"He didn't meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn't bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual, programmer."
And the article details how those two were intimately linked.
A leader has to have technical competency, at least on a general level, on the products their teams develop. How else could they make informed decisions? Advisors can only help so much, the persons who ultimately make the big decisions have to understand what's going on. Sadly, these big companies are less about technology and useful products and more about sales and marketing.
A sad fact of life is that sales and marketing are what distinguish successful products from flops. Regardless of the quality of your product, if users don't know your product exists, understand how it can solve their problem and have a efficient mechanism to adopt it, your product will die.
I wonder what would be a good big company CEO that is close to general purpose as possible. (I know there are these legacy MBAs that cut costs by treating the company if it was a widget factory, which I know is bad.)
Same thing applies in big companies. Many great leaders start in the factories, or as junior assistants straight out of school.
P&G is one of the better firms at creating a cadre of general managers who start in entry level positions. These are people who learn how to build brands from the bottom. Even still, they seem to botch a CEO promotion here and there.
GE tends to do this pretty well too. You can see it by how highly regarded their "Almost CEO" execs are.
This idea translates to other businesses beyond technology as well. My brother is a vp at a movie theater company and does a fantastic job leading his employees because he has worked every job at the theater, from usher and ticket taker on up through management.
Having that experience gives him a much better rapport with employees because they know he has been in their position, but also helps him make better decisions that affect those employees.
My name is Kevin, and I am one of the cofounders of Dealflicks.com. We help fill in empty seats by targeting showtimes that are much slower. Based on our research about 88% of seats go empty. We launched in July of last year, and we are now in 180 locations across the nation. Which theater does your brother work at? I would love to connect with him.
Product CEOs are intimately familiar with their products including design decisions, code quality etc. This creates an attachment to get a little too involved in implementation details even as the company is growing beyond say 100 people. One way to get a bit detached is to be deeply involved in hiring people and coaching technical leadership. By thinking at a meta-level it is not hard to arrive at some process that can be documented that teams can self-manage well enough for product CEO to let go.
I'd say this is exactly what the article is arguing against. A product CEO is not necessarily going to be any good at hiring people or coaching leadership. The product CEO letting go is often the very worst thing that can happen, since the product CEO is the one who provided the framework that all of the products are succeeding on.
Am I correct that part of the reason you don't "communicate direction" in informal settings like ad hoc conversations is to make sure you've thought everything through? I just imagine talking with someone and suddenly having a cool idea that would necessitate a significant change in direction, and not being able to talk about. So I've suddenly clammed up because I need to think and can't do it out loud, and meanwhile my people might be working on the wrong thing.
Would it be consistent with this article's philosophy to discuss it in that context as "maybe it would be a good idea to..." rather than "this is what we're doing"? I haven't actually run a company myself so there could be all kinds of subtleties I'm clueless about... Actually, the question is not whether there are any but which ones are relevant.
It kind of happens like that. You have to occasionally keep your mouth shut because if you voice every product idea you have, then your staff may think that is what you want them to do. It may just be some idle random concept that comes to mind, but if you say it and find out later that your people have worked on it, you may be sad.
So if you say, wouldn't it be cool if we made (product x) out loud, and it is related to something your company might do, don't be too shocked if someone in your company hears you and then does it. If you weren't serious, and that person has spent 20 hours working hard on it, you will now come to two conclusions. 1. You have wasted their time and your money 2. You now have to disappoint a hard working, dedicated employee. You can't do that too often or they get frustrated and leave.
So in my experience, when you have only ad hoc, verbal only meetings about product, you will get bad results. I have made this error myself in the past. If I want a good result from my staff, I have to give them clear, written direction so that they can follow it and not need to continually check with me.
You may once in a great while get a product you make a profit on, but it is the exception and not the rule. It shouldn't take you so long to write out the new idea that you should try to save time by blurting it out. Simply tell your people what the idea is, and how it fits in with their previous priorities. Toyota uses a sheet of A3 to propose ideas. The constraint helps produce clearer direction. http://a3thinking.com/faq.html
One of the things that sucks about being CEO is that even if you couch your thoughts in a million conditionals, "I think", "What do you all think", etc. etc., folks will inevitable take some or all of what you said as The Law™. Heck, it might've just been a silly idle thought you never thought anyone would take seriously. Someone will take it seriously. You might say, "Don't take this seriously." Someone will still take it seriously.
