Thread by @jmikolay

Channeling @eriktorenberg

A summary of his big ideas, in three threads...

Thread 2⃣: Management and Leadership

Good management matters more than ever…
🔷Today’s employees need to be both productive and creative
🔷To do that, they need to be inspired and internally motivated

Management gives you leverage…
🔷Optimizing management creates ripple effects
🔷Managers dictate the experience of most people at a company
🔷Leverage is the art of making small changes that have big impacts
🔷Employees optimize for managers as much as the specific company

A reminder for founders…
🔷No one cares like you care
🔷No one's going to sell like you will
🔷No one’s going to have credibility like you do
🔷You own functions initially, while building out processes that scale beyond you

A reminder for CEOs...
🔷Recruit people
🔷Hold people accountable
🔷Nail down the strategy for the company
🔷Deliver the capital to pursue the strategy
🔷Decide what the company will and will not do
🔷Communicate the hell out if things, within and outside the company

Create cultural infrastructure…
🔷Hire for culture upfront
🔷Culture is what people do when you're not there
🔷Culture is more like gardening than architecture
🔷You plant some seeds and pull out weeds that aren't working

Set goals and communicate them…
🔷Often problems come up that seem like communication problems, but they're planning problems
🔷There are different ways to set goals, just make the process clear and transparent for everyone

Allocate enough time to recruiting…
🔷After you raise money, your job is to hire people who can build
🔷More than 50 percent of your time should be spent hiring
🔷Spend time with ideal passive candidates, recruiting over a long time horizon

Take your time hiring…
🔷Hiring should be a last resort
🔷Make sure you have a good job description and need to hire
🔷Don’t decide too quickly whether you should hire a person or not
🔷Get the first 10 hires right (each employee will replicate themselves ten times)

Draft Tom Brady in the 6th round…
🔷Calibrate raters
🔷Treat recruiting like a funnel
🔷Diagram the experience and identify potential leakage
🔷Qualify leads (i.e. comp expectations, ideal role, location)
🔷Find people Google isn’t chasing but have even more talent and grit

Some qualities to look for in hiring…
🔷Drive and grit
🔷Bias to action
🔷High integrity and low ego
🔷High slop and learning velocity
🔷A person who is long-term oriented
🔷A micro-pessimist and macro-optimist

Don’t just interview the candidate, *sell* the candidate…
🔷Quality interviews
🔷Social time with the team
🔷Consistent communication
🔷Make them feel special, not a cog
🔷Transparent and sensible process
🔷Clear expectations of role across team

When onboarding a new employee…
🔷Articulate what success looks like
🔷The best indicator of how long they will stay is their experience on the first day
🔷Make sure everything's set up so they can ship something on that day
🔷Make sure they can understand company priorities

A hire isn't truly a hire until…
🔷They've completed a 90-day plan
🔷Have a hire write first draft of an annual review and co-define what success looks like
🔷Then back into a 90-day plan (which should have been backed into from the job description)

Give direct, clear, and concise feedback…
🔷Give it during regular 1:1s
🔷Make sure you ask for it too
🔷You're looking for people to take ownership and show a growth-mindset
🔷Make it a good experience for the feedback giver or else they won't give it

Run group meetings well…
🔷Make sure people are prepped ahead of time
🔷Have a meeting owner to move people along
🔷Have a note-taker to track decisions and next steps

Measure performance and pull compensation levers…
🔷Decouple performance review from bonus (do that before the review)
🔷It’s more important to figure out fair compensation within the organization than within the market
🔷The goal is no surprises: retain, renew, and reset

Double down on your stars…
🔷It's how you keep great people who would otherwise leave
🔷Promote from within if you believe you have people who have 10x value creation
🔷Improving their abilities is more important than trying to fix people who won't create 10x value

Fire crisply and kindly…
🔷Cut the cord
🔷Don't negotiate
🔷Don't feel too terrible
🔷Don't demote (usually)
🔷Don't have long transition periods
🔷You're letting people go to a different company where they will be more valued, more respected, and more successful

Only when it’s clear you need one, hire an executive…
🔷Don’t hire too senior, too soon (or too late)…
🔷If you're not sure whether you need an exec, don't hire one
🔷Understand whether the role is value protecting or value creating (spec accordingly)

The best executives…
🔷Act like owners
🔷Act as part of a team
🔷Act as primary individual contributors
🔷Act to build organizations, often from scratch

Source executives but don't outsource your evaluation…
🔷Create a roadmap
🔷Use data to write specs for the role
🔷Know why you’re hiring and what you're hiring for
🔷Hire the best person for the next nine months
🔷A great exec pays back 10-100x+ more than the cost of a search

After you hire executives…
🔷Manage them
🔷But don’t micro-manage them, except temporarily
🔷Ask people under them semi-regularly how they're doing

Lastly, don’t hesitate to fire an executive…
🔷Judged by output of their organization
🔷When you no longer trust them to build their org and you feel compelled to micro-manage
🔷Andy Grove said you always fire a bad exec too late. If you're really good, 3 months too late

Find the rest here...

Thread 1⃣

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