As employee #36 I lived through some of these things first hand and definitely agree with them (I think we were over 200 people when I left).
It was painful going through the enterprise focus transition along with a nonsensical reorg imposed by the aforementioned Big Tech VP. One day we had focused platform-specific teams working on satisfying customers, the next we were moved to cross-functional feature teams and focused on enterprise features that (from our perspective) no one ever asked for.
I also felt the sting from mediocre engineering managers. I remember sitting down with Tracy and Ralph at Uptown Bar and giving them both barrels on what I thought of several managers. To their credit those managers weren't working there very long after that conversation.
IIRC Ralph asked if I wanted to move to being a manager and I declined but in hindsight I think that was a mistake - we needed good management in engineering more than we needed my code.
Another thing that hurt us was hiring a bunch of PMs. Most of them were condescending, ignorant, or both... but suddenly they were telling the engineers who had built everything what to do? IIRC we could have cut that department down to two people with no loss.
The leader of this product team was a manager that just didn't seem to be doing his job, only pushing paperwork and giving scatterbrained presentations. I never did find out why he was kept on so long. I think I very cheekily asked Tracy one time which of his relatives worked at Y2K or Sequoia such that he couldn't be fired because it was clear everyone in engineering was fed up with his nonsense. I'm pretty sure at least several top engineers quit due to that guy specifically.
Either way I don't regret my time at PlanGrid. It was a great team and I'm proud of what the team did and what I did.
As an outsider to the tech industry, it seems to me that the Product Manager/Product Owner role seems to be not only the most BS role, but also the most damaging role? Considering that I saw a post a few weeks back, I saw a similar post (I think on HN itself) where PMs were being fired en masse, I wonder if there is any real utility with the product team, or if it's just a holdover from Google doing its thing back in the days that everyone decided to copy.
“Product Manager” is a double category error - the right title is customer analyst. This clarifies the actual function of the role, and eliminates most of the dysfunction
A common theme seems to be founders who want to keep all the cool stuff about being a small business while they scale to the ARR of a corporate. It can't happen. 1000 people don't all care about some new feature shipped by someone over in the payments team so don't subject them to it.
Most of us have been there in the painfull all-hands meeting falling asleep because the more people you have, the less they will care about the business. In a a team of 5, I have a lot of skin in the game and also a lot of influence. In a company with 100K employees, most of us are just a cog and some cogs don't even move anything!
Hiring is like a code base, you have to have the right abstraction at the right time. Starting out, better everything be a concrete implementation, that is everyone is directly responsible for making things work.
Next is what I found most people doing differently from my ideal - abstract and refactor base on your existing implementation, not because of some framework doing it, nor because the previous project did it this way. Do you need a data access layer, a library, a folder, to talk to database where the first implementation was just storing things as a variable? You probably need a database and plain SQL. Do you need site reliability engineer to keep your site online while your traffic all comes from friends? Do you need a QA for testing? Or do you need a product manager where, as a founder, the value proposition has yet to be proven? How often do you see a code base spinning up all the folders/empty files because "we may need it". And how often when you hire someone, they spin up various incarnation people * time like teams, sprints, squad, function, BEFORE understanding the current implementation. This is why you hire the wrong people. And you know it only 1 year down the road. Wrong abstraction. Using framework has its appeal, where a cookie cutter solution mostly work. But it also has its limitation, bloat.
Once a wrong abstraction is in place, the more code/people depends on it, the more effort it takes to refactor
Btw, the most important point from OP's is the last one. Life is fragile, treat people well. That's more important than all the three letter acronyms in the world.
A lot of the enterprise requirements he talked about add no actual value to the product; they're just checkboxes on an RFP that are required.
Theoretically applying all of those requirements to your product might make your product more secure, scalable, or reliable. It'll also make your product harder to maintain, harder to test, and harder to improve.
Many of those requirements are there because vendors put them there. If you're part of the RFP process (and you should be if you're actually selling to that sort of customer) you should be actively pushing back on requirements that you feel are pointless...making them optional instead of required, or at the very least providing a delivery date instead of delivering day 1.
In the enterprise space there's no guarantee you'll get the contract; to an extent the decision more political than technical. You should do a brutal assessment of your actual chances before engaging in any work implementing their requirements before the contract is signed. And since the sales cycle will be at least 6-9 months you'll have plenty of time to figure things out.
Lastly, if your product is highly desired the "requirements" can be bent or delayed. They're guidelines and can be overridden, if you have the right relationships.
