most famous young founders had a veteran executive running a lot of things behind the scenes. Steve Jobs had Mike Markkula, Eric Schmidt was running the show at Google, Facebook had Thiel and Sean Parker. This applies to pretty much every one of these companies
most of the startup myths about these companies are embellished because having a young prodigy founder is good for marketing. Of course some are never able to make the jump and get replaced by the board
My impression is these people are great learners and upgrade themselves to do what's required of them to grow the company - most importantly how to hire, empower and motivate talented people. We're (HNers I guess; assuming dev-focused mentality) bound to think it means reading the manual and cracking complex problems, but it's more towards prioritizing, figuring out who knows what and how to manage people.
I'm not an investor so this is all anecdata from going through YC and having a close friend get to 100Ms in funding. My friend has obv hired an amazing exec team, but like thousands of things, he learned how to do it by reading, asking for advice and asking for help. Early stage he figured out how to get a 'technical cofounder' - literally got on the phone with 100 engineers (got me to screen like 3-5 to get a gist of what I was looking for). Of course, I was only just one source: for everything he had to figure out/study he got input from many sources.
They learn, they figure out what's important enough for them to put their time/attention, they delegate to talented people. I guess the quote 'A players hire A players and B players hire C players' applies too. They can tell who's an A player by setting the bar high enough to their standard.
I think there wont be a straight answer to this question - people who figure it out make huge companies and a lot of money as a reward for cracking this puzzle. Re:groupon then on top of that you have a couple of dice rolling and if your number doesn't hit you're out.
Only a partial answer to your question (there's plenty of good ones), but it reminds me of the time I reached out to the CTO of a small startup looking to hire a director of data science.
I've lead a few teams before and have a decade+ plus of experience at a range of companies so I had a pretty reasonable idea about what's out there, and I figured it was a small startup so I might be a good fit.
I got a pretty blunt response that they were looking for someone that had managed teams for over 5 years, preferably at a single org. Not unreasonable but when I looked at the CTO's linked in they had only ever managed their current startup and only for 3 years at the time of the discussion.
I just found it curious that they felt the job of CTO could be learned pretty much as you go, but anyone without their target experience wasn't even worth talking to.
It looks like they had major layoffs a year ago, and aren't making much of a dent in their space so it's quite possible that "survivorship bias" is a big part of it as well.
It makes sense in another light though. You should try to hire people that will bolster your weak areas. In this case a lack of experience managing larger teams.
To be fair, sometimes it's not unreasonable. There is a huge difference between being in an often tiny team smashing out code to get a product out the door and leading multiple teams specialising in multiple different disciplines.
There's also a huge difference between being able to architect a piece of software and being able to work out a 5 year technology roadmap, manage budgets, analyse the competitive landscape, manage multiple stakeholders etc...
For some people that difference is the difference between having an enjoyable job and absolutely hating going to work...
Plus you have to luckout on developing a product that the existing capitalists won't just extinguish. So much of success is having the right product at the right time. The fact that facebook got big was partially because there was no major media social network that could buy politicians and advertising and outright buy out competitors before they've ever gotten too large to be a threat. Now there is, facebook assumed that role by growing to that size having no solid competitors, and that opportunity for new mark zuckerbergs making facebooks is probably closed off.
If a new EV company appeared today, founded by some rag tag college grads versus someone who was already rich, what are the odds it gets legs and runs? I bet zero. I bet it gets bought out by an existing competitor that can afford to navigate all the byzantine regulations they themselves penned to defend their niche in this industry. That's even the working model many startup founders have, to create just enough of a coherent product to get bought out by a larger fish and not have to deal with maintaining or expanding that product.
Having seen this up close, it's mainly a combination of a strong growth mentality and willingness to adapt, plus survivorship bias.
For the former, a lot of company scaling isn't really that hard - it's hard because it's busy, varied, and relentless, but it isn't like quantum physics where most people just can't neurologically handle it. You also have to do it if you want to keep your job so obviously there's strong incentive to learn.
Basically if you're willing to learn and adapt (often requires many humbling or embarrassing moments), you just figure it out.
""How were these people able to transition from founders of a tiny company to successfully running and managing large (people or revenue) companies? Many of them had never done this before so how did they figure out what to do and how to do it?"
Obviously they have to be smart but I think it's a lot about ambition to be willing to do what it takes. Most people simply don't have the drive to keep pushing forward once they have reached a certain level of wealth.
I think your second guess is the closest - but, I'd push you a bit further: Very few single mistakes are so big that that single mistake will doom a company, especially a company that's seeing a bunch of success and growth.
In the Groupon case, I pretty quickly see two key mistakes:
* not being willing to make a hard decision ("following the data" on short term metrics for something he said he knew didn't feel right as a long term decision)
* not being able to keep an eye on the long-term and change course when needed. He frames this as "it happened too fast" but also makes it sound like this wasn't one decision, but a whole series of them.
