I'm honestly more interested in studying the most ineffective founders.<p>We spend too much time focusing on survivors, when I feel like the best learning comes from looking at failure.<p>I'd be willing to be there's a lot of failed / failing companies out there doing the exact same thing as the "most effective founders", so what makes them different? I'd be interested to know.
Self help pablum for aspiring founders. I'll just highlight a couple of the ridiculous things in there. "Minimize unnecessary micromanagement". There's just a ton in there. First, micromanagement already has a negative connotation so recommending to minimize it rather than eliminate it is just an obnoxious hedge. Then it doubles down on recommending minimizing only "unnecessary" micromanagement. You just go right ahead micromanaging those losers who deserve to be micromanaged. How else are you going to drive out the undesirables?<p>"Invite disagreement". All hedge. "some studies have shown", "in tern it <i>could</i> mean more innovative and inclusive products". Not because you want to show respect for the opinions of others or that you listen to what people have to say but because it <i>could</i> lead to more innovative and inclusive products ie. "I don't really care what you have to say other than how it hits my bottom line but go on talking. I'll let you know if I think you say something worthwhile"<p>"Keep pace with expertise" This was nice until you get to the bottom of the actual report and find out that Josh has an undergraduate degree in Biology and an MBA. I'm not sure how that shows any expertise in what is being written about but please go on nor how that could possibly qualify you as Chief of Staff at Google Research but there it is.<p>I think what's more interesting about stuff like this is not what they're saying but what they're selling. I can only guess that the real research Google did was that they needed more startups to get started using their products and that they would continue to use and expand their use of Google services as they grow.
I’ve worked with managers from big co’s as well as directly with many startup founders. Helping mainly B2B SaaS teams with Product Design [1]<p>This article is written from a corporate pov, judging founders and founding teams, which are fundamentally different animals, from the wrong angle.<p>The pattern I’ve seen all effective founders had in common from my experience were 2<p>1. Building something people want. Usually they started with something crappy, focussing on product market fit first. Almost always have paying customers.<p>Then<p>2. Tirelessly working 24/7 on product & telling more people about their product.<p>All the managerial things mentioned in the article are important at some point. But it’s not what will make or break a startup.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.fairpixels.pro" rel="nofollow">https://www.fairpixels.pro</a>
I would have expected stuff like:<p>- expertise or at least competency related to the domain<p>- social currency, ability to influence/convince people<p>- stamina and fortitude<p>Most of the points in the very short article are about "don't be an asshole to your employees", which is certainly a good thing and what people should be doing. But I can think of quite a few outrageously successful founders who have been insufferable dickheads.<p>I think my second point above might be the single most important one. I have no data to back it up, but I feel like if you can just make people do what you want in some way or another (and that includes customers, workers, partners etc.) then you're set up for success. At least short or midterm (a few years).<p>I think this is a bad thing because it is quite arbitrary and stupid. I say that in a loving way. I wish we (humans) were not that dumb.
While there is some decent leadership advice in this article, I can't help but to wonder: all these articles seem to focus on personal leadership qualities, does anyone recommend good articles that focus on other things like socioeconomic status, college/degree level, age, etc? It seems intuitive that @$$hole founders fail, but all things considered equal I intuition also tells me these other factors are equality if not more impactful.<p>Edit: Couple minor typos.
This reads more like a generic SEO page, stating platitudes, rather than a novel analysis by one of the largest, most influential companies in the world.<p>If Google considers this quality content, is it really surprising their search results increasingly return non substantive answers to questions?
Kind of a click bait title from Google, which is disappointing. This is really about characteristics of effective leaders, and has little to do with effective entrepreneurship, sales, hiring, engineering, etc. The points they suggest are also pretty generically applicable (and have been recommended for decades) to managers in general, so it’s not clear to me what’s different about founders specifically here.
Here's my list of the traits had by the most effective founders:<p>- strong will to make the vision a reality<p>- humility to update the vision when appropriate<p>- natural ability to motivate people to work toward the vision<p>- the ability to focus and to keep the team focused<p>- the ability to explore and to keep the team exploring<p>- the ability to present and fundraise effectively<p>- luck<p>All but the last item are not very scarce characteristics (roughly 1 in 200 people has them all in sufficient quantity to succeed as a founder).<p>The last one is where it gets difficult, and at every iteration the impact of luck gets amplified, to the point where it is actually the signal that everyone is looking for to "pile on" to an early stage endeavor.
