Little Summaries of Company Building: Part 20
Previous Notes:
Observations from experiences on company building:
- Little Summaries of Company Building: Part 1
- Little Summaries of Company Building: Part 2
- Little Summaries of Company Building: Part 3
- Little Summaries of Company Building: Part 4
- Little Summaries of Company Building: Part 5
- Little Summaries of Company Building: Part 6
- Little Summaries of Company Building: Part 7
- Little Summaries of Company Building: Part 8
- Little Summaries of Company Building: Part 9
- Little Summaries of Company Building: Part 10
- Little Summaries of Company Building: Part 11
- Little Summaries of Company Building: Part 12
- Little Summaries of Company Building: Part 13
- Little Summaries of Company Building: Part 14
- Little Summaries of Company Building: Part 15
- Little Summaries of Company Building: Part 16
- Little Summaries of Company Building: Part 17
- Little Summaries of Company Building: Part 18
- Little Summaries of Company Building: Part 19
Observations from experiences on company building:
- People & Relationships:
- High-performance and hard-charging culture may be great for your startup. Being heartless, not so much. Doing so may void the benefits of extreme performance.
- Quite a few founders have an obsessive focus on the product. And it is much needed. Good founders also put serious energies to figure out the right fit for the product, i.e., the right user or market. And in this process, relationships sometimes take a backseat. This can reduce the cumulative startup output as you are building it.
- Are people complicated? Yes. But not so much that you cannot figure out using some simple steps.
- In most cases, it helps to understand every team member as an individual. What is a team member in the context of company building? This would refer to all individuals who help in a direct and indirect way. Employees, investors, advisors, friends, family, customers, competitors, et. al.
- This is easier to do and put on some sort of an auto-pilot as a process if the founders start real early. Putting extra effort at the initial founding stage pays off in a huge multiplicative way. Understand the first few hires, investors, and advisors. This entails spending time together. 1-1 works best. Sprinkle some small group get-togethers and observe how a person acts in a social setting. Unplanned interactions are great, almost the same way you interact with the family. Observe small things and hold any judgment.
- Once you figure out a few different personality types, apply this process to scale.
- Taking the higher road always helps in relationships. Speak very little, ask deep questions. If possible, meet people outside of work. Do an activity together. Do not get irritated by differences. Accept them as a reality of society. Remember you are not looking for "your type". At a rational level, always keep your goal in mind. It is to enable the individual for their absolute best performance. If you do so, your future headaches reduce. And you can direct your energies towards what you do best for your startup. Else, people issues will suck your time, energy, money, and at times, reputation.
- Go out of the way to create high communication comfort. Anyone should be able to reach out to you or anyone else within the team with no fear. Over-communicate in the initial stages of relationship building. If possible, establish more than one channel for reach-outs.
- Reward and treatment are two different things. Reward performance, but treat even a laggard well. Separate in a nice way. Establish a regular forum to explain this to everyone around you. The need for repetition is due to short-term human memory. And more so in today's world with umpteen distractions. Repetition of core messages seems boring, but it will help you also an individual.
- Practice, practice, and then some more.
- Taking your idea from a hazy concept in your brain to sizable adoption is only possible with tons of help. Help comes from people. The same investing principles of leverage and compounding apply to people relationships!
Let's Talk: If you have a true experience that resonates, please send me an email.
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