These are both classic new-leader mistakes, so maybe the version of Groupon that hadn't imploded in a parallel universe still made them but also learned from them just soon enough to prevent disaster.
Mistakes are inevitable, how you respond to them matters just as much.
Wade gave a memorable talk during our YC batch. When asked how he ran Zapier remotely, which was unusual at the time, he said something along the lines of "When I want to talk with the team, I open Slack. When I want to file a support ticket, I open Zendesk."
Ironically, we were the last in-person batch that was cut short by COVID, so his comments turned out to be quite helpful.
Zapier's impact in the broader ecosystem isn't unlike AWS' in the sense that it has enabled so many orgs to build faster without the hassle (connectors, APIs, event processing, ...). I wonder how many startups got where they are now thanks to good old Zapier-based workflows built by sales ops & marketing teams keen/forced to bypass eng :)
Curious, how does hn community use Zapier? I tried it couple of times, but it's tough to build anything sophisticated there than basic trigger-based scenarios
Imo, integromat (make.com) or n8n are way more powerful.
As a no code but very technical person zapier is incredible. I’ve posted about it before but in the adtech world a lot of people are technical but don’t code and automate lots of tasks/integrations/alerts/ etc with zapier.
Yeah, like, who's gonna seriously follow those? One in ten? PMs and POs?
I honestly think that in all the companies I've been the all hands should've been a 5 minute read email, rather than yet another meeting that is splitting my day.
Many people I know use those meetings to workout or take care of chores. You don't have to sit there and be mad your time is being wasted, go ahead and make use of it if your manager is leaving you idle.
Sure but still, as I'm doing work that requires concentration splitting my morning or afternoon is something I can't fully make up by doing side activities.
Adding a new app to their platform. As that app gets more popular in general, if Zapier has it, there is a higher proportion of individuals that want to get data into / out of that app. So along comes Zapier.
I imagine they're referring to the fad around 2012 that a lot of people in the startup space fell into: startup people with no experience building and running teams suddenly thinking that they are part of a new transformational movement of flat self-organizing.. organizations. Things were never going to be the same again, a complete revolution in human organization. Except a few years later everybody who tried it rolled things back and realized there was a reason for hierarchy to have existed for thousands of years.
It turns out that the reason that works for Valve is because Valve is sitting on a money printer and they're successful despite the free-for-all nature of the org, not because of it.
It's reminiscent of people cargo-culting the Google dev interview, thinking there's a causal relationship there between Google being successful and their interviewing practices.
I'm guessing the OP is implying that Zapier fell for that fad and should be talking about their experience with it.
I still dislike "learnings" - even if though is attested in the 14th century and I'm perfectly happy with "teachings." I greatly prefer "lessons" or even "lessons learned" (or "lessons learnt" if you're outside of the US.)
There's a popular misconception on HN that YC is all about VC funding.
I used to think this too, before doing YC and realising YC emphasise funding as a tool, not as a goal. You raise as much as you need to achieve your goals.
Zapier really embody that lesson writ large - they didn't take additional funding because they didn't need to. I hope their success emphasises that lesson.
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[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadI hate business lingo, and it's everywhere. Constant.
At least, thats the lesson I teach.
How were these people able to transition from founders of a tiny company to successfully running and managing large (people or revenue) companies? Many of them had never done this before so how did they figure out what to do and how to do it?
I often think of Zuckerberg or the Collison brothers as examples.
They hadn't done anything like this before so how did it work out for them?
- Is it survivor bias?
- Were the ideas and the execution so good at the beginning that once the company was up and running it didn't matter if they made mistakes?
- Did they have excellent advisors/mentors? If so, how did they know who to listen to? (I think of the scene in The Social Network where Justin Timberlake advises Jesse Eisenberg to go in wearing pyjamas to a VC meeting)
- First mover advantage? (not the case for FB or Stripe as far as I can tell)
All of the above comes from reading this article: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/andrew-mason-on-grou...
In it, Andrew Mason talks about how Groupon "followed the data" into offering more and more deals to the point that they imploded the company. He, like Zuck and the Collisons, had never done this before and seemed intelligent and was acting in good faith. Yet things went south for him.
Genuinely curious to hear people's responses.
As your perceived worth goes up you start meeting more "interesting" people who want to help more, and of course they ultimately want something more from you.
So you eventually have a big network through this process, and at a certain level its not even about trading favors, but trading the potential for a favor. And with this support group you can answer almost any question, market trends, merger opportunities, fund raising access, its all there for you.
1. You can't move from a small company to running a large company without being able to identify (eventually) where it works in one but not the other, so you must think critically.
2. Not being afraid to get it wrong also means not shying away from an admission that you need to improve and then doing so.
I think where a lot of people get it wrong is more static thinking. Applying what worked for you at the small company to the large and expecting it to work.
