Prolific Work, Co-Founder Conflicts and some Zen Wisdom

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I am trying to figure out my niche and audience. There is a vague idea, but it is not really there yet. I will run a few more experiments and will share more thoughts as the hypothesis gets better. And I purchased the Newsletter OS recently (was an absolute steal at $15). It looks like a solid framework to research and put the newsletter together.

Pretty interesting fortnight worldwide… let’s all take a breather and get back to work. Here are my explorations in the past fortnight.

Prolific Work

In the past fortnight that passed by, I came across this interesting discussion on Hacker News. The article that started this is Be Prolific by Chris Mytton. A short one-line description of the idea:

A simple experiment was done: An art class was split in half. One-half of the students were told that they’d be graded based on a single piece of work, and the other half that they would be graded on the quantity of work produced. The half that was being graded on quantity ended up producing higher-quality pieces.

This was a very counter-intuitive idea for me. How can you produce better quality with quantity? The answer is quite simple: By iterating and learning from your mistakes you actually ended up producing better work. For every subsequent art produced, learnings from the previous work were subconsciously brought forward.

Consistency improves quality.

Some of the interesting points of discussion and ideas in the thread that I want to highlight:

• Do the work. Don’t try to find ways around doing it or cut corners because it will come back to bite you. Have an efficient process but don’t ever slack. Then the reverse effect of each subsequent work being worse happens.

• The "genius" perception hides all the hard work, false turns, recoveries, retries, .. busy work as you put it .. that's behind the core insights and discoveries.

• For ‘prolific’ improvement, feedback is very necessary, and so it is absolutely essential to share your work.

• Quantity does not lead to quality by itself. You must be trying to learn something new with each new piece and move towards a concrete skill. Quantity iterates the feedback loop.

We could be prolific in anything - learning a new skill, language, etc. My latest interest is to improve how I learn. I have been wanting to read a lot, take notes so that I can quickly refer them back. I am evolving a system here and maybe a few issues later, I can present my system to you all. Anyways, I was thinking of how consistent I need to be to make an impact.

And then I saw this interview with Ness Labs’ Anne-Laure Le Conff with Juveni Beckford. TL;DR Juveni Beckford read 450 books over a decade and shared his process.

Do go through the Twitter thread in detail - some awesome value bombs there. But a few things that stuck with me are:

• Read books in parallel. Don’t think of a serial approach.

• Problem-driven reading make the reading more actionable since you are looking to implement the learnings soon and absorb the readings.

• There are some books which shake your core beliefs, and there are others whose ideas stand the test of time and those are the books that are worth reading.

I am planning to test some new ways of exploring, reading and note-taking of the books. I will share across my learnings and system in a future post. Till then, let’s be prolific in whatever we do.

Co-Founder Conflicts

Last week, I shared a few readings around Founder Burnout. Around the same time, I came across a tweet thread shared by a founder with the news that she had finally bought out her co-founder and she is now free. (Unfortunately, I missed bookmarking the tweet and I am unable to share the reference.) Then I decided to read a little bit more into it.

I have seen a lot of dirty laundry aired in public with a lot of negativity and mud-slinging. I am not going to go into the gory details of different stories. But what I am going to do is share some good reads that go objectively into this problem and give an analysis from my perspective.

My first read is this blog written by Elad Gill (for those unaware, he wrote the High Growth Handbook - a must-read for all founders and entrepreneurs). The title is slightly intimidating - How to fire a co-founder? Few interesting points from the article:

• ~20% of startups in one particular YC batch blew up in the first 9-12 months after entering YC due to founder issues. A side note: According to Elad Gil, the 4 main reasons why startups fail are: Run out of money, Team/Founder Implosion, Unable to scale and Bad board/Investors.

• First, try to work it out as much as possible. Have honest and open conversations and give/get candid feedback. Sometimes having a series of frank conversations is the best way to fix things.

• If nothing can be worked out, who should leave?  The likely outcome depends on the impact each person has on the startup. The person with the larger impact and critical to the survival of the company stays and the other leaves.

• Great founders have got fired in the past. The top example that comes to my mind is Steve Jobs. It is not the end of the world.

Here there are 2 paths:

• You are staying and one of the co-founders is leaving

  • Have an open conversation with the co-founder and discuss the terms clearly w.r.t equity etc and proper compensation terms are agreed upon.

  • Communicate transparently with the team and be very clear about what has happened and what will happen.

  • Buck up and get ready to continue the story you have started into a new chapter.

• You are the one leaving

  • Don't worry about your reputation. Founding team issues are quite common and many people don’t always survive the stress of a raw startup.  Learnings from this journey are invaluable and a great experience to travel towards the next initiative.

  • In this stressful time, try to act in a mature and thoughtful way on the way out.  Don’t hold any resentments and burn bridges.

  • Take some time off, recharge yourself and find the next adventure.

Irrespective of what happens, the show must go on. Probing deeper here, I have understood that there are a few key reasons for these conflicts. The root causes in my opinion are just two:

1. Resentment due to unequal equity

   1. An excellent read on this is this article by Jerry Colonna and Andy Sparks in Ask Jerry on co-founder resentment.

   2. Co-founders choose to split equity unequally for various reasons, and learning about these reasons will reveal the power imbalance in the relationship. These power inequities are the true source of resentment in co-founder relationships.

   3. Maybe you feel resentful because you don’t get the same kind of visibility as your co-founder. Or maybe you don’t have a clearly defined role.

   4. When co-founders avoid challenging conversations at the outset, they’re more likely to avoid facing uncomfortable realities further down the road. It’s these unspoken painful realities that become the cause of resentment. 

2. Founder unable to scale Overall, founders need to address the issue of transparent and candid communication. Get comfortable with difficult conversations. That’s the key to handle co-founder problems.

   1. Found this excellent Twitter thread on how to address if a co-founder is unable to scale. Do read the complete thread which has great actionable advice.

   2. Key point: If a co-founder is unable to scale, have an honest conversation and discern the person’s superpower and give an initiative with a smaller team where the co-founder can shine.

   3. A quote that is useful in this context:

We’ll See

I have read this wonderful story that has evoked a lot of thought for me.

A boy is given a horse on his 14th birthday.

Everyone in the village says, “Oh how wonderful.”

But a Zen master who lives in the village says, “We'll see.”

The boy falls off the horse and breaks his foot. Everyone in the village says, “Oh how awful.” The Zen master says, “We'll see.”

The village is thrown into war and all the young men have to go to war. But, because of the broken foot, the boy stays behind. Everyone says, “Oh, how wonderful.” The Zen master says, “We'll see”.

via Archisman Das at Lenny’s Newsletter

Here whether the event is good or bad is extremely fluid. Time is constant but timing is just a matter of perspective and something we cannot control. We are currently living in one of the strangest and unprecedented times.

Is 2020 a bad year or a good year? “I think we will all see (albeit differently).”

Thanks for reading and do share your feedback through a reply or hit me up on Twitter @satyadileep.