Last week, I had the pleasure of sitting down for an intimate fireside chat with…
Entrepreneurship
A few weeks ago I shared some important leadership lessons from Stewart Butterfield, including investing in your own growth to make sure that the founder scales as fast as the company. Growing with your start-up can be a very tough undertaking for a founder. It requires reinventing yourself dramatically in very little time. When you […]
Last week, I had the pleasure of sitting down for an intimate fireside chat with…
I’m very excited to announce Version One’s investment in Tindie, a marketplace for gadget tinkerers…
A few weeks ago I shared some important leadership lessons from Stewart Butterfield, including investing in your own growth to make sure that the founder scales as fast as the company.
Growing with your start-up can be a very tough undertaking for a founder. It requires reinventing yourself dramatically in very little time. When you start your company, you will be a “maker” for most of your days, wearing a thousand hats and tackling whatever needs to be tackled. But as the start-up scales and you hire employees, your day-to-day is taken over by more managerial tasks, like hiring and managing people, running company meetings, etc.
Going from a maker to manager was one of the hardest transitions I went through when building my own start-up and I don’t think I was fully aware of what was happening to me at the time.
Not all start-ups will scale as quickly as Slack did, but all founders will need to grow into new roles as their company grows. And here are some things to consider.
First – choose your path: do you really want to transition into a manager?
You will first need to decide whether you want to go down the path of becoming a manager or not. There’s typically little choice for a founder CEO. It’s unusual to hire a non-founder CEO early in a start-up’s life because it will most likely fail. But other founders might have a choice between staying as individual contributors or becoming managers (e.g. the difference between becoming a CTO who provides technical direction vs. VP of Engineering who manages the whole dev team).
This decision is tough and further complicated by what you think others expect from you. And, the answer will not be immediately obvious: how can you know what the right choice is when you’ve probably never been in this situation before? Nonetheless, it’s an important question to consider and find your own answer to.
How to grow into the role of manager
If you do decide that you want to become a “manager”, there are a few things that can help you grow in to this role:
Scaling from founder to manager is more of an evolution than an overnight transition. Great leaders are made, not born – although we tend to see just the end product and not the hard work that led to the success. The keys to growth are a founder’s self-awareness and a willingness to see feedback as an opportunity to grow, not just a criticism.
Health / Biology, Portfolio, Version One
Shifting healthcare systems from reactive to proactive care is critical – the best outcomes occur when people can take action early, before a condition becomes a diagnosis. That’s why we are excited to announce that we have led a $2.5m pre-seed round for NiaHealth and are thrilled that they are coming out of stealth and […]
We are continually refining our thesis on healthcare, from looking at clinical-grade at-home diagnostics to biotech and…
Over the past year, some of the most interesting and intellectually-stimulating pitches we heard have…