Here's the thing, though: if you can be misunderstood you will be misunderstood. As those often-microscopic misunderstandings compound, people lose a sense of direction. As a founder you'll be repeating yourself and the core values and mission of the company over and over and over again until you want to throw up. This becomes more true as the company grows. A small company often operates more like a hive mind where there's a huge amount of implicit, shared understanding.
My personal strategy is this. In a normal situation if I have a clear idea of what I think should be done, get the key stakeholders into a room to Solve Problem X. Insist that before they get into the room they think about some ideal ways to solve Problem X. If necessary, constrain the solution space by giving high level priorities. Once in the room, have folks share their thoughts.
As CEO you should grill their ideas as intensely and rigorously as possible. You should have a fuller set of facts than they do (hopefully), which means you should be able to see holes they don't.
Most of the time -- assuming you've hired smart people -- your idea or something close to it is one of the ideas that staff brings up. It might even be an improvement on your idea. If that happens, great! You're done. Nobody needed to know you had the same idea and Jane Doe Staffer gets credit for a good idea.
More often than you'd expect, someone else brings up an idea that simply never occurred to you in the first place. This idea would never have surfaced if you started the conversation with your thoughts.
This is win-win-win. The good idea wins. Jane wins because she was empowered to come up with a good idea and saw it realized, which means she'll be excited to do it again in the future. The team wins because they see you're the kind of person who accepts and integrates good ideas. As Harry Truman said, "It's amazing what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit."
If the idea doesn't come up then you might introduce your own or guide the conversation in a way where folks in the room think of it, e.g., there's some fact you have that nobody else does. This is my strategy for normal situations. In exceptional situations, e.g., there's something incredibly urgent, different rules apply. Your staff will be much more inclined to follow your lead in that situation, though, if they see and understand it as an exception.
But if you walk into a room and bring up your idea first, it sets the tone and inevitably everything will be a variation on whatever you said. Even worse, the folks in the room will take what you said as The Law™ even if you didn't intend it to be that way. As a CEO or founder your words inherently carry more weight than anyone else's.
As a founder, you are an idea, product, execution, sales, or customer service guy. Rarely do you start out good at all of those. You may never have them all. Get good help fast in the areas you fail at.
Founder's fail because they lose (or never really had) empathy for their customers or staff in these areas. If you can't feel what your users/staff feel, you can't properly navigate them out of their pain.
Lots of good advice, but I'll disagree with the bit about insisting on formal documents instead of e-mail - might work for some people but if you're not one of those people, you might end up getting paralyzed by the task of writing formal documents for everything. If e-mail is what works for you, use it. Bill Gates used to give a lot of guidance by e-mail and Linus Torvalds still does.
I believe the reason he is advocating for formal documents is that it's a more effective way to disseminate and reinforce culture, standards, and vision once a company gets larger than a certain size.
There are a few nice features of writing vs. talking in person. First, it makes it less likely two people will take what you said differently. Second, it immediately creates a shared vocabulary. Third, it creates an artifact that can both be revisited and shared with new folks entering the company. Fourth, everyone knows everyone else knows. Even if what you're saying is totally innocuous, if you tell Person A but Person B finds out you told Person A before you can tell Person B yourself (maybe they were out sick that day, whatever), you run the risk of people seeing an "inner circle" and an "outer circle." "Knowing first" can become a kind of very counterproductive gold star.
I think those are more like the reasons he was advocating for writing rather than some obsession about process per se.
I agree, these are good reasons to prefer writing over verbal communication. But you can obtain them by dashing off an e-mail to a mailing list, you don't have to spend hours sweating over how to phrase a formal document.
Let me gently remind everyone that one success or failure is not completely deterministic.
A single business failure or short-term success doesn't say much about someone as a founder. That his/her interest and drive can be made to fit the current market conditions plus still more relatively intangible luck in other areas factor heavily in any end result.
Founders who have successfully built and sold, say at least three companies for millions each over a period of years would tell me this person has a genuine talent for entrepreneurship.
Best to go for it, and if it takes off get all you can while it's there to be had, setting aside an untouchable personal nest egg as soon as you can. You should have a feel for the business so if a good offer comes along when your gut tell you that it has perhaps plateaued or peaked take that as an exit sign. If it doesn't take off don't be discouraged, know when to make that exit too.
"Founders who have successfully built and sold, say at least three companies for millions each over a period of years would tell me this person has a genuine talent for entrepreneurship."
No.. it tells you this person is a lower risk than someone without a track record or a worse track record.
History is filled with people and companies who had a string of successes followed by failures. Those people weren't talented one day, and untalented the next.
