I really like the fact that this book is explicitly addressed to (CXOs of / senior managers of) companies that have already found a product / market fit, and is now transitioning into a 'BigCo', which means that startup founders who are not going through that stage of company growth can skim the book, (as can people who want to remain engineers). There is a lot of 'managerese' in the book, which is inevitable given its focus. I still can't decide if some of the interviewees are actually insightful, or just happened to be at the right place at the right time, and are now mouthing platitudes.
This book is really meant for people who want to be senior managers in a company that is growing like crazy, and want to take on the people and organizational challenges that result.
Also the book is very explicitly centered around the "SF way" of building companies, and I wonder how much of this advice would apply to, say, a Chinese unicorn. (I think, not very much. e.g: 'diversity' as key focus area for the CEO seems to be a very SF centric (or at least US centric) way of doing things, and reflective of social and political phenomena in the USA. I doubt Chinese or Korean CEOs spend as much time on 'identity politics' flavored 'diversity hiring' as a CEO would in SF)
So if you are scaling up a post product/market fit company in SF/the USA, and are in a senior management position in that company, this book is likely to be of great help.
Even otherwise it is a good roadmap to how you can "live long enough to see yourself become the villain" ;-).
The book has a different focus from many "startup" books and that is refreshing. Overall I liked it, modulo the 'platitude problem' I mentioned above.
I really liked the interview with Patrick Collison, who seems to have his head screwed on right.
>I doubt Chinese or Korean CEOs spend as much time on 'identity politics' flavored 'diversity hiring' as a CEO would in SF
There are many responses to that statement, but one of the most notable ones is that there are significantly more non American users of American software products than non Chinese/Korean users of Chinese/Korean software products.
Building a diverse team that will be able to reason about how your product will be used in a variety of cultural contexts, by people from a wide array of different backgrounds, is therefore much more important in the former situation than the latter.
The issue is that the commonly accepted definition of diversity is always about having different gender, race and sexual orientation represented.
The important thing though is to achieve diversity of thought, which is a positive thing since it brings a larger set of creative ideas to the table.
In the SF Tech Bubble, people look diverse but they all think more or less in the same way as the "Culture" part of hiring will remove anyone not fitting in the same mold. Also as soon as ideas get out of the spectrum of acceptable ideas, people get shamed and learn to shut up or lose their job.
I think that the current conversation going on about diversity completely misses the point. It mainly became a good way for companies/CEO to demonstrate a morale high ground.
I think it is hard to not say that part of Silicon Valleys success is because of diversity and that part of the diversity is as simple as "gender, race and sexual orientation". I isn't a political correct things to say but Japanese, Korean and to some extent Chinese people are generally better organized, harder working and smarter than Americans. But they are also to a large extent also culturally isolated. Which makes their societies full of social rules. We can certainly question how much of a meritocracy the US is, but it certainly is to a large extent compared to the mentioned countries.
It isn't even that diversity itself being new perspectives, it is that non-diversity excludes people. And in highly uncertain activities it is all about how many people you can bring to the starting line. Success is its own filter, if you put a largely arbitrary filter in front you end up with a corresponding decrease in success. Which create a situation similar to the social rules in Asian countries.
If there will be any regret in Silicon Valley in 50 years I don't think it is going to be whatever the current political issue is, but that it didn't acquire a larger share of the global tech market. And that is certainly a factor of competition, equality, diversity and other things that give more people the chance to do just that.
I think you can summarize "what is the government good for" with "solving collective action problems", but libertarians tend to think that there are not many important such problems because market solutions are so versatile.
...but the most important collective action problem IMO (ever since someone told me about Ronald Coase) is maintaining low transaction costs in markets so they can function. So free markets and (good) government seem to me symbiotic.
I've noticed a trend in recent interviews with founders and VCs where they lament employee entitlement and work-ethic compared to Chinese firms. What's the deal with this trend? I mean, look, you're building a unicorn: an individual engineer is likely contributing tens of millions of dollars of real value to your organization... and when you exit, you and your investors are capturing the bulk of the upside... why are you getting busted-up over tiny perks and engineers who work "only" 50-60 hours a week
Haircuts and lunches cost you way less in the long run than equity and salary. You're making out like bandits.
> an individual engineer is likely contributing tens of millions of dollars of real value to your organization...
If that's the case. If as an engineer you can contribute millions to a company. Why don't you start your own? I'm sure each line of code you create will inflate the price by a million dollars.
Of course, I'm being flippant. But the point still stands.
> If that's the case. If as an engineer you can contribute millions to a company. Why don't you start your own? I'm sure each line of code you create will inflate the price by a million dollars.
But the same is true for founders and VCs: Everyone needs each other. VCs require founders. Founders require employees. An entrepreneur doesn't hire workers out of the goodness of their heart and most (competent ones) will hire as few workers as they think they can get away with.
This is why they absolutely should not be complaining about the so-called entitled employee: Demand for skilled labor is high. Normally, this would push wages upward, but organizations have managed to short-circuit this by offering non-salary compensation in the form of perks. They've completely hacked the labor supply/demand curve greatly in their favor. They should be delighted.
Not really. This video completely skips over all the classical and neoclassical thinking on labor economics and inadvertently lays the foundation for an argument on collective bargaining by employees.... but I don't think that's what the video's author was going for.
A VC already has the finances, they aren't constrained by the original argument of "demanding" a higher price for their salary. They have already attained wealth and now choose to pour some of that wealth into funding other ventures.
A founder, is someone who has decided to push the gratification of (payment, rewards, whatever you want to call it) to the far future and that is if they make it. In the interim they will survive by various means, bootstrap, F+F round or they approach a VC giving up equity for investment and a salary to the next round of investment.
