Dylan's half-formed thoughts and musings
I spent last week walking around the mountains and parks of Wyoming which was a delightful change from London. In between coyotes, eagles and a grizzly bear, I read a few things including Paul Graham’s Founder Mode post and MrBeast’s leaked onboarding doc.
It’s always interesting to see who is surprised by notes like these. Founders tend to shrug and go ‘obviously’, investors tend to eyeroll slightly and then copy whatever their founders are doing and journalists are horrified.
Fundamentally (or at least to me), these documents are both responses to the fundamental company-building question of how to scale founder obsession (the F+1 problem). Specifically it’s clear they’re written with a common trauma of hiring badly. Notice I did not say ‘hiring the wrong people’. Hiring (senior) people into your company is an exercise in assessing their compatibility with your obsession. It is, in my experience, one of the most difficult things to do well and we spend oddly little time discussing it. Worse, and at the risk of changing the title of this newsletter to ‘everything is survivorship bias’, I feel a great deal of senior hiring advice and experience tends to under-emphasise time and place factors and over-emphasise org design factors. Sometimes success teaches you very little.
I was looking back at ~20 years of startup notes to see all the dumb things I’ve done in this area. And some of them are very, very dumb (although they did eventually lead to some quite good onboarding docs). As ever, this is not advice (take some or none of it) but here are four particularly useful mistakes from a much larger number:
