‘Give Away Your Legos’ and Other Commandments for Scaling Startups

http://firstround.com/review/give-away-your-legos-and-other-commandments-for-scaling-startups/

106 39 9 years ago

ChuckMcM• 9 years ago

That is a great way to look at scaling. One of the most frustrating things can be people who can't see their role on the other side of scaling, so they subconsciously (or consciously) work against scaling the company. If you are one of the leaders in such a company you have to spend time helping people see that there is still a place for them in the larger company. That can be hard because as one of the leaders it seems "obvious" to you that they are a valued part of the team, but take a moment and help them see that too.

mistahchris2• 9 years ago

Agreed. I've been on the side of coming into roles where people were reluctant to let go at first and feeling reluctant to let go of responsibilities. It feels weird. The lego analogy seems to fit really well from my experience.

ubertaco• 9 years ago

Worth noting: Quip's story and practices are definitely a bit different from your typical new startup, given that they are owned by (and provided the resources of) Salesforce. I work at a different company that Salesforce acquired, and internally, it seems like Quip is almost mandated as the standard way of writing/sharing docs.

djinnandtonic• 9 years ago

This site first nagged me to join their newsletter and then locked the second half of the article behind an email harvester.

This is toxic behavior from a content provider, please do not drive traffic to this site.

raphaelb2• 9 years ago

There is a link on the email collection ad that says "Continue without an email address".

CodeWriter232• 9 years ago

It’s still obnoxious behavior that IMO should not be rewarded with a share. On my device, the “ad” was offscreen. Highly suboptimal UX. I saw the "Continue without an email address" prompt and thought “fuck them”, crashing my attention sphere like that. And forcing me to scroll-scan to get my place back. The web is full of startup how to stories; I’ll just wait for the next one to pop up on HN.

askafriend2• 9 years ago

I don't understand this reasoning which I ultimately write off as entitlement.

They produced the content. They think it's valuable enough to put behind an (annoying) interaction that allows them to grow their newsletter. You don't think it's that valuable and you don't even want to find out if it is or not. That's 100% fine. Just don't read the article. It's not your content, and you're not entitled to an ad-free version of it just because you're on the internet.

It's not your site. It's not your content.

But then you go and call the site "toxic" and call for a boycott? On what basis? If the content is actually good, then I personally would be inclined to support the site.

semanticist• 9 years ago

I'm not entitled to an ad-free version, but equally they're not entitled to my attention, or my email address. In an ideal world we give each other a bit of value and everyone comes out ahead, but if one side takes the piss it's entirely reasonable for the other side to call them out on it, refuse to participate, and highlight their behaviour for others.

anigbrowl4• 9 years ago

They invited people to read and then inflicted an annoying and unwelcome interaction on them that interrupted what they were invited to do. It's OK to ask for something at the end of the article but not to engage in that sort of bait and switch. Also, it's pretty damn entitled of the many sites which give you a finger-wagging lecture about your ad blocker the first time you ever visit.

Yes, it's toxic to offer an article and then snatch it away mid-way. Try doing that with a small child or an animal and see what sort of reaction you get.

tensor• 9 years ago

I think it's fair to prefer that such content not be linked here. I don't come here for this sort of content and being duped into reading half the article only to realize later that it's for pay (in information).

They should be upfront about the cost, and it would be nice if articles like this were marked here somehow so those of us who are uninterested in giving out our email to marketers can avoid clicking on the link.

anigbrowl4• 9 years ago

I wonder if the nascent web annotations protocol offers a vector for pre-emptively flagging this sort of crap.

jpm_sd• 9 years ago

I think this is a pretty good overview. In my last job I joined a team of 25 that grew to 250. In my current job I started on a team of 8, we just hit 35 and we're in that "30 to 50 employee" awkward zone. I'm much more comfortable with it now, having seen the same kind of chaos very recently, and I'm trying to help the younger employees understand that it's all normal!

kqr2• 9 years ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10200754

Maybe it should have (2015) added to title.

dspig• 9 years ago

I agree djinnandtonic (dead comment). The site asked a question in a slightly insulting way, then went blurry for a reason I didn't feel inclined to scroll around to find.

