Startup Rebels

Great managers help their team achieve their dreams, not just achieve great results at work. But how are you supposed to know what your team members' dreams are, let alone help them achieve them? Shouldn’t you be focused on their professional goals instead of their dreams? 

Today, by popular demand, we dig into management tips and techniques from Radical Candor. If you’re a people manager of any sort, tune in to learn about the most robust career conversations framework we’ve ever seen. You’ll also hear about running effective 1-1s and staff meetings, as well as other techniques you can apply today to be a better manager.

You can't find product market fit unless you where you are and which direction you're headed in. 

Most companies needlessly struggle by using one northstar metric early on, usually copied from competitors. Others struggle because they track every metric under the sun.

In reality, there are three things you need to measure to find product market fit: Retention, engagement, and growth. 

You can measure some of these with very few users and very little time. Others take dozens or hundreds of users and multiple weeks for meaningful measurement.

In this episode we'll help you measure your progress towards product market fit with knowledge from Reforge, top tier VCs (first round capital, a16z), Rahul Vohra from Superhuman, and Sachin Rekhi from Notejoy.

 It’s not just business, it’s personal, and deeply personal. Despite prevailing advice about “keeping it professional”, we all know that achieving great results as a team is predicated on having great relationships within the team - great personal relationships.

How do you balance your desire to have great personal relationships with delivering open and honest feedback? How do you get the best out of the people on your team without alienating them or making them defensive?

Today we’ll dig in to Kim Scott’s Radical Candor and talk through her excellent communication framework and how you can apply it as a leader in your company.

The Radical Candor chart: https://www.radicalcandor.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/2x2.png

Growth trajectory and performance: https://www.radicalcandor.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/marriagegrowth.png

How do you really know what is ethical? Is there such a thing as objective ethical fact? Metaethics is a branch of philosophy that grapples with these issues.

Everybody wants to believe that they are doing moral good, and that they are running their business ethically. But is there some absolute ethical truth that applies to all businesses? 

In this episode, we introduce metaethics then dig into ethical anti-realism and views like nihilism, subjectivism, and non-cognitivism. Listen in so we can help you build an ethical framework that you can apply when you are making tough decisions in the course of business.

If you were looking for the ideal mentor to improve your decision making, you'd probably look for a guy who made millions as an investor, studied the topic for years among brilliant minds, and perhaps was a champion at playing some hyper complicated strategy game. Well, look no further. Today we'll be talking about Richard Zeckhauser's book, Maxims for Thinking Analytically. Professor Zeckhauser has made millions as a private equity investor, taught decision science at Harvard for decades, and is a champion bridge player. His legendary class, Analytical Frameworks for Policy Making, has been taken by generations of political and business leaders. This episode will give you the same blueprint for making better decisions that is used by Illuminati-style global elites the world over.

 

Every leader knows that culture is important - it comes up all the time in management and leadership literature. But what is culture, really? Why does it matter? And how do you build a great culture in your organization?

Today, we dig into Ben Horowitz’ What You Do Is Who You Are. You’ll hear about what Horowitz has to say about culture, and how you can directly apply that to your organization. We’ll talk through some of the takeaways from the book and analyze my experience as a senior engineer at a growth stage tech company through that lens.

Support the pod by getting the book through our affiliate link! https://amzn.to/3fFbKca

You cannot create a successful business without validating your ideas early and often. Most people use product tests (aka building an MVP) as their first and only means of validation. Creating an MVP is the slowest and most expensive way to validate your idea. We're going to talk about low-cost, fast, techniques you can use to validate everything from the problem you're solving, to your value prop, business model, and growth strategy. I guarantee, if you're interested in creating things that people care about, this will be one of the most valuable episodes you ever listen to. Based on Brian Balfour's Reforge, Thinking Like a UX Researcher, the Mom Test, and our years of experience working at startups at every stage of growth from pre-MVP to $1B+ unicorn.

Reaching product market fit is the first major hurdle you have to overcome if you want to start a successful business. If your product isn't flying off the shelves faster than you can handle, you're not there yet. The lean startup methodology is the most common approach people take to get there. But it’s fundamentally flawed. Today, I’m going to teach you a better approach based on Reforge: A growth strategy and product program run by a bunch of VCs, entrepreneurs, and executives from various unicorn tech companies like Uber, Lyft, Instacart, etc.

On the frontier, decisions had life and death consequences. Decide wrong and you’d end up scalped and burned alive or ripped apart by a grizzly bear. With a cool head and some street smarts, you could make ten years of a regular person’s salary in a single hunt. And nobody kept a cooler head than legendary frontiersman Daniel Boone. The mindset, leadership, and decision making techniques that helped him survive can help us thrive. Learn how in today’s episode.

As we said in the last episode, life is a series of decisions, and the quality of your life is directly proportional to the quality of those decisions. But what we didn’t say is that many of the most important decisions are made with other people, in groups. This week we’ll learn additional individual decision making techniques, but also the science of group decision making, with all the perils and opportunities it entails.