I have one tool to share with you. If you remember one thing from this video, it's this, you have a finite number of tries. But if you timebox your tries, you'll get to try a lot more things. And that will maximize your chance of success. Remember to timebox. Let's get into it.
How do you build a fast growing startup team that builds a world-class product? This is part two, focusing on management with empathy and how to build an organic remote work culture from scratch that is truly collaborative.
Here is what we cover in this masterclass:
01:00 Managing culture remotely
01:54 Weekly check-ins and 1:1s with leadership
02:29 Remote work requires trust by default
03:45 How to run a 1:1 remotely
04:52 Forming an organic remote culture
08:53 How to communicate values
11:39 How to handle management when things go wrong
13:17 How to handle performance issues
15:02 How to handle misalignment in values
16:39 Rewards and recognition
17:42 Approaching diversity and inclusion
New vlog this morning:
Sometimes you just really nail that idea. It's something everyone wants. It's clearly the future. Like in this clip from Silicon Valley:
Nelson Bighetti: The user can control their Hooli phone solely with their neural impulses. Point, click, drag, even type, all using only brainwaves. Think it, and it happens.
Gavin Belson: Holy shit. Seriously?
Nelson Bighetti: Seriously.
Gavin Belson: This is great! Fuck yes, team! So, what's our timeline here? I mean, when can we start testing this? How long before we can integrate this into Nucleus?Nelson Bighetti: Not long. It'll probably happen in our lifetime, we just have to figure out how to make it work. But I really believe that our grandchildren are going to grow up taking this technology for granted.
Gavin Belson: Our grandchildren?Nelson Bighetti: I know you're single, but you might meet someone.
Gavin Belson: No... no!
It's not enough. Getting pointed in the right direction is just not enough. As you saw in that clip right there, Big Head in "Silicon Valley" found this out the hard way. You can't just point at the moon, you've got to build the goddamn spaceship.
This is the first part of a two part masterclass on remote work, now live here:
01:46 Meet Shogun, the e-commerce page builder
02:58 They started fully remote as a side project that became profitable
04:23 The Tools: Hardware and software that enables remote work
07:40 How to do learning & development
08:29 On recruiting for remote teams
11:35 Remote recruiting process
19:43 How to legally hire remote candidates
22:05 Onboarding remote employees
22:05 Onboarding remote employees
Watch the full video at YouTube here: https://youtube.com/garrytan — You can also read the full Shogun Remote Work guide at their blog here.
I guess we're all working remotely right now, so who better to sit down with than a team that is the best at remote work that I've ever seen, Shogun?
Today's a master class in how to run remote work teams, from a team that has been working remotely from nearly the beginning. They've gone on to create one of the best products in the whole portfolio, and they did it through great recruiting, great management, great software, and great processes.
In this masterclass today, they sit down with Katelin Holloway Partner at Initialized and former head of people at Reddit to walk through all of the secrets they learned the hard way so you don't have to. Part one is about recruiting, tools, workflow— Let's get started.
20M software developers in the world— if you can convince this set of people in the world to use your software, you've got a very very valuable startup. Today I wanted to sit down with the folks behind one of the best developer experiences I have ever seen and hear their lessons as they built it.
Quick run of show—
01:15 Algolia is realtime fast customizable search, both backend and frontend
02:02 Tech giants can put 100s of devs on search. Algolia democratizes that.
03:34 Walking through the developer experience
03:45 The homepage
04:01 Evolving from self-serve to enterprise
04:16 Even if you sell by enterprise, showing value to developers immediately is still key
05:51 Garry's magical experience using Algolia
06:12 The docs drive you directly to the tutorial: Interactive is better
09:53 Design tip: Strong call to actions
10:42 Developer docs are only effective when they make devs feel powerful
11:56 How did Algolia implement their interactive developer docs?
13:01 How to support 9 runtimes? 15 engineers out of 100 are devoted to dev xp
14:43 Low bar high ceiling: the holy grail for products and services
16:56 How Sylvain got into tech
18:56 When your competition is 20 year old tech: Lucene and Sphinx
Today we're sitting down with Rui Ma. She is a very old friend of mine who also runs one of the top Chinese tech podcasts. Th ere are so many stories we never get to hear in the West, so I thought it would be fun to talk through a bunch of those narratives. It's a country of 1.4B people. People say China is either the future, or it copies the future. The reality is a little bit of both.
Transcript below
The best podcast on Chinese technology— Tech Buzz China
00:30 Meet Rui Ma, Co-host of Tech Buzz China
00:58 Tech in the West doesn't pay enough attention to China
01:18 Why Rui started Tech Buzz China
02:13 Luckin Coffee is an example of US tech media getting it wrong
02:43 Media’s false equivalence: Luckin = Starbucks
What's it called and how do we find it?
It's called Tech Buzz China, and then you can just go to any platform and we'll be there.
That's awesome, and what kind of stuff do you like to talk about?
Basically I talk about China tech, but it's with a heavy emphasis on internet. So, consumer internet primarily because that's really a lot of the big Chinese internet companies, that's what they're doing.
There's just so much happening in China and it feels like the media environment is completely separate. It doesn't make sense, it's worlds apart in sort of a sheer hardware platform, a sheer, like, software platform, but I don't think people pay attention to what's happening with Chinese companies nearly enough, and I'm glad for what you do. Thanks for doing that!
Oh, thank you.
Why did you start the podcast?
