How To Operate

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Introduction
So I'm going to talk about how to operate. So I've watched some of the prior classes, and I'm going to assume that you've already sort of hired a bunch of horrendously resourceful people. That you've built a product that at least some people love. And you're probably raised some capital. And now you're trying to build a company. So you're enforcing a product and now you have to forge a company. And I'd actually argue forging a company is much more difficult than forging a product. Basic reason is people are irrational. So you probably all know this either your parents, your significant other or your brother or sister, or your teacher, somebody in your life is irrational. Building a company is basically taking all the irrational people you know, putting them in one building and then living with them 12 hours a day at least. So, it's very challenging.

Building an Engine
Now, there's techniques for coping with that and some people get good at it and some people don't but that's where really what operating is about. So basically what you're doing when you build a company is you're building an engine. And at first you have a drawing literally on a whiteboard, and you're architecting it, and it looks very conceptually clean, and beautiful, and pretty. But when you start actually translating to practice actually it looks more like this, and you're holding it together with duct tape. And it takes a lot of heroic effort of people to actually hold it together. That's why people work 80, 100 hours a week, is that heroic effort is actually necessary to keep this thing together. Because you don't actually yet have polished metal in place. Eventually you want to construct a high performance machine. A machine that actually almost nobody really has to worry about every hour. Every minute and as we used to joke about eBay that if Martians took over eBay it would take like six months for the world to notice. That's what eventually what you want to get to. Or as Warren Buffet says, you know, build a company that idiots could run because eventually they will. So this is what you want - basically a performance machine that idiots can run.

Your Role as a Leader
Now, as a leader, what is your real job? What's your role? Strictly speaking there's only one book that's ever written that actually explains how to do this, it's a little old. It was written in 1992 by Andy Grove, who's quite famous, quite successful, and his definition of what your job is, is to maximize the output of an organization, your organization that you're responsible for. The CEO is responsible for everything and a VP would be part of the organization. And the organizations around you, so if you're VPE, you're actually are responsible for the performance of the product team too, or the marketing team, because you have influence there. So this is how you measure people and you want to focus on the output not the input - the old adage about not measuring motion and confusing that with progress, you're measuring only progress.

Ordering Smoothies and Being a Task Rabbit
And this is going to sound like a fancy and glamorous thing to do. Maybe people get excited about managing a whole large organization, and being responsible for the output. But in practice, what you're going to learn today hopefully is that it's more about things like ordering smoothies, teaching your receptionist how to answer the phone properly, and serving as a $10 an hour task rabbit for your employees. So let's talk about that.

Triage and Focusing on What Matters
So at first when you start a company everything's going to feel like a mess. And it really should - if you have too much process, too much predictability you're probably not innovating fast enough and creatively enough. So it should feel like everyday there's a new problem and what you're doing is fundamentally triaging. So some things will look like a problem, and they're actually colds, they're just going to go away. So, somebody's annoyed about this or that. That may be a cold, and you shouldn't stress about it, and you certainly shouldn't allocated a lot of your time to it. And some things are going to present themselves as colds, but just like in the emergency room, if they're not diagnosed properly they actually can become fatal. So what I'm going to try to do is help give you frameworks for thinking about which things are colds and which things are potentially fatal.

Editing
So one of the most important things I've learned at Square is actually a concept of editing. And this is the best metaphor I've ever seen in like 14 years of running stuff of how to think about your job. It's natural, it's a natural metaphor so it's easy to take with you every day. And actually it's easy to transmit to each of your employees so that they can figure out whether they are editing or writing. It's a natural construct. You generally know when someone asks you to do something - am I more writing or am I more editing?
So an editor, as is the best metaphor for your job, and we're talking about the specific things you're doing in editing:

