It’s been just over a year since I joined an emerging tech company in Silicon Valley (current headcount about 45), and this seems like a good time to share some initial impressions.
Before I begin, a few important disclaimers – necessarily more elaborate than usual. My role is chief medical officer, and I’m not an engineer – so while I work closely with the engineering team, my experience is inevitably different from those who are in the trenches coding and creating product. I also have an obvious self-interest in the company doing well, so even though my hope is to offer generalized impressions, and not discuss what our company specifically does, you should still read this with my bias in mind. Third, while the company was founded around six years ago, I’ve been especially fortunate to have joined at a particularly auspicious time, characterized by an unusual amount of activity and growth; this is clearly not representative of all, or even most companies in the Valley.
Each Person Matters
When I worked at a large pharma company about a decade ago, I felt almost no connection between the work I was doing and the fate of the company as a whole – understandable, given that the company employed over 100,000 people. I took pride in what I did, and strove to design useful clinical studies that addressed relevant questions, but I certainly didn’t feel that my presence was particularly important.
In a small technology company, by contrast, every person is essential, and you don’t hire any more people than you absolutely need. Consequently each person feels tightly connected to the success of the company. Writing in the Wall Street Journal recently, David Gelernter described this as the “best feature” of a young tech company – “a lifestyle of low authority and high responsibility, where each developer sees his work changing the product on a daily basis.”
This sense of common purpose suffuses all the activities and interactions within the company, as everyone is locked into the idea of company success. This leads to some of the most productive workplace discussions I’ve ever encountered. The palpable sense of having skin in the game – rather than delivering against a big-company process metric that can seem arbitrarily defined – is enormously empowering and energizing, focuses effort, and makes for a dynamic, solutions-oriented environment.
The War For Talent Is Real…
While all companies, presumably, want to recruit great people, the focus on talent in Silicon Valley is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Some of this reflects basic market dynamics, where the demand for outstanding engineers outstrips the supply.
But the emphasis on talent and people seems to go beyond the need for outstanding developers, and speaks instead to the view that what distinguishes a breakout company from the hundreds that are funded but go nowhere is the quality of team. There is an unbelievable obsession with recruiting talent that isn’t just “good enough” but truly the best in the world; the goal is “stars in every position,” as Netflix put it in a famous (or infamous) slide deck (see here). The result – as perfectly captured in the Netflix deck – is “stunning colleagues,” and an inspirational environment, which I feel incredibly fortunate to have experienced.
… And Has A Dark Side As Well
The flip side of the aspiration to build a super-high-performance team where everyone’s work is seen as critically important to the fate of the company is the intense scrutiny everyone receives. While Netflix may have expressed the sentiment in a particularly brutal fashion — “adequate performance receives a generous severance package,” – the truth is, a small venture-backed company just doesn’t have anything close to the tolerance for coasting that’s seen in many large organizations, and everyone’s job – including the CEO’s – is vulnerable if the expected extremely high level of performance isn’t achieved, or if the company evolves in a fashion that requires a different skill set.
I’ve heard several seasoned VCs say that the most common mistake made by inexperienced CEOs is not taking quick and decisive action to dismiss employees viewed as underperforming, or no longer a fit for the organization. In an environment where everything seems to be fast-moving and high-stakes, there are strong pressures to ensure you are fielding the best possible team at all times.
Vision-Dating
When you are developing a new product (as most emerging tech companies presumably are), a key part of your mission, and your success, is identifying potential partners – generally early adopters who share your particular view of the future (and then of course, believe your product will actually deliver it).
I’ve called the resulting process “vision dating,” as it shares some of the frustrations of dating but also the excitement. I vividly recall the disappointment of heading off expectantly to meet with organizations that on paper seemed like perfect partners, only to discover heartbreaking, irreconcilable differences. Other times, it’s clear that the other organization may not be quite ready for a serious relationship.
On the other hand, there’s nothing quite like the thrill of really hitting it off with a potential partner, and discovering a shared view of the future. This doesn’t guarantee the relationship will be a success, but you feel the connection viscerally, and lose sleep in thinking about the possibility of an enduring partnership.
What makes this process especially exciting is that, as a young tech company, you are often seeking the early adopters, the visionaries, the confident, original thinkers with a distinct perspective on the future. It’s a great group of people with whom to spend your time, whether or not a partnership ultimately develops.
Face-To-Face
I’ve spent more time on planes in the past year than I did during my several years as a management consultant. The simple truth is that for all the enabling technologies we have – iPhones and web conferences and even videoconference robots (our office has two) – nothing comes close to face-to-face conversations, and the opportunity to better understand, in as granular a fashion as possible, where someone else is coming from, what concerns she has, what problems she is trying to solve, and what are the local considerations that are factoring into her thought and decision process.
The idea of getting out of your office and spending time with potential customers, while hardly unique to Silicon Valley, is a key theme of lean startup guru Steve Blank. “Get out of the building,” he advises companies, and spend time doing customer discovery – “a lot of listening not a lot of talking.”
All In
When you join a growing tech company, you presumably sign on because you resonate with the mission of the company, and are passionate about what it aspires to do (hence the joke in Mike Judge’s brilliant Silicon Valley, where every startup ritualistically asserts it is making the world a better place).
The truth is, there’s something incredibly intoxicating about being “all-in” – about deeply believing in what you are trying to do, in the worthiness of your endeavor. The commitment is not about the hours, or at least, not just about the hours, but rather about giving your heart over and deeply caring about the success of the enterprise. As a result, you feel to your core the sting of setbacks, but also the elation when things are going well.
This level of emotional involvement with work is certainly not unique to growing tech companies, and can be felt by impassioned academics (I think of my parents and their commitment to dyslexic patients), authors, artists and presumably a range of other professionals. However, work with such a dynamic emotional range seems – perhaps deliberately – far less common in the business world. To be fair, it’s also probably not what most employees are looking for.
But I have loved it, and despite the hours and the travel and the dizzying highs and terrifying lows – or more likely, because of them – I’ve felt engaged, energized, optimistic. I feel so much more realized as a person, and so glad that my kids get to see what this type of fulfillment is like.
Now, let’s see what happens in year two…
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