Category: STARTUPS

What’s your leadership style?

I saw this question on a website today and had to quickly introspect what my leadership style was in a short passage. Here’s what I wrote:

I believe I am a visionary coach and a servant leader. Breaking that down, I am a vision driven but pragmatic leader where in I set/drive the vision and tell my teams to go achieve them by running their own initiatives, while course correcting as an empathetic servant leader. As a coach, I love meeting, coaching and mentoring engineers to go on to do great things(Lots of examples of success, some failures), by providing ways for individuals to connect with the company’s goals with personal goals and values through structured 1-1’s and in-depth conversations. I structure all my 1-1’s on both short term concerns/feedback and long term career focused goal development. I provide feedback by being radically candid (as described in Kim Scott’s book Radical Candor) by caring personally and challenging directly.

Interview engineers like a reverse bloom filter

Hiring is hard. Hiring great engineers is harder. But cleaning up bad engineering work from bad hires is the worst!

If you are an engineering manager like me, its your responsibility to hire engineers and generally set the bar very very high for candidates. The most obvious well known trick is to hire people smarter than you(The whole A’s hire A+’s, B’s hire C’s thing). But many a times, especially in startups or service companies, due to high pressure demands, this bar can go down and there is nothing worse.

There a lot of the times engineers can be false positive -i.e. they come across as brilliant in the interviews. Many a times this is because engineers are extremely well prepared specifically for interviews(having gone through the thousand of resources available online, the data set of available questions,unheard of yet, is bound to get smaller)

So , interviewing has to model a bloom filter in reverse

Background on a bloom filter:

During the process, you are probably involved in a couple of rounds with the interviewee, but in general its your engineers who interview potential candidates. Engineers understand engineering terms better. Hence we should be modelling the process and communicating to the engineer similarly.

Bloom filter.svg
“Bloom filter” by David Eppstein – self-made, originally for a talk at WADS 2007. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

A Bloom filter is a space-efficient probabilistic data structure, conceived by Burton Howard Bloom in 1970, that is used to test whether an element is a member of a set. False positive matches are possible, but false negatives are not.

The idea is that a query for an item returns either “possibly in set” or “definitely not in set”. Elements can be added to the set, but not removed (though this can be addressed with a “counting” filter). The more elements that are added to the set, the larger the probability of false positives. Plus a bloom filter is a great data structure particularly if you are using strong caching mechanisms. Hence you’d do good getting your engineers to learn a swanky data structure while they interview other candidates.

How does this apply to interviewing:

Applying this to an engineering candidate is interesting. You have to be biased towards false negatives, false positives should not make it. Ala a reverse bloom filter, which could say a candidate should be looked at as  “Great but wont make it” and not “OK should make the cut” or False negatives are possible but false positives aren’t.  Essentially this says, its OK to lose very very good engineers who don’t make the cut(but certainly are great), but its absolutely not ok to hire bad eggs on a false curve. The cost and time spent on training and cleaning up behind these engineers can get exponentially higher than the time spent carefully interviewing candidates and selecting the right one. 

Might be a convoluted way to think about it,  but it’s worked so far for us. 🙂

Comments welcome. Ok maybe instead of a reverse bloom filter I could have said a lossy hash table or a LRUCache or even a direct mapped cache. But they don’t sound as catchy 🙂

Engineering management Lessons so far- part 1

Engineering management is hard. Mostly because programmers who turn managers start to treat people like code, and this not so good article on TechCrunch will tell you that is good, but it isn’t. Code is predictable. People are not.

Some key lessons so far
1.) You cannot lead a cavalry if you think you look funny on a horse: Self confidence is key

2.) Respect and leadership are privileges earned hard but lost quickly – Don’t lose it if you can help it, burn out the fire’s as quickly, if you cant.

3.) Ability to manage conflicts is key- data driven is the only way

4.) Every engineer on your team needs to constantly know what to do next

5.) You HAVE TO BE UPDATED On technology/code/processes and continue to be CODING – cant stress this enough, or you are the guy the developer’s say “Hey manager, we are about to finish this module and pull a late night, can you order some pizza’s for us” to.