This isn't about who needs who. VCs or Founders don't actually need anyone:
A VC doesn't need a founder. They can setup a company themselves and pay market rate for the staff to fill positions.
A Founder doesn't actually need a VC, they can bootstrap the company and live off raman noodles until they reach profitability and in some cases keep investing into the company until it gets big enough to sustain itself and the founder.
The only class (if you want to call it that) in this scenario are the workers that need the VC or the Founder to setup a company for them to join.
> An entrepreneur doesn't hire workers out of the goodness of their heart and most (competent ones) will hire as few workers as they think they can get away with.
What is the problem here? This is how a company is meant to be run. If you want otherwise, it's now called a CHARITY.
> They've completely hacked the labor supply/demand curve greatly in their favor.
Have they? Let me know when they have guns to people's heads demanding they work there. There is nothing stopping someone from leaving and getting more cash/perks elsewhere. We are in the free market after all.
Free market, which I have pointed out numerous times and yet you don't quite seem to grasp this notion.
> Not really.
I don't think you understood the video and honestly, I don't know what you are arguing for.
This will be my last reply. I think I've said all that needs to be said.
> A VC already has the finances, they aren't constrained by the original argument of "demanding" a higher price for their salary. They have already attained wealth and now choose to pour some of that wealth into funding other ventures.
I know you're done debating, so I'll leave this here for your education.
VCs are fund managers who work on behalf of their LPs (Limited partners, or fund investors), with very few VC funds being self-funded by their managers. Most VCs are not independently wealthy by first-world standards and most LP money comes from large institutions rather than individuals. Angel investors are a different story, but they are working with much smaller amounts of capital.
> A VC doesn't need a founder. They can setup a company themselves and pay market rate for the staff to fill positions.
While there's nothing legally preventing them from doing so, most LPs would be very upset (and likely sue) if their fund managers took their cash and directly founded companies with it. The closest thing that exists to something like this are "Entrepreneurs in Residence" which are often not directly involved with managing the fund.
> If that's the case. If as an engineer you can contribute millions to a company.
Because hard skills that are vital for the viability of a business don't translate to soft skills required to setup organizations, manage people, get proposals and close deals.
For a sports analogy, Michael Jordan might have been the absolute best basketball player but he is unable to build or manage a team. Does that mean to you that Michael Jordan did not deserved to be compensated for the "tens of millions of dollars of real value" that he brought to the Chicago Bulls in particular and the NBA in general? Do you actually believe that if he should've shut up and started his own basketball team to have any claim to any of the value he created for other organizations?
> Because hard skills that are vital for the viability of a business don't translate to soft skills required to setup organizations, manage people, get proposals and close deals.
True. But then there is nothing stopping the enginners from attaining those skills and then reaping the rewards. Many engineers have done just that.
Like it or not. We participate in the free market. Want more monies?
1) Start up your own venture.
2) Increase your skills with desirable ones which an employer will pay for.
3) Negotiate with your employer that you should have a higher salary/benefit package for exchange of your time.
At the end of the day, this is how it's always been. But if you want to inject Socialism into the workplace then fine. Guess what?
Go and setup a company which is a co-operative. Everyone who joins gets an equal piece of the company and revenue of the company. It's pretty easy to setup. There's really no excuse from my perspective why no one can't do it.
Again, once in that co-operative, let us know [who don't know], how it works out.
To be fair PC gives tons of credit for stripe to the employees. Almost every interview. One interview specifically is how I Built This with Guy Raz with him and his brother John.
Eh. Smart guy as always, but I read anything on company building/management by unicorn startups with a large degree of skepticism. Basically, if you have a great product, and then exercise some moderate degree of thoughtfulness in company building and hiring, everything will work itself out. Every tech unicorn loves to preen about their culture, etc, but they’re all driven by incredibly strong near-monopoly products. They would have to actively try to screw things up.
Building any type of company requires a huge amount of active effort from many different people. The idea that a great product will make and grow a company by itself is basically engineering fantasy.
In the case of Stripe, they've worked their asses off not just building the product, but also raising a ton of money which in turn they used to market the crap out of their product. Without that money and the marketing, even with the same product, Stripe would have most likely already failed.
Culture is a difficult component to define, much less manage. Everybody thinks they're consciously pursuing major initiatives to build culture but the vast majority are just consuming the culture that emerges and then reinforcing it with the status quo.
I think it is, but it's a better reading experience as a book, IMO. I'd say plus then you get to support the author but knowing the companies he's invested in I don't think he's doing this to make money from book sales :) (more likely to further improve his already impressive deal flow, and to help others)
This book is really meant for people who want to be senior managers in a company that is growing like crazy, and want to take on the people and organizational challenges that result.
Also the book is very explicitly centered around the "SF way" of building companies, and I wonder how much of this advice would apply to, say, a Chinese unicorn. (I think, not very much. e.g: 'diversity' as key focus area for the CEO seems to be a very SF centric (or at least US centric) way of doing things, and reflective of social and political phenomena in the USA. I doubt Chinese or Korean CEOs spend as much time on 'identity politics' flavored 'diversity hiring' as a CEO would in SF)
So if you are scaling up a post product/market fit company in SF/the USA, and are in a senior management position in that company, this book is likely to be of great help.
Even otherwise it is a good roadmap to how you can "live long enough to see yourself become the villain" ;-).
The book has a different focus from many "startup" books and that is refreshing. Overall I liked it, modulo the 'platitude problem' I mentioned above.
I really liked the interview with Patrick Collison, who seems to have his head screwed on right.