Management

I’m sitting on my balcony on the ninth floor of a hotel overlooking Miami Beach thinking about motivation. Specifically, mine. I’m deep into writing the first draft of Startup Communities and – with Amy – decided to plant myself in a warm place for two weeks as I finished up this draft. We got here late Monday night. Today is the first day I wrote any words on the book. I procrastinated as long as I could and finally opened up the doc in Scrivener and started writing after my run today. I pounded out a solid hour of writing before shifting gears, responding to some email, and writing a few blog posts. I know that I can only productively write for a max of four hours a day before my writing turns into total crap so I’ll be happy with another hour today. I’ll then consider myself fully in gear for four hours tomorrow. ...

Every company I’m involved in keeps track of numbers. Daily numbers, weekly numbers, monthly numbers. Ultimately, all the numbers translate into three financial statements – the P&L, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow Statement. While these numbers are sacrosanct in the accounting and finance professions, they are lagging indicators for most startup companies. Important, but they tell the story of the past, not what is going on right now. I’ve formed a view that every young company should be obsessed about three magic numbers. Not two, not five, but three. Before I explain what those numbers are, I need to tell a story of how I got to this point. ...

I had a great breakfast meeting at the Cambridge Marriott with Michael Schrage , a research fellow at MIT yesterday morning. We had never met before and I loved the conversation – his brain was bubbling with ideas that are relevant to many of the things I’m interested in, he challenged some of my thinking, and we had a deep and awesome conversation about open source hardware, makers, and MakerBot . ...

A decade ago I didn’t pay much attention to the VP of HR position. Today, I view it as a key role if you are growing headcount at least 50% year over year and have more than 20 people in the company. And, title inflation notwithstanding , I prefer to call it “VP of People” since we are people after all, not “human resources” or “HRs”. Over the past five years, I’ve had the privilege to work with a handful of amazing VPs of People. And, as several of our portfolio companies continue their incredible growth rates, I’ve been involved in recruiting a few new ones to these companies. I have three basic principles for each of them. ...

Suddenly, title inflation is everywhere. I’ve seen more business cards or email sigs lately with adjectives like “executive” or “senior” or “senior executive” or “special” or “chief” in front of more traditional titles (e.g. “vice president”). The “chief” one is especially bizarre since it’s not always obvious whether the CSO is a “Chief Sales Officer” or a “Chief Security Officer” which in and of itself is a problem. I’ve never paid much attention to titles. This is especially true when I’m involved in helping recruit someone for a company. I’m much more focused on what the person is going to do and what they’ve done in the past than what their title is (or was). Every now and then an obsession with title is a positive trait as it drives an important discussion about roles; most of the time it’s an annoying obsession with title. ...

I’m at the end of day three of another very intense, but enjoyable and satisfying week. I’ve been in Seattle the past two days and am headed to LA for the next two days before finally making it home after being on the road for the past two weeks. As I was getting ready to go to bed in order to wake up in time to make my 6:40am flight, I was rolling my one remaining priority for the week around in my head. I was thinking to myself, “two down, one to go.” And I realized I have been using a construct of “three priorities a week max” for a long time. ...

I recently sat through an annual CEO 360 review at a company that has been very serious about executive development since inception. It reminded me how powerful this is when it’s done correctly. In this particular case, the entire board and management team had an hour-long facilitated discussion without the CEO in the room. The facilitator is not an employee of the company but has worked with the entire management team on executive development as they’ve grown over the past 5+ years. ...

I think I’ll avoid all the “are super angels colluding “, “no they aren’t “, “go fuck yourself and stop talking horseshit “, and “guys, quit being narcissistic and do something productive” blog chatter today and focus on something that came up yesterday. I was on a call when someone asked a straightforward question that had a binary answer (yes or no). The person responded with a five minute explanation with a lot of details, all factually correct and contextually relevant, but at the end still didn’t answer the question. ...