6.) As tough as it might be, you cannot lower the hire bar – Absolutely zero tolerance, because bad hires come bite you back in the rear.

7.) You can employ carrot or stick method in certain situations – but caveat emptor

Thats what I have so far. Ill be updating this and have some sort of a value list as I experience more of engineering management.

I’ve enjoyed reading this piece and this piece on Engineering management, there are a lot of very valuable key lessons to take from them, so I suggest you read up on those if you are in this black art of engineering management

Sam Altman’s CS183B – Lecture 6 – Alex Schultz

Lecture 6 was by Alex Schultz – a very good talk on Growth.

Salient points

  1. Self intro: Paid for college doing online marketing, directions marketing. I started with SEO in the 1990s. I created a paper airplane site, and had a monopoly in the small niche market of paper airplanes. When you want to start a startup also see how big the market could be. (In the long term, it wasn’t great.) But what that taught me was how to do SEO. And back in those days it was Alta Vista, and the way to do SEO was to have white text, on a white background, five pages below the fold, and you would rank top of Alta Vista if you just said planes 20 or 30 times in that text. And that was how you won SEO in the 1990s. It was a really, really easy skill to learn.
  2. Retention is the single most important thing for growth and retention comes from having a great idea and a great product to back up that idea, and great product market fit. The way we look at, whether a product has great retention or not, is whether or not the users who install it, actually stay on it long-term, when you normalize on a cohort basis, and I think that’s a really good methodology for looking at your product and say ‘okay the first 100, the first 1,000, the first 10,000 people I get on this, will they be retained in the long-run
  3. Every different company when it thinks about growth, needs a different North star; however, when you are operating for growth it is critical that you have that North star, and you define as a leader. That one metric that drives the company and a person who drives it.
  4. For Facebook the magic moment, is that moment when you see your friend’s face, and everything we do on growth, if you look at the Linkedin registration flow, you look at the Twitter registration flow, or you look at what WhatsApp does when you sign up, the number one thing all these services look to do, is show you the people you want to follow, connect to, send messages to, as quickly as possible, because in this vertical, this is what matters. When you think about Airbnb or eBay, it’s about finding that unique item, that PEZ dispenser or broken laser pointer, that you really really cared about and want to get ahold of. Like when you see that collectible that you are missing, that is the real magic moment on eBay. When you look on Airbnb and you find that first listing, that cool house you can stay in, and when you go through the door, that’s a magic moment
  5. Operating for growth, what you really need to think about, is what is the North star of your company: What is that one metric, where if everyone in your company is thinking about it and driving their product towards that metric and their actions towards moving that metric up, you know in the long-run your company will be successful.

  6. Make sure you have deliverability. Focus on notifications and triggered based emails, SMS, and Push Notifications.( A bunch of theory on SEO methods)

    Conclusion:

    “A good plan, violently executed today, is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.”

    BTW PG said Startup = Growth – so lets keep that in mind all the time shall we.

    Btw I highly recommend Genius and thank them for the lecture annotations. A lot of these posts are filtered from there- very helpful.

Sam Altman’s CS183B – Lecture 5 – Peter Thiel

Been busy with office work and finally getting a chance to continue blogging on what I learnt with the Sam Altman lectures.

Lecture 5 was by Peter Thiel. Thiel is notoriously famous for being a cut throat execution oriented investor and has invested in some of the most successful startups on the planet. His lecture was of course polarizing (wouldn’t have it any other way) titled Competition is for losers and mostly took out pieces from his very successful and highly recommended book Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.

Salient points

1.)  If you’re the founder, entrepreneur, starting a company you always want to aim for monopoly and you want to always avoid competition. And so hence competition is for losers!

2.) If you have a valuable company two things are true. Number one, that it creates “X” dollars of value for the world. Number two, that you capture “Y” percent of “X.” And the critical thing that I think people always miss in this sort of analysis is that “X” and “Y” are completely independent variables, and so “X” can be very big and “Y” can be very small. “X” can be an intermediate size and if “Y” is reasonably big, you can still have a very big business.