Eliminating Things: The first thing an editor does, and you probably all had this experience in school, is you submit a paper to a TA, a draft to your friend. And the first thing an editor does is they take out a red pen or nowadays, you know online, and they start striking things - basically eliminating things. The most important task as an editor is to simplify, simplify, and that usually means omitting things. So that's your job too, is to clarify and simplify for everybody on your team. The more you simplify the better people will perform. People cannot understand and keep track of a complicated set of initiatives. So you've got to distill it down to one, two, or three things. And use a framework that they can repeat without thinking about, they can repeat to their friends, they can repeat at night. Don't accept the excuse of complexity. A lot of people will tell you that this is too challenging, this is too complicated. They're wrong. You can change the world in 140 characters. You can build the most important companies in history with a very simple to describe concept. You can market products in less than about 50 characters. There's no reason why you can't build your company the same way. So force yourself to simplify every initiative, every product, every marketing, everything you do. And basically take out that red pen and start eliminating stuff.
Asking Clarifying Questions: The second thing editors do is they ask you clarifying questions. So when you present a paper to somebody, what do they usually do? They find some ambiguity somewhere and they say, "Well did you really mean this? Do you mean that? Do you have an example of this?" That's what your job is. So you're in a meeting and people are going to look to you, and the real thing you do is you actually ask a lot of questions. And they can be simple, basic questions like, "Should we try this seven days a week or six days?" They can be fundamental questions like, "Where's our competitive advantage here?" We try to do this actually as investors too - some investors will ask you a billion questions about a billion things and they'll have you do diligence forever. We try to narrow it down to what are the one, two or three things that actually matter for this company and only focus on those things. It allows us to be more decisive, and we can make decisions rapidly. It allows us not to distract you from your day job, which is actually building a company. And yet, I think we still get to the highest fidelity answers. We don't have all these extra, extraneous details, pieces of data. Now it's hard, it's something you have to practice, but when you're good at it, every step you eliminate, Andy Grove estimated that you can improve performance by 30-50%.
Allocating Resources: The next thing you do is allocate resources. So the editing construct, this is what editors do all the time. They take editors from the Middle East covering the Middle East and they move them to Silicon Valley, because Silicon Valley is now more interesting. Or they move them to a sports section because they want to compete on the basis of sports with other journals and other publications. So that can be top down where you allocate resources and say "We're now going over here, we're going to compete on this basis". And then next month, next quarter, next year, you're like "Well, that Middle East coverage is getting boring and bland. We don't want to do that anymore. Let's go chase after something else." Or it can be bottom up. Just like journalists mostly come up with their own stories, the people who work with you generally should be coming up with their own initiatives. So, a reporter who covers Google will generally come up with the interesting stories that they're hearing and propose one or two to their editor for approval. But it's not like the editor is saying, "Go cover Google, and this is the angle I want." Once in a while they do that, but that's not the day-to-day, meat-and-potatoes of what a journalist does every day. Your goal over time is to actually use less red ink every day. So one way of measuring how well you're doing in communicating to your colleagues about what's important and what's not, what things are important and some things are not, is how much red ink you're pulling out every day. It's okay if you have a bad day and the red ink's all over the place. But it's not okay if the red ink next month is more than it was last month. So measure yourself of how much red ink you're creating.
Ensuring Consistent Voice: The other thing that's very important that actually isn't as intuitive to a lot of people is, the job of an editor is to ensure consistent voice. So if any of you read The Economist, you can tell that there's one consistent voice. You can pick up any article, any post in The Economist, and it feels like it's written by the same person. Ideally your company should feel like that - on your website, your PR release, your packaging if it's a physical product, your recruiting pages, it should feel like it was written by one person. That's extremely difficult to do, and at first you're going to be tempted to do that yourself which is okay for a founder to do initially. Over time you do not want to be doing all of the consistent voice editing by yourself. You need to train people so that they can recognize the differences in voice. So if you see this website page and it looks very different than the recruiting page, you start by asking questions - "Why is that? Is the reporting messed up? Are the leaders over here not really understanding the voice of the company?" So, you've gotta fix that over time. But you want to start with the objective that everything should feel exactly the same. It's quite difficult in practice. Almost every company has at least one piece of the organization that isn't exactly on the same voice. At Apple, which is notorious, under Steve Jobs' regime which was notorious for getting this right - if you asked someone who worked at Apple about the internal tools for recruiting, if they really feel like Apple products, all of them will tell you no. So you're never 100%, but you definitely want to get as close to that as you can.

