Dalton Caldwell</a> on consuming tech media and being careful to choose things that encourage you to do more.</p>\n<p><strong>Topics</strong><br />\n<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://youtu.be/uCRBLKGaHtY?t=0s\%22>00:00 – Consume information that encourages you to do more<br />\n<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://youtu.be/uCRBLKGaHtY?t=1m25s\%22>1:25 – You don’t need permission from investors to start a company<br />\n<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://youtu.be/uCRBLKGaHtY?t=2m30s\%22>2:30 – Is thought leadership important?<br />\n<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://youtu.be/uCRBLKGaHtY?t=4m5s\%22>4:05 – Your thought process is influenced by the information you consume</p>\n<!--kg-card-end: html-->","comment_id":"1104007","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/wordpress/2019/10/Consume-Information-That-Encourages-You-To-Do-More-Dalton-Caldwell.jpeg","featured":false,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2019-10-11T02:44:12.000-07:00","updated_at":"2021-10-20T10:53:22.000-07:00","published_at":"2019-10-11T02:44:12.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a71085","name":"Dalton Caldwell","slug":"dalton-caldwell","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/Dalton.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Dalton is Managing Director, Architect and Group Partner at YC. He was the cofounder and CEO of imeem (acquired by MySpace in 2009), and the cofounder and CEO of App.net.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/dalton-caldwell/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71174","name":"Advice","slug":"advice","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/advice/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71172","name":"Video","slug":"video","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/video/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a71085","name":"Dalton Caldwell","slug":"dalton-caldwell","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/02/Dalton.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Dalton is Managing Director, Architect and Group Partner at YC. He was the cofounder and CEO of imeem (acquired by MySpace in 2009), and the cofounder and CEO of App.net.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/dalton-caldwell/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71174","name":"Advice","slug":"advice","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/advice/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/consume-information-that-encourages-you-to-do-more/","excerpt":"YC Partner and Head of Admissions Dalton Caldwell [https://twitter.com/daltonc] \non consuming tech media and being careful to choose things that encourage you to\ndo more.\n\nTopics\n00:00 [https://youtu.be/uCRBLKGaHtY?t=0s] – Consume information that encourages\nyou to do more\n1:25 [https://youtu.be/uCRBLKGaHtY?t=1m25s] – You don’t need permission from\ninvestors to start a company\n2:30 [https://youtu.be/uCRBLKGaHtY?t=2m30s] – Is thought leadership important?\n4:05 [https://youtu.be/uCRBLKGaHtY?t=4m5s","reading_time":0,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null},"mentions":[],"related_posts":[{"id":"61fe29f1c7139e0001a7191b","uuid":"395e6c97-7acc-49bb-9d6d-f833e439e99b","title":"What’s the Second Job of a Startup CEO?","slug":"the-second-job-of-a-startup-ceo","html":"<!--kg-card-begin: html--><p>Successful startups go through three broad phases as they scale, and a startup CEO’s job changes dramatically in each phase. A CEO’s first job is to build a product users love; the second job is to build a company to maximize the opportunity that the product has surfaced; and the third is to harvest the profits of the core business to invest in transformative new product ideas. This blog post describes how to become a great Phase 2 CEO by focusing on the highest leverage tasks that only the CEO can accomplish. As YC’s Continuity team, we’ve seen many Phase 1 CEOs transition successfully into Phase 2, and some who have not. The future of your startup depends on which kind you are.</p>\n<p><strong>Your First Creation is a Product, Your Second Creation is a Company</strong></p>\n<p>A CEO’s first job is to build a great product and find a small group of people who love it and use it enthusiastically.<sup id=\"footnoteid1\"><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"#footnote1\">1</a></sup> A Phase 1 startup CEO is the Doer-in-Chief. You must be deeply involved in both building the product (observing/interacting with users, writing code, designing product specs) and acquiring users/customers. Delegation should not be a word in your vocabulary. If you succeed, it’s because your deep involvement and unique vision give the company a perspective and drive that few others have. The other imperative for a Phase 1 CEO is to conserve money in order to extend the time to iterate and improve the product.