Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

One final, unorthodox tip: if possible, build your expertise before you build your network, and build your network before you build your company. Each one leads elegantly into the next.

Project Aristotle, an internal Google research project, looked at thousands of teams at the company with years of empirical data on performance and concluded that empathy between team members and a group norm of emotional support was the best, most consistent predictor of a team’s success.

The best entrepreneurs . . . know how to tell an amazing story that will convince talent and investors to join in on the journey. —Alejandro Cremades, 2016

What traits and behaviors should be rewarded and recognized in our employees? Which ones should be discouraged?

What criteria should be applied to people we hire, those we promote, and those we let go? What makes someone a good person versus a bad person? How should hard-to-resolve conflicts be handled at our organization? What’s your preferred form of communication and why? What enables you to deliver your best work? What stops you from it?

Ask questions during skip levels (meetings where a senior manager meets with team members who report to the managers below them) with engineers that go beyond identifying problems and into concrete solutions. For example, asking, “What good development practices did your last company have that you don’t see in play here?” surfaces best practices.

path for ICs to progress means you get the best people in the right roles with the ability to advance their careers and their pay. Forcing management to be the only way up will cost you talent in places you need it, and worse, install the wrong people in those roles, harming everyone on the team. CHAPTER 15 VULNERABILITY ≠ WEAKNESS In Silicon Valle

Finally, and perhaps most broadly, in a design review of the first version of Moz Analytics, one of our software tools,

The problem with MVPs, and with the “something > nothing” model, is that if you launch to a large customer base or a broad community, you build brand association with that first version.

The classic funnel optimization promoted by many marketers has this peculiar idea that we must race to turn as many visitors as we can into paid customers and that any missed opportunity represents a flaw in our marketing process.