Hey friends - greetings from Austin!
Wayne Chang and Jeff Seibert are the founders of Digits, a startup that helps you analyze and understand your business finances. Before starting this company they founded and sold companies to Twitter, Google, and Netflix.
I came across two of their blog posts this week about "how to fire yourself" and the order of operations to build your startup. I found it very insightful and wanted to share it with all of you who are building your businesses or planning on starting a business one day.
The Role of the Founder/CEO: You Have One Job: In this blog post, Jeff discusses how you need to learn that your one job is to make yourself completely unnecessary from the day-to-day operations. Here are his 3 main lessons:
1. Perform The Role, Then Hire Someone Better
2. Hire People to Help you Hire.
3. Bring Top-Down Context, Not Top-Down Decisions
The Build Order every Startup should follow to become Successful: In this blog post, Wayne walks through the order of operations you should go through as you build your startup. It was very interesting and I've never thought of it this way. One example, I liked was this:
Here’s an example of a poorly designed build order for building a team: Founder says, “We need to hire the next engineer.” The founder then proceeds to put together a job description and make a post on Craigslist. And when resumes start trickling in, he or she sits there reading through each one, trying to find the perfect engineer. In this “build order” scenario, the founder has elected himself or herself as the one to sift through the resumes, make screening calls, and interview all the applicants — when, in reality, that’s a very poor use of their time. They should be focused on more strategic things, not doing something that could easily be hired for. This might seem inconsequential, but compound the amount of time that one task takes over the course of a day, a week, a month, and you’ll start to see how inefficient it is — especially when compared side by side to a competitor with a better build order.
Here’s a more effective build order: In recognizing the inefficiencies of a founder sifting through resumes, one of the first hires of any startup that’s venture-backed should be a recruiter. This is a no-brainer. And here’s why. In hiring a recruiter first, you’re essentially saying, “I’m going to trade money now for a resource that will save me time later. They are going to be our talent scout, looking everywhere for the best talent — so that I, as a founder, can get more of my own time back and work on the next piece of my startup.” Doesn’t that sound like a much better use of resources?
To make this even more obvious, imagine you’re playing a resource-driven video game and you have two ways you can spend your first 50,000 imaginary coins. You can either spend some of those coins to buy a 2nd character that will work on finding more resources for you, or you can keep those coins to yourself and do the slow and steady building yourself.
I’d imagine any gamer would absolutely choose the former. But this is something that’s very non-obvious to a lot of founders. It’s as if they feel compelled to do as much of the work themselves.
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Have a great Sunday,
Rohun