</p>\n<p>Most startups fail because they are not able to create a product that users love enough to abandon existing alternatives. Success in this first phase means discovering more demand for your product than your small team can handle. When this happens, you have to shift your focus as CEO to building a company that can capture and maximize the demand that your product has surfaced. Company-building becomes the CEO’s primary job in a Phase 2 startup. The company you build is your second creation and will be your lasting legacy as a founder.</p>\n<p>As a Phase 2 CEO, you need to transition from “Doer-in-Chief” to “Company-Builder-in-Chief.” This is how you scale as a CEO, and CEO scaling is the first step in company-building. For most founders, this is very difficult. When you’ve been a successful Doer-in-Chief, it’s hard to stop. It’s hard to stop coding, designing product specs, and interacting with customers on a daily basis. It’s hard to stop answering support tickets, doing all the product demos, and debugging the latest build. It’s even hard to delegate the random and sometimes menial tasks that you’ve accumulated over the years because they were “no one’s job.” But you have to stop doing all of these things so that you can safeguard your time for high leverage tasks that only CEOs can do.</p>\n<p>This transition can cause confusion and even friction with your team, who can suddenly wonder what you are doing if you’re no longer committing code or why you’re suddenly delegating a bunch of menial tasks that you’d been doing for years. But once your startup reaches 20-30 people, you’ll have to spend more time leading (i.e., directing the activities of others). And since time is finite, the only way to lead more is do less. Without delegating, you simply won’t have time to focus on company-building and you’ll end up slowing everyone else down.</p>\n<p>It may seem impossible at first, but you can eventually delegate day-to-day responsibility for everything you did in Phase 1, even Product. You obviously can’t drop everything overnight, but your job is to replace yourself by hiring people better than you into leadership positions. As David Rusenko, the co-founder and CEO of Weebly has said, “Often, the first time I find out about a product feature is reading about it on our blog. It shocks most founders to hear this, but I know I’ve done my job well because I’ve yet to see a feature that was built poorly. You should aspire to build a team that’s so good that you don’t have to be involved in the product details.”</p>\n<p>In practice, Phase 2 usually begins when a startup has around 20-25 employees and ends when it reaches 400-500 employees. At the end of Phase 2, you’ll have a leadership team that you’ve “road tested” to the point that you can confidently delegate everything you did in Phase 1. Your direct reports should be experienced leaders who can perform at a high level with minimal involvement from you, provided that you have set direction well. You can then shift the burden of company building to your leadership team so that you can start working on Phase 3: taking profits from the core business and investing them in new, transformative products. As an example, Facebook built its senior management team in Phase 2 while running the business at roughly breakeven. In Phase 3, it began to generate huge profits in its core business thanks to more lucrative in-stream ads, so it could allocate significant resources towards Messenger as a separate product and buy Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus.</p>\n<p><strong>Three Tasks That CEOs Can’t Delegate</strong></p>\n<p>Stated simply, your job as a Phase 2 startup CEO is to delegate everything you did in Phase 1 in order to create time to focus on three critical operational tasks that only the CEO can do <sup id=\"footnoteid2\"><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"#footnote2\">2</a></sup>:</p>\n<p><strong>1. Hiring a Leadership Team and Making Sure They Work Well Together</strong></p>\n<p>Only the CEO can hire the company’s senior leadership team and make sure that they work well together. You can get help and feedback from others as you hire, but when you bring leaders like a VP of Engineering, VP of Sales, and CFO on board, the ultimate hiring decisions must be yours. You can’t hire by compromise, looking for someone who everyone around you likes. The choice has to be yours because the consequences are yours as well.</p>\n<p>Recruiting senior executives takes an extraordinary amount of time. If you are doing it for the first time, meet lots of people so that you can develop good judgment about the skills, experiences, and personality traits that you need. Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO of Stripe, made it a point to meet with the “best-in-the-world” in each field so he could get a sense of what a great candidate looks like. Because executive hiring takes so much time, you should stage these hires rather than trying to hire everyone at once. Our recommendation is to hire a good executive search firm to help you run your first couple of searches. It will cost you an arm and a leg, but if it helps you hire the right person, it’s worth every penny.