📉 The #1 downfall of founders, Stand out with anti-values, ...
Vamos! Best Business Podcasts is celebrating its 1st birthday today. This special edition features Lenny’s Podcast, 20VC, and The Logan Bartlett Show. Enjoy 🎉
What you need to know
🩺 Use OKRs as a diagnostic tool
❌ Stand out with anti-values
📉 The #1 downfall of founders
🩺 Use OKRs as a diagnostic tool
🥉 Third place (3 min read vs 1 hour 13 mins listening)
Unleash your company’s potential. Christina Wodtke, a lecturer at Stanford University, sheds light on the transformative power of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). She discusses the importance of focusing on strategic goals, the reasons behind their potential failure, and how OKRs can be used to diagnose dysfunction within your management team.
What they say
Why start OKRs
The main benefits of OKRs are they create concrete action, a cadence of progress, and alignment.
There's no question what the single most important thing to do in the company is - assuming you don't have 20 OKRs every quarter.
At the end of the quarter you grade your OKRs. How well did we do? What got in our way?
It creates a learning cycle. You take that information and say 'Next quarter, what should we try next?' Your company will constantly get smarter.
If you just ask the question 'What are we doing this week to get closer to our goals', that is the very heart of OKRs.
It's useful to tap into temporal landmarks like Mondays or quarters that are already built into the world.
We piggyback onto them. It's Q1. Boom. We're going to stop. We're going take a breath. We're going see what we actually have to do. Raising your head above the noise is really vital.
Christina Wodtke
Why OKRs fail
OKRs fail when you're in the weeds. You’ve got to let go. You have to trust your people.
OKRs are a great diagnostic tool. They tell you if something's broken.
If somebody doesn't know what to do and you're like 'I told you what my strategy is' it means something's wrong with the strategy or you aren't being clear.
If your OKR process isn't working then you have to step back and go 'Okay, how far deeper do I have to go before I figure out what's wrong with my management team?'
It could be the CEO but it could be some weird group dynamics and you've got to focus on that.
You've got to fix things at the top and then everything else runs a little better.
Christina Wodtke
What I say
Why it matters: OKRs can be a great tool but you need to focus on outcomes, not outputs. It’s easy to think you’re making progress when you track the wrong things:
Yay, we shipped a new feature
Woo, we built a mobile app
Fuck yeah, our campaign is live
What does that actually mean? Goal-setting frameworks are only as good as the goals you set. Your entire focus should be on how to set the right goal. The framework you choose to track your goals matters far less.
Between the lines: The concept of OKRs is great but DHH and others have long advocated for shorter cycles. At 37signals, the team adopt a 6 week cycle called Shape Up. You still get all of the benefits of action, alignment, and learning, but you’re far more agile. After adopting a similar cadence with my side projects, I’d thoroughly recommend this if you’re at a small or early stage startup.
❌ Stand out with anti-values
🥈 Second place (2 min read vs 45 mins listening)
Prioritize people with grit. Amjad Masad, founder and CEO of Replit, reveals his counterintuitive playbook to hiring entrepreneurial people. We'll also explore how he filters out lazy people and how you can steal marketing strategies to get high quality candidates.
What they say
How to weed out lazy people
There's no amount of process you can put in to make someone who doesn't want to work hard to work hard.
The only way to address this is to hire exceptionally entrepreneurial people.
Filtering out people is the hardest thing you can do in an interview process. We do a lot of work to filter out people who wouldn't be a fit.
We send people material including why you shouldn't work at Replit. We have an entire blog post about that: work here is hard, there's a lot of uncertainty, we haven't succeeded yet.
We send people our non-values page. We try to be somewhat provocative in the phrasing.
For example, one of our values is seek pain. The idea is that most problems at companies are just delusions from not wanting to face pain. We want to create a company that engages with that pain and is proactive about it.
At the at the end of the process we're typically selling people but we're also anti-selling them at the same time.
Amjad Masad
What I say
Why it matters: By intentionally seeking out candidates who can thrive in an environment of uncertainty, you can build a culture that values hard work, innovation, and results. Amjad’s approach to hiring can help you attract team members who are aligned with your values and goals, reducing the risk of costly turnover and low productivity.
Between the lines: Building on Amjad’s amazing anti-values idea, here are two marketing concepts you can use to take this hiring strategy to the next level:
(1) Reactance. Actively tell people not to apply if they exhibit your anti-values. By making the role unavailable to some people, you’re inadvertently making it more desirable.
(2) Us vs Them story. Position yourself and your values against a common enemy. That enemy could be something as broad as ‘lazy people’. You’ll then attract passionate, hard working candidates who want to join a team of like minded people.
📉 The #1 downfall of founders
🥇 First place (4 min read vs 1 hour 27 mins listening)
Founder CEOs are highly attuned to the market. They're better than anyone at knowing how it might evolve in the future. They may not always be right, but their foresight and intuition is unparalleled. So why do they struggle to use these same skills looking inwards?
Spenser Skates, co-founder and CEO of Amplitude, says the number one struggle for founder CEOs is realizing when changes need to be made to their executive team. He elaborates on the problem and shares actionable advice on how to overcome it.
What they say
Where founder CEOs fail
The downside of founder CEOs is they don't have experience building an executive team and operating an organization at scale. That is such a learning process.
The hardest thing you can ever do is change the people on your team. There are people who are only a fit for a certain stage.
At a certain point there becomes a disconnect between a person's skill set and where the company needs to go.
That is so hard to reconcile because you have so much loyalty to that person for how much they've done for the company. That's the number one downfall of founder CEOs and it's why they burnout after about a decade.
Spenser Skates
Spenser's advice to his previous self
I would have made changes at Amplitude earlier. There's no question in my mind. I always feel like I'm a year late on a bunch of those decisions.
There are things you can do now. Talk to CEOs who are a bit ahead of you. Get advice from great board members who have perspective on this.
Constantly meet external people because a lot of times the solutions to the problems that you're having are not within the knowledge of the people at your company.
Constantly get knowledge from people outside of your organization on things like how do you build a sales organization, what is a great marketing strategy, and how do you attract great engineering talent. That will help you calibrate what great looks like.
Spenser Skates
What I say
Why it matters: You don’t know what you don’t know. At my first startup we made two mistakes hiring executives. Both failures were because I didn’t know what good looked like. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times? No, this is a lesson I’ll never forget.
By surrounding yourself with people who have ‘been there done that’, you can lean on them for support to truly ascertain if someone is up for the job or if they’re just saying what you want to hear.
Between the lines: We all wear rose tinted glasses. That’s why parents have more than one child. After a few years, those early months don’t seem as bad as they were in the moment. This is important to remember when seeking feedback from others.
A founder who has recently solved the problems you’re about to face will provide more relevant advice than a founder who has just taken their company public. Give weight to people who have recently been in the trenches. Learn from their mistakes.
Advice from people who have been out of the game for 5+ years should be taken with a grain of salt because they’ll be shaped by their most recent experiences. The only caveat to that is navigating a recession like we’re in today. If you’ve not experienced it before, learn from those who have.
Shoutouts
When I find newsletters, podcasts, or books worth sharing, I’ll feature them here:
📨 Ever stopped yourself from subscribing to a potentially amazing newsletter because you’re worried about cluttering your inbox? With Meco, you can enjoy your newsletters in an app built for reading while giving your inbox space to breathe. Download the app here.
Note, these quotes were pulled at different points of the episode. Some sentences were left out to make the narrative clearer and more concise. Podup is not associated or affiliated with any podcast (unless otherwise stated). All roundups are independently written and do not imply any sponsorship or endorsement by the podcast.