Key Learnings From The hard thing about hard thing
Startup CEOs should not play the odds. When building a company, you must believe there is an answer and not pay attention to the odds of finding it.
One of the most important management lessons for a founder/CEO is to stop being too positive. A young CEO may feel pressure from employees depending on them to be positive. However, they must face their fear and tell it like it is.
When laying people off:
The CEO should address the entire company.
The CEO should deliver the message personally.
Be clear in your own mind about why you are laying people off. Do not sugarcoat the situation. The company failed to hit its plan. In order to rebuild trust, you have to come clean with your employees.
Train your managers to lay off their own people. The manager must personally fire each of their employees. They cannot pass the task to HR or a peer. This is because only the manager has the context to answer any questions from the employee about their firing.
Lies that losers tell include:
We are so close.
The new version is going to be amazing.
We are going to get acquired.
Our competitors are idiots.
We are going to raise another round of financing.
It’s not my fault.
Take care of the people, the products, and the profits in that order.
Training is the boss's job. The manager should personally train their employees to be productive and successful. Startups should train their people to increase productivity, improve product quality, increase sales, and decrease employee attrition.
Senior people pose important challenges:
They come with their own culture that is unlikely to match your environment.
They will know how to work the system to their advantage.
Their skills may have atrophied.
The CEO's most important operational responsibility is designing and implementing the communication architecture for the company. One-on-one meetings are a time-tested way to make sure that the best ideas, the biggest problems, and the most intense life issues make their way to the people who can deal with them.
You do not create a culture; you only design a culture. As a company grows, its culture will evolve. A properly designed culture often ends up looking cultlike in retrospect. A good cultural design point will be trivial to implement but have far-reaching behavioral consequences.
When scaling a company:
Communication, common knowledge, and decision making become difficult.
The basic idea is to give ground grudgingly.
The goal should not be to make everyone happy, but to design the best company possible.
The most difficult skill a CEO must learn is managing their own psychology.
The only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company.
The best entrepreneurs will only work with the best venture capital firms.
The hardest thing about being a CEO is that the job is lonely. The CEO is the only one who cannot quit the company.
The key to being a successful CEO is to embrace the struggle.