The assumption is: "And remember that A players can recruit other A players, …”, not “ "And remember that A players can ONLY recruit other A players, …”.
(Added: My Ph.D. in mathematics is useful for something.)
The point is that B players have a very hard time ever recruiting A players and actually almost always hire people that are worse than themselves (i.e. c players). This is very true and should be something founders watch out for very carefully as they scale.
The A player thing is less about how good they are at hiring and more about how strong of a player they are overall. Founders generally need to be A players to be successful founders.
An A player will still make hiring mistakes but they have the skills/ability/aura/whatever to convince other A players to come work with them.
Many A players won't want to work for/with a B or C player because they won't see this as a good opportunity.
Not sure if they actually meant that B players can't hire B players but maybe. This sort of framing is pretty high level though.
Not sure if anyone doesn't get this but just in case this isn't clear, the entire point of the quote isn't that people can be neatly separated into A/B/C classes, but that lowering the hiring bar can lead to a slippery slope effect that continuously lowers the bar, hence the short-term benefit of hiring someone good enough has to be measured against the long-term cost of this slippery slope effect.
The author is quoting Steve Jobs who would parrot it to his original Macintosh team. The Macintosh was an overpriced black and white appliance that nearly bankrupted Apple. Wozniak's team on the other hand built up the Apple II to be cheaper, faster, more modular. The Apple II saved the company. Ironically Wozniak is the A person and Jobs is the B person
I'm currently knee-deep in the enterprise world, and trust me, the point about selling into these orgs is very true. My team just spent the last year moving our client off a Salesforce Lightning-based solution onto our custom-built one. No one in the org could tell us why they chose to build it in Lightning, but everyone now says they love our solution.
The lessons you learn building a startup are good and always usable, but you need to be ready to learn what it's like to work in and with an enterprise, to figure out how to adapt and sell your product to them. It's an arduous process, but worthwhile.
This while A/B/C are just code words for the right pedigree. Say, Mr. X worked for a no-name company, got a degree from some state college. Such a person can't recruit candidates whose pedigree is Ivy league credentials, and top tier companies. You can see this often in terms of successful exits for many start ups: people with right pedigree (that is, right network) can bring more multiples for their startups, than others do.
I hate this BS about A managers hire A people, B people hire C etc. This is total MBA thinking (I think it comes form GE, or at least they espoused it) on a forum where people routinely mock MBAs.
I have been lucky to work in a field where teams frequently work in parallel and success or failure is pretty clear cut. And teams are often stratified based on the priority of project. Many times-- not always -- the "B" team crushes the "A" team. Why? Some reasons include: the A team is performative and focused on the things that burnish the careers and reputation of its members. B teams have more of a sense of the wolf being at the door and that if they don't perform their task they will feel the consequence. Being underdogs promotes teamwork.
Obviously people have profound differences in their strengths and weaknesses and some people are completely inappropriate. But calling people stars or A player covers up a lot of lazy thinking that includes a lot of bias. I have worked at smaller startups that say "we only hire A players". Obviously that is delusional but worse it covered up the more profound questions. Why did you hire the wrong person? Why did that person or team fail?
> Many times-- not always -- the "B" team crushes the "A" team. Being underdogs promotes teamwork.
It's clear you don't understand what A and B people are then. If the "B team" is crushing the "A Team", then they aren't the "B team". Also, notice how you switched "player" with "team"? The quote is "A players hire A players", not "team".
The point is that top tier individuals typically hire top tier individuals. The reason this notion isn't so clear cut is because its hard to identify A players before the fact. It's a retrospective truthism.
Yup, this is the one thing that struck me wrong in the essay.
After spending multiple paragraphs about how they found that they had to dig much deeper into the background of every exec, getting 10+ references from reports, peers, and their managers, and developing specific lists of red flags . . .they end the section with: "Takeaway: Always trust your gut on people. "
Yes, for sure, if you 'gut' tells you something is off about someone, seriously consider and trust that also, but what was really effective was not gut-trusting, but gathering more hard data and observations to evaluate.
Just seems like the author didn't really think it through.
In general good people will be able to identify good people (colloquially: game recognizes game). And good people will know they are being interviewed by someone who is not so good, and they won't want to join. A hires A.
Additionally, people who are not so good tend to be threatened by good people. So they will rather hire someone that won't threaten or "find them out". B hires C.
So 3/4 of the main points here are in regards to hiring the right people...
Almost makes me wonder if hr teams/operations shouldn't be measured on just headcount but rather getting the right people in
Hiring speed, hire quality, compensation (including things like work/life balance, healthcare, flexibility). I think you can try for two.
