As someone who runs a company, this article resonated with me. This stuff happens in every department and has a lot to do with how the company is run day to day. If you think about the major deliverables of a department - and pick any department - “manager culture” says the head of that department produces the deliverable internally, getting feedback from stakeholders outside their team perhaps, but “owning” the decision. Thus the product roadmap is “owned” by the product team, and the person the VP PM or CPO reports to is a passive recipient of it even if they have input or feedback on it. But that cascades downward: in manager culture, the mobile roadmap is owned by the mobile PM, the internal tools roadmap is owned by the internal tools PM, and so on. They all buy into manager culture, where autonomy is viewed as a defining aspect of their impact and importance, and to take away that autonomy is to undermine them and risk losing them (“micromanaging, which is bad”).
This same thing happens with marketing. Budgets get set. Agencies get hired. Branding and creative campaigns get developed and show up on the doorstep of the CEO hundreds of thousands of dollars deep. In engineering. In customer support. In finance (we have to do this, because the forecast cycle requires it; we can’t do that, because we don’t have the budget).
In founder culture, the founder gets down and dirty in the roadmapping process. They will give direct feedback on how a customer issue is routinely handled, or a design choice, or a creative campaign. Or a technical standard - Gates and Jobs both famously did this incisively and decisively. I’m no huge fan of Zuck, but it’s clear how much involvement he has with product and design for example. He famously bought Instagram because he wanted to, and understood its importance to facebook’s future, not because a strategy team identified it and a corp dev team engaged and investment banker to analyze and negotiate it. Mark Pincus was like this at Zynga too- ask anyone who was there.
Why is this important? Because people all the way down the organization don’t usually have the same nuanced understanding of the product, the market, the company strategy, the positioning, as you do. They will make decisions that optimize their subsystem but are sub optimal to the system. I had a customer support manager recently ask me if he could move a set of things that was causing a lot of load on his team to our law firm. The law firm of course charges 10-30xx per hour what a customer support agent makes. Even if you do a good job evangelizing the company mission and hiring non-mercenaries and whatnot, again and again and again you will see people wanting to “professionalize” their teams in ways that add more process, slow things down, and attenuate impact.
So If you let your company get into manager mode, you really lose control of the boat. And if you try to operate in founder mode after hiring a bunch of managers, they pissed because they don’t want to be micromanaged. But if they were crushing it, you wouldn’t need to.
I think the best founders are able to navigate this dynamic effectively, whether that’s by being able to effectively make a jump to a more delegated model, or building a team that can leverage their strengths without snuffing their hands-on involvement, or taking back the wheel at the right time.
A good counter example I can think of is Yahoo, when Jerry Yang took back over after Terry Semel retired. Manager culture had deeply set in there, and was not reversible despite Jerry’s good efforts and some great executives who were aligned to it. (And yes, the big, Steve Jobs inspired, “fix the company retreat” they did was literally “VP’s and up”.). As someone who worked there, was not a VP, but likely would have been in a “top contributing employees” cull by different measures, it was extremely painful to experience.
I would note that it takes a lot of energy to sustain this mode and be a leader through it, or to make changes in this direction to course correct.
Anyone who has kids has to answer the phone from strangers routinely. School staff and camp counselors are routinely using their own cell phones these days to communicate with parents.
Doing it the opposite way - tying all outbound school/camp calls to a single callerID - risks blending the important with the automated reminders. LAUSD abuses their automated calling system to the extent that my wife and I have both screened calls from the front office involving an injured child, more than once.
The real issue here is getting to the root cause, which is carriers and their intermediary aggregators having incentives to carry large volumes of spam.
In a number of markets, operators have increased the cost of SMS messages to deter spam, only to find a massive increase in traffic pumping fraud that mysteriously appears in the system of trusted intermediaries. Everyone's making a goddamn fortune off it, and no one actually cares to fix it.
TL;DR Phone numbers are not unique ID keys for people. But it seems like many companies view it as an easy, cheap 2nd factor (generally, "something you have"), to be combined with a strong password ("something you know").
The problem of course being that SIM-bound number can be hacked or stolen, and non-SIM-bound numbers are not actually "something you have". If a Google Voice number is controlled by the same login as a gmail account, there goes your 2nd factor.
A lot of people do use Burner for this per the link above. (I'm a founder).
Burner + Ad Hoc Labs | Mobile, back end, and dev ops engineers | Los Angeles | Full-time | ONSITE
Burner is innovating at the intersection of software and telecom by offering smart virtual numbers that help users maintain privacy, organize their communications, and manage their identities online. We have a thought leadership position on user privacy and control and are at the forefront of what phone numbers are capable of when treated like smart software rather than dumb directory endpoints.
We are also a founder-led team generating millions of dollars in revenue and "control our destiny" from a VC point of view, while growing well. We have recently hired a fantastic new CTO and are building up our engineering and product teams to further innovate and drive the value and utility of Burner to our users, while also exploring other opportunities. We are hiring a DevOps lead (kubernetes, docker, terraform), an Android Developer (Java/Kotlin), an iOS Engineer (Swift), and a Platform Engineer (Scala) to join our team. We will also review strong candidates from other disciplines warmly.
We've been based in Atwater Village, Los Angeles since before it started blowing up and have a great team, culture, and office vibe.
Burner | Los Angeles, CA | Dev-ops Engineer | Full-time
Burner (Ad Hoc Labs, Inc.) Burner is empowering people to take control over their primary channel of communication – the phone number.
