These are some of the things I've learned, and wish someone had told me when starting a company.
0. Don't
This is perhaps the most fundamental piece of advice I could offer. And it has two meanings.
First, it means do not build a company. For most people this is a bad idea. You will suffer enormous amounts of pain and failure, it will take a significant toll on your personal life, your family life, and relationships. It is pretty simple. Do not build a company.
If you insist on building a company, then the second meaning is this: it is not about the company, but the solution. Build a solution.
Fall in love with this, and form everything around this solution. This is your vision for what you are creating. This is the north star you are chasing after. The solution is everything. Your dream. What you envision to bring into the world.
Around this solution, the structure and formation of a company will naturally emerge. But if you are the founder/CEO/creator/leader, and you want to do something meaningful, then I think you must understand the vision and the solution you are creating and believe in it 1,000,000x more than anyone else.
Understand this solution in ways others do not. That is your leverage. You understand the solution crystal clearly. Then, the company becomes a vehicle for delivering the solution at scale, and realizing the vision you set out.
For example, Steve Jobs wanted to create a personal computer. He was obsessed with that idea and the potential of computing. The kinds of things he cared about were consciousness, design, human computer interactions, expanding the human mind. Not funding, headcount, profit, and stakeholder value...
I believe the best entrepreneurs are accidental. They come from people who started building their dreams or pursuing great ideas that would change the world, and had a chip on their shoulder. Not people who wanted to build companies.
1. Spiritual Alignment
It is important that the mission of your team resonates with you deeply and spiritually.
You should do something important, and that resonates with you on a profoundly personal level. Or else it will be hard to wake up in the morning and keep doing it.
Only you know if this is really true.
2. Designing Technology
Designers and engineers are the same. Designers are more connected to human emotions and experiences. The designers taste has to be respected and understood by the engineers, or else there will be a disconnect in the team culture and product experience. The limitations of engineering have to be understood and respected by the designer.
In it's purest form, anyone can have good ideas in design - the designer is responsible for bringing them together.
On the right team, design and engineering are blended, they are sitting next to each other, and are developing the best experiences together for the customer. They do not applaud each other, but create experiences that are magical. 12/10 experiences.
The best designers are visionary, able to take abstract visions and shape them into reality for engineers to understand and build. I don't believe it is possible to be both a world class designer and a world class engineer.
3. Great engineering
Is not about technology but about deep understanding of how to build things. Great engineers can solve problems and build things creatively at layers deeper than other people are seeing. Many engineers think in ways that non-engineers will never understand.
A SpaceX, one interview question is "explain what happens when you tap a letter on your keyboard and it appears on my screen." The interviewer hopes you can reason through keyboard interfaces, binary switches, chip design, transistors, the internet, information packets, etc.
It is not about being able to recite or memorize an answer, but how they think. Is this person able to reason about it well enough to display the ability to think deeply about this topic?
Great engineers aren't by default social, and they are often hard to communicate with. This means in searching for engineers, you need to correct way more for your bias on how "friendly" they are or how much you like them.
The best people to evaluate great engineers are great engineers.
4. Ambition
Know the ambitions of the people you are working with. Don't get excited by generic ambition, but the right kind of ambition. Does this person just want to make money, and make a lot of it? Is this person seeking status? This tells you a lot about them.
Do not work with people who are in it for money or status, because both will lead them, and you, away from your purpose.
Seek people whose ambition is towards the mission you are on, and towards mastering their craft in that mission. Design, product, engineering, lights, audio, video, story telling. These are crafts. Seek those who understand 1) the mission and 2) aim to be the best at their craft.
An astronaut's mission is to land on the moon, and to get there they master space flight, navigation systems, physics, gravity, communication, physical performance, etc.
5. Questioning yourself
Before I started latch, I interned at a small business run by a family friend. The CEO never questioned himself, and when I asked questions about why we were doing certain things, was shut down and told to focus on my responsibilities. This made me leave pretty quickly.
You are wrong all of the time - and good ideas can come from anywhere.
Pay attention to your own biases. "How we do things" is a bias. Wishful thinking is a bias. There are also the emotions of meeting someone, and hoping they will like you or want to work with you. This is another form of bias.
Aim to leave your emotions out of it and analyze the situation. Bring people you can trust in to evaluate people.
6. What people do
Pay more attention to what someone does, not what they say. There is a lot of noise, you have to look for the nugget of truth and signal in their actual outputs or behavior.
7. Bureaucracy
Fight bureaucracy at all costs. Eliminate rules, cancel policies, stop trying to run things like a military encampment.
Your responsibility is to lead towards a common vision, to bring everyone towards a clear understanding of where we are going, and to create an environment to push them to thrive in. You have to pay close attention to whether people are actually thriving. If someone is not doing well, you should be able to just tell from a brief conversation. T
Meetings, meetings about meetings, rules, policies, rituals, and systems to try and create structure early on will hinder your progress endlessly, creating bloat and stupidity.
Creativity is breaking through these systems constantly and upending them.
This is not to undermine the value of systems and design thinking. Sometimes you need systems, for instance to track your competition, to to track your metrics. But often times these systems can be created out of fear, and indicate you are seeking to control the situation.
8. Politics
Avoid politics. Politics are the social dynamics, posturing, and role playing that occurs in human social situations. It's signaling that you are doing the thing, instead of doing the thing. Fuck. That.
Creative design and engineering is free of politics.
The creative way is where everyone is doing great work together towards a common vision, trusting that each person on the team is incredible and capable of playing the right role towards that vision. There is an organic flow of information and mutual trust.
The state of creating the art is the sole thing that matters - the politicking is a negative side effect of that.
9. Free expression
Create an environment of free expression and lively debate. Encourage people to speak up. Never shut down the opinions or ideas of your team, without first making it clear that you value their view points and are striving for the truth. If you do, then you will create resentment and distrust. People will think you care more about your ego and being personally right than understanding the truth. And they will be right.
Note: Being an asshole is not acceptable even if you are right. There is a way to be right and kind.
9. Make decisions fast
Make decisions quickly. Do not wait week to decide, just decide right now. It is more likely your opinion won't change in a week, your initial instinct was correct, and you are just losing time. The benefit of deciding instantly is greater than the cost of a few bad decisions.
9. Hell yes or no
This is the simplest and best hiring advice I've ever heard. But no one listens to it. We've hired a few people in the past that were a weak yes, and all of them eventually left the company. The damage to culture and progression is palpable.
If the immediate reaction after the first interview is something like:
"I'm on the fence with this one..."
"That part was good, but..."
"He messed this up, but..."
Then listen to your instinct and pass. This is the wrong person for the organization.