A Ragamuffin's Journey

heyamberrae:

GREAT read.

in short:

• their ability to recognize young people with extraordinary ability
• everyone be tasked with exactly one priority (YESSS)
• enforced an anti-meeting culture where any meeting that included more than 3-4 people was deemed suspect and subject to immediate adjournment if he gauged it inefficient (YESSSS)
• expected to pursue our #1 priority with extreme dispatch (NOW) and vigor. To borrow an apt phrase, employees were expected to “come to work every day willing to be fired, to circumvent any order aimed at stopping your dream.”
• strong bias toward hiring (and promoting / encouraging, as Keith mentions) smart, driven problem solvers, rather than subject matter experts
• individuals and small teams were given fairly complex objectives and expected to figure out how to achieve them on their own
• extreme bias towards action
• willingness to try - get someone to give it a *try* and then let performance data tell us whether to maintain the decision or rollback
• So you never started a sentence like this “I feel like it’s a problem that our users can’t do X”, instead you’d do your homework first and then come to the table with “35% of our [insert some key metric here] are caused by the lack of X functionality…”
• almost every all-hands meeting consisted of distributing a printed Excel spreadsheet to the assembled masses and Peter conducting a line by line review of our performance (this is only a modest exaggeration)
• Vigorous debate, often via email: Being able to articulate and defend a strategy or product in a succinct, compelling manner with empirical analysis and withstand a withering critique was a key attribute of almost every key contributor