Management, speed, and co-founder relationships

Welcome back to the Z Fellows newsletter! Every Monday we share 3 ideas - to help you build companies, ship products, and create your life's work.

1: Peter Thiel on Management

"The best thing I did as a manager at PayPal was to make every person in the company responsible for doing just one thing.

Every employee's one thing was unique, and everyone knew I would evaluate him only on that one thing.

I had started doing this just to simplify the task of managing people.

But then I noticed a deeper result: defining roles reduced conflict.

Most fights inside a company happen when colleagues compete for the same responsibilities.

Startups face an especially high risk of this since job roles are fluid at the early stages.

Eliminating competition makes it easier for everyone to build the kinds of long-term relationships that transcend mere professionalism.

More than that, internal peace is what enables a startup to survive at all.

When a startup fails, we often imagine it succumbing to predatory rivals in a competitive ecosystem.

But every company is also its own ecosystem and factional strife makes it vulnerable to outside threats.

Internal conflict is like an autoimmune disease: the technical cause of death may be pneumonia, but the real cause remains hidden from plain view."

Source: Zero to One

2: The Importance of Speed

Jeff Bezos: “Being wrong might hurt you a bit, but being slow will kill you.”

Paul Graham: “Mere rate of shipping new features is a surprisingly accurate predictor of startup success.”

Sam Altman: "I have yet to meet a slow-moving person who is very successful."

3: Brian Chesky on Strong Co-Founder Relationships

“We [Airbnb cofounders] had a rule. The rule was that winning an argument was never more important than preserving the relationship. And the reason that's important is because if you start a company, you're going to have to debate a hundred thousand things... so no one argument can be the thing. There has to be this larger sense that we're a band.”

“I think a lot of human connection requires constant contact, constant connection, a deep sense of respect, a sense that I'm only here because of them, a sense of humility and gratitude, and a sense that I'm never going to try to win. Because if I win alone, I'm not going very far.”

Source: Designing a 10-Star Experience

Best of The Week

See you next Monday,

- Jay + The Z Fellows Team

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