

Ask HN: First Employee/Hire - Trust Among Founders? - sonder

With any new startup, the founders are usually hesitant to fully trust some of the people they hire. How did you, as one of the first hires, convince founders to take ownership over a certain portion of the business?
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lasky
I've succeeded at convincing founders to allow me adequate decision making
ownership necessary to be successful - and I've also failed. It's highly
variable, and for me, it's largely been a function of the personalities and
experience of the team I'm working with.

One experienced CEO I worked with was great at delegating AND empowering key
people. He knew (and often told us) this was key to his ability to grow the
company into a true enterprise. I was promoted twice in the 2 years I was
there. I was employee #30 when I joined, since I'm still in touch with the
CEO, I learned they just hit 350 employees. (This is a privately owned, non-
VC-backed company).

One inexperienced CEO I worked with was all about delegating tasks (I suspect
largely because he didn't want to do any of this work, and/or felt his
employees would be better at it than him) but often struggled with empowering
his people to make decisions to get done what they need. He tried though, and
I suspect will be better at this. This was also partly because he was
simultaneously running experiments on how to build a company with a novel
style of management - and we were working together during the very early
stages of this.

Another inexperienced CEO I worked for had very little ability to entrust
anyone at the company to do anything, let alone make any decisions. This was
all delegation, zero empowerment, and zero trust. It was a complete hindrance
to being successful, and will be impossible for that company to grow very much
in that style.

The successful instances were actually very early in my career; the
unsuccessful much later.

The problem with many startup founders is they really have limited experience
to work off of, and not yet a lot of confidence in what they are doing. It
takes a lot of confidence in yourself, the person, and your business, (or
faith!) to hand someone the reigns on something important and not look over
their shoulder every 2 seconds.

So first, your expectations for what you want to take over need to be
realistic. The founder(s) need to be on board with giving up this
responsibility and it needs to fit into the role they envision you fulfilling.
Also, this should go unsaid, but you need to actually believe you can do it.
If you still have doubts, that's ok, we all do; but before you try convincing
anyone to give you this responsibility, you should have some voice somewhere
inside of you telling you that you could probably do this, and you truly want
to.

I hope this is helpful

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sonder
Yes, this was definitely helpful! Thanks for sharing.

