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We like to think that we’re not ruled by schedules, that we can throw off the chains of habit at any time—but most people are creatures of routine. They’re comforted by the knowledge of what comes next. They need it to plan their lives and their projects.
Predictability allows you to codify a product development process rather than starting from scratch every time. It allows you to create a living document with checkpoints, milestones, schedules, and plans that trains new employees and teaches everyone: This is how we do it. This is the framework for how to build a product. Ultimately, that predictability is how you’ll actually make your deadline.
If you don’t understand how customer adoption maps onto product and company development, you’re missing a very important part of the puzzle.
Companies that build with electrons are focused on CAC—customer acquisition costs. Aside from direct labor, their money gets spent selling and supporting their product.
In the early days, Tesla was so focused on the car itself—and really only several parts of the car—that almost nothing else mattered. They had basically no customer support—there was nobody you could talk to on the phone. So if your Tesla had an issue, they’d just come to your house and drive it away. You’d be left without a car, wondering what you were supposed to do next.
But the second you start a new product, you have to hit the restart button—even if you’re at a big company.
You make the product. You fix the product. You build the business. You make the product. You fix the product. You build the business. You make the product. You fix the product. You build the business. Every product. Every company. Every time.
Before you commit to executing on an idea—to starting a company or launching a new product—you should commit to researching it and trying it out first. Practice delayed intuition. This is a phrase coined by the brilliant, Nobel Prize–winning economist and psychologist Daniel Kahneman to describe the simple concept that to make better decisions, you need to slow down.
If this idea is going to eat up years of your life, you should at least take a few months to research it, build out detailed (enough) business and product development plans, and see if you’re still excited about it. See if it will chase you.
The best ideas are painkillers, not vitamins. Vitamin pills are good for you, but they’re not essential. You can skip your morning vitamin for a day, a month, a lifetime and never notice the difference. But you’ll notice real quick if you forget a painkiller.
When you close your eyes, you should already know exactly who your first employees will be. You should be able to write down a list of five names without a second thought. If you don’t have that list of names ready before you start, you probably shouldn’t be starting.
Titles, pay, and perks should never be your main draw, but that doesn’t mean you should be cheap.
In those very, very early days you want people who are there for the mission above all. You’re looking for passion, enthusiasm, and mindset. And you’re looking for seed crystals.
That means you have to be ready to be scrutinized, to be examined, and—most likely—to be found wanting. You might hear “no” a dozen times before you find “the one.” It’s like a particularly brutal form of dating—but instead of asking to buy them a drink, you’re begging them for money. It ain’t fun.
The world of investment is cyclical. The funding environment is always shifting back and forth from a founder-friendly environment to an investor-friendly environment.
does your business actually need outside money right now? For many early pre-seed-stage startups, the answer is “no” surprisingly often.
There will be no break unless you force yourself to take one. So do all the stuff they tell you to do before bed: no caffeine, no sugar, keep it cold, keep it dark, and for the love of all that’s holy, keep your phone away from your bed. You’re an addict. We all are. So don’t make it too easy for yourself—charge your phone in another room. Don’t be the alcoholic with a whiskey bottle in their nightstand (I wish I could say I do this every day, but hey—I’m human, too).
Eat well—You are an extreme athlete, but your sport is work.
There are moments where you simply cannot function as a human, never mind a leader, and you need to recognize them and walk out the door. Don’t make a bad decision because you’re frustrated and overworked—get your head on straight and come in fresh the next day.
As a leader, you’ll have to get into the weeds. Don’t be worried about micromanagement—as the crisis unfolds your job is to tell people what to do and how to do it.
You’re landing a dozen jets on an aircraft carrier at the same time—while giving press briefings and occasional therapy sessions. You will be incredibly worried, but you can’t tear your hair out—I strongly recommend being bald already.
There is always a temptation to obfuscate or couch everything in legalese—to say “mistakes were made” but never admit they were yours. This will not work. People will figure it out. And they will be pissed.
It’s a useful corporate tool to remind people what can happen, what you’ve learned, and how to avoid similar disasters in the future. The story is handy managerially and as a cultural touchstone. But, most importantly, it’s true: your team got through this. Now they can get through anything.
Nest policy was always to hire a mix of new grads and to host an intern program. It was not a popular policy—not at first. The hiring managers bitched and moaned. They wanted to hire people with a ton of experience, dump a pile of work on their heads, and just let them dig themselves out.
