• First step: attract great people
  • “Great things in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people.” - Steve Jobs
  • A players hire A players, and B players hire C players.” — Steve Jobs*
  • Do not hire before the system/playbook is created, in the hope that this hire will drive revenue
    • “That hire is necessary because we want to create a new thing.”
    • 別為了拓展事業雇人，而是雇人幫你買回時間。
    • Drive the revenue first, then hire for the service/demand you’ve already created
    • The mistake was thinking that there is a linear correlation between a new employee doing a thing that theoretically should contribute to revenue and the real world of that thing, the communication and managerial overheads associated with having an extra person on the team, even if they think is contributing to revenues, the whole system ended up slowing down.
  • Do not think too much when hiring the first person, because the first person you hire is such a massive leverage.
  • Daniel Priestley: 12-person team is the sweet spot
    • As soon as you add a 13th person to the team, suddenly everything breaks, because 12 people can fit around the same table, and 12 people can all basically be managed by the same general manager
    • As soon as you get to 13, now all of a sudden you need to split up into different teams. You need managers to manage those teams. This causes communication overhead.
    • Desert Territory: your company is too big to be small and too small to be big in between 12 people and 40 people
  • Smaller teams are better
    • Faster decisions, fewer meetings, more fun
    • No need to chop up work for political reasons
    • No room for mediocre people (can pay more, too!)
    • Large-scale engineering projects are more soluble in IQ than they appear
• Many tech companies are 2-10x overstaffed
  • Criteria for hiring someone: energy > expertise > money (salary)
    • Hard skills get you hired. Soft skills get you promoted.
  • A much better way to get really effective people
    • ❌ Hire based on experience
    • ✅ Hire based on aptitude
      • They may never have done it before and have no experience in this area, but are they a smart person who can figure things out? Are they a quick learner and persistent improver?
      • Look for curiosity and lack of ego as a proxy, because the combination of these attributes helps people learn faster.
  • If you hire people just because they can do the job, they will work for money/paycheck. But if you hire people who believe what you believe, they will work for blood, sweat, and tears
  • “Is this person a force of nature?” is a good heuristic for finding people who are likely to accomplish great things.
  • Great people are never on the market because bad people—the seriously unqualified—are on the market quite a lot
  • Instead of thinking as recruiting as a “gather resumes, filter resumes” procedure, you’re going to have to think of it as a “track down the winners and make them talk to you” procedure
    • Meet a lot of people, and keep track of who goes on to impress you and who doesn’t.
  • Hiring slower, but better, is more advantageous than hiring quickly and compromising the quality of your employees. Remember, a business is not a family; it’s more like a professional sports franchise.
  • A Chief of Staff is the most important hire you’ll make as a founder. They’ll handle operations, communication, and special projects. This allows you to focus on what you do best: building the future.
  • Don’t just hire people who are good at the same things you are. Hire complementary team members.
• Find a co-founder with complementary skills, but the same moral compass as you
  • How to choose the right business partner?
    • People I grew up with
    • People I find fascinating on the internet
    • Nothing in between!
  • 絕對不要和朋友一起創業
    • Friends from business, not business from friends.
    • “A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship.” — John D. Rockefeller
• As a startup founder, you are building businesses for:
  1. your customers
  2. potential investors
  3. ⭐️ potential acquirers
• Hiring smart people, trusting them, and getting out of the way. Setting a specific vision so we’re all aligned, allowing a level of independence of operation so people can be making decisions quickly on their own.
• No hierarchy. No clique culture.
• Onboarding is key. Most companies think that onboarding is showing someone where the bathroom is, and where the code repos are.
  • Assign a mentor that progressively helps less and less depending on the need. That person can be any level, but is more of a resource of who to ask for anything and everything because people forget, or new things come up and are afraid to ask.
• The Four-Eyes Principle (The Two-Person Rule) for quality control: a certain activity, i.e., a decision, transaction, etc., must be approved by at least two people.
• You need 2 types of people to keep early-stage startups from stagnating:
  • Someone who’ll shamelessly sell the product before it’s fully ready to be sold
  • Someone who’s embarrassed by this and will push to improve the product faster
• Sam Altman
  • It’s often easier to succeed with a hard startup than an easy one.
  • An easy startup is a headwind; a hard startup is a tailwind.
• Minimize synchronous communications (e.g., in-person talks, meetings). Maximize asynchronous communications (e.g., Slack messages).
  • Group DM / Channel Messages > Direct DM
    1. Better transparency (everyone is on the same page)
    2. Avoid repetitive information
• The quality of your business is directly proportional to the quality of the people you hire which is directly proportional to your character and your ability to cast a clear vision and how they fit in it (not how they help you accomplish yours)
  • Taleb’s Surgeon - If presented with two equal candidates for a role, pick the one with the least amount of charisma. The uncharismatic one has got there despite their lack of charisma. The charismatic one has got there with the aid of their charisma.
• Run the company by ideas, not by hierarchy
• 2 main focuses every single day

