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 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?

Sam Altman’s CS183B – Lecture 2

Lecture 2 was part 2 of the first class i.e. Ideas, Product , Teams and execution with focus on Teams and Execution. The class started with Sam answering a couple of questions from the questionnaire.

Q: How does someone identify markets that are growing quickly?

A. College students instinctively have better know how of this, better than older people, since they see friends, market trends etc., everyday closer than others.

Q: How do you deal with burnout?

A. It sucks, but keep going. Address the challenges, things that are going wrong , and things would get better. Founder depression is a serious issue

Team Notes:

1.) Choosing Co Founders is very very very  important. Co Founder blow up is the main reason for failing YC Startups. Best place to find a co founder – college or a very interesting startup type company – FB, Google. Don’t go solo, very difficult.

2.) Best friend\Friend\Acquaintance Co founder > Solo Founder > Random Founder you meet. Founders = 007 , Hire James Bond type people – do whatever it takes to achieve goals,tough+calm.

3.) Hire slowly, hire correctly.Get the best, don’t settle. Recruitment is hard! Spend either 0% or 25% of time hiring. Use personal referrals liberally. Look outside the valley.

4.) Hire the Venn Diagram intersection of Smart, GTD and Like to spend time with. Try to work together on something instead of just interviews. For interviews ask  for projects and call references.

5.) Give lot more equity to employees vs investors. Do this very soon. Be near equal, this is a very difficult decision, vest equity. Employee retention is a big part. Do simple things to do this , not micromanage, praise teams. Fire fast.

 Execution notes:

1.) CEO –> Vision, Raise money, evangelize, hire and manage, make sure the company executes.

2.) FOCUS –> What are you spending time and money, find two things to do everyday with laser focus. Say No a lot, Set overarching goals and repeat them over and over again, communicate.

3.) INTENSITY–> Not for work life balance, all consuming. GTD!

4.) INDECISIVENESS is a startup killer – Bias towards action.

5.)  ALWAYS KEEP MOMENTUM and ALWAYS KEEP GROWING.

BUILD FEATURES–> SHIP–>VIEW METRICS.

Don’t let competitors worry you unless they don’t care about you.

 

Slide Deck

Sam Altman’s CS183B – Lecture 1

Signed up for Sam Altman’s CS183B. Quite excited to watch and learn a little bit about how to build startups. Sam Altman is a proven technology leader(sold Loopt(First YC batch)) and voted one of the best founders ever by Paul Graham(PG), and hence is his successor at YCombinator as the President.

The first class was just an introduction. I think the biggest insights from the first part of  Sam Altman’s talk were

1.) 4 components that make a great startup – Great idea, Awesome product, Strong founding team, and cut throat execution

2.) Ideas are important(contrary to recent popular belief that ideas don’t matter)! Of course not the most important, but certainly ideas form a very important piece of the startup value prop.

3.) Make amazing products. Products are easy to build if you have a strong founding team and the right toolset. Its better to have a small group of users who absolutely love the product rather than having a large group of users who just like it.

4.) Dont follow the policy – “We will build and they will come”, rather follow “I will build what they want by asking them over and over again”

5.) The holy grail of growth metrics :

Total registrations
Active users
Activity Levels
Cohort Retention
Revenue
Net Promoter Score

Slide deck: Sam Altman Slide deck

Dustin Moskovitz, Co Founder at Facebook and Asana, also talked about the pitfalls of thinking about startups as being cool, rad and the most fun thing to do and the only reason for you to start something is that you can Not start it , your own passion of solving a problem you are facing and helping others to solve the same problem and the acknowledgement of the world of the existence of the problem and the need to solve it.

Slide deck: Dustin Moskovitz Slide deck

 

Here is a link to the questionnaire , if you want to ask Sama or PG or Adora Cheung any specific questions:

Questionnaire

Btw – These are a few books, in my opinion, you need to read before even thinking of starting something

1.) Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future – Peter Thiel

2.) The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses – Eric Ries

3.)Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Management of Innovation and Change) – Clayton Christensen

4.)The Four Steps to the Epiphany – Steve Blank

5.) Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas From the Computer Age – Paul Graham

Of course this is just 5 out of the many that are out there, so please comment on what books you would rate higher than the ones above for any budding entrepreneur to read.

 

PS: I’ll be summarizing all classes into possibly flashcards like posts with 5 points each, like above