00:17:46 · Snow Lee
Various leadership styles have evolved, especially in Silicon Valley over the last decade, focusing on mentoring, coaching to enable team members to grow independently. Generally, leaders are encouraged to create an environment that where team members can achieve success as players rather than taking the direct actions themselves. While this approach requires time for team members to learn, it's believed as a way to achieve more. When I took the CPU position at Buzzvil, I needed to redefine customer problems. As I introduced earlier, there were many types of customers including advertisers, publishers, ad consumers, and further subdivisions. Although I really enjoy meeting customers, it's clear that I cannot meet them all. Most importantly, I understand that the insights gained by team members through interviews are much more beneficial than the lessons I can provide. This led to various activities including one on ones, nudging, and selling OKRs and more, which took time but weren't necessary. On the other hand, founders are evaluated by their business success. They even often don't have a chance to be evaluated by others. Founders must be players on the field, especially when seeking product market fit in a rapid changing market. Now as a co founder of Runbear, I initially considered dividing customer engagement between team members and myself. You know, now we have five people but I quickly abandoned the idea every single customer story is crucial to me. I needed to unlearn what I learned as a leader. While I do appreciate mentoring and coaching leadership, sitting on the bench is not an option for me as a founder, at least for now. Let's talk about the delegation. Delegation is usually categorized into five to seven letters. For example, level one, do as I say. Level two, research and report. Three, investigate and recommend. Four, decide and inform. And finally, five, Act independently. The delegation level should be used differently for different situations. You cannot expect a baby to learn how to run by themselves when the baby cannot even walk yet. As a leader, I strive to maintain levels three to five as much as possible. Of course, no one can start as an expert from the beginning.
00:20:44 · S0, S1, S7
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00:21:13 · Snow Lee
[00:21:13] S5: Thus, I use initial levels for new members, but I try to move quickly to level three. On the other hand, as a founder, I adjust the delegation level based on tasks rather than the person. Startups need generalists more than specialists, requiring team members to quickly learn and perform unfamiliar tasks. If I clearly understand the task, I use level one. If I know the direction but not the details, level three. If quick action followed by learning is needed, level four. Expectations, we all have expectations for others. Both leaders and founders seek faster learners, of course. The difference is that leaders look for individuals who can quickly perform their roles and beyond, while founders seek those who can solve problems. For example, as a CPO, I looked for members with work capable of quickly learning PM skills. On the other hand, as a founder, now I'm looking for members who can learn how to solve the problems whatever the problem is. Because of these expectations, hiring complete juniors as an early stage startup founder feels particularly challenging due to lack of patience. Most founders choose to be poor leaders of a successful business rather than good leaders of a failed one. But as a leader, we should be patient and lead members to grow for the long term goals. Once I had an underperformer in one of my teams at Buzzvil. At that time, I was reading the Netflix novel's rules. I was inspired by Netflix's management philosophy and because of that, I initially thought that firing him was the best move. However, the upper leader of the underperformer suggested that while he might not fit for the current team, he could excel in another. His current team was working on a new project requiring the ability to define and solve undefined problems, which seemed to cause anxiety for him. I changed his team and the result was astonishing. He became the top performer and an opinion leader of the new team. This experience taught me not to rush to the judgment based on the other company's philosophies. So resilience, you know resilience is well known required capability for founders. You know, we fall down so many times a day, but we always get back up, right? I remember that the day of OpenAI Dev Day last year. Do you know that it is cold as the wedding because it killed thousands of startups on the day, including us? But we didn't give up.
00:24:24 · Snow Lee
Interestingly, day, it opened new opportunities for us. Thank you, OpenAI. So long story short, these are the differences between leaders and founders that I found. Despite of differences, becoming a good founder may not be so different from becoming a good leader. The differences are significantly influenced by the endless responsibility and the anxiety of being a founder. While anxiety driven motivation can accelerate actions in short term, it risks misdirection and is unsustainable in the long long run. Founders also need to be patient, trust members, and lead the team to achieve more. A good leader is just not just a silent supporter or someone who makes members do as he or she says. Instead, focusing on long term goals, building an environment that fosters team growth, and taking the final responsibility make a good leader. In this way, while leaders and founders may make different short term decisions based on the situations and objectives, their ultimate goals align. While becoming a good leader may not be mandatory to become a successful founder, I do believe successful founders must become good leaders. Thank you.
00:26:21 · Hannah Lee, S0, S1, S7
[00:26:21] S6: All right, thank you Snow. Thank you for the presentation. All right, so you gave us a brief explanation of how you underwent a lot of these experiences of being a founder, wanting to be a leader, and also trying to learn from other different philosophies and finding your own ground in the middle. So I think there's a lot of stories to tell in between those moments that you mentioned, so I think we're going to dive into them. As people were just listening, if you had any questions during the talk that you want to ask during this live session, please make sure to do so in the live chat. We will be covering them as we go. But I just first wanted to start off with the last part that you mentioned with Runbear, because you mentioned that with the founder mentality that founders need to have, OpenAI Dev Day was one of the Ad[00:27:14] S0: This episode is brought to Ad[00:27:15] S1: you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed Sponsored Jobs can help carry the load. Ad[00:27:25] S7: It boosts your job post to help Ad[00:27:26] S1: it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a 75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. [00:27:43] S6: When you face difficulties in your previous sort of idea. So can you tell us a little bit more about what your journey has been so far with Runbear and also building Plugbear?
00:27:54 · Snow Lee
[00:27:54] S5: Great, great. Thank you for asking. I can talk whole way but let me try to make it short. Our previous product, actually the product is still live and it's running, we have the customers. The product is Runbear and it's helping the customers with the technical support and especially related to the DevOps part. So you can consider it as a little bit vertical side of the AI Copilot. And at the moment, OpenAI Dev Day, OpenAI launched two big products. One is OpenAI GPTs, and other one is OpenAI assistance. We know that the Runbear provides unique backdrop. We know that our product is different, but we were worried, really worried about that. Our customers may not understand that because the building AI is getting more easier and easier. So we needed to compete with not just with the competitors, other players. We need to compete with the engineering teams inside of the customers. That's the point we were stuck and we were shocked. So at the moment we think about it, we consider about it and what we were missing, what we can do and at the time we realized that we spent more time on integrations rather than building the core of AI itself to build the Runbear. So we even research it to find another solutions so that if we can use that kind of integration solutions for the Runbear and we couldn't find find the best one for us. So we jumped in, we spent one or two weeks to launch the product, and just after the launching the product, we got some traction and we are now in the middle of the growth.