</p>\n<p>YC teaches founders to manage their startups using weekly milestones to ensure rapid iteration and progress. That’s great for a small company trying to find product-market fit, but it’s not the way to manage senior executives. You manage senior people to longer term outputs rather than week-to-week tasks. To do this well, you first have to set the right quarterly and annual milestones for the company and for each executive. It’s also your job to acclimate new executives to the culture of the company. As you build your senior team, expect to spend extra time with new executives individually and as a team on culture and teamwork. You should insist that new executives take the time to build relationships across the organization rather than pressuring them to come in and start changing things immediately.</p>\n<p>Learning how to evaluate the performance of senior executives is also a challenge, partly because your face-to-face interactions do not provide much of the information you need. You have to evaluate how well they are building their organizations, how productive and happy their employees are, and how well they are working with other teams and executives. You should expect that at least 25% of your leadership hires don’t work out. For most startup CEOs, it’s very difficult to fire their first executive, and most CEOs take too long to do it. But it’s better to act quickly and leave a void in the organization than to leave an ineffective senior executive in place for too long. The longer you leave an under-performing executive in place, the more credibility you lose with everyone else on your team.</p>\n<p>Your job is done when your entire leadership team has been hired, you’ve coached them to work well together, and they can operate at a high level with minimal involvement from you. Don’t be surprised if 50% of your time goes to hiring and managing your senior team; it’s time well spent.</p>\n<div id=\"creating-purpose-and-alignment\">\n</div>\n<p><strong>2. Creating Purpose and Alignment</strong></p>\n<p>The second task that CEOs cannot delegate is creating purpose and alignment at the company. When your startup has less than 10 people who all sit together, you don’t need to work very hard to keep people aligned. Everyone can easily hear what’s going on, understand how their work fits into the broader goals, and have a say in every decision. Communication is simple and creating alignment is easy.</p>\n<p>But when you start hiring more people, soon in different offices and from broader backgrounds and functions (e.g., sales, finance, etc.), creating alignment becomes a lot harder. Your team no longer sits within earshot. You aren’t able to interview or even meet everyone who joins the company. And you may not even able to attend employee onboarding sessions. As an example, there was an 18-month period at Twitter where the company was hiring 50 people per month in offices all around the world. There was no way the CEO or any one executive could meet everyone who was joining the company.</p>\n<p>As a Phase 1 CEO, you are the lead rower on the boat. But in a Phase 2 startup, your job is no longer to row. Instead, it’s to define the purpose of the voyage, set the direction of the boat, and measure the pace and performance of a much larger number of rowers. In business speak, the CEO’s job is to define the Mission (purpose), Strategy (direction), and Metrics (pace and performance). These three elements provide the essential context that a growing company needs to be able to perform.</p>\n<p>One of the best examples of “Mission-to-Metrics” alignment comes from a friend who visited the manufacturing floor at SpaceX. Seeing a SpaceX employee assembling a large part, he stopped to ask him, “What is your job at SpaceX?” He answered, “The mission of SpaceX is to colonize Mars. In order to colonize Mars, we need to build reusable rockets because it will otherwise be unaffordable for humans to travel to Mars and back. My job is to help design the steering system that enables our rockets to land back on earth. You’ll know if I’ve succeeded if our rockets land on our platform in the Atlantic after launch.” The employee could have simply said he was building a steering system for landing rockets. Instead, he recited the company’s entire “Mission-to-Metrics” framework. That is alignment.</p>\n<p>Can you define the Mission, Strategy, and Metrics for your startup in a way that’s clear, simple, and inspiring? Most Phase 2 CEOs can’t readily do this. And, when they sit down to define it, they find it harder than they thought. The diagram below captures the task at hand:</p>\n<p><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://ycombinator.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Artboard-2white_wborder.png/">How To Start A Startup</a> and <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://www.paulgraham.com/ds.html/">Do Things That Don’t Scale</a>.