More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Elad Gil
Started reading
July 28, 2018
if you don’t keep innovating—your product will go stale. And somebody will come out with a better product and displace you.
the general model for successful tech companies, contrary to myth and legend, is that they become distribution-centric rather than product-centric.
“A common trigger of founder burnout is finding yourself working on things that you hate.”
a lot of people at Stripe have written their own guides to themselves.
“What do I want to be involved in? When do I want to hear from you? What are my preferred communication modes? What makes me impatient? Don’t surprise me with X.”
“I think that founders should write a guide to working with them.”
My answer would be that you can map decision-making to org structure to a point.
Be transparent to the org about whose role and responsibility it is to make those calls.
When I’m leading through a tough decision, I try to say, at the outset, “I want all of your opinions, but I’m going to be the one who ultimately makes the decision.”
Don’t get too comfortable. Because if you are succeeding in scaling, you’re not going to be able to use everything you came up with for the next phase.
“As your company grows, how you communicate information has to evolve, too.”
One thing that I have really thought about is the set of what I’m going to call “founding documents” that are really important for any company to have, especially as you get beyond, say, 50 or 100 people. That includes your mission statement and your vision, but also your overarching long-term goals.
if you read those goals again today—and I worked on them, the leadership team worked on them, three years ago—they’re still the same.
The analogy I drew was to games, or sports.
“You know why playing a game is fun? Because it has rules, and you have a way to win.
Picture a bunch of people showing up at some athletic field with random equipment and no rules. People are going to get hurt. You don’t know what you’re playing for, you don’t know how to win, you don’t know h...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
organizations need constraints and objectives to optimize against, so that people can actually independently make decisions.
“You need to codify a set of principles and behaviors and
then cohere to them, culturally.”
Bi-weekly or weekly 1:1s.
Quarterly planning sessions—it’s
Speaking of 1:1s
We’ll do a career session
Personal goals—I believe in the two of us reviewing the top 3-5 personal goals you have each quarter or so
As work is ongoing or a team member does a great job on something, forward it or link from our 1:1 doc.
“I like a good laugh and to have fun with the people I work with.”
“Your board members are optimally people that you wish you could hire for the company, that are truly out of reach otherwise.” —Elad Gil
“The makeup of your board should change as your company scales from a young organization seeking to develop a meaningful product to a more mature startup in high-growth mode.” —Elad Gil