> The most effective founders are not nearly as confident as the least effective founders are...If that’s you, remember it is likely a signal of growth, and not of inevitable failure.<p>This was good to know. I constantly feel that imposter syndrome, especially as we grow and I am trying to keep my leadership skills at pace with our team size.
> This observation aligns with what is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, where overconfidence at the start of the journey helps founders get started, but discouragement and self-doubt set in soon after<p>It’s refreshing to see mention of the DK effect linked to a more recent paper, one where the original authors are amending (contradicting) their original work. But I have never ever seen the DK effect mentioned in a context where it actually works as a reasonable explanation of human behavior, this post included. For example, if we take these papers at face value, one of the few things they actually do show is that there is a positive correlation between confidence and what they call “performance”; the more confident someone is in themselves, the more likely they are to be right about it. The most common (mis)conception of DK is the opposite of that. Being confident and then having reality set in is not what DK measured. Really, the only use DK has is a way for the speaker/author to position themselves as smart & authoritative by citing their awareness of it, often as if knowing of it helps you avoid it.<p>The original paper just did not measure anything even remotely close to startup success by founders, and thus it’s conclusions simply do not carry into this context. The paper did not measure any kind of job performance by any professionals. It didn’t measure complex tasks either. The tasks were basic and academic, e.g., a little grammar, ability to get a joke (seriously!), and the primary statistics they gathered were based on people ranking themselves against others whose performance they didn’t know, not primarily on isolated or objective self-evaluation. The sample of people was a tiny(!) set of Cornell undergrads(!) volunteering(!) for extra credit. There are just <i>so</i> many things wrong with assuming this work represents real human behavior, and the paper was misleading and is so completely misunderstood that I wish references to it would just stop: they’re never correct and never useful.
A list more useful:<p>- have energy<p>- have a goal, the why?<p>- surround yourselves like the people you want to be<p>- launch something crappy<p>- keep doing something, anything.. one day it will all accumulate<p>- be good at finding people who know instead of learning yourself
The qualities / behaviors highlighted just seem like good people leadership skills, period.<p>I do not see it being specific to founders or startups.
Tldr - Effective leaders do x, y and z. Ok, how do you know they do those things? We ask people. How do you know they're effective leaders? We ask (presumably the same) people. What's the sample? Startups that people have selected to be in our accelerator (presumably based on, among other things, whether the leaders were deemed to be effective by our people). So many issues with the analysis that its hard to tease out anything of value.
This from a company that hires a gazillion phds. Sigh.
1. Mitigate risk<p>2. Corollary of #1: never take a client providing over 10% of your annual revenue, or table personal assets to grow<p>3. keep your legal positions clear: talk with contract, copyright and trademark lawyers early<p>4. keep your tax strategy clear: talk with regional corporate accountants, and customs brokers early<p>5. Prioritize revenue: without a profit-mode your project is not a business<p>6. Corollary of #5: provide _paying_ customers value they are happy with, or cull the project<p>7. Manage or be managed: you are running a business, and not a charity. There are several styles for doing this, and no way is perfect. Often hiring friends is a mistake, as when serious money starts to flow people often revert to their primordial rodent brains.<p>8. Marketing: your conversion rate is below 1.7% ? than adapt/cull the project…<p>9. low hanging fruit is usually rotten: if it is something some kids can _appear_ to copy to make a quick buck, than the market will quickly fragment. a.k.a. “chasing the long tail” of market distributions is financial suicide<p>10. admit you can’t know every scam, and accept as a business there are always losses. As a small entity you are vulnerable to all sorts of legal, technological, and personal attacks. Technical people often think being smart somehow immunizes them from cons some sociopaths mastered... it doesn’t... talk with people, and you will see this is a very common bias.<p>11. With shareholders one must acknowledge the structures of power:
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Politics/dp/1610391845" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po...</a><p>12. post failed projects on your website as bait, so when the business-intelligence people show-up looking for soft-targets... they too can enjoy the losses... nothing more enjoyable than watching irrationally competitive opportunists go bankrupt pumping money into something you wisely abandoned. ;-)<p>I wouldn’t call my entities successful by “startup” standards, but they have remained profitable for over 14 years... and they are mine.