That was the system we had at Nest. We called it the Three Crowns. Here’s how it worked: Crown 1 was the hiring manager. They got the role approved and found the candidates. Crowns 2 and 3 were managers of the candidate’s internal customers. They picked one or two people from their team to interview the candidate. Feedback was collected, shared, and discussed, then the Three Crowns met to decide who to hire.
rules. Everyone on the team knew what we interviewed for and what we cared about so they could calibrate on more or less the same things. We expected candidates to be mission-driven and good on their feet, the right fit for the culture, and passionate about the customer. We also had a “no assholes” policy.
In an interview I’m always most interested in three basic things: who they are, what they’ve done, and why they did it. I usually start with the most important questions: “What are you curious about? What do you want to learn?”
Another good interview technique is to simulate work—instead of asking them how they work, just work with them. Pick a problem and try to solve it together. Choose a subject that both of you are familiar with but neither is an expert in—if you pick a problem in their domain they’ll always sound smart; pick a problem in yours and you’ll always know better.
The first month or two are crucial and should be a period of positive micromanagement. Don’t worry about getting too in the weeds or not giving them enough freedom. Not at first. A brand-new person needs all the help they can get to become really well integrated.
team. Sometimes you’ll screw up and hire assholes or people who just can’t perform or adapt to the culture. But more often the real shock of growth is that over time you’ll bring on people who are just okay.
Turns out people get weirdly defensive about cake. It’s always a mini-crisis when you have to stop having all-company birthday parties for individual employees.
In the beginning, you don’t really need HR. When you’re five, ten, even fifty people, you can just use an external recruiter to grow the team, talk to each other when issues come up, and outsource the basics—health care, 401(k)s, etc.
Coaches are there to help with the business. It’s all about the work: this company, this job, this moment in time. Mentors are more personal. They don’t just help with people’s jobs, they help with their lives, their families.
But as the team grows, you’ll need to bring in formal mentors or coaches to help with some of the load. At 120 people, you should have executive coaches who can be there to guide your leadership team through their new responsibilities as well as communication and organizational strategies.
So to preserve what you love, have your team write down the things they value most and build a plan to continue them. And remember it’s not necessarily the obvious stuff that binds people to your company—it can be small things, silly things.
Culture arises organically but then needs to be codified to be maintained.
And make every team write down how they do things: What’s the marketing process? What’s the engineering process? What are the phases for how we make a product? How do we work together? It can’t just be left in people’s brains. People leave. New people join.
Everything that needs to be created needs to be designed—not just products and marketing, but processes, experiences, organizations, forms, materials.
[See also: Reading List: Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All.]
But when you think like a designer, you stay awake to the many things in your work and life that can be better. You find opportunities to improve experiences that people long ago assumed would just always be terrible.*
And then, after he’d built a foundational understanding of what the packaging could be and its innate limitations, after he knew the messaging in his bones, he worked with designers and copywriters to make it perfect. But none of that could have happened if he hadn’t tried it himself first.
5. The best marketing is just telling the truth. The ultimate job of marketing is to find the very best way to tell the true story of your product.
But good marketing isn’t bullshitting. It’s not about making something up, crafting a fiction, exaggerating your product’s benefits, and burying its faults.
Steve Jobs often said, “The best marketing is just telling the truth.”
First you break down the pain points that your customer is feeling or has habituated away. Each pain is a “why”—it gives your product a reason to exist. The painkiller is the “how”—these are the features that will solve the customer’s problem. The “I want it” column explains the emotions that your customers are feeling. The “I need it” column covers the rational reasons to buy this product.
For every version of the Nest story, we wrote down the most common objections and how we’d overcome them—what stats to use, what pages of the website to send people to, what partnerships to mention or testimonials to point to.
The whole point of the creative team is to be creative, to come up with the most elegant and compelling version of the truth, to tell your story beautifully. But unchecked creativity can get you sued. You do not want to do it without a lawyer present.
And even an innocent white lie in your marketing can taint everything you do when it’s exposed. You can instantly lose customer trust.
I wanted the words and images that we used to describe our products to be as great as the products themselves. I wanted the entire experience to shine. I wanted the marketing team to be as exacting as the engineering and manufacturing teams—to learn from this rigor so they would begin to push themselves just as hard, or harder, than I pushed them.
The question of why we made it connected explicitly to why anyone should buy it. We had to get it right—for our customers and for ourselves.