Delegating vs Abdicating
The next complicated topic is delegating. So just like with the metaphor of editing, writers do most of the work in the world. Editors are not actually writing most of the content in any publication. That's actually true of your company too. You are not going to do most of the work. You shouldn't be doing most of the work. And the way you get out of doing most of the work is you actually delegate. Now the problem with delegating is that you're actually responsible for everything. So as a CEO or founder there is no excuse - there's no "That's that department over there, this person over there screwed up". You're always responsible for every single thing, especially when things go wrong. So how do you both delegate but not abdicate? It's a pretty tricky challenge and both are sins. If you over delegate or you abdicate, or you micro-manage, those are both sins.
So I'm going to give you a couple techniques for solving this:

Task-relevant maturity: This actually comes from Andy Grove's "High Output Management". It's kind of a fancy phrase for basically, has this person ever done this before? It's really simple. How mature is this person in doing something? And the more they've done the exact same task before, the more "rope" you're going to give them. And the less experience they have, the more they're trying something new, the more you're going to actually instruct them and consistently, constantly, regularly monitor. So that's kind of a basic concept but it's worth keeping in the back of your brain. The interesting implication, and this is pretty radical, is that any executive, any CEO should not have one management style. Your management style actually needs to be dictated by your employee. So with one particular person, you may be very much a micro-manager because they're quite low on this scale. And with another person you may be delegating a lot because they're actually quite mature on this scale. So it's actually a good thing if you do reference checks on somebody, and half the people you call say they're a micro-manager, and the other half say they actually give them a lot of responsibility - that's a feature not a bug. I didn't understand that at first, at all. I used to be befuddled when people would do reference checks on me, and come back with this complicated mosaic. And then I finally figured out that maybe I was actually doing my job correctly, and so then of course, I taught other people that this was the way to do it.
Conviction vs Consequences Framework: A more nuanced answer that I've come up with is how do you make decisions about delegating versus doing it yourself. You don't want to do it yourself too often. So what I've basically borrowed from Peter Thiel, this is my first two by two matrix ever in my life but he taught me something at least, is you basically sort your own level of conviction about a decision on a grid - extremely high, extremely low. There's times when you know something's a mistake, and there's times where you wouldn't do it that way, but you have no real idea whether it's the right or wrong answer. And then there's a consequences dimension. There are things that if you make the wrong decision are actually catastrophic to your company and you will fail. There are things that are pretty low impact, that really at the end of the day aren't going to make a big difference, at least initially. So what I basically believe is that where there are low consequences, and you have very low confidence in your own opinion, you should absolutely delegate, and delegate completely. Let people make mistakes and learn. On the other side obviously, where the consequences are extremely dramatic and you have extremely high conviction that you're right, you actually can't let your junior colleague make a mistake. You're ultimately responsible for that mistake, and if it's really important you just can't allow that to happen. Now the best way to do that is to actually explain your thinking, the "why". It's easy to shortcut when you get busy, explaining the "whys" of the world, but it's very important to try. When I was at LinkedIn I had a colleague who was quite talented. On occasion we'd get annoyed if I didn't exactly agree with his opinion on something, and so I'd spent a lot of time trying to persuade him why I was making a decision a certain way. And his wildcard, the card he would ultimately call out if I didn't quite persuade him, he's like, "Okay you're the boss", and that meant to me like I was burning a lot of social capital. Every time he said that, I knew I was like really creating a thin line, and that ultimately that was going to backfire if I did that too often. So you want to track the times that you're doing that.