Good point, financial and even hierarchical corporate success prior to any entering into any new venture changes at least a person's level of hunger and drive in most cases.
Don't get so excited to point out bad statistics that you bias yourself in the opposite direction.
You need the number of founders of this kind of company, and the overall success ratio, before you can start judging skill vs. luck with any certainty.
Seems to me some founders are the right CEO for the first few years of a company, and should be replaced at a certain point in scale. Typically they transition to a CTO, board-level advisor, or chief visionary sort of position. Often, after a few more years, the founder will leave, either because (s)he hasn't been able to fully release the reins, or just because (s)he is bored and wants to start a new venture. [edit: or because the CEO is a paranoid psychopath and wants to scorch the earth, enforce fealty, and redact the founder from the company history.]
That is true. However if you run a company you don't own and make those mistakes, you'll wind up discovering your failure somewhat later after your shortcoming have done much more damage.
Does anyone else find the author's stylistic choice of the generic 'her' throughout this article a little weird? I'm all for using language to erode stereotypes about the types of people involved in tech enterprise, so in theory I should applaud TechCrunch here, but I feel like the use of the female pronoun in an article describing a hypothetical CEO as a failed product is perhaps a step in the wrong direction.
One woman to another, might I remind you of the ill effects of arbitrarily mandating what is and is not healthy for all ladies! Your concern is noted but thankfully my constitution is such that I can certainly participate in a dialogue about the use of the female pronoun in this particular article and the tacit conclusions a casual reader might draw from it.
The constitution doesn't excuse you from flinging poo at the writing style of a highly prolific and well-known writer for his choice of always using the feminine pronoun, regardless of the conclusions drawn therein. All you are attempting to do is downgrade the quality of the article because of something birthed from your own ignorance of the writer and your own insecurity.
At what point do you think "protecting" women by constantly attempting to create drama where none was intended at all (especially considering the author) is helping women feel more welcome to your industry? If "she" is not allowed to fail, then "she" is not accepted as an equal to the "he" that is able to fail with spectacular results. See how easy it is to spin intention against you based on null opinions?
Why not simply use a neutral descriptor instead of a gendered one? If it is true that the author is as committed to the female pronoun as you suggest he is, isn't it therefore implied that he would only encourage such thoughtfulness at the intersection of language, gender, perception, failure, objectification and technology?
Why not simply use a neutral descriptor instead of a gendered one?
Because English doesn't really have gender-neutral, singular pronouns? You're down to artificial sounding language full of "one" and "they" and "their" or using invented pronouns that aren't in widespread use.
In order to reach your goal of "using language to erode stereotypes about the types of people involved in tech enterprise", would it be better to reserve the use of "him" for failures and "her" for success?
I then suggest you are promoting a biased view. Some people alternate between him and her, some just refer to the person in a way that does not indicate the sex (this CEO, the founder...)
Somehow, I prefer the latter, because it's simply trying to present arguments without reference to sex, instead of "using language to erode stereotypes about the types of people involved in tech enterprise", which could also be called "performing propaganda using newspeak" (and that is less politically correct of course)
EDIT: as noted below, «If "she" is not allowed to fail, then "she" is not accepted as an equal to the "he" is able to fail with spectacular results.» - spot on
I certainly would not advocate using 'him' for failure and 'her' for success.
I definitely would prefer to see neutral descriptors used in articles like these (as I implied downthread); when I wrote "using language to erode stereotypes" I intended it to be taken as an author alternating between pronouns in a single work.
I used to try to write completely gender-neutral, using such things like "s/he" or "his or her" or "one," since "they" feels a little off to me. Unfortunately, the English language offers no easy way to do this, so now days I alternate between the genders, and I've found it to be effective when there are two heroes to the story, one "he" and one "she."
Unrelated, but I've noticed that often when Ben Horowitz discusses a theoretical CEO, he will often refer to that CEO as a female. I'm sure it isn't a mistake, but that he is consciously trying to promote female leadership roles in the industry.
It's been common for a while. I usually do it too. Or if there are two unnamed people, I usually make the higher-status one "she" and the lower-status one "he".
That might help with the incorrect perception that a man is more likely to be relatively high on the social totem pole compared to a woman (well, correct me if I'm wrong about this).
If you wanted to be totally egalitarian, I guess you could role a dice each time you need to write about a new nameless person.
No, I couldn't. However, I could roll one die or multiple dice. ;) Anyhow -- in this case, I see no need to be egalitarian, as nobody is harmed by the reverse discrimination.