<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"#footnoteid1\">↩</a></p>\n<p><b id=\"footnote2\">2</b> The focus of this essay is on a CEO’s operational responsibilities. There are certain non-operational responsibilities such as building/managing a Board, raising money, interacting with the press, etc., that are also part of a CEO’s job, especially when a startup is small. Generally speaking, the less time a Phase 2 CEO spends on these types of non-operational tasks, the better, because they come at the cost of running the company.<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"#footnoteid2\">↩</a></p>\n<p><em>Thanks to Daniel Yanisse, Patrick Collison, David Rusenko, Ben Holzman, Michael Seibel, Ed Catmull, Sam Altman, Leore Avidar, Tyler Bosmeny, and the YC Continuity team for reading drafts of this essay.</em></p>\n<!--kg-card-end: html-->","comment_id":"1096555","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/wordpress/2016/11/businessman-standing-in-office-looking-out-picture-id150220735__1024%C3%97768_.jpg","featured":false,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2016-11-29T00:00:11.000-08:00","updated_at":"2021-10-20T13:17:53.000-07:00","published_at":"2016-11-29T00:00:11.000-08:00","custom_excerpt":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a71078","name":"Ali Rowghani","slug":"ali-rowghani","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/Ali.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Ali is Managing Director of YC Continuity, where he invests in & advises growth-stage startups. Ali directly contributed to the growth of 2 great companies — as CFO / COO at Twitter and COO at Pixar.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/ali-rowghani/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a7114b","name":"CEO","slug":"ceo","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/ceo/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a7114c","name":"Company Building","slug":"company-building","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/company-building/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a7114d","name":"culture","slug":"culture","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/culture/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71155","name":"Growth","slug":"growth","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/growth/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71156","name":"Growth-Stage","slug":"growth-stage","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/growth-stage/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71174","name":"Advice","slug":"advice","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/advice/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a7116d","name":"Essay","slug":"essay","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/essay/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71181","name":"YC Continuity","slug":"yc-continuity","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/yc-continuity/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71182","name":"#ycc","slug":"hash-ycc","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"internal","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/404/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a71078","name":"Ali Rowghani","slug":"ali-rowghani","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/02/Ali.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Ali is Managing Director of YC Continuity, where he invests in & advises growth-stage startups. Ali directly contributed to the growth of 2 great companies — as CFO / COO at Twitter and COO at Pixar.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/ali-rowghani/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a7114b","name":"CEO","slug":"ceo","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/ceo/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/the-second-job-of-a-startup-ceo/","excerpt":"Successful startups go through three broad phases as they scale, and a startupCEO’s job changes dramatically in each phase. A CEO’s first job is to build aproduct users love; the second job is to build a company to maximize theopportunity that the product has surfaced; and the third is to harvest theprofits of the core business to invest in transformative new product ideas.","reading_time":13,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null},{"id":"6335e2416c330f000113fac3","uuid":"35201943-5292-4030-906c-00e0478b0141","title":"First Five Launches with Whatnot","slug":"first-five-launches-with-whatnot","html":"<p>Today <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.whatnot.com//">Whatnot (<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/whatnot/">W20) is a lively platform where collectors can buy, sell, go live, and geek out with other like-minded people across a wide variety of product categories. But, like every startup, the founders of Whatnot began with only an idea. YC’s <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/anuhariharan/">Anu Hariharan</a> sat down with the co-founder and CEO of Whatnot <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/grantlafontaine?lang=en\%22>Grant LaFontaine</a> to discuss their first five launches.</p><p>The takeaways are below, and the interview can be watched on <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKD0IAcwMig\%22>Youtube.