I came across this somewhere on the interwebs. Which also reminded me of this article (in Russian), which discusses the “progressive JPEG” approach to projects. The idea being for a project to always be 100% ready, but with varying degree of details being worked through.
The other day I came across this story by Guy Shachar, in which he shares his experience with hiring people and the lack of candidates.
The struggle is real. All the different startups are competing over the same human resource and let me tell you, the list of proficient talent isn’t as long as you might think. Or as someone once told me, the problem with going after the top 1% of talent, is that there is only 1% of top talent. In fact the only thing that’s harder than finding top talent employees, is finding top talent employees that are interested in working in your startup.
This reminded me of a long rant I wrote about ten years ago – Where did all the PHP programmers go? And I wasn’t even looking for the top 1% of talent at the time. I have been continuously involved in hiring for a number of companies since that blog post. I’ve tried a variety of different approaches with varying success. But the problem is real and it’s getting worse. There’s huge demand, insufficient supply, and the quality of the supply seems to be dropping as well, with many educational institutions falling behind the progress.
And it’s even tougher for the startups, as they don’t have much to throw into the competition with the larger established companies.
“You fired your top talent. I hope you’re happy.” is a response to “We fired our top talent. Best decision we ever made.” article. It’s one of the best things I’ve read all through last year.
In his article “The Rising Stakes In SaaS” Tomasz Tunguz somewhat confirms my sentiment about the end of the startup era:
Machine learning, broad consolidation, category creation, and new distribution models each will change the SaaS ecosystem in fundamental ways. As the number of new startups ebbs, and major forces in the industry reshape it, I suspect we’re going to see a massive amount of innovation in SaaS, a reinvention after the perfection of a 20 year old playbook.
I found the rest of his article interesting as well. In particular this part on how companies tend to react to the massive levels of competition:
This rivalry causes four major responses:
- Verticalization – compete with a horizontal player by picking one customer segment and building a product better suited to them. Trades market size for better product market fit.
- Segmentation – focus on SMB, Mid-Market, or Enterprise, to play where competition isn’t present.
- Feature optimization – develop a product with 20% of the features but 80% of the value, and use a simplified product to challenge the competition.
- Opting out of starting a company – deciding the timing isn’t right because of the competition.
“Notes on Developing a Strategy and Designing a Company” is a rather lengthy paper from the Harvard Business School, with the following abstract:
These notes provide a sequence of steps for creating or evaluating a strategy and associated company design, drawing clear lines to quantitative and evidence-based evaluation of enterprise performance and to financial valuation. The notes are intended for practical use by managers or instructors of MBAs and executive MBAs.
There’s plenty of good questions, answers, and ideas on how to improve a company, whether it is in its first days, or has been around for a while.