Startup Systems

systems that power startups

There’s lots of well-intentioned advice out there about the risks if a business takes off and there isn’t a solid foundation to stand on. But at the same time, it's no surprise that startup leaders see words like "optimizing headcount through capacity planning models" and file it away as unnecessary bureaucracy that’s more befitting of the “BigCo”... See more

How Talent Teams Can Better Weather Boom-and-Bust Cycles

Raising money is never an accomplishment in and of itself —it just raises the stakes for all the hard work you would have had to do anyway: actually building your business.

Some signs of cultural corrosion caused by raising too much money:

Hiring too many people—slows everything down and makes it much harder for you to react and change. You are

Fictive Kin • Pmarchive · How much funding is too little? Too much?

Superhuman

A startup’s biggest competition isn’t an established player, it’s inertia.

The 100 Best Bits of Advice From 10 Years of First Round Review

If you allow your ICP to fray, you’ll lose

From the beginning, we knew we needed to define a good ideal customer profile (ICP). There are many approaches to defining a good ICP, but a quality we underestimated is specificity . Simply put, an ICP must be a single market segment :a group of people for whom the value of solving a problem is roughly the... See more

Lenny Rachitsky • Lessons learned from a startup that didn’t make it

Takeaways:

Engineers continued to be the predominant function across the first three hires. Not shown in the chart, but 100% of companies hired at least one engineer among their first three hires .

Interestingly, customer success/support continues to be a popular role for the first three hires. Of the non-engineer hires, almost a quarter of them are

Lenny Rachitsky • Hiring your early team

At a big company, you're trained to get it right and get it out. You can’t risk experimenting on your customer base. When you're at a small company, you don't have any product-market fit, so you have to get it out, then get it right.

How to Scale Yourself Down

The critical path method (CPM) is a project management technique that’s used by project managers to create an accurate project schedule. The CPM method, also known as critical path analysis (CPA), consists in using the CPM formula and a network diagram to visually represent the task sequences of a project. Once these task sequences or paths are... See more

Critical Path Method (CPM) in Project Management

But here’s the key for an early-stage startup: "As we’re building our plans, we only focus on those first three months, that first chapter. So we break that down into monthly high-level goals, and that's what I hold the team accountable for,” he says. In other words, don’t try to get detailed for longer than a few weeks out. "At a startup, it’s... See more