My other quibble with your comment is that the perception, on average, is correct. The point of what Horowitz, I and other writers are doing in this respect is to remind people that the common situation need not be the only one, and -- more important -- should not be regarded as the "natural" one.
I've noticed this as well - and as a female co-founder of a hardware startup, I have to admit I really love it. Rarely do you find the female tense being used to describe tech related news. It's a subtle thing, yet it makes a world of difference to me when I read it.
We need a gender-neutral pronoun already. If you use "he" when it comes to a hypothetical person, someone will say you're sexist, if you use "she" someone will think you're overly PC, and writing "he/she" just doesn't roll of the minds tongue.
The introduction of a genderless pronoun is a current topic in Sweden. Let me assure you that the accusations about being overly PC are far more prevalent when using the new gender-neutral pronoun than when simply using the female one.
Indeed, that is the biggest problem with trying to use gender-neutral pronouns. You'll probably be perceived as either someone who is overly cautious about offending someone, or a gender studies academic or something similar to that. Not that there's anything wrong with the latter, but you can't have words being associated with certain "types" if you want to achieve general colloquial adoption.
English already has gender neutral pronouns, though they are so rare or new that I only ran across one a few months ago. The words are: zhe, zher, zhim. I'm still waiting to actually hear one of these come out of someone's mouth...
Are there any examples of a "professional CEO" who replaced the "product CEO" brought the company around or took it to the next level? It would be an interesting research if someone collected these data and calculated this probability.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] thread"He didn't meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn't bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual, programmer."
And the article details how those two were intimately linked.
There are examples of products which have sold extremely well despite having close to zero spent on marketing.
P&G is one of the better firms at creating a cadre of general managers who start in entry level positions. These are people who learn how to build brands from the bottom. Even still, they seem to botch a CEO promotion here and there.
GE tends to do this pretty well too. You can see it by how highly regarded their "Almost CEO" execs are.
Having that experience gives him a much better rapport with employees because they know he has been in their position, but also helps him make better decisions that affect those employees.
My name is Kevin, and I am one of the cofounders of Dealflicks.com. We help fill in empty seats by targeting showtimes that are much slower. Based on our research about 88% of seats go empty. We launched in July of last year, and we are now in 180 locations across the nation. Which theater does your brother work at? I would love to connect with him.
Best,
Kevin
Would it be consistent with this article's philosophy to discuss it in that context as "maybe it would be a good idea to..." rather than "this is what we're doing"? I haven't actually run a company myself so there could be all kinds of subtleties I'm clueless about... Actually, the question is not whether there are any but which ones are relevant.
Not every thought needs to be immediately vocalized
So if you say, wouldn't it be cool if we made (product x) out loud, and it is related to something your company might do, don't be too shocked if someone in your company hears you and then does it. If you weren't serious, and that person has spent 20 hours working hard on it, you will now come to two conclusions. 1. You have wasted their time and your money 2. You now have to disappoint a hard working, dedicated employee. You can't do that too often or they get frustrated and leave.
So in my experience, when you have only ad hoc, verbal only meetings about product, you will get bad results. I have made this error myself in the past. If I want a good result from my staff, I have to give them clear, written direction so that they can follow it and not need to continually check with me.
You may once in a great while get a product you make a profit on, but it is the exception and not the rule. It shouldn't take you so long to write out the new idea that you should try to save time by blurting it out. Simply tell your people what the idea is, and how it fits in with their previous priorities. Toyota uses a sheet of A3 to propose ideas. The constraint helps produce clearer direction. http://a3thinking.com/faq.html
Here's the thing, though: if you can be misunderstood you will be misunderstood. As those often-microscopic misunderstandings compound, people lose a sense of direction. As a founder you'll be repeating yourself and the core values and mission of the company over and over and over again until you want to throw up. This becomes more true as the company grows. A small company often operates more like a hive mind where there's a huge amount of implicit, shared understanding.
My personal strategy is this. In a normal situation if I have a clear idea of what I think should be done, get the key stakeholders into a room to Solve Problem X. Insist that before they get into the room they think about some ideal ways to solve Problem X. If necessary, constrain the solution space by giving high level priorities. Once in the room, have folks share their thoughts.
As CEO you should grill their ideas as intensely and rigorously as possible. You should have a fuller set of facts than they do (hopefully), which means you should be able to see holes they don't.
Most of the time -- assuming you've hired smart people -- your idea or something close to it is one of the ideas that staff brings up. It might even be an improvement on your idea. If that happens, great! You're done. Nobody needed to know you had the same idea and Jane Doe Staffer gets credit for a good idea.