nikanj• 9 years ago

Me too, I close tabs when I get mid-article overlays

ma2rten• 9 years ago

You can actually just click on "continue without email" and continue reading.

satori99• 9 years ago

Same. I find it so irritating to be bugged when halfway through reading an article, so I close the tab and never engage with their site again.

bcoates• 9 years ago

Turn on your ad-blocker? I can only reproduce the dumb wall if I have the noxious bounceexchange.com enabled

cocktailpeanuts• 9 years ago

I don't care so much about the content here, but it's interesting to note that they've "paywalled" their content by making you submit your email.

It's probably so that they can spam you in the future with their newsletters that feature their portfolio companies and what not.

Not saying this is bad, but it shows how the priority has shifted. For the last couple of years it was trendy for VCs to blog. Basically VCs became marketers. They call it "inbound marketing". Basically they use content to gain mindshare so that founders will think of them when it's time for them to raise money.

But now that this channel has become commoditized--basically every VC firm has a blog and anyone can write analysis content on Medium--and people's average attention per publication has gone way down, they have shifted their focus from "inbound marketing" (basically a brand marketing) to "direct marketing" (A fancy term for spam email marketing).

What's interesting about this is that VCs are now more blatant about the fact that they're using content as marketing.

spamillion• 9 years ago

  paywall

Oh, I wouldn't label this a paywall as such, since the requested information is not challenged with verification of authenticity.

They aren't making you verify your email, before showing you the rest of the article, and this permits you to use "test@example.com" as the token acknowledgment of their solicitation.

This rates on par with a CAPTCHA to read the full article, since the user merely needs to adhere to the [a-z,A-Z,0-9]@[a-z,A-Z,0-9].[a-z,A-Z,0-9] regex, to dismiss, and providing a real email is an option, indicating that they're willing to accept junk data as part of their collection of subscribers, since mailing list email bounces aren't a disaster.

You only have to submit an email, not your email.

tedmiston• 9 years ago

I don't care so much about the content here, but it's interesting to note that they've "paywalled" their content by making you submit your email.

The text link at the bottom "Continue without an email address" worked for me, as did Reader mode in Safari.

mistahchris2• 9 years ago

LPT: You can still read the content without submitting your email by using your browser's "reader mode".

devmunchies• 9 years ago

If you’ve ever watched an extremely high performer go from killing it one year to struggling the next, you know what I’m talking about

That was me. I was killing it at my company when it was 700 people, but two and a half years later it was over 1600 people and the pace slowed way down. Long story short, yesterday was my last day and I'm moving to a 150-200 person company where I'll have more influence/impact.

jrochkind1• 9 years ago

pay-walled.

rocky1138• 9 years ago

I searched for a while to find what she was talking about with LEGOs and it turned out that it wasn't actual LEGOs she was talking about. I kind of lost interest at that point.

yathern2• 9 years ago

You get upset at the use of metaphors? I thought it was fairly apt:

That’s why her talk is about Legos. The emotions you feel when new people are coming in and taking over pieces of your job — it’s not that different from how a kid feels when they have to share their Legos. There’s a lot of natural anxiety and insecurity that the new person won’t build your Lego tower in the right way, or that they'll get to take all the fun or important Legos, or that if they take over the part of the Lego tower you were building, then there won’t be any Legos left for you.

paulmd• 9 years ago

Money shot:

That’s one of the other counterintuitive things: Adding people doesn’t mean there’s less work for the people that are already there. It means that the entire company can do more. If one person was managing all of marketing before and then you hire someone to manage your content channels — the person who was doing marketing before is not going to have less to do. It either means that she'll be able to do the rest of her job better, or that she'll be able to take on new things.

You might say that people are thinking in terms of Amdahl's Law, while what happens in reality is Gustafson's Law. The task increases to fit the available processing power.

cwillu• 9 years ago

Can we not reward people who inject shit like "text-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5) 0px 0px 6px; color: transparent; user-select: none;" into their content?

‘Give Away Your Legos’ and Other Commandments for Scaling Startups

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