The company I founded just hit 25 employees and I just got finished spending a couple quarters trying to ignore management because it seemed cooler to have no structure, and working on a project in hero mode because I got over-excited about it... wish it had come out 6 months ago :)
- Have 1 piece of paper with 3-12 month goals that you look at every day
- Have a tool/paperstack/book? for each day of these goals? Can you expand on this?
- Have a tool/paperstack/book? for each employee? Can you expand on this?
I'm working on my own method similar to this and I'm just curious about your preference of paper vs. book vs. tools.
Thanks in advance! Micah
These 2.5 months have been very interesting and being from the other part of the world I don't have access to these kind of people and information. The people I know and hang out who have created companies have revenues of a couple of millions when they have something "big", surely not billions.
I hope one day to be also part of the YC family
Here are 42 quotes I picked up from the lecture that I've published here: https://medium.com/@RajenSanghvi/42-quotes-from-sam-altman-o...
P.S. I've somewhat religiously been watching/taking notes from these lectures since they started. I really agree with a lot of the comments here, that it's been a very practical lecture series with lots of tactical advice that you can directly apply to your startup (as opposed to high level strategy discussions). Thanks to YC and Sam for putting this together.
The whole lecture series is great addition to startup community and will be useful for founders everywhere for years to come.
For some of the work, e.g., trademarks, I would suggest getting those filed earlier than "later-stage". Similarly for the bookkeeping, tax planning and taxes, accounting, employee benefits, stock planning, where to put the intellectual property to lease back to the operating business, etc.
Altman suggested each year, for the first 10 years, assign another 3-5% of the stock to employees. That sounds generous and like it would create one heck of an internal fight for stock.
Once an apparently wise adviser told me, "Never give stock to an employee who doesn't contribute directly to earnings.".
For some more on leadership and culture, also draw from the AVC.com blog user JLM's contributions and links, often back to JLM's Web site, at Fred Wilson's blog AVC.com. JLM has long been the most popular contributor to that blog.
Altman seemed to want a fairly strict organizational hierarchy. He recognized that too little hierarchical organization can be bad but was not clear on just how much a good hierarchy should do.
A strict hierarchy can lead to a lot of goal subordination (where a middle manager works for their own interests largely against the interests of the company), process and formality over reality and progress, fighting with people down the hall instead of against problems inside the company or competitors outside, arrogance, fear that any effort at innovation could have a lot of downside with nearly no chance of upside, fear that good success could lead to jealousy and attacks from above, narrowly just managing the existing business with no interest in progress for new business directions or even for the existing business, etc.
For how to get work done and evaluate employees outside of just a strict hierarchy, I'm entertaining borrowing from other work. E.g., when someone sees a problem, find a likely person, or for a really big problem a person and some assistants for a team, and (a) have them investigate and write a paper and give a presentation describing the problem, its importance, etc. If continue, then (b) have them do some research and write a paper, etc., on proposed solutions and give a presentation. (c) If continue, then have them write a paper, etc., planning the implementation of the solution. (d) If continue, then have them write a paper on the implementation with budgets, other resources, milestones, quality control, due dates, progress reporting, etc. (e) If continue, then have them proceed as in (d).
At employee evaluation time, look at the papers and, especially, the completed projects.
I definitely intend to get the transcript and slides. Apparently Altman has learned a lot, somewhere, in his own start-ups, watching YC start-ups, somewhere.
