Anders Pedersen
13.4K posts
@arrowdrive
Senior DBA, 20+ years experience. Views are entirely my own unless stated otherwise. He/him. This profile dead. Same account name on Bluesky
Does anyone remember a car called Datsun before it was renamed Nissan?
This is what I mean when I tell people “I don’t get hired to teach you how to be a big company. I get hired to remind you to operate like a startup.” Yes, I hire talented leaders and strong managers. But I also: - Read all the product docs, comment on all the designs - Review every offer letter and make sure the bar is being raised - Have fewer 1:1s w my directs, so I can have more time w the full org - Watch every web lead for interesting companies and ping to the right PM - DM individual engineers about what they’re working on - Keep my team relatively flat, and invite skips into my staff group I’ll go on a small tangent and be an operator apologist, which is I think PG is too hard on hired-guns like myself, which are a necessary step as your org grows. I have 200 person team, and I have to hire leaders otherwise I simply wouldn’t have the hours in the day to scale to our ambitions. The trick is to hire folks you trust to operate in founder-like ways, who also know (and welcome) the proverbial Eye of Sauron can swing their way. You also much actively remove as much nonsense as possible: no talking more about process than content of work, less polishing deck after deck, kill useless meetings that only exist to make people feel included, and force teams to show, not tell, their progress. Lately, I’ve seen a lot of my product peers lean into this mode with glee. IMO post ZIRP has been positive for teams in this sense, as constraints can force the issue of shifting into founder mode (there’s no managers to instill manager mode!) It could feel like micromanaging. But in the right culture, it just feels like a fun team coming together to work on big problems. Maybe this all changes soon and we go hard into founder mode as default because teams stay relatively small. Testing this with @chatprd (which is already MUCH smaller than my last startup at same revenue.) I have so much to say on this, because I make my living as an operator and fuel my passion with founder energy. Maybe I’ll write the book. “The Founder-Operator”, anyone?