More often than you'd expect, someone else brings up an idea that simply never occurred to you in the first place. This idea would never have surfaced if you started the conversation with your thoughts.
This is win-win-win. The good idea wins. Jane wins because she was empowered to come up with a good idea and saw it realized, which means she'll be excited to do it again in the future. The team wins because they see you're the kind of person who accepts and integrates good ideas. As Harry Truman said, "It's amazing what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit."
If the idea doesn't come up then you might introduce your own or guide the conversation in a way where folks in the room think of it, e.g., there's some fact you have that nobody else does. This is my strategy for normal situations. In exceptional situations, e.g., there's something incredibly urgent, different rules apply. Your staff will be much more inclined to follow your lead in that situation, though, if they see and understand it as an exception.
But if you walk into a room and bring up your idea first, it sets the tone and inevitably everything will be a variation on whatever you said. Even worse, the folks in the room will take what you said as The Law™ even if you didn't intend it to be that way. As a CEO or founder your words inherently carry more weight than anyone else's.
Founder's fail because they lose (or never really had) empathy for their customers or staff in these areas. If you can't feel what your users/staff feel, you can't properly navigate them out of their pain.
There are a few nice features of writing vs. talking in person. First, it makes it less likely two people will take what you said differently. Second, it immediately creates a shared vocabulary. Third, it creates an artifact that can both be revisited and shared with new folks entering the company. Fourth, everyone knows everyone else knows. Even if what you're saying is totally innocuous, if you tell Person A but Person B finds out you told Person A before you can tell Person B yourself (maybe they were out sick that day, whatever), you run the risk of people seeing an "inner circle" and an "outer circle." "Knowing first" can become a kind of very counterproductive gold star.
I think those are more like the reasons he was advocating for writing rather than some obsession about process per se.
A single business failure or short-term success doesn't say much about someone as a founder. That his/her interest and drive can be made to fit the current market conditions plus still more relatively intangible luck in other areas factor heavily in any end result.
Founders who have successfully built and sold, say at least three companies for millions each over a period of years would tell me this person has a genuine talent for entrepreneurship.
Best to go for it, and if it takes off get all you can while it's there to be had, setting aside an untouchable personal nest egg as soon as you can. You should have a feel for the business so if a good offer comes along when your gut tell you that it has perhaps plateaued or peaked take that as an exit sign. If it doesn't take off don't be discouraged, know when to make that exit too.
No.. it tells you this person is a lower risk than someone without a track record or a worse track record.
History is filled with people and companies who had a string of successes followed by failures. Those people weren't talented one day, and untalented the next.
You need the number of founders of this kind of company, and the overall success ratio, before you can start judging skill vs. luck with any certainty.
Please tone down the rhetoric; this isn't healthy for you or the women you purport to defend.
At what point do you think "protecting" women by constantly attempting to create drama where none was intended at all (especially considering the author) is helping women feel more welcome to your industry? If "she" is not allowed to fail, then "she" is not accepted as an equal to the "he" that is able to fail with spectacular results. See how easy it is to spin intention against you based on null opinions?
Because English doesn't really have gender-neutral, singular pronouns? You're down to artificial sounding language full of "one" and "they" and "their" or using invented pronouns that aren't in widespread use.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-specific_and_gender-neut...
I then suggest you are promoting a biased view. Some people alternate between him and her, some just refer to the person in a way that does not indicate the sex (this CEO, the founder...)
Somehow, I prefer the latter, because it's simply trying to present arguments without reference to sex, instead of "using language to erode stereotypes about the types of people involved in tech enterprise", which could also be called "performing propaganda using newspeak" (and that is less politically correct of course)
EDIT: as noted below, «If "she" is not allowed to fail, then "she" is not accepted as an equal to the "he" is able to fail with spectacular results.» - spot on
I definitely would prefer to see neutral descriptors used in articles like these (as I implied downthread); when I wrote "using language to erode stereotypes" I intended it to be taken as an author alternating between pronouns in a single work.
Does anybody else notice that?
If you wanted to be totally egalitarian, I guess you could role a dice each time you need to write about a new nameless person.
My other quibble with your comment is that the perception, on average, is correct. The point of what Horowitz, I and other writers are doing in this respect is to remind people that the common situation need not be the only one, and -- more important -- should not be regarded as the "natural" one.
That's a funny word.
> My other quibble with your comment is that the perception, on average, is correct. T
Show me the numbers.
EDIT: I've heard that "they" can be used.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
http://www.progress.org/fold162.htm