Focus on building 10x teams, not on hiring 10x developers
Avichal Garg CEO of Spool
Software development, however, is more like rowing. It’s a team sport that requires skill and synchronization. This applies at all scales. On a three-person boat, one person out of sync will stall your boat. As you get bigger, no single developer can impact your team’s performance, so again synchronization is key.
Making your team as efficient as possible is what determines long-term success.
It’s true, just having one person off and you’ll be going in circles.
Via Avichal’s Blog
Perfect description of what being with the right team feels like.
“You’re sitting with some guys, and you’re playing and you go, “ooh, yeah!” That feeling is worth more than anything. There’s a certain moment when you realize that you’ve actually just left the planet for a bit and that nobody can touch you. You’re elevated because you’re with a bunch of guys that want to do that same thing as you. And when it works, baby, you’ve got wings”
Keith Richards - Life
VCs Are Not Your Friends
A close personal friend of mine just had to learn this the hard way. I think the gist of this blog post from Steve Blank is pretty dead on. If you understand the entire nature of the VC entrepreneur relationship you are much more likely to drive the results that are best for your company.
While the best VC’s treat entrepreneurs like you are their most important customer, and they add tremendous value to your startup (recruiting, strategy, coaching, connections, etc.) they are not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. Entrepreneurs need to understand that VC’s are simply a sophisticated form of financial investors who in turn need to satisfy their own investors. At the end of the day VC’s have to provide their limited partners with great returns or they aren’t going to be able to raise another fund.
via Steve Blank
Getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, and less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
I am not a hunter, never have fired a gun, but I’m told that if you want to shoot a duck, you have to shoot where the duck is going to be, not where the duck is. It’s the same with introducing technology: if you’re only focused on the market today, by the time you introduce your solution to that problem, there’ll probably be several others already entrenched. It will be hard to dislodge them, and hard to convince people that what you have is so much better that they should make a change. Much better to figure out where the market place is going to be in a few years, focus on providing a solution to that, and let the market forces catch up to you.
Entrepreneurs have to keep adjusting to … everything’s changing, everything’s dynamic, and you get the idea and you get another idea and this doesn’t work out and you have to replace it with something else. Time is always critical because somebody might beat you to the punch.