An example of this is at Square, one of my favorite people in the world, and my second hire, first marketing hire had this program he wanted to run called "Inner Square", which basically allowed Square merchants to give out ten other Squares to their colleagues. Just imagine a food truck outside, they'd put like ten Squares on the counter and people could just grab them. Kyle had this great idea that this would be this awesome marketing program - Squares would spread Squares to other people. To some extent it was on brand, so it didn't have catastrophic consequences. Each of these ten Squares didn't cost that much money, so financially we could afford to do it. But, at that time my ten years of experience said there's just no way this is going to work at a meaningful enough scale to move our metrics enough. I actually would prefer we not do this. But Kyle was so excited about this that I decided to just let him do it. He learned that actually when you measure this thing it's not massive, it doesn't create massive value for the company. It did require a fair amount of operational complexity to ship all these Squares to people and figure out how to get them to be Squares etc. But it allowed him to be excited about his job and to learn how to filter future ideas, so it was totally worth letting him make the "mistake".

Editing the Team
The next and possibly most important thing you do is actually edit the team. These are the people that you work with, and nobody's going to have a perfect team and you're certainly not going to start that way. So what I'm going to try to do is maximize the probability for success in editing the team.

So I like this idea of Barrels and Ammunition. Most companies, once they get into hiring mode, just hire a lot of people. And they expect that as they add people, their throughput, horsepower, or velocity of shipping things is going to increase. It turns out it doesn't work that way. Usually when you hire more engineers you actually don't get that much more done, you actually sometimes get less done. You hire more designers, you definitely don't get more done, you get less done. We could talk about why.

But the reason why is that most people, even great people, are actually ammunition. But what you need in your company are barrels, and you can only shoot through the number of unique barrels you have. That's how the velocity of your company improves - by adding barrels, and then you stock them with ammunition, and then you can do a lot.

So if you go from a one barrel company, which is mostly how you start, to a two barrel company, suddenly you get twice as many things done per day, per week, per quarter. And if you go to three barrels, great. If you go to four barrels, awesome. Barrels are incredibly difficult to find, but when you have them, give them lots of equity, promote them, take them to dinner every week because they're virtually irreplaceable. Because they're also very culturally specific. So a barrel at one company may not be a barrel at another company because one of the definitions of a barrel is they can take an idea from inception all the way through shipping and bring people with them. And that's a very culturally specific, opportunity specific skill set.

So two questions probably are occurring to you:

How do you figure out who's a barrel and who's not?
You start actually with a very small set of responsibilities. It can be fairly trivial. It can be something like, "I want to reward the engineers that are in my office at 9 o'clock at night every night with an ice cold fresh smoothie." This is actually a real example. I was frustrated our engineers were working really hard at Square. Maybe 20% to 30% would stay very late into evening, and I wanted to serve them dinner but I also wanted to give them something cool to reward them. You could think about alcohol, but that's a little complicated. So smoothies were probably a little bit better than the pizza, which drains you of energy. But nobody could get smoothies to my office to show up at 9 o'clock sharp that were cold, that tasted good and delivered in the right place that engineers would find them. You'd think this is simple, but in fact, it like took months to get this right.
So then we had an intern start, and I think on his second day, I was explaining this problem and he said, "Well, I'll do it", and I was like looking at him thinking there's no way. I've seen my office manager fail, my assistant fail, all who are actually pretty good. This just isn't going to happen. And then lo and behold that night they showed up on time, cold, delivered to the right place. And my first instinct was great, not about the smoothies, but okay, now I can actually give you something more important and consequential and complicated to do. And that's what you actually want to do with every single employee every single day - expand the scope of their responsibilities until it breaks, and it will break. Everybody, I couldn't run the world. Everybody has some level of complexity that they can handle, and what you want to do is keep expanding it until you see where it breaks and that's the role that they should stay in, that level of sophistication. But some people will surprise you. There will be people who you don't expect, without different backgrounds, without a lot of experience, that just can handle enormously complicated tasks. So keep testing that and pushing the envelope.

What's another signal to look for once you've hired someone?
With an open office, just watch who goes up to other people's desks, particularly people that they don't report to. If people start going to an individual employee's desk and they don't report to them, it's a sign that they believe that person can help them. So if you see that consistently, those are your barrels. Just promote them, give them more opportunity as fast as you can.

