You need 2 types of people to keep early-stage startups from stagnating:
- someone who ’ll shamelessly sell the product before it’s fully ready to be sold
- someone who’s embarrassed by this and will push to improve the product faster
The best tech companies drive strategy through product. This is why founders and CEOs tend to be product leaders, and product / design / engineering is more important than ops / marketing / finance. Here’s what this looked like for me as a business leader at Amzn and Facebook: