Leadership at a Startup

Every software start-up is truly a unique enterprise. Nowhere else can so many people create value with nothing but their own potential and a small amount of capital (generally, for pizza and computers). Of course, it’s also very easy to lose the value before it grows, as when you run out of pizza money before anyone likes what you’ve done. But the point of this is that start-up companies are usually a “non-management” environment. It’s not a matter of intense management or lax management; it’s loosely coordinated management anarchy:

• If there is still money, you work doing whatever you do that adds value.
  
• If there is no money, not a lot changes except that you have to decide if you’re willing to work for nothing for a while.

The idea is that if it all works out eventually, there will be money to create organizations and so on. Because you were there early, you’ll skip all the levels of bureaucracy at Dilbert®-style companies that already got old. Maybe…

Working at a software start-up is like concentrating time. You can focus on exactly what you are best at doing, which is how we experienced it. (Both authors went through it at different companies on different continents but the experience was the same!) Most software professionals have experienced some form of crunch time—the variable seems to be only how long it lasted. In a relatively short period of time, you get good with the tools at hand, translating school knowledge into tech magic. When the bag of tricks runs out but there’s still more intensity needed, you learn to research and expand yourself in real time. You find the state of the art for your specific task and immerse yourself in it. Feeling powerful and sharp, you take on bigger and bigger jobs, shunning the suggestion that someone else should be brought in to help, assuming that’s even possible. A few late nights and some weekends is all you need to stay on schedule. You are now a hero—irreplaceable, self-sacrificing, revered, and respected.

Before you even realize it, though, you are burning out. Skills are evolving, but technology is mutating right under your nose and you can’t change fast enough. There are no more hours in the day that you can work, and you are already as good as it gets with the tools at hand. The light at the end of the tunnel gets further away, and you need help! One answer, a very good one in fact, is for you to find a way to scale your abilities. Learn to achieve more through management.

Thanks for reading this Management Use Case. I'm the co-author of a new book on software development leadership entitled You.next() that features dozzens of other use cases for leadership. Please see more at www.youdotnext.com.