00:30:02 · Waseem Daher, Aditya Agarwal
[00:30:02] S0: I agree. I mean, it's... I'm not, like, a big card player, but it's, like, kind of, like, you're dealt a certain hand in your poker game. And, like, sometimes it's a bad beat. Right? But it's like, well, these are cards I had, and I played them as well as I could've, like Right. Given what I knew at the time. It's like, I think that's the kind of thing that you're sort of aiming for. [00:30:17] S1: Yeah. Absolutely. And that... You know, and I think that the other thing that helps you with startups is just speed. Right? Because the quicker you can recover, if you do have a bad beat, the more you can also have some chips on the table in some ways to kind of play the next hand. It can help a lot. So what do you think most founders actually get wrong about company building? [00:30:34] S0: I think this is a consensus view at this point, but I think you basically as the company grows, you internalize this advice of, oh, I need to hire VPs. I need to hire a head of sales. I need to hire a sales rep. And then all of those people the machine is what interacts with the world, and you get the data fed through the machine. And I think that's actually very dangerous. Again, this is not a super hot take, but it's like you want us to remain as close to reality as possible, and that frequently requires you to go and do stuff yourself or inspect things yourself.
00:30:34 · Waseem Daher, Aditya Agarwal
[00:30:34] S0: I think this is a consensus view at this point, but I think you basically as the company grows, you internalize this advice of, oh, I need to hire VPs. I need to hire a head of sales. I need to hire a sales rep. And then all of those people the machine is what interacts with the world, and you get the data fed through the machine. And I think that's actually very dangerous. Again, this is not a super hot take, but it's like you want us to remain as close to reality as possible, and that frequently requires you to go and do stuff yourself or inspect things yourself. [00:31:07] S1: Yeah. I'm actually... I'm generally curious at which point in our collective, I would say, wisdom on building companies, we came to this idea that there could be people who were not actually on the front lines learning about what is happening so that they could manage through abstractions. Because more and more, I'm like, that does not make any sense. [00:31:29] S0: Yeah, it basically doesn't work. [00:31:30] S1: It just doesn't work. Yeah.
00:31:30 · Aditya Agarwal, Waseem Daher
[00:31:30] S1: It just doesn't work. Yeah. [00:31:32] S0: They say, oh, you should hire someone who would do the job better than you would, and then you should delegate to them. And like, not to be a dick, there are a lot of jobs where, like, no, I would do it better than you would do it, like for arbitrary you. And the challenge is actually a scaling challenge. It's like, no. I don't have time to do every single sales call. It's like it's not the highest leverage use of my time. Yeah. But it's like, I think if that's the case, it's actually pretty dangerous to just, like, hand the keys to someone and be like, okay. You do all the sales calls and just, like, let me know how it goes. [00:32:00] S1: I mean, the other flip side of this is like, oh, you should hire yourself out of a job or something. Right? And I'm just like, no. That doesn't make any sense to me because I should be world class at what I'm doing. And by definition, that means there should be almost zero people better than me at what I'm doing. So that doesn't make any sense [00:32:16] S0: to me. I think there are some areas that are, like, high leverage and high impact for you. Like, this sounds like a plug. You probably don't need to be doing your own accounting. Like, you should buy buy on to do that. But but, like, there is [00:32:27] S1: See, ma'am, no one in any accounting.
00:32:27 · Aditya Agarwal, Waseem Daher
[00:32:27] S1: See, ma'am, no one in any accounting. [00:32:28] S0: Exactly. There's some stuff where it is actually just not strategic for you to do it, and those are, I think, phenomenal places to delegate. There's some stuff that's so on the critical path of the business's success, though. And I think if you just are a passenger on that stuff, that's very dangerous. What matters there actually changes over time. It's like in the early days, it might be building the product or selling initial units or whatever. In later days, it might be a marketing campaign. That's a moving target. So you actually have to be pretty abreast of what's happening in the org so that you can insert yourself at the point of maximum leverage.
00:33:04 · Aditya Agarwal
[00:33:04] S1: Sometimes what I see at the early stages is when a founder is working on something that is clearly the alpha is in the technology. Or like, hey, the hardest part here is getting the technology right. Or sometimes it's actually getting the storytelling right because ultimately technology is hard, but perhaps not 0.01% hard. But then the founder chooses to say that, Oh, this is the most important thing, but I'm going to go hire somebody else to do it. And in my head, I'm thinking, That doesn't make any sense because the founder, by definition, should be doing the hardest thing in the beginning. They should be the world class expert at doing the hardest thing. And then over time, their job is to find people who help them do the other things because they should continue to focus on the hardest thing. So I strongly believe that micromanagement is actually not a bad thing. Staying in the weeds, staying in the details is awesome. And as the founder and CEO, you should actually have a really good understanding of every function in the company. Right? It might take a little bit of time to get ramped up. But on everything, finance, legal, HR, marketing, sales, if somebody left in those roles, you should be able to go and play that role until you have to hire someone else. What do you think perhaps has changed in this day and age of AI? Do you think something has to change about company creation or company scaling? Scaling is perhaps an easier question, maybe about company creation.
00:34:30 · Waseem Daher, Aditya Agarwal
[00:34:30] S0: Yeah. I mean, scaling, surely, the answer is yes. I think on creation, I think it is true that the barrier to entry is lower than it's ever been. [00:34:38] S1: Mhmm. [00:34:39] S0: And I think that's actually really powerful because rather than drawing the picture now, you can, like, vibe code the prototype and have someone play with it. And, look, that's obviously different than the production code, but, like, your ability to just, like, go and produce v o point o one of any good... Any given thing is, like, easier than it has ever been. And that is a trend that actually was true pre AI as well, which is, like, when we started our very first company in, you know, in 2008, there was, like, a real question about, like, are we gonna put a server in a data center to, like, host our email? Was like, no, we should just use Google Apps, but that was not the obvious story. Was like Google Apps and Stripe and all of this stuff has made running the infrastructure of your company much, much easier and therefore made company creation much more accessible. And I think the last frontiers of this historically had been building the product or doing the designer on the product or stuff adjacent to that. And we're starting to see that chip away too, which is pretty cool. [00:35:37] S1: Maybe to kind of finish up here, how do you stay curious, Waseem? You've always struck me as someone who is deeply curious about the world, but as with the jobs of running a company, having young kids, how do you find that you are refilling your cup of curiosity?