The most important job of an editor is simplify, simplify simplify, and that usually means omitting things.
If people start going to a desk, some one individual employees desk and they don't report to them... it's a sign that they believe that person can help them. So if you see that consistently, those are your barrels. Just promote them, give them more opportunity as fast as you can.
Ultimately, I don't believe that you can build a company without a lot of effort, and that you need to lead by example.
The job of an editor is to ensure a consistent voice.
You want to start with the objective of everything should feel exactly the same.
I walk into a company office and I can tell often whether I'm gonna invest, as soon as I walk in.
Most people would agree that the details matter when it faces the user. But where the real debate is on things that don't face the user.
It's easy to shortcut when you get busy explaining the why's of the world, but it's very important to try.
The way you scale that is you create notes for every meeting and send it to the entire company.
As the company scales, everybody is not going to get invited to every single meeting, but they're gonna want to go to every meeting.
Most people will solve the problems they know how to solve. Roughly speaking they will solve B+ problems instead of A+ problems. A+ problems are high impact problems for your company but they're difficult problems.
The next thing you do is allocate resources.
The companies I have traditionally seen do best over the long term had lead investors for their seed rounds
There are three things you need to do as a CEO-founder. Think strategically, drive design, and drive technology. Some people who are really good at one can build a pretty foundational company. Most people who are very successful are good at two. But Jack is the only person in the Valley I've met who's all three. He's a first-rate strategist, a first-rate designer, and a first-rate technologist.
Basically this is what you want - a high performance machine that idiots can run.
At first when you start a company, everything's gonna feel like a mess and it really should. It should feel like everyday there's a new problem, and what you're doing is fundamentally triaging.
What you actually want to do with every single employee, every single day is expand the scope of their responsibilities until it breaks.
You generally know when someone asks you to do something- am I more writing, or am I more editing? The editor is the best metaphor for your job.
The people that work with you should generally come up with their own initiatives.
Your goal over time is to use less red ink every day.
It's never a metric, it's where the person is going or not. Metrics are used to make things work better, but don't necessarily make a business better.
Possibly the most important thing you do is actually edit the team.
You need to simplify the value proposition in the company's metrics for success on a whiteboard.
The construct of a dashboard, first of all should be drafted by the founder.
Usually when you hire more engineers, you actually don't get that much more done, you actually sometimes get less done.
