I was watching Chef's Table a month ago and there was a quote that struck me:
"As a creative person, to feel like you're cooking someone else's food, is not particularly nice...
it turned me off from cooking completely."
I relate with the statement, because I think it's
how I became an entrepreneur.
Thinking back,
Kenny and I were not working together at the time, but we were both feeling the pain of "cooking someone else's food." We didn't feel like we were having a real impact. We couldn't see how our efforts changed the business. We didn't feel like our ideas mattered. We didn't have the luxury choosing who we worked with. And so we left. While I looked up to my manager at the time, we just wanted more control over what we built and and who we built it with.
We are both creative people.
Because of that, we like working with other creative people. People who come to you with solutions instead of just problems. People who don't limit their thinking to their current responsibilities... like sales reps who have ideas on how the product can be improved or engineers who have ideas on how our pricing model could be better. And not just bringing good ideas, but people who are willing and excited to take on the extra work of getting it done. Seeing it through from start to finish.
I think this is what people refer to when they say "the founder mindset" - the motivation to bring an idea from initial thought into reality.
Since I like working with creative people, this is one of the more important things I look for in hiring. People who are curious and who want to be the creators of their own work. Not people who prefer a task list.
The other thing we always tried to do was to look at what we were hiring for, and try to find people who were (or would be) better than us. We always tried to level up the team.
What I didn't realize at the time was how linked these two things were. I had thought it was more self-serving; the more problem-solvers we have, the more problems we can solve, and the more value we can create for the business.
But ambitious, creative people want to learn and grow in new ways. They want to be challenged. And they want to understand the full mechanism of what they're working on. To do that, they need an environment that empowers them to be creative.
Doing this requires a specific kind of culture.
The belief that great ideas can come from anyone. Even the most junior person on the team. It's not just motivational for new people, it's also practical. People who are new to your startup (or to startups in general) oftentimes think in different ways and are not biased by status quo. This can lead to innovative ideas instead of iteration.
Leaders who pass down the credit for wins and own the responsibility for failures. It's all too common for praise to concentrate at the top of the team. If a leader is truly doing all of the great work, then it's a sign they're not empowering their people to create on their own. This also requires rewarding leaders for team accomplishments over individual ones.
Promoting from within and challenging from within. Be willing to let people take on a new challenge or business problem and take on that opportunity to grow. Sometimes you need to bring in someone who's done it before. But that can't be the default every time.
Most importantly, it requires transparency and constant communication. Everyone needs to have visibility into the entire business or they will not have enough context for their creativity to be productive.
When a group of ambitious, creative people come together in an environment that encourages this culture, magic will happen.
