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

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

Airbnb’s hack was to scrape Craigslist’s vacation and rental home listings, then contact all of the owners and convince them to also list their properties on Airbnb (or, according to some accounts, do so without even getting permission).

Recruiting for software engineers is best done directly by founders. Find people who look interesting, uncover a connection you have to them in your network, get an intro, meet for coffee, get them excited about your company, and if they’re not interested, ask who they know who might be. Not one of the group’s members had success with external recr

Together, these sources of capital are called limited partners, or “LPs.” Much as startups raise money from VCs, VCs raise money from LPs. The venture capitalists will try to convince an LP’s investment committee that their approach to startup investment opportunities, their team’s judgment and experience, and their fund’s assistance will produce a

Pro Tip: When you invest in behaviors based on your newfound knowledge, don’t try to control the outcome, just the behavior. This holds equally true for your startup as for your emotional health. Because, as much as we wish we could, we never have full control over outcomes. We own our behavior, and some of the time (hopefully often), the right beh

For many companies, “do one thing” is unrealistically reductive advice. But it pays to know that adding more priorities scales exponentially, not linearly. At Moz, I found it vastly less complexifying to add one additional product (e.g., Moz Local) to the company’s charter than to add a third or a fourth. Each new product and priority cost vastly m

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

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.