Once you get large enough your ability to really selectively recruit gets a lot harder when natural attrition means you need to replace X amount of people just to continue operating as before.
Of course earlier on, the fewer the people the larger the impact each one will have so just like the article says about transitioning to enterprise, the focus and requirements of the HR team change as well.
Great article and lots of salient advice in this post. It's so interesting to me that a company can get to $50 million ARR, and then feel strained because "there's enterprise competition". So what? I get that the pressure of VC-backed companies is go big or go home, but if the market that got them to 50 mill still loves and enjoys the product (which seems like it did), and churn is manageable, then one can probably truck along as a nice profitable business with some operational adjustments.
Again, I get that the VC-backed status doesn't allow this, but that's such an interesting distinction - this would be a successful $50mill ARR business if not VC-backed, but since it is, the panic button is pressed and that thus leads to decisions and scrambling that upend a lot of what was working.
Guess we all (as usual) need to make decisions about capital sources early and how we want to grow, as well as the real trade-offs between those choices.
I got the impression that the 2022 late stage funding implosion was also the death of ARR as a be-all growth metric. It got Goodhart's Law'd to death after all the companies that went public at huge valuations based on ARR turned out to not be as "recurring" as investors would have liked.
I wonder if you have more context or numbers. What companies are you thinking of. I remember companies like WeWork and Coinbase dropping in valuation but what more traditional Saas companies have run into this sort of hurdle?
I'd argue that ARR is still a good measure just not the growth at all costs, w/e it takes to get toe 100M ARR/Unicorn status anymore. After all, sales is sales and if you don't have repeatable sales you probably don't have much of anything.
Love this article. Thank you for sharing. Read it and felt seen and less isolated as I reflect on some of my own similar mistakes. My colleagues loved it too!
Thanks so much for sharing these insights! Especially the humanizing points around life still unfolding around you regardless of how much success you achieve.
On the whole, this is a fairly good write-up but this is just not right:
> Being at a startup is hard in a way that is almost indescribable to anyone who hasn’t experienced it.
Being at a startup as an employee isn't necessarily hard. You hear this type of "startup is so hard" because running companies well is hard and successful startups will often grow faster than their founders are able to grow their own ability to run companies, which makes their own job challenging. And a lot of startups are poorly run in ways that are entirely avoidable (often as a result of their CEOs not being able to grow as quickly as their company) which can make life hard for the employees as well. But this isn't a necessary part of the startup experience.
Startup work is much more chaotic than established companies. It is much closer to my creative experiences of directing a feature film and being in a touring band than it is to my time at big software companies. Instead of having clearly set requirements, you have to figure out the requirements as you go, and it's different and unique challenges every day.
She clearly means from an executive point of view given the context. And having been an executive at two start-ups and one middle-sized company, I agree with her 100%.
Most non-startup jobs tend to be well-defined and come with a pre-existing business strategy and existing resources, such as a project codebase and existing at least semi-working solution to which one can inspect and add to.
Contrast this with startup companies, where it's often required to explore and build completely new things from the thin air of the ether. I'm not saying other jobs don't also have elements of this, as new projects and opportunities do emerge, but being at a startup is definitely an extreme situation and arguably a different game. In the meta lens, it can be viewed as the act of mining the veins of market realities for golden ideas.
It's for the risk takers and adventurers. I've witnessed many a great engineer learn it's too undefined which can be uncomfortable, and is not a good fit for them.
It's nothing personal, along the exact same lines as some folks who can't stand working for a large company.
Different strokes and all that. This form of diversity is one of the beautiful things about the spectrum of humanity. In aggregate, it works!
xenadu02|3 years ago
It was painful going through the enterprise focus transition along with a nonsensical reorg imposed by the aforementioned Big Tech VP. One day we had focused platform-specific teams working on satisfying customers, the next we were moved to cross-functional feature teams and focused on enterprise features that (from our perspective) no one ever asked for.
I also felt the sting from mediocre engineering managers. I remember sitting down with Tracy and Ralph at Uptown Bar and giving them both barrels on what I thought of several managers. To their credit those managers weren't working there very long after that conversation.
IIRC Ralph asked if I wanted to move to being a manager and I declined but in hindsight I think that was a mistake - we needed good management in engineering more than we needed my code.
Another thing that hurt us was hiring a bunch of PMs. Most of them were condescending, ignorant, or both... but suddenly they were telling the engineers who had built everything what to do? IIRC we could have cut that department down to two people with no loss.
