Transitioning
Paul Graham wrote an article not too far back called What Startups Are Really Like that mentioned a number of things the people he had funded were surprised to learn over the years. Lots of good stuff there, and I wholeheartedly agree with most. (Especially #12, It’s Hard to Get Users. You grow up hearing that if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. That, it turns out, is sadly untrue, as the fact that Apple spending a few hundred million dollars a year marketing the iPod proves empirically. In fact I think that if I were running one of the many startup funding groups using Y Combinator’s model, I’d start by putting together a team of people with experience in user acquisition to run it. That would be about the only way to compete.)
I’ve recently come to realize there’s one thing I’d add to the list, which is that a startup is hard when it’s not yet succeeding (either because it’s too early or it’s just struggling) and then once you start doing well, it gets even harder. That’s unintuitive I think, and if you’d have told me that when my startup was struggling I might not have believed it. The hard part is transitioning.
When you first start off, it’s you and one or two other people and you’re doing everything. All of the high-level work. All of the grunt work. Everything in between. You’re a lawyer, accountant, designer, programmer, customer support person, and whatever else you need that day. You hopefully communicate well with your cofounders in order to divide up labor, and then you each go out and do everything that needs to be done because there isn’t anyone else to do it.
However if you think about Google, you’ll realize quickly that Larry and Sergey aren’t doing that. I’m not sure what exactly they do (though I’ll bet they do a lot of whatever it is) but you can be pretty sure they aren’t trying to tweak the colors on the main page or iterate the Page Rank algorithm anymore. In fact even at a startup of 50 people, that’s clearly not going to fly.
So among software companies that succeed, the founders probably start off doing one thing and end up doing something else. I can’t say for sure what the end-point is like because I haven’t gotten there yet, though I promise to share if I do. But I can tell you what comes in that transitional period right after the early stages and it’s pretty hard.
At first you’re working part-time on hiring (probably a totally new skill set for you) and the rest of the time you’re still getting things done. Then you hire a couple people, and you’re working on hiring, getting things done, and managing the people you hired (another new skill set, and one that often does not come easily to people who get things done well themselves) to make sure they’re not only getting things done, and done well, but getting the most things done well that they possibly can.
That in and of itself, when it comes to programming, business, and other mainly mental tasks, is a chore so onerous that many books have been written about it. In fact large businesses have multiple layers of people in their org chart dedicated entirely to that, but you’ve got to do that yourself and hire new people (because the work keeps on piling up) and keep the servers running, all at the same time.
So you keep on trying to juggle the three but you realize more and more that you just can’t do it. One or two of them get done well, and one or two of them get totally neglected, and its almost certainly the new and hard tasks like management that get pushed to the side.
Then maybe you wake up one day to find that when you were hiring, you hired people who didn’t have the same skill sets as you because you were hiring them to compliment you. You were figuring you’d keep doing what you’d been doing, and they’d do these other new tasks. But now you really can’t do what you’ve done for the last couple years because you have other responsibilities and you need new people to step up and do what you did, and you maybe don’t have them because that wasn’t what you were hiring for.
Even if not though, you’re still in a pretty tough spot because your natural inclination is to minimize the other crap and keep getting things done. That’s what got you where you are, and you’re in a good place, so you tend to keep on doing it. You’ve spent months or maybe even years doing what needed to be done when it needed to be done but now you’ve got to not only trust the people you hired (the end results of the hiring process you totally pulled out of your ass because you had no experience hiring and maybe even had no experience being hired before) to get things done when needed, but also monitor how they do it and help them do it better.
The next step, which is where we’re getting to now, is where you transition entirely to managing and hiring, and your employees get everything done. This is a letting go process, I imagine, much like sending your kids off to college, except in this case if your kids party too much and fail Calc II you just lost the business you spent years building. In business, though, you adopted your children and can send them right back to the shelter at any point, so its your fault if they do not succeed, which doesn’t make it easier when you’re nervously trying to determine whether or not to write up that job offer letter or can the employee who might be underperforming.
And then after that I suppose you’re hiring and promoting other people to do the hiring and promoting, and focusing on higher-level stuff. And after that I guess you’re sitting next to your Gulfstream V on a beach acquiring a taste for Mai Tais or something, who knows.
But during the ugly duckling phase, where you’re not quite a General yet but not quite a Private First Class anymore, transitioning is extremely tough. It’s a great problem to have, but it’s perhaps the most stressful thing you’ll deal with in the early life of a startup.
January 5, 2010 at 6:12 am
complement…unless you just hired them for an ego boost.