Notes from Business of Software Conference 2017
I speak tomorrow at the Business of Software conference. Here are my notes from the sessions so far.
1. Jason Cohen : Healthy, wealthy and wise
“This is not a presentation, a sermon” – a passage from the book of hackernews. “I don’t want to be a founder anymore – there’s a lot to lose from speaking how I feel. We’re profitable, growing, debt free and about to be acquired. The problem is I am supremely unhappy”
The founder who posted this had four choices:
Quit, killing company
Hate the next 2-5 years
Fix it
Keep running the company
It seems to be a common pattern that founders aren’t happy despite achieving all the things they set out to do (See Credit-Suisse research study).
You have to decide to face some ugly , emotional truths – no one will force you to since you have no boss. It’s easy to be a victim of your own denial.
Jason asked the room “who here has taken too long to fire someone?” and most people raised there hands. “Too soon” – on ly a few people. There’s the good reason, and then there’s the real reason we do (or don’t do) thing.
2×2: matrix, Things that don’t need to be done, needs to be done, want to do, don’t want to do
The fact that a thought won’t go away, and keeps you up at night, is a good indicator it’s something you need to deal with.The emotionally tough choice is usually the right choice.
How to do the tough thing:
Be swift: delay never helps, often hurts
Be decisive: flapping hurts
Be kind: to the person, to others, to yourself
Someone is always the smartest people in the room, but many people might believe that it’s them.
A players hire A. B’s hire Cs.. The presumption is that as an A, you are an A at everything, but when you take on a new role, like finance, even after a couple of months you are not really an A. And when you hire, you are calibrating against yourself, so you unintentionally hire a C and staff new roles or departments with C.
“We don’t hire smart people to tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”
Be an editor, not a writer. Hold people to hire standards, but hire people who can do their own job/role better than you can.
Action oriented vs. results oriented – results are about outcomes and customer satisfaction, action is just a series of acts and choices
He told the story of selling his first company Smart bear. He got an offer and talked to his wife, who said “you have to sell.” And he asked why. And she said “Don’t you know how unhappy you are?” And even when he sold the business, he thought he’d feel better, but not at first. It took a long time to resort himself.