3.) If we look at perfect competition, there’s some pros and cons to the world of perfect competition, on one end of the spectrum you have industries that are perfectly competitive and at the other end of the spectrum you have things that I would say are monopolies, and they’re much more stable longer term businesses, you have more capital, and if you get a creative monopoly for inventing something new, I think it’s symptomatic of having created something really valuable.

4.) Companies lie for their own benefit regarding monopolies. Anyone who has a monopoly will pretend that they are in incredible competition; and on the other end of the spectrum if you are incredibly competitive, and if you’re in some sort of business where you will never make any money, you’ll be tempted to tell a lie that goes in the other direction, where you will say that you’re doing something unique that is somehow less competitive than it looks because you’ll want to differentiate. (Example, a restaurant not making money in Palo Alto will position itself as “Well we’re the only British food restaurant in Palo Alto” to seek attention of the monopoly they create. CounterExample of Google who have monopolized the search market but all press and PR is about Self driving cars and the competitive space they are in)

5.) Very counterintuitive ideas that comes out of the monopoly thread is that you want to go after small markets. If you’re a startup, you want to get to monopoly. You’re starting a new company, you want to get to monopoly. Monopolies have a large share of the market, how do you get to a large share of the market? You start with a really small market and you take over the whole market and then over time you find ways to expand that market in concentric circles.

Conclusion:

So much of people’s identities got wrapped up in winning these competitions that they somehow lost sight of what was important, what was valuable. Competition does make you better at whatever it is that you’re competing at because when you’re competing you’re comparing yourself with the people around you. I’m figuring out how to beat the people next to me, how do I do somewhat better than whatever it is they’re doing and you will get better at that. I’m not questioning that, I’m not denying that, but there often comes this tremendous price that you stop asking some bigger questions about what’s truly important and truly valuable. Don’t always go through the tiny little door that everyone’s trying to rush through, maybe go around the corner and go through the vast gate that nobody is taking.

 Now if you haven’t been catching up, its fine, my final post in this series is going to be an infographic on what’s been talked about so far and I absolutely recommend his book Zero to one – Buy it here, must read for anyone wanting to build startups

Sam Altman’s CS183B – Lecture 4 – Adora Cheung

Lecture 4 was on Building Product, Talking to Users, and Growing by Adora Cheung. Adora is the CEO of HomeJoy, a online platform which connects customers with house cleaners. Adora Cheung did the first few cleaning jobs herself(Talk about dogfooding), and until late 2013 continued to work at least one cleaning job per month. HomeJoy, After Series B, led by Google Ventures, in early December 2013,  has raised about $38 million totally so far.

Salient points from the talk.

  1. Build a startup when you have a big block of available free time!
  2. Build a startup that solves a problem you have. Adora and her brother Aaron started a company called PathJoy(online platform to connect users to life coaches), but didn’t continue after a years effort, since they realized it wasnt the problem they wanted to solve.
  3. Start by learning A LOT about the target segment, become experts,story board ideal user experience. Build an MVP and put it out, smallest feature set to solve the problem, with simple product positioning.
  4. Have lots of avenues for customer feedback. Go out, talk to users. But setup support@company , surveys, qualitative,quantitative feedback, beware of the honesty curve, graph everything. Stealth is stupid.
  5. There are three types of growth. Sticky, viral, and paid growth.

Sticky growth is trying to get your existing users to come back and pay you more or use you more. Viral growth is when people talk about you. So you use a product, you really like it and you tell ten other friends, and they like it. That’s viral growth. And the third is paid growth. If you happen to have money in the bank you’re going to be able to use part of that money to buy growth.

Key to growth = Sustainability

Sam Altman’s CS183B – Lecture 3 – PG

Lecture 3 had  Paul Graham speaking on the Counterintuitive Parts of Startups, and How to Have Ideas. PG is an advisory icon and the founder and former president of YCombinator, and the primary driving force for this list of amazingly good startup’s. He is also known for his essays on startups.

PG spoke about how startup’s are counter intuitive.

1.)  Startups are counterintuitive! They are like skiing. The first counterintuitive point is that , You cant trust  your intuition about startups,but you can trust your intuition about people.

