Startup Systems
systems that power startups
Startup Systems
The mistake is thinking your startup idea is venture-scale and getting on the VC treadmill. Once you’re on the treadmill, here’s what changes:
- High growth expectations: VCs are looking for companies that grow big enough fast enough. If your business isn’t suited to this kind of rapid growth, it can lead to undue pressure and unrealistic
Lenny Rachitsky • Your startup idea probably isn’t venture-scale
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
We try to be as rigorous and data-driven as possible in quarterly planning. All objectives are measurable, either in terms of quantifiable thresholds or Boolean “was X completed or not.” Our objectives are very aggressive, and often at the end of the quarter we only end up completing 70% in one direction or another. The remaining 30% helps identify... See more
Lenny Rachitsky • How Perplexity builds product
how Perplexity builds
"A startup is a permissionless way to improve society"
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
When talking to people, look for two things: pain and pull . Pain tells you there’s an opportunity to solve a problem. Pull tells you that you’re actually solving the problem.
Here’s what pain and pull look like in practice:
Here’s what pain and pull look like in practice:
- People pay you money: Several people start to (or offer to) pay for your early product, ideally people you don’t have a direct
Lenny Rachitsky • What to Do if Your Product Isn’t Taking Off
Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation—anchored in understanding customer’s needs, prototyping, and generating creative ideas—to transform the way you develop products, services, processes, and organizations.
When using design thinking principles, you bring together what is desirable from a human point of view with what is... See more
When using design thinking principles, you bring together what is desirable from a human point of view with what is... See more
Systems Thinking vs Design Thinking, What’s the Difference?
And what you see internally is what I'll say is razor-sharp focus on reducing cycle time and bias to action and how do we reduce cycle time. I think it's basically the core of it culturally to me is getting people to think about smaller units of time for decision making. It seems obvious but I think you really have to reinforce it culturally. So... See more
Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor)
“It's just to remind people that we don't work in years, quarters, weeks, we work in days. Each day matters and so never put out something tomorrow that you know can get done today. And that bias to action really permeates not just in the product teams but everywhere.”