  • Build the product

    “Just build something that you’d want to use today, not something you think people would use somehow.” — Paul Graham

  • Talk to the user (user onboarding) → C2B (Consumer-to-Business), H2H (Human-to-Human), “消費者信用紀錄”

    • 零售 (Retail)：B2C
    • 批發 (Wholesale)：B2B
• We need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries
• Every business should have a visionary (dreamer) and an integrator (doer).
  • The visionary is the idea generator
  • The integrator makes things happen
• Default operations in the company
  • 4-day workweek (instead of 5)
    • 20% 自由時間 — 每星期五可以做自己想做的 Project
  • 7-hour workday (instead of 8)
• The Peter Principle
• The Bike Shed Effect (The Law of Triviality)
• The Locksmith Paradox
• “It’s a marathon, not a sprint.”
  • The goal is to create and maintain MOMENTUM, not burn ourselves out on SPEED.
• 10 Facts

  • People don’t leave companies, they leave bad managers.

    “Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to.” — Richard Branson

  • Pay people what they’re worth, not what you can get away with.

  • Skip the “We’re a family BS”. Be authentic. You’re a team.

  • Tolerating bad behavior is like cancer for company culture.

  • Do what you say and role model the behaviors you want to see.

  • Infallible leaders make their team more likely to fail, so admit your mistakes.

  • Help your people to become their best selves, or someone else will.

  • Create a culture of feedback, or you’ll build a house of cards.

  • You have 2 ears and 1 mouth for a reason. Listen more than you speak.

  • When something isn’t going to plan, remember to look into the mirror.

• Maker’s Time vs Manager’s Time
  • Managers operate with a day blocked into one hour chunks. They change what they are doing each hour in order to operate and get through their appointments and to do lists.
  • Makers operate in fluid, long blocks of at least a half day. They focus on a single project for extended periods.
  • Each schedule works fine on its own, but when they collide and come into tension, problems arise in organizations. The manager who forces the maker into various meetings is doing a disservice to the organization. The manager who learns to let the makers make in their preferred cadence will always win.
  • 「多造鐘，少報時」
• Key element of a successful company’s core values/culture
  • Open communication = transparency = honesty
  • Supportiveness = collaborative teamwork
  • Lean management (base on high-trust base)
  • Fun environment
• Cultivate an environment of respectful disagreement. Encourage candor. One of the worst things that can happen to a team is for people to feel uncomfortable discussing problems and expressing their honest opinions. Build a culture of candor so that people know it’s the norm to tell the truth, even when it’s difficult or awkward.
• 公司的 Mission 由三個部分組成：
  • 畫像（Vision）
  • 投入（Implementation）
  • 量尺（Measurement）
• Feedback

