451 Posts found for Source: First Round Review

Metrics are, in my opinion, the least important part of an annual plan because they’re not very strategic. The metrics tell us if we’re on the right path. But charting the right path is actually the hard work.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jeff Lawson | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Management

While early employees help set implicit norms, building systems early in a company’s lifecycle sets explicit norms. How do decisions get made? How are meetings structured? How are goals set? These systems are much easier to build when the company is small, and very challenging to put into place as the company grows.

Content: Quotation | Author: Kevin Fishner | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Organizational Behavior

As CEO, if someone brings a problem to me, of course, I’m always anxious to solve it. But I’m always going to think, “How did this problem come to be? And how did it come to me? And should it have come to me?”

Content: Quotation | Author: Dave Girouard | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Management

I think a lot of managers convince themselves that the person sitting across from them is an employee and our shared interest is about what we do here in this company today and tomorrow. And I think what I’ve learned is that the best managers say “No, no, no, that person sitting across from me is a human being, and I need to play a … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Russ Laraway | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Training & Development

We’re a memo culture, not a meeting culture, and we put a lot of time into long-form documentation. Why? My belief is that content scales; your time doesn’t. I’ve personally written many hundreds of pages of strategy and documentation to align the team. Keep in mind what content replaces: taking meetings to explain the same material over and over again, emailing people, meetings, calls, seemingly … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Sam Corcos | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Communication, Management, Organizational Behavior

Your job as a CEO is to build fire departments, not put out fires. If you’re regularly putting out fires yourself, you’re doing it wrong. Focus your time on how to enable others on your team to put out fires themselves.

Content: Quotation | Author: Sam Corcos | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Corporate Governance

The problem with to-do lists is they lead to unrealistic optimism about how much you can accomplish because items on a to-do list are untethered from the constraint of reality: time.

Content: Quotation | Author: Sam Corcos | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Personal Development, Productivity / Work Tips

The most substantial improvement in my ability to manage my time came from using my calendar as my to-do list (and subsequently killing my to-do list).

I used to have the habit of overcommitting myself, which became a major source of anxiety in my life because I was dropping balls left and right, and it led me to disappoint a lot of people when deadlines would … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Sam Corcos | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Personal Development, Productivity / Work Tips

When I go to my manager asking for her to provide feedback on a resource or simply take a look at something, I appreciate that she challenges me to share my intent and clarify what I’m looking for in a response. This helps streamline communication and prevent any misunderstanding, and that clarity of thought is something I always remember when I’m making an ask.

Content: Quotation | Author: Lauren Jones | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Management

When my managers have been great, they’ve looked at my situation with compassion above all, above what they (or the company) need from me. The same goes for when I’ve been my best as a manager. That doesn’t mean the company’s priorities don’t prevail — it just means I feel acknowledged as a human being in whatever the situation is.

Content: Quotation | Author: Devan Goldstein | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Management

The best managers are incredibly consistent — they’re almost always on time, follow-up, and close the loop on open items. The diligence and consistency seem straightforward but are rare in a leader.

Content: Quotation | Author: Liz Kosinski | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Management

For the past couple of years, Annie Duke has been sharing her advice with founders and angel investors in closed sessions for the First Round community, but given our focus on open-sourcing so others in the tech ecosystem can learn, we thought readers of The Review would be curious to see a few pages from her decision-making playbook, tailored specifically for the startup context.

In this … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Annie Duke | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Entrepreneurship, Organizational Behavior

Naivety is an important quality for entrepreneurs to possess — there are no assumptions about what is and isn’t possible. The ability to not know what lies around every single corner is actually an advantage because it forces you to look around corners that you normally would never go towards.

Content: Quotation | Author: Irving Fain | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

Most founders tend to remain high-level when the topic of culture comes up. For starters, there are tons of reads on why culture matters, but strikingly few on how to actually architect it. We all understand what it means to some extent, but it’s rarely defined or broken down. There are frameworks for product/market fit or founder-led sales, but when it comes to culture, the … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Laura Del Beccaro | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Culture, Entrepreneurship, Organizational Behavior

Too often HR or legal policies solve for the exception — but then you force everyone to operate in a worse environment simply because someday there could be a bad actor who does a bad thing. I’d much rather solve for the 99%.

Content: Quotation | Author: Marco Zappacosta | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Legal, Management

When you’re hiring a role, you make your list of what you want this person to be great at, and your list is 12 items long. What happens is you end up hiring for lack of weakness rather than exceptional strength in any one area — that leads to a mediocre outcome. Push yourself to define the role in terms of three specific key attributes … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Marco Zappacosta | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Hiring, Human Resources

The cultural attributes and values of an organization are really a reflection of who joins early on — the shared values that bring the early team together. Building the culture starts with who you hire, and it’s nothing more than that. It’s a mistake to be too explicit about the culture and values upfront in the earliest days of a startup. You don’t know yet … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Marco Zappacosta | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Culture, Entrepreneurship, Organizational Behavior

It’s useful to recognize the ways in which you’re not a special flower. In the early days, you think you and your company are special in every way, and then over time, you realize there’s a lot of stuff that everybody goes through.

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

Usually, post-mortems is the word you use to describe analyzing the things that don’t go well, but we do post-mortems when things go well, too. That is the way in which you continually build this muscle of analyzing the outcome and asking what all of the inputs were that led you there and try to do your best in the moment when everything’s fresh in … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Jeff Lawson | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Management

The thing that I’ve noticed about OKRs is the objectives aren’t prioritized in most companies. At most companies, the energy of OKRs is really around the key results. Everybody gets very focused on the metrics. And I actually think the most important part of our BPM is not the measures, it’s the priorities.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jeff Lawson | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Management