2.) The second counterintuitive point is that what you need to succeed in a startup is not expertise in startups, what you need is expertise in your own users. Most startups founders now go through the motion of building a startup, because it feels cool, hire people, rent an office in SoMa etc., But forget to do the one important thing, build something users want.

3.) The third counterintuitive thing to remember about startups: starting a startup is where gaming the system stops working. IN a large company, you can get away by sucking up to people, sending emails late nights and on weekends to create an illusion of hard work, but you cant do that in startups, because there is no boss/management to fool, and you are fooling yourself. To some extent with the right phrases you can fool some investors but its not in your interest to do so!

4.) The fourth counterintuitive point is that startups are all consuming but this doesn’t end once you grow as a company. They take over your life. As the companies get bigger, the problems don’t go away, they just change scale. Larry page, a billionaire, still has a lot of problems to tackle daily.  IT NEVER GETS EASIER. It maybe a different set of problems but still the total volume of worry never decreases. Mark Z cant bum around a foreign country

5.) The fifth counterintuitive point is that the age/point in your life at which you should start a startup will eventually come to you. Starting startups is hard, but the answer to the question when should I do it, you can tell!

Reading how to get ideas is here: An exercise left to the reader.

PG’s essay on the topic.

How building startups are like planting trees

Starting startups and planting trees basically have the same steps. Here’s an analogy

1. Find the right soil and area –  this is basically market research without which there is no beginning.  Making sure the soil, the weather, the surroundings is crucial for plants to even begin. Same for startups. Find the right product/market/idea fit. Solve a real problem.

2. Buy the right seeds –  this is the formation of the idea. The idea has to be right, and fit the market, just like the right soil needs the right seeds. Also to buy the seeds you need money and possibly land. You either put in your own money or borrow from friends and family with a promise to repay in kind. This is angel investment. Angels can be friends and family/bootstrapped/angel investors.

3. Choose the right people to plant the tree with – planting and growing trees is a lifelong process.  And you need the right set of people to work with you, who share the same vision for what the tree should look like 20 years from now and will do anything to see it gets there. Also ideally you’ve planted other trees before with these people. This is how you should choose Co founders. The vision should be to grow an Orchard of trees. Ideally you’ll need someone who knows the science of planting trees (CTO) and someone who can ensure daily watering/healthcheck operations happen smoothly(COO). Your primary role(CEO) will be to oversee the other two and start talking to local markets about the benefits of buying your produce and signing up early customers. The purpose is after all to create customers.

4. Plant the seed – This is the start. Make sure everything is in order. Team is set, plans are set, laser focused on building, growth and execution.

5. Water the seed till it becomes a healthy plant – Early growth. This basically proves the land is fertile and the growing trees here is not disastrous. This also sends the right cues to investors and customers alike, who see that 20 years from now, you might be the best producer in the market, and want an early piece of it.

6. Find people who can buy you the right tools and fertilizers– expecting trees to grow on their own is hard especially considering all the factors that can go against it. Find Investors who can buy expensive fertilizers and help solve your problems with their vast experience of having grown trees before. These people are only here to help. Make sure of that, and that you don’t give up too much of your early produce or promise too much of your end product

7. Water everyday and grow the tree – Water the plants everyday, ensure good health, start selling produce, put money back into buying things that help in growth. Similarly for startups – execute, execute, execute, use early revenues to buy more tools , build more metrics and hire more people

8. Find people to help you plant more seeds – find coworkers who believe in your vision and work hard with you. Find people willing to invest in helping you to plant more trees. Scale your startup.

9. Build a business- now that you have the produce, the customers willing to buy your produce and the right hardworking team you have sustainable business. Grow the business. Start planting more trees and orchards, start planting trees in other suitable orchards, acquire orchards that have trees you’d like but cant plant them due to the time involved.

10. Sell the Orchard or continue to expand across regions, orchards – sell or go IPO

At every point be aware of bad weather conditions(co founder spats, bad hires), diseases(bad execution, bad advice) that can kill the plant and make sure to root them out early.

Very similar don’t you think. Comments?