On people and belief
The financialization of the software industry produced enormous wealth and also a lot of people who don’t understand what makes software companies work. It’s not the capital. It’s not the tech stack. It’s not the methodology.
It’s belief. People need to believe what they’re doing will work. They need to believe in each other and in the mission of the day.
Values before the product
A company that actually wrote this down: Guidewire’s values-and-practices deck. The whole thing is worth a read, but the gist is that values exist to make hard calls easier.
Selection matters more than training
Byron Deeter had a sharp version of this argument recently, as it is playing out in the PE space. Sadly the “PE-playbook” is very financialized and rational - and misses the heartbeat that made these companies even worth acquiring. It is a paradox for those who want to paint by numbers to fix the numbers. The secret is in the intangibles:
"The current SaaSacre narrative is overly simplistic and wrong!
The companies that are going to get run over are the ones that gutted engineering, pushed up prices on customers for marginal workflow products, focused on FCF above innovation, and in many cases even added leverage.
What fits that profile? Just about every large software PE deal or aggressive public activist. They're all cooked!
They can't innovate because they don't have internal talent. No strong AI engineer wants to go work in these shops and they have to service debt so they can't be bold. Their only chance is M&A and they're running out of time. This cycle is going to play out 3x faster than cloud did (and be 7x larger, btw).
The newly public & 'challenger' class of cloud will innovate and lead, but it's a short list.
Chaos = opportunity! It's never been a better time to be the disruptor.
This'll be fun!"
Byron Deeter on XBelief in the mission
Championship teams put company goals ahead of individual goals, and this is the mission. Mission is not so much world-view as it is company-view. It is a statement of POV. A statement of what WE uniquely believe, for our business.
Winning teams…
- Hire more for curiosity and judgment, less for credentials. Pattern-matching to past resumes often selects AGAINST the trait you actually need. Someone who is ex-Google or ex-Facebook or ex-Salesforce is telling you, rather explicitly, that they are going to carry a torch. If you want someone who is a big company careerist - hire for this profile.
- Defend the belief layer. When leadership stops articulating the mission, people stop believing it. The narrative is the work. The old saying is - you know you’ve told the story enough when people start making fun of you and your mannerisms. If they are imitating you in the hall, it’s working.
- Cut the distractions. Anything that isn’t YOUR mission, is competing with it. The longer you tolerate competing missions, even if they seem benign and even worse if they seem virtuous, the weaker the real one gets. This is not meant to be a political statement one way or the other - just to say, the more the daily emotions of today’s politics creeps into your org, the harder it will be to keep people focused.
People are capable of great things if they perceive it’s worth it. Make it worth it.
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