The leader of this product team was a manager that just didn't seem to be doing his job, only pushing paperwork and giving scatterbrained presentations. I never did find out why he was kept on so long. I think I very cheekily asked Tracy one time which of his relatives worked at Y2K or Sequoia such that he couldn't be fired because it was clear everyone in engineering was fed up with his nonsense. I'm pretty sure at least several top engineers quit due to that guy specifically.
Either way I don't regret my time at PlanGrid. It was a great team and I'm proud of what the team did and what I did.
fakedang|3 years ago
paulsutter|3 years ago
Ben-G|3 years ago
It's been a while - we should catch up soon :)
hemloc_io|3 years ago
Their bathroom is fun
lbriner|3 years ago
Most of us have been there in the painfull all-hands meeting falling asleep because the more people you have, the less they will care about the business. In a a team of 5, I have a lot of skin in the game and also a lot of influence. In a company with 100K employees, most of us are just a cog and some cogs don't even move anything!
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
dilyevsky|3 years ago
a_c|3 years ago
Next is what I found most people doing differently from my ideal - abstract and refactor base on your existing implementation, not because of some framework doing it, nor because the previous project did it this way. Do you need a data access layer, a library, a folder, to talk to database where the first implementation was just storing things as a variable? You probably need a database and plain SQL. Do you need site reliability engineer to keep your site online while your traffic all comes from friends? Do you need a QA for testing? Or do you need a product manager where, as a founder, the value proposition has yet to be proven? How often do you see a code base spinning up all the folders/empty files because "we may need it". And how often when you hire someone, they spin up various incarnation people * time like teams, sprints, squad, function, BEFORE understanding the current implementation. This is why you hire the wrong people. And you know it only 1 year down the road. Wrong abstraction. Using framework has its appeal, where a cookie cutter solution mostly work. But it also has its limitation, bloat.
Once a wrong abstraction is in place, the more code/people depends on it, the more effort it takes to refactor
a_c|3 years ago
manv1|3 years ago
Theoretically applying all of those requirements to your product might make your product more secure, scalable, or reliable. It'll also make your product harder to maintain, harder to test, and harder to improve.
Many of those requirements are there because vendors put them there. If you're part of the RFP process (and you should be if you're actually selling to that sort of customer) you should be actively pushing back on requirements that you feel are pointless...making them optional instead of required, or at the very least providing a delivery date instead of delivering day 1.
In the enterprise space there's no guarantee you'll get the contract; to an extent the decision more political than technical. You should do a brutal assessment of your actual chances before engaging in any work implementing their requirements before the contract is signed. And since the sales cycle will be at least 6-9 months you'll have plenty of time to figure things out.
Lastly, if your product is highly desired the "requirements" can be bent or delayed. They're guidelines and can be overridden, if you have the right relationships.
donnythecroc|3 years ago
ipaddr|3 years ago
In point one they list this. In point 3 he mentions his biggest mistake was hiring someone with starpower from a public company who didn't work.
Unless the founder is an A player in terms of recruiting everyone hired would be a C player or less. And in point 3 we learn he is not an A player.
How do B players ever get hired?
williamstein|3 years ago
(Added: My Ph.D. in mathematics is useful for something.)
oragnediscussy|3 years ago
molsongolden|3 years ago
An A player will still make hiring mistakes but they have the skills/ability/aura/whatever to convince other A players to come work with them.
Many A players won't want to work for/with a B or C player because they won't see this as a good opportunity.
Not sure if they actually meant that B players can't hire B players but maybe. This sort of framing is pretty high level though.
candybar|3 years ago
skrebbel|3 years ago
LarsDu88|3 years ago
faangiq|3 years ago
georgeecollins|3 years ago
HorizonXP|3 years ago
I'm currently knee-deep in the enterprise world, and trust me, the point about selling into these orgs is very true. My team just spent the last year moving our client off a Salesforce Lightning-based solution onto our custom-built one. No one in the org could tell us why they chose to build it in Lightning, but everyone now says they love our solution.
The lessons you learn building a startup are good and always usable, but you need to be ready to learn what it's like to work in and with an enterprise, to figure out how to adapt and sell your product to them. It's an arduous process, but worthwhile.
raincom|3 years ago
georgeecollins|3 years ago
I have been lucky to work in a field where teams frequently work in parallel and success or failure is pretty clear cut. And teams are often stratified based on the priority of project. Many times-- not always -- the "B" team crushes the "A" team. Why? Some reasons include: the A team is performative and focused on the things that burnish the careers and reputation of its members. B teams have more of a sense of the wolf being at the door and that if they don't perform their task they will feel the consequence. Being underdogs promotes teamwork.
