Newsletter #29: How to optimize yourself for growth?
11 minutes reading time. Thoughts on startups, growth, and technology 🚀
Welcome to another edition of the Struggle.
The Struggle is a weekly newsletter where I share my thoughts and learnings from running a fast-growing startup in Southeast Asia.
In the past, I have written essays on how startups are all about growth. Today, I want to reflect on how that growth impacts you as a leader and how you can be successful.
In my experience, your ability to grow as a leader in a fast-paced environment boils down to the following:
Knowledge and skills
Focus
Leadership and authenticity
Managing your own psychology
Enjoy the ride
Knowledge and skills
As a leader in a startup, you need to constantly learn and evolve. After all, your company will go through countless iterations, learnings, and mistakes. If you truly want to learn those lessons, you need to start with yourself.
I take a proactive approach to my personal and professional development. I am an avid reader of books typically reading about 30 books annually, listen to curated lists of podcasts (e.g. Acquired, Invest Like the Best, Masters of Scale, etc.), I am religious about finding the best-written content on the web in the form of blogs and newsletters (e.g. Ben Evans, Not Boring, Finimize, Morning Brew, the Hustle, Everything Bundle, a16z, etc. etc.) and occasionally pass courses by MasterClass and LinkedIn Learning. Thanks to all that content, I have been able to continually expand my mind to new ideas that help me, in turn, to push my contribution at Greenhouse to the next level.
Focus
In a startup environment, there is no end of what's possible. In a pre-product-market-fit phase, you feel compelled to try a new campaign, launch a new feature, change your value proposition, implement a new cool tool to help your team with productivity, test a new revenue stream, give a try to a new pricing strategy or pivot the business altogether. Hence, your #1 priority becomes your ability to focus not only yourself but the entire team.
In startup language that's often referred to as your North Star. The North Star helps your team to focus on the most crucial metric to the success of your company. After all, you cannot make your team, customers, partners, and investors happy at all times. You need to use your limited resources to focus on what creates the most value for your business. My advice here is to pick something that's constant.
Monthly active users, lifetime value, customer acquisition cost, traffic, conversion rates may be very important to your model, but as you are iterating your product the unit economics will be changing. Hence, my recommendation in an early-stage startup is to focus on priorities that will deliver value to your business no matter how big your company is:
Revenue
Customer Experience
Trust / Reliability
Identify a way to measure such metrics and focus all efforts on one of them, until you reach product-market fit. Afterward, you will have the chance to grow the business and focus on different teams on department-specific metrics.
Leadership and Authenticity
I have written several posts about leadership in the past as I find it incredibly important. Startups go through so many near-death experiences that your ability to inspire a group of people to trust and follow you may very well determine your business's likelihood of success.
But trust is one of these things in life that takes forever to build and can be lost in an instant. So how can create the necessary trust? The answer is authenticity.
People can sense when you are not authentic, if that's the case no one will think of you as a leader. The best way to build trust is to show a high degree of authenticity and transparency. But to sustain an image of authentic personality you need to deliver on your word, as often as possible. No matter how small promise you make, always deliver on it before people start chasing.
"We use a core leadership framework called “impeccable agreements” at Sunrun, which comes from a book called “The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership.” This boils down to committing to doing what you say you will. It sounds simple but it has really transformed how we interact with each other. If for some reason you can’t follow through, you have to explicitly renegotiate the agreement. That’s painful, so the end result is that we’re much more careful about what we agree to in the first place, and we keep the vast majority of our daily promises."
– Lynn Jurich, co-founder and CEO, Sunrun
Managing your own psychology
Everything mentioned above becomes irrelevant if you burn in the process of going through so many difficult moments. I have named this publication "the Struggle" for a reason, as running a startup can be brutal. Especially when you are going through something like COVID19. Letting people go, seeing your revenues evaporate, and handling pressure from stakeholders is real hard.
To hold the ship together you need to manage your own psychology well. I have an executive coach that I see regularly and I am genuine with friends, especially those who have been through similar experiences. All that helps me to be a more empathetic and confident leader.
Enjoy the ride
That’s what has helped me so far. Constantly working on improving my knowledge, identifying the North Star, working on leadership skills through authenticity, and managing my psychology. If done well, working at a startup is an extremely rewarding, once-in-a-lifetime experience.
“Becoming a leader of leaders rather than merely a leader of a team requires a growth mindset, humility, and hard work. In a rapid growth situation, responsibilities outgrow capabilities. The CEO must recognize this is the case for all key leadership positions, including the CEO job itself.”
– Rich Barton, co-founder & CEO of the Zillow Group
Resources worth checking out:
📝 How to Craft Your Product Team at Every Stage, From Pre-Product/Market Fit to Hypergrowth | Nikhyl Singhal - He co-founded three startups: one that failed, one that got acquired by IBM, and one that was scooped up by Google in 2011. He then settled in for a stint at the tech giant, launching Hangouts and assembling the product team for Photos before taking up the reins at Credit Karma, where he oversaw the launch of a half-dozen new product lines and grew the product team from 10 to 75 people in four years.
📝 34 Questions to Recruit World-Class Talent in the Remote Era / James Currier - For the last century, we’ve been learning about the best ways to hire and work in an office setting. Now the clock has reset and we’re racing to find the new best practices for the remote era. This sudden cultural shift to remote work presents an opportunity for startups. Startups that adapt will have the advantage and they will become magnets for the best talent.
A quote worth remembering:
💬 Statement by Jeff Bezos to the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary:
“In addition to good luck and great people, we have been able to succeed as a company only because we have continued to take big risks. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment. Outsized returns come from betting against conventional wisdom, but conventional wisdom is usually right. A lot of observers characterized Amazon Web Services as a risky distraction when we started. “What does selling compute and storage have to do with selling books?” they wondered. No one asked for AWS. It turned out the world was ready and hungry for cloud computing but didn’t know it yet. We were right about AWS, but the truth is we’ve also taken plenty of risks that didn’t pan out. In fact, Amazon has made billions of dollars of failures. Failure inevitably comes along with invention and risk-taking, which is why we try to make Amazon the best place in the world to fail.”
A book recommendation:
📖 The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone
The definitive story of Amazon.com, one of the most successful companies in the world, and of its driven, brilliant founder, Jeff Bezos.
Positive news worth sharing:
Malnutrition is falling worldwide. Even badly-affected regions such as South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa have seen improvements. It’s down to a more political commitment to food security, investment in agriculture, and new nutrition programs.
Conflict and climate change still hamper the UN’s goal of ending hunger. But the data is positive: some of the world’s most vulnerable people are now being fed.
Check out the source here.