Clara Shih, AI lead at Salesforce, talks about why startup founders need to change themselves as their companies grow. She draws on Bob Tinker's "Survival to Thrival" and her own decision to step back from Hearsay to let new leadership take over.
You need to change yourself and write a new job description at the pace that your startup is changing, which is usually pretty darn fast. And you have to re interview yourself. Maybe it's every six months, maybe it's every 12 months. It depends on your space and how again, how quickly your startup is evolving. But generally it follows this trajectory. And I love this slide from another entrepreneur friend of mine, Bob Tinker. He wrote he's a serial entrepreneur, he was a founder CEO of MobileIron, took it public and he now has another startup. But he wrote this book called Survival to Thrival. And one of the key concepts in here is that to be successful, to go from 0 to 1, you start off as Davy Crockett, you have the machete and you're going through the forest and you're just doing whatever it takes. You're being the Jack or Jill of all trades, you and your co founders and you're the pioneer and you're blazing the trail. And it's just you because you haven't raised money yet. Then you raise your seed round and now you've got a band of superheroes who you're trying to rally and everyone, it's like kind of a motley crew. And so you're Joan of Arc or you're a Braveheart and you're like charging and everyone's following you and you know everybody, they know you. You're the warrior. But then at some point your company grows to be 350 people or 500 people or 10,000 people and you can't act like that anymore. It just doesn't scale. You kind of have to shift your mode to a completely different personality. You have to be the architect. You have to think about building a system. You have to think about managing managers of managers, of managers of managers. You have to be a leader. You have to do it playing both the air game and, and the ground game. And for me, after 11 years of that, I realized that I wasn't fit for the job. And so I transitioned myself out of the company and I passed the torch onto our COO, Mike Bozzi in 2020. And I'm still the board chair of Hearsay. But it was painful, right? It's because I didn't realize that was what was happening. But it was important to, in retrospect, to think about that.
O processo de reconhecer limites, mesmo quando a vida parece exigir sempre mais.
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