Obviously people have profound differences in their strengths and weaknesses and some people are completely inappropriate. But calling people stars or A player covers up a lot of lazy thinking that includes a lot of bias. I have worked at smaller startups that say "we only hire A players". Obviously that is delusional but worse it covered up the more profound questions. Why did you hire the wrong person? Why did that person or team fail?
Swizec|3 years ago
Fit matters. You wouldn't hire Jim Carey for a DiCaprio role.
mbesto|3 years ago
It's clear you don't understand what A and B people are then. If the "B team" is crushing the "A Team", then they aren't the "B team". Also, notice how you switched "player" with "team"? The quote is "A players hire A players", not "team".
The point is that top tier individuals typically hire top tier individuals. The reason this notion isn't so clear cut is because its hard to identify A players before the fact. It's a retrospective truthism.
toss1|3 years ago
After spending multiple paragraphs about how they found that they had to dig much deeper into the background of every exec, getting 10+ references from reports, peers, and their managers, and developing specific lists of red flags . . .they end the section with: "Takeaway: Always trust your gut on people. "
Yes, for sure, if you 'gut' tells you something is off about someone, seriously consider and trust that also, but what was really effective was not gut-trusting, but gathering more hard data and observations to evaluate.
Just seems like the author didn't really think it through.
gumby|3 years ago
If that is the case, how do the B people get jobs in the first place? Who hires them?
vasco|3 years ago
Additionally, people who are not so good tend to be threatened by good people. So they will rather hire someone that won't threaten or "find them out". B hires C.
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
thexumaker|3 years ago
Ataraxic|3 years ago
Once you get large enough your ability to really selectively recruit gets a lot harder when natural attrition means you need to replace X amount of people just to continue operating as before.
Of course earlier on, the fewer the people the larger the impact each one will have so just like the article says about transitioning to enterprise, the focus and requirements of the HR team change as well.
triceratops|3 years ago
jvanderbot|3 years ago
https://tracy.posthaven.com/part-i-founder-led-enterprise-sa...
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
moneywoes|3 years ago
forgingahead|3 years ago
Again, I get that the VC-backed status doesn't allow this, but that's such an interesting distinction - this would be a successful $50mill ARR business if not VC-backed, but since it is, the panic button is pressed and that thus leads to decisions and scrambling that upend a lot of what was working.
Guess we all (as usual) need to make decisions about capital sources early and how we want to grow, as well as the real trade-offs between those choices.
kolbe|3 years ago
Ataraxic|3 years ago
I'd argue that ARR is still a good measure just not the growth at all costs, w/e it takes to get toe 100M ARR/Unicorn status anymore. After all, sales is sales and if you don't have repeatable sales you probably don't have much of anything.
wittedhaddock|3 years ago
reasonabl_human|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
rfrey|3 years ago
candybar|3 years ago
> Being at a startup is hard in a way that is almost indescribable to anyone who hasn’t experienced it.
Being at a startup as an employee isn't necessarily hard. You hear this type of "startup is so hard" because running companies well is hard and successful startups will often grow faster than their founders are able to grow their own ability to run companies, which makes their own job challenging. And a lot of startups are poorly run in ways that are entirely avoidable (often as a result of their CEOs not being able to grow as quickly as their company) which can make life hard for the employees as well. But this isn't a necessary part of the startup experience.
issa|3 years ago
icelancer|3 years ago
metadat|3 years ago
Contrast this with startup companies, where it's often required to explore and build completely new things from the thin air of the ether. I'm not saying other jobs don't also have elements of this, as new projects and opportunities do emerge, but being at a startup is definitely an extreme situation and arguably a different game. In the meta lens, it can be viewed as the act of mining the veins of market realities for golden ideas.
It's for the risk takers and adventurers. I've witnessed many a great engineer learn it's too undefined which can be uncomfortable, and is not a good fit for them.
It's nothing personal, along the exact same lines as some folks who can't stand working for a large company.
Different strokes and all that. This form of diversity is one of the beautiful things about the spectrum of humanity. In aggregate, it works!
mariambarouma|3 years ago
Seen it SO many times when startups decide they need "grownups" in big positions to be credible externally
dilyevsky|3 years ago
steve76|3 years ago
[deleted]
adelia89|3 years ago
[deleted]