Founders, Friction, and Focus: Building Engineering Teams at Early-Stage Startups

So what's special about working in that early-stage startup space?

Well, it's kind of a double-edged sword, right? I mean, you're in charge of a lot of things.

You get to wear a lot of hats.

You get to problem solve in a lot of different areas, which is quite intellectually stimulating and kind of exciting, right? You're on the frontier embarking on something exciting and new.

But it's also quite hard.

You don't have a lot of support, right? You have to kind of figure things out, and oftentimes you're making decisions under limited resources, limited time, you know, not ideal conditions.

So I guess I, I love the thrill, I suppose.

[chuckles]

Given that experience and working in multiple of those companies, what are the gotchas? What are the things to be aware of?

Well, I guess keeping in the theme of, of your podcast, I would say early-stage startups are highly, highly dependent on the personalities of their founders.

So things that might be, you know, small personality quirks can then be ballooned into [chuckles] major organizational issues.

So if a, you know, founder is avoidant, cannot confront an existential issue for whatever reason, it can kind of fester.

If they're erratic, they can make decisions on a whim that can thrash the team.

You know, if they're excitement-seeking, they can get bored when something's working, but then it's, like, not stimulating them, and I've seen a lot of those things, right? And so one of the things that I...

that I've often seen when people kind of go into it coming from a stable corporate, they're kind of perplexed or shocked by that fact of the experience.

They'll be like, "Geez," you know, like, "This person does this," and that defines their experience for, like, you know, like, you know, much more so than maybe would be expected in a, in a corporate setting.

Um, I'm not saying that doesn't happen in a corporate setting, but it's just much more pronounced.

So I would say that's one of the kind of gotchas, so to speak, that's, like, maybe not as talked about and, uh, understood maybe.