Thread by @dunkhippo33

Some Sat thoughts on growing pains. One of the earliest hurdles in building a company is in how to structure work w your first hires.

@HustleFundVC we now have 14 ppl & have rejiggered how we work recently.

More here >>

1) When we started 3 yrs ago, it was just @ericbahn and me. We decided we would build an in-person team in the SF Bay Area & it would be small. And that would be fun.

3) But both of those things went out the window quickly.

@shiyankoh came along and told us she was going to start a vc firm in SEA. We couldn’t pass up working w her. But in-person wasn’t going to work because she would be in Singapore.

3) (the prior one should’ve been #2!)

We moved all mtgs to zoom - incl w founders. And our all partner mtgs were 3x per wk for 1hr instead of 1 multi-hr partner mtg on mondays (as traditionally done in vc)

4) Unbeknownst to us, this started out as a kludge but turned into a strength.

It prepared us for Covid - we had no workflow changes this yr.

It gave us faster cycles on work to make faster decisions. This wasn’t deliberate.

But it changed my thinking on cycle time.

5) Having faster cycles is a strength in many biz decisions. Mtg 3x a wk is ok but how can you speed up your decision loops near infinitely and as you add more ppl?

6) Fast fwd, our team grew a lot. I’ll talk about how some other day - but big big thanks to our sponsors and gov grants as well as our teammates who have taken so much risk with us!

Small microfunds don’t have budget to support a team of this size.

7) Since we had @shiyankoh onboard who was already remote, we slowly moved towards an all-remote model. Covid solidified that.

4 timezones and lots of cities.

Zoom is fine when needed but this is not a good way to work w this size team dispersed.

8) The best remote teams like Gitlab et al are optimized for remote.

-strong documentation
-asych friendly

You shouldn’t have to rely on real time mtgs to do work well.

Remote requires tons of discipline we didn’t have so we needed to make big changes.

9) We reset how we do mtgs.

They are all small and functionally grouped. 40 min for mtg. Agenda prepared beforehand. 20 min for everyone to do action items right after.

Everyone takes notes during the mtgs on a collab file.

10) Every function is spelled out w specific captains who run these. And team members who are on each team.

I’m both a captain and a team member on various different functions.

11) @ericbahn set up templates on Notion for our mtg notes so they all look the same way.

Easy to scan and anyone can read other teams’ notes. We are default-open.

12) Lastly, we do 1 all team mtg 1x per wk for 1 hr just for fun.

It’s our placeholder for a recurring happy hour, pechakuchas (look that up), and team workouts to try to keep the team together while remote.