I thought there was an opportunity to more clearly bridge a divide that I saw between English coverage of Chinese tech companies and then what actually was happening on the ground in China. There are certain companies that are really popular in the media, or with the media here in the U.S., and are actually viewed quite skeptically in China, for example. There are other companies that are viewed very strongly in China that might not get a lot of airtime here in the U.S. but that are really interesting. And so, I look primarily at actually Chinese rich coverage, and I lived and worked in China for eight years, so, I tried to use my knowledge and cultural understanding to bring that, yeah.
That's super useful. What's the most extreme example of this?
One of the more extreme examples of recent years is a company called Luckin Coffee, which basically does delivery of their coffee. In China, there's a lot of skepticism about the company, but in the U.S., I think that they have, you know, there's some balanced coverage, but overall, I felt like that they were covered more favorably here.
How do you think that happens, that reporters here can't get access to the right people to sort of vet the story properly?
I think basically the reason why that happens is that there are certain narratives that come more naturally to Western audiences, so it's just more interesting because it's more familiar, whereas there are lots of things that are more unique to China that are just difficult to explain without have to provide a ton of context.
In the case of Luckin, they sort of just used one work to explain their business, and the word was Starbucks, which I think everyone here can understand, but if you take another company in China, like Kuaishou, which is a short-video app that does live-streaming e-commerce, all these other things, it's just much harder to explain 'cause there's no Western analog.
When and how should you sell your startup? M&A (mergers & acquisitions) are always a high stress process, and there are a lot of things you have to consider when you are trying to get a startup exit executed in the right way. Garry's startup Posterous was sold to Twitter for $20M and Andrew Lee's startup was sold to Zynga too. As venture capitalists today we work with more than a hundred startups from the earliest possible stage to now a total market value of over $36 billion. We've seen nearly every kind of startup exit and regularly try to help founders as they navigate these problems. This short video encompasses a lot of the advice we end up giving frequently to our community.
Transcript below
Andrew: Are you recording now?
Garry: Yes, recording. The reality is like, we sold our company because the company was ****ed.
Andrew: Yeah.
Garry: We were out of money. This is why you really sell your company. You made something good and then you're not growing. You can't raise more money. The company's going to die.
Andrew: Yeah, but sadly, what's happening is you always get approached when your company is growing, it's doing super well, and you don't really need anybody, and that's the time when it's probably the best time to sell. That's the classic problem.
Garry: That's the conundrum! It's okay, though, this video is to help you figure out how to actually get it done.
Andrew: And remember, companies are not sold, they're bought.
New vlog this morning! Transcript below or click play above.
Do you ever get a lot of email? Do you ever wish you could just do this with all that email?
Of course, then this would probably happen.
As much as I'd like to hide from email, I can't hide, and most founders cannot hide either.
The ability to deal with a crazy amount of information and prioritize it properly feeds into the one trait that is super important for every founder— Conscientiousness. That is being able to do one's work well and quickly, with diligence.
There's an interesting study by Bucknell University from 2004, linked here. It's a study of businesses that were able to survive for eight years, and it studied founders on five different traits: agreeableness, extraversion, emotional stability, openness, and conscientiousness.
Those first three had no affect on the outcome of the business after eight years. There was no significant correlation. Being agreeable or disagreeable? Maybe it doesn't matter.
However, conscientiousness and openness we do have to worry about. Conscientiousness is positively correlated. The surprising result is that openness is actually anti-correlated with success over eight years.
I think this points to a certain type of transition that happens in the life of every startup. Early on it's incredibly important to be as open and creative as possible. Later on, it's incredibly important to be as conscientious as you possibly can be.
Pre-product market fit? You need openness. You need creativity. You need the ability to do something that nobody else has done. You need the chaos of the prototyper, you needed to try things that other people have never tried. You need to be contrarian against the status quo.
But, over the long haul, that switches. It's the founder who has to manage the transition from this open, creative period, to one of scalability.
Post-product market fit is about execution. It's about that founder who found product market fit, giving power and control over to the best possible people they can possibly hire. It's about delegation, it's about goal setting, and then it's about keeping people accountable to those goals that were set. It's a switch that a lot of people fail at.
Here's what it looks like when someone who has product market fit finds it, and loses it. The graph goes up, up, up, to the right, plateaus, and then starts falling.
Founders who cannot scale, end up being overwhelmed by email first. It kind of looks like the scene from the movie "Brazil" that started this video. You're jammed for time. You become a bottleneck for the decisions you have to make. Your decision quality suffers over time.
The fix is straightforward. You must invest in your skills as a manager. You must hire people you really trust, who are excellent, and then you have to delegate and trust them. But then verify! You've got to hold them accountable.
Those are all skills that many first time founders, who start off as incredibly open, and creative, do not have, but they must either develop those skills, or hire people under them who do have those skills.
We have a finite number of hours in the day. Founders need to really manage this transition well— going from founder to CEO, running a board, running a team of executives. You have to be the player-coach, instead of just the star player.
So this is actually a pretty useful roadmap for founders. Pre-product market fit, it's about openness, it's about creativity. Later, they need to switch into conscientiousness mode. They need to take what they've learned, and then march the whole team in that direction, and hold that team accountable the way they would hold themselves accountable.
When a founding team nails the first, and then the second, that's the makings of something that can truly be great.
This is a transcript of my vlog just posted on YouTube. Watch the full video on YouTube at https://youtube.com/garrytan
If you can turn your thoughts into actions, that is supreme alchemy. Here's Planet Asia and Talib Kweli talking about exactly that.
New vlog this morning! Transcript below:
What do you do when someone steals your idea? First off, yes, it does happen. It's so hard to get a good idea that sometimes it's easier for people to just look at what's already working, and then rip it off.