William Hsu talks about building a company versus starting one, arguing that accumulating skills and experiences matters more than titles. He draws on his time at AT&T and eBay to show how iteration and learning shape a career, and why networking is really about building trust.
Chapters
Building a company is very different than starting a company. Starting a company is selling a vision, it's recruiting, it is raising money, it is Getting interviewed by TechCrunch. Building a company is on average a 7 to 10 year road. It is hiring and firing, it is managing a product roadmap, it's motivating, setting goals, reiterating goals, it's having one on one. It's looking up your KPIs, it's tracking your KPIs. These are very mundane and day to day things where you need discipline and knowledge to do. And what I did in those 10 years was to really accumulate skills and experiences and not titles. And I view that as a very important thing to do. And then one of the most important thing that happened in my career was the realization that networking is actually not about networking, it's about accumulating trust from others. One of the great examples I like to give is at, AT and T. I was hired to kind of build a division, a new business unit for AT&T. And one of the hardest things you have to do is and when you're given a task, your job is try to fill out and find people smarter than you to kind of solve that problem with you. And I went back to my days at ebay. I was very junior employee at ebay, but I worked hard, I was smart, I was collaborative and I built a great reputation, a good enough reputation. So I went back to ebay and found as many people as I can to come and work with me at ebay. They were more senior than me, got paid more than me, but they were willing to come to AT&T because they understood that the value for what we can accomplish together is not really about the title or the hierarchy, it's about the accomplishments itself. And the last thing I will say about how do you really spend that time building a career that 10 years of your life is how do you really accumulate experiences and iterations? It's not about the 10 years actually, or the two years or the three years. It's really about how many times you can get another bat, how many times can you iterate and learn and repeat, Go to companies that let you learn and repeat, Release as many products on Marketplace as possible, launch as many marketing campaigns as possible, understand the feedback loop between your customers and the feature set, all the things that get you to understand, hey, well that wouldn't work if I did that again, but this will work and I better try it one more time.