The other question everybody asks about people is, when do you hire somebody above somebody? And when do you sort of mentor somebody or when do you need to replace somebody?
The way to think about this is every company has its own growth rate and every individual has their own growth rate. So some companies that are very successful, let's say LinkedIn - LinkedIn was always a very linear company, it never went like [exponential growth gesture]. For example, I joined LinkedIn 18 months after we launched and we had only 1.5 million users which in a social product is a very small number. When I joined I was the 27th employee. When I left two and a half years later we only had 57 employees. In contrast, when I joined Square as the 20th employee, two and a half years later, we had like 250-300 employees.
So each company has its own velocity on this curve, and if the company's going like [exponential growth gesture], you can only keep people in the roles if their own personal learning curve is going like [exponential growth gesture]. On the other hand, if the company's growing like [linear growth gesture], anybody whose learning curve is faster than that, you can keep giving them the same role to do. So always track the individual slope of an employee, and the company's growth rate.

Aiming Your Barrels Now you have your barrels identified. You've picked out the people that can really take an idea that you have in the back of your head, scope it out, run with it, make it happen, ship it, and it's perfect. Where do you aim these barrels?
I'm going to argue that you really need to spend a lot of time focusing people. This is something I've learned from Peter Thiel, actually. He used to insist at PayPal that every single person could only do exactly one thing and we all rebelled. Every single person in the company rebelled to this idea because it's so unnatural, it's so different than every other company where people want to do multiple things. And especially as you get more senior you definitely want to do multiple things, and you feel insulted to be asked to do just one thing. Peter would enforce this pretty strictly. He'd basically say "I will not talk to you about anything else except this one thing I've assigned to you. I don't want to hear about how great you're doing over here. Just shut up, focus, and run away until you conquer this one problem."

The insight behind this is that most people will solve problems that they understand how to solve. Roughly speaking, they will solve B+ problems instead of A+ problems. A+ problems are high impact problems for your company, but they're difficult. You don't wake up in the morning with a solution, so you tend to procrastinate on them.
So imagine you wake up in the morning, you create a list of things to do today. There's usually the A+ one at the top of the list but you never get around to it. So you solve the second and third, and over an entire company of hundreds of people that just cascades. So you have a company that's always solving B+ things. Which does mean you grow and add value, but you never really create that breakthrough idea because no one is spending 100% of their time banging their head against the wall every day until they solve it.
So I highly recommend some version of that. You can be less stringent. You can be like you can give people three things to work on, but I would still track at least the concept of what would happen if you only gave everybody one thing to prioritize.

Creating Tools for Decision Making Now, because you can't make all the decisions, you don't want to be making all these decisions yourself, you have to create tools that enable people to make decisions at the same level, ideally, of fidelity that you would make them yourself.
So how do you create scale and leverage?
Build a Dashboard: This is an old Square dashboard. It actually looks pretty presentable even today. The construct of a dashboard, first of all, should be drafted by a founder. You need to basically simplify the value proposition and the company's metrics for success on a whiteboard. You can have other people build the dashboard, I don't actually care about that, but you need to draw it out. Like what does business success look like to us and what are the key inputs to that. And then have someone create something that is very intuitive for every single person in the company including customer support to use. And then, the key metric of whether you've succeeded is what fraction of your employees use that dashboard every day. If it's actually useful it should be close to 100%. It's not going to be probably 100%, but you want to measure that. Just like you have quality scores for all your other KPIs with users, the dashboard needs to be as intuitive as your product is for users.
Transparency: Another concept is transparency. People talk a lot about transparency. It's kind of a goal that everybody ascribes to, but when push comes to shove very few people actually adhere to it. Let me walk through a little bit of transparency and different stages of transparency:
Metrics are the first step. Everybody in your company absolutely should have access to every single thing that's going on.
Take your board decks, and as you get more formal, the board decks will get more complicated. Actually review every single slide with every single employee after the board meeting. You can strip out the compensation information if you really want to. But every other slide you should go through with the entire employee base and explain it. And if you can remember some of the feedback you got from your board that's really cool to pass on.
As your company scales, everybody's