100 day goals - 42Floors. People usually don’t believe me when I tell them how fast it took to build the first version of Flightcaster.
Remember, Flightcaster was not a trivial piece of technology. We were one of the first production applications to use Clojure. And, we launched (insanely I might add) with a research infrastructure, website, iPhone app and Blackberry app simultaneously. And all of this was done in just over three months, from first line of code to launch. At the time, it was the most productive any of us had ever been in our lives. We were in the summer 2009 Y Combinator batch. This concept of setting the time limit first and adjusting the scope second is really powerful.
I don’t know why we ever stopped doing it. Nothing was really accomplished in the hundred days after demo day. Without any clear ambitious goals, we simply drifted towards a less productive state – scope would be added way too easily, design iterated on too many times, code perhaps more polished than it needed be. How Open Should a Startup CEO be with Staff?
CEO transparency.
It almost sounds uncontroversial. A CEO should tell her staff everything! Right? Right?!? Of course not. It’s a hard topic to write about because it’s almost an accepted norm that total transparency is good. For starters let me use “CEO” as a proxy to include her “inner circle” which might mean co-founders or might just mean senior execs of the business. The Mind of the Founder You took the risk to start your company. Scary why? All of a sudden you know you’re going to be judged. Your parents want to know why on Earth you’d leave a job at Google. Your peer group is envious of your finally doing what they’ve always wanted to do but found it too hard to give up the golden paycheck and predictable future.
Your VC friends have been egging you on. Scary because that hard earned $40,000 you have slavishly saved “for the future” is going to dwindle fast if you can’t bring in funding. But so far this is the easy bit. How can you show “traction” on a product that just launched? Making Yourself a CEO. She got a big booty so I call her Big Booty.—2 Chainz, Birthday Song The other day, a friend of mine asked me whether CEOs were born or made.
I said, “That’s kind of like asking if Jolly Ranchers are grown or made. CEO is a very unnatural job.” After saying it and seeing the surprised look on his face, I realized that perhaps it wasn’t as obvious as I’d originally thought. After thinking further, I realized that most people actually assume the opposite—CEOs are born not made. In athletics, some things like becoming a sprinter can be learned relatively quickly because they take a natural motion and refine it.
Being CEO requires lots of unnatural motion. In fact, even the most basic CEO building blocks will feel unnatural at first. Giving feedback turns out to be the unnatural atomic building block atop which the unnatural skill set of management gets built. The Shit Sandwich The shit sandwich can work well with junior employees, but has the following challenges: The Keys.
Why Founders Fail: The Product CEO Paradox. Editor’s note: Ben Horowitz is co-founder and partner of Andreessen Horowitz.
He was co-founder and CEO of Opsware (formerly Loudcloud), which was acquired by HP, and ran several product divisions at Netscape. He serves on the board of companies such as Capriza, Foursquare, Jawbone, Lytro, Magnet, NationBuilder, Okta, Rap Genius, SnapLogic, and Tidemark. Follow him on his blog and on Twitter @bhorowitz. If I knew what I knew in the past I would have been blacked out on your a** —Kanye West, Black Skinhead Because I am a prominent advocate for founders running their own companies, whenever a founder fails to scale or gets replaced by a professional CEO, people send me lots of emails. In response to all of these emails: No, I am not going to rewrite that post, but I will write this post.
The founder doesn’t really want to be CEO. The board panics. The Product CEO Paradox. The Product CEO Paradox This happens all the time. How can we prevent that? Keep and drive the product vision.