Be Lean

Small teams with solid vision win.

Today most startups and companies that I come across seem bloated to me. A company that should be having 10 people is having 100 and still struggling. The goal of this blog post is to look into ideas that will help in achieving the lean deadly team that can kill anything blocking it’s way.

The first step to make one is ofcourse, getting the right people. You have already lost the game when you go the traditional HR route to scout for people to hire. This will most probably lead to uncompetetive hires which is not what we want. Do you really think searching keywords on linkedin and searching profiles manually will get you the right people ?

You should invert the game. Instead of manually scouting for people, build your own influence and the right people will automatically show up. Help people, do stuff that is cool and adds value to people’s life, do things for free, do opensource and many other things. Doing this will result in increase of your respect and influence. The right people will automatically respect and join. This holds true for other things like job hunting as well. Which do you think is better: 1) applying to hundereds of jobs manually or 2) just working on your skills and putting it up on social media and let companies automatically reach out to you ?

Now let’s say you got smart peope to join you somehow, how do you retain them ? The smartest and best people keep getting ample opportunities day in day out. If you are not respectable and only provide money as a benifit, those people will eventually leave.

For lean companies its better to give out equity and make people partners instead of employees. Don’t be greedy and let everybody grow according to what efforts they put in. Retaining is one of the most ignored things. As a benchmark, comma.ai just has 12 people, only 2 people ever quit in their 7 years journey till now and their product reviews topped even tesla, let alone other ‘big’ car manufacturers. You have to work with people and build a religion that the team lives and grows by.

Have strong beliefs, ethics, opinions. The founder’s opinions, although open to discussion/refinement should be dead solid. It’s human nature to lie to get things done. Many sales teams lie just for the sake of selling, many people lie in resumes to get a job, many people lie to investors to scam funds. You should be good enough to smell bullshit from a distance. This will save you from people who lie. But for that you have to be good. You have to keep learning and have considereable generic knowledge to be able to do this. Having strong opinions help you to focus on what really matters to your vision and skip things that don’t. This vastly decreases mental pressure to ‘try out different things’ and instead, focus.