---
As an aside, I see this all the time, it's not just a founder problem. I'm of the opinion that the reason agile mostly doesn't work is because well-meaning people don't actually know what good software dev looks like and reach out to prescriptions such as scrum. They form the belief that's the right way to do it and hang onto it, when in actuality if they'd make a few non-agile adjustments they may find themselves with a lot more success.
lots of mentorship from investors and others with experience. Even the most famous young founders had a veteran executive running a lot of things behind the scenes. Steve Jobs had Mike Markkula, Eric Schmidt was running the show at Google, Facebook had Thiel and Sean Parker. This applies to pretty much every one of these companies
most of the startup myths about these companies are embellished because having a young prodigy founder is good for marketing. Of course some are never able to make the jump and get replaced by the board
Was he really? I always thought he was more of a coach to the founders.
I'm not an investor so this is all anecdata from going through YC and having a close friend get to 100Ms in funding. My friend has obv hired an amazing exec team, but like thousands of things, he learned how to do it by reading, asking for advice and asking for help. Early stage he figured out how to get a 'technical cofounder' - literally got on the phone with 100 engineers (got me to screen like 3-5 to get a gist of what I was looking for). Of course, I was only just one source: for everything he had to figure out/study he got input from many sources.
They learn, they figure out what's important enough for them to put their time/attention, they delegate to talented people. I guess the quote 'A players hire A players and B players hire C players' applies too. They can tell who's an A player by setting the bar high enough to their standard.
I think there wont be a straight answer to this question - people who figure it out make huge companies and a lot of money as a reward for cracking this puzzle. Re:groupon then on top of that you have a couple of dice rolling and if your number doesn't hit you're out.
I've lead a few teams before and have a decade+ plus of experience at a range of companies so I had a pretty reasonable idea about what's out there, and I figured it was a small startup so I might be a good fit.
I got a pretty blunt response that they were looking for someone that had managed teams for over 5 years, preferably at a single org. Not unreasonable but when I looked at the CTO's linked in they had only ever managed their current startup and only for 3 years at the time of the discussion.
I just found it curious that they felt the job of CTO could be learned pretty much as you go, but anyone without their target experience wasn't even worth talking to.
It looks like they had major layoffs a year ago, and aren't making much of a dent in their space so it's quite possible that "survivorship bias" is a big part of it as well.
My impression has always been that there's an assumption the CEO can grow, but the technical person can't.
This is interesting. Do others have the same experience? (I don't have a large enough sample to tell.)
There's also a huge difference between being able to architect a piece of software and being able to work out a 5 year technology roadmap, manage budgets, analyse the competitive landscape, manage multiple stakeholders etc...
For some people that difference is the difference between having an enjoyable job and absolutely hating going to work...
If a new EV company appeared today, founded by some rag tag college grads versus someone who was already rich, what are the odds it gets legs and runs? I bet zero. I bet it gets bought out by an existing competitor that can afford to navigate all the byzantine regulations they themselves penned to defend their niche in this industry. That's even the working model many startup founders have, to create just enough of a coherent product to get bought out by a larger fish and not have to deal with maintaining or expanding that product.
For the former, a lot of company scaling isn't really that hard - it's hard because it's busy, varied, and relentless, but it isn't like quantum physics where most people just can't neurologically handle it. You also have to do it if you want to keep your job so obviously there's strong incentive to learn.
Basically if you're willing to learn and adapt (often requires many humbling or embarrassing moments), you just figure it out.
Obviously they have to be smart but I think it's a lot about ambition to be willing to do what it takes. Most people simply don't have the drive to keep pushing forward once they have reached a certain level of wealth.
In the Groupon case, I pretty quickly see two key mistakes:
* not being willing to make a hard decision ("following the data" on short term metrics for something he said he knew didn't feel right as a long term decision)
* not being able to keep an eye on the long-term and change course when needed. He frames this as "it happened too fast" but also makes it sound like this wasn't one decision, but a whole series of them.
These are both classic new-leader mistakes, so maybe the version of Groupon that hadn't imploded in a parallel universe still made them but also learned from them just soon enough to prevent disaster.
Mistakes are inevitable, how you respond to them matters just as much.
Ironically, we were the last in-person batch that was cut short by COVID, so his comments turned out to be quite helpful.
Kudos to the team; What a success this is!
I honestly think that in all the companies I've been the all hands should've been a 5 minute read email, rather than yet another meeting that is splitting my day.
what exactly is Zapiers network effect?
It turns out that the reason that works for Valve is because Valve is sitting on a money printer and they're successful despite the free-for-all nature of the org, not because of it.
It's reminiscent of people cargo-culting the Google dev interview, thinking there's a causal relationship there between Google being successful and their interviewing practices.
I'm guessing the OP is implying that Zapier fell for that fad and should be talking about their experience with it.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/learnings
I used to think this too, before doing YC and realising YC emphasise funding as a tool, not as a goal. You raise as much as you need to achieve your goals.
Zapier really embody that lesson writ large - they didn't take additional funding because they didn't need to. I hope their success emphasises that lesson.