Meetings

• No-Gos
  • Back-to-back meetings
  • Pointless meetings → “Meetings to meet”
    • Regular/recurring status update / job report meetings
    • Group brainstorming
      • Workers do their best creative work alone. But that doesn’t mean colleagues shouldn’t work together. Rather, they would benefit more from comparing individual notes after extensive, independent thinking. → promotes deeper discussions during the meeting
  • Meetings without a clear G.A.P.
    • Goals
    • Agenda
    • Pre-meeting preparation
  • No simple meetings such as answering questions, status checks, or conveying information in the morning, allowing the team to work, uninterrupted, on the most important things
    • Schedule them at 3 (2–4) PM in the afternoon instead
    • Schedule difficult meetings that require important decisions in the morning
  • I find most meetings are best scheduled for 15–20 minutes, or 2 hours. The default of 1 hour is usually wrong, and leads to a lot of wasted time.
• Gos
  • Shorten meeting length
    • 30 → 25, 60 → 50
      • The tighter window makes participants more efficient -> avoids “how about the weather” small/idle talk / low-value chitchat that most meetings open with and gives you a 5-minute break to reset in between meetings.
  • Adding a short 15-minute buffer between meetings to avoid wasting time.
  • 會議人數應隨時間逐漸遞減
  • Scheduling meetings at the beginning or end of the day rather than in the middle.
  • Schedule “office hours” for your team. Carve out “focus time” for your team.
  • During meetings, always take notes. And action points. Make meetings as short as possible and have an agenda in mind!
  • Whoever is latest to the meeting pays for the coffee, food, drinks.
  • Walking ¹/Standing Meetings instead of Sitting Meetings
  • Long-term future envision/planning meetings
  • Schedule all meetings and calls in one day. Group related meetings together on specific days or in designated time blocks.
  • Asynchronous meeting with pre-recorded video using tools like Loom
  • Friday Forum: celebrate wins of the week
  • Schedule only the following two, non-negotiable, mandatory team gatherings EVERY WEEK
    • Iteration Planning Meeting (IPM), Monday 9:00–0:00
    • Weekly Retrospective, Friday 16:00–17:00
  • CEO 信箱 (private one-on-one)
  • Visual Meetings
  • Ensure that all meetings are highly targeted. Broad meeting mandates with scattered agendas should be avoided if possible. Clear, narrow purpose and action items are a must.
  • Ensure that meeting attendees are specifically chosen for the purpose of the meeting. They should have high credibility to weigh in on the task at hand. Consider rotating through attendees if a meeting has multiple agenda topics.
  • Steal the Amazon playbook and require a pre-read memo before a meeting to push information gathering and discussion into the preparation.
    • Have everyone read and take notes for 30min silence in advance without using their private time and then discuss together. Meeting turns to a open minded workshop.
    • Study and read memos instead of listening to ppts
  • Meetings are still the best way to accomplish certain things: Social bonding, deep discussions where ideas rapidly ricochet off each other, decisions where it’s important to “look in everyone’s eyes” to get the final agreement, and more.
  • How to handle hybrid meetings with on-site and remote participants?
    • Instead of expecting remote participants to speak as on-site participants do, encourage them to stay muted and leave/type text messages by using the chat function, to share their responses, answer questions, and contribute to discussions.
    • This approach mitigates potential internet/audio synchronization issues and delays caused by participants needing to unmute themselves, avoid disrupting the flow of the meeting.

• “management by sight” → ineffective
• “management by objective” → effective

Invest Round In Startups

Capital is not a solution to problems. Capital is a means of scaling solutions.

• Venture Round
• Rolling Fund
• Fundraising
• 種子輪 > 天使輪 > A 輪 > B 輪 > C 輪
• Different types of investors
  • Angel
  • Incubator
  • Accelerator
  • Venture Capital = VC (風險投資/創業投資/創投)
  • Private Equity = PE (私募股權基金)
• Early Investors: 3Fs (Friends, Family, Fools)

Stripe Atlas | Incorporate your start-up in Delaware: C corp or LLC