462 Posts found for Source: First Round Review

I’m a big believer in teaching leaders to fish. That’s why we’ve rolled out a weekly(ish) email for leaders … that summarizes all the things they need to be thinking about in terms of managing and messaging to their team. We break it down into a few sections: things to know, things to do, things to share. It sounds simple, but let’s be real, leaders … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Terra Carmichael | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Communication, Human Resources, Leadership, Management

The double-edged truth of the fast-scaling startup: If the company grows as it should, it will outgrow many of its people.

Content: Quotation | Author: Khalid Halim | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Organizational Behavior

The law of startup physics: humans grow linearly, companies grow exponentially.

Content: Quotation | Author: Khalid Halim | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Organizational Behavior

I started noticing patterns in startups — which I’ve validated with executives and VCs over the years — that how companies scale and break matches military groupings. So, the most efficient group in the military is a group of three, then a group of eight, and then three groups of eight, so 24. Look across companies and you’ll see that around 24 people, someone speaks … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Khalid Halim | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Organizational Behavior

Scott Belsky’s new book, The Messy Middle, covers an expansive range of topics, from constructing teams (“If you avoid folks who are polarizing, you avoid bold outcomes”) to culture and tools (“Be frugal with everything except your bed, your chair, your space, and your team”) to anchoring to your customers (“empathy and humility before passion”). We’re pleased to present Belsky’s introduction to his “Optimizing Product” … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Scott Belsky | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Innovation, Management

There’s a behavioral design professor at Stanford, BJ Fogg, who has developed a model that says for any behavior in the world to occur, you need three things to happen at the same time: motivation, ability and a trigger. Motivation can play off of many things, like pleasure or pain, hope or fear. Ability refers to how easy it is to execute the behavior. And … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Payal Kadakia | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales

You know, in the beginning, people would say, “Oh, well, we need to build this thing to scale.” But, honestly, let the site go down. If people keep coming back, it’s a pretty good sign that you’re onto something. If they don’t due to a brief technical lapse, it’s likely not just the tech; there’s a dangerous fragility with your business or business model.

Content: Quotation | Author: Payal Kadakia | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

For Elad Gil, an important lesson for aspiring founders and investors alike is that nonobvious markets can lead to hypergrowth, but they’re hard to spot in the moment. The trick lies in finding what bucks conventional wisdom before anyone else and scaling that unlikely idea into a high-growth company — something Gil is very familiar with.

In his roles as an operator and angel investor, Gil … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Elad Gil | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Strategy

How many times have you seen a [job description] that defines the position by listing a dozen different skills? Don’t describe the entire position in exquisite form, even though all those skills may be useful. That laundry list of requirements won’t exist in a human. Invariably you end up with someone who’s mediocre at all of them, but not exceptional at the ones at which … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Marco Zappacosta | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Human Resources

Howard Morgan is an encyclopedia of tech history and startup lessons. And all that he hasn’t experienced firsthand, he soaks up, too. (He keeps a running list of all the books he’s read over the last 30 years; it’s over 5,700 entries long.) In this exclusive interview, we dig into the practice Morgan has seen differentiate good founders from great founders: the ability to relax … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Howard Morgan | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

Most people choose not to take action because humans are very loss averse. We all want to minimize regret, and we tend to ascribe more regret to acting rather than failing to act. Failing to act doesn’t really feel like our fault. If you’re trying to be persuasive, you can anticipate this instinct. If you desire a particular outcome, make sure that your stakeholders need … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Tyler Odean | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior, Persuasion

Cognitive biases create our reality. The best we can do is accommodate and lean into them — we can’t escape them.

Content: Quotation | Author: Tyler Odean | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Communication, Decision Making, Management, Organizational Behavior

To make whatever you’re offering appeal to a human being, be aware that any information you put out there will be consumed through a comparative lens. If you don’t explicitly tell your audience which comparisons to make, they’ll make them on their own. And these automatic comparisons probably won’t be as flattering as the ones you’d choose for them.

Content: Quotation | Author: Tyler Odean | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Communication, Management, Organizational Behavior, Persuasion

It’s infinitely more difficult to persuade someone that they’re wrong than to persuade them that there’s new information that should change their minds. Any time you’re trying to convince someone to change their thinking, always frame it as an opportunity to be right going forward — not an admission of past error.

Content: Quotation | Author: Tyler Odean | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Communication, Management, Organizational Behavior, Persuasion

People will remember a totally random sample of the information you give them. It won’t be the best sample. It won’t be the summary you wish you could hand them. It’s a random set of data. Because they’ll remember random parts, you want to construct a message that — when sampled at any point — reinforces your argument and remains persuasive. Keep it to the … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Tyler Odean | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Communication, Management, Organizational Behavior, Persuasion

The reality is that visionaries like Steve Jobs haven’t been successful because they thought of something amazing and original out of thin air. Rather, they were gifted at constantly persuading many people to follow them on their journey to something amazing and original. To succeed, startup founders need to cultivate persuasion as a skill and habit. That’s how they’re going to get the funding, the … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Tyler Odean | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior, Personal Development

If you speak to System II [thinking] (i.e. pose something complex enough that it requires reasoning), you’re asking to be doubted. Many of us have had the thought while listening to someone: “I don’t know why you’re wrong, but I still don’t believe you.” That’s System II doing its job. To persuade someone, you need to speak as much as you can to System I … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Tyler Odean | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior, Persuasion

What most people think of as vision is actually persuasion.

Content: Quotation | Author: Tyler Odean | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Persuasion, Vision

Not long after James Everingham joined Instagram as the head of engineering, results came back from the employee satisfaction survey that’s conducted every six months. The marks were pretty good, but one problem spot caught Everingham’s eye: the low transparency score.

Transparency is a persistent, thorny problem because we’re not all on the same page about what it even means. To Everingham, transparency was about building … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: James Everingham | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Communication, Decision Making, Management, Organizational Behavior | Company: Instagram

Follow up with candidates — both those who got offers and those who didn’t — to get their feedback. You want all candidates who didn’t get the job to still have an incredibly positive impression of your company and your process. The world is small. Reputations are long. You want them to have wished they would have gotten the job — so much so that … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Dan Pupius | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Human Resources