My name is Quang, I’m cofounder and CEO of Plato. Before Plato, we were Birdly and were in YC W16.
After having graduated from college, with two of my engineers friends, we decided to build our own company. We made a lot of mistakes along the way; and one of the biggest was to hire too soon a bunch of engineers. We were all three technical cofounders so we could have built the MVP ourselves. But instead of that, we decided that two cofounders over three would do the “Product management” and “Marketing", and that we should hire 3 engineers (including 2 interns) to code the product for us. That was before YC. YC could have prevented us from making that mistake. And this had been our worst mistake.
Without even noticing it, we transitioned from “Individual Contributor” to “Engineering Managers”. Without even noticing it, we happened to spend more time doing “management” than building the product and optimizing for product-market fit. Without even noticing it, we were doing the rookie mistakes most first-time engineering managers do.
Among some rookie mistakes: - We hired our engineers focusing only on their technical capabilities - We didn’t make one-on-ones, but rather two-on-ones, and we focused on performance and operational - We micromanaged them, and even time-boxed them sometimes - And many more mistakes…
But at the time, those mistakes were unknown unknowns. In other words, we didn’t even know we were doing the bad things.
We don’t all need to do all those mistakes, or at least, when we do, we should know it, figure it out and fix it.
That’s why we’re building Plato, a platform to find your perfect mentor to help you become a better Engineering Leader. Mentors of the community come from top tech companies such as Google, Facebook, Lyft, Slack, Trello, Netflix, Spotify, Digital Ocean, Segment, Uber… They want to help you avoid the common pitfalls they learned the hard way.
I know many of you already have learned the hard way many lessons like us. I’m sure many of you would be amazing mentors. Feel free to let us know if you want to become a mentor.
Looking forward to have your feedback on our new product, Thanks HN community!