As DevOps Engineer, you will be a key member of a team building the next generation of mobile privacy tools, working closely with the platform team to upgrade and maintain existing infrastructure while helping to design and deploy the next generation of services to power the Burner mobile apps.
This is quite interesting! (Former book editor here.) I will totally use this to discover and buy books.
I might suggest your "buzzfeed for books" comparison doesn't do it justice. Perhaps "Pinterest for books" or "Reddit for books"?
As feedback, a few thoughts off the cuff:
- I'm hesitant to auth Twitter, because you ask for permission to post but don't do the thing where you promise never to post on my behalf without advance warning.
- I think the "shelves" model is interesting. I'm definitely interested in what David Bowie found interesting. Maybe not so much Art Garfunkel (though IIRC he is an obsessive reader so who knows)
- It would be interesting if there was some cut where, for a given book on a given shelf, you could see other popular/relevant shelves it was on. Sort of the way Twitter surfaces tweets in your timeline that were liked by a friend.
- Maybe a view of just books, not shelves.
- I want to see what others had to say about these books, not just whose shelves they're on. Maybe that comes later, when you have more activity?
- Looks like you can add a book to your reading list, "heart" it, or "heart" a whole shelf. This is a slightly confusing information architecture, vs. something like on Airbnb which has a clear architecture of saving properties you like to a list. Might want to refine that a bit.
Thanks a lot for your feedback. Reddit for books would definitely be more relatable to people on HN :)
You've suggested some serious interesting things.
Like giving the link to other shelves on which a book is. I currently don't have a book view because the site itself is very new and I want to validate if people really like the proposition as such. But this information can be integrated in the current shelf model too. I'm thinking something at the bottom of a shelf where the reader gets to see the other shelves that contain the same books.
Hearting of a shelf and the share on the right is indeed confusing people. Will do something about it sooner than later.
Thank you again for taking out the time to write your feedback :)
My pleasure and definitely agree some of the things I suggested go well beyond MVP. It is the blessing and the curse of getting product feedback that the second you do something interesting, people want a million more features ;-).
I thought the most interesting but unexplained phrase in the piece was "contrary to paperwork filed with the Nevada DMV".
As in, "Uber also claims that, contrary to paperwork filed with the Nevada DMV, it has never deployed a custom LiDAR system in any of its cars or trucks and will not be ready to do so by the time the case is slated to go to trial in October."
So, what paperwork did they file with the Nevada DMV? Was it for a permit for them to run driverless cars on Nevada's roads? Did they lie to Nevada in the process of trying to get that permission?
Or is there a more benign explanation of that statement? (I suppose it could have been a non-material error...)
"But in paperwork filed with Nevada regulators last July, Otto claimed that it “developed in house and/or currently deployed” a 64-laser LiDAR system in its autonomous trucks. Uber now says this was an error. “Every single self-driving car that Uber has put on the road to date uses commercially available LiDAR sensors from third parties,” Uber wrote in its filing."
This same thing happens with marketing. Budgets get set. Agencies get hired. Branding and creative campaigns get developed and show up on the doorstep of the CEO hundreds of thousands of dollars deep. In engineering. In customer support. In finance (we have to do this, because the forecast cycle requires it; we can’t do that, because we don’t have the budget).
In founder culture, the founder gets down and dirty in the roadmapping process. They will give direct feedback on how a customer issue is routinely handled, or a design choice, or a creative campaign. Or a technical standard - Gates and Jobs both famously did this incisively and decisively. I’m no huge fan of Zuck, but it’s clear how much involvement he has with product and design for example. He famously bought Instagram because he wanted to, and understood its importance to facebook’s future, not because a strategy team identified it and a corp dev team engaged and investment banker to analyze and negotiate it. Mark Pincus was like this at Zynga too- ask anyone who was there.
Why is this important? Because people all the way down the organization don’t usually have the same nuanced understanding of the product, the market, the company strategy, the positioning, as you do. They will make decisions that optimize their subsystem but are sub optimal to the system. I had a customer support manager recently ask me if he could move a set of things that was causing a lot of load on his team to our law firm. The law firm of course charges 10-30xx per hour what a customer support agent makes. Even if you do a good job evangelizing the company mission and hiring non-mercenaries and whatnot, again and again and again you will see people wanting to “professionalize” their teams in ways that add more process, slow things down, and attenuate impact.
So If you let your company get into manager mode, you really lose control of the boat. And if you try to operate in founder mode after hiring a bunch of managers, they pissed because they don’t want to be micromanaged. But if they were crushing it, you wouldn’t need to.
I think the best founders are able to navigate this dynamic effectively, whether that’s by being able to effectively make a jump to a more delegated model, or building a team that can leverage their strengths without snuffing their hands-on involvement, or taking back the wheel at the right time.
A good counter example I can think of is Yahoo, when Jerry Yang took back over after Terry Semel retired. Manager culture had deeply set in there, and was not reversible despite Jerry’s good efforts and some great executives who were aligned to it. (And yes, the big, Steve Jobs inspired, “fix the company retreat” they did was literally “VP’s and up”.). As someone who worked there, was not a VP, but likely would have been in a “top contributing employees” cull by different measures, it was extremely painful to experience.
I would note that it takes a lot of energy to sustain this mode and be a leader through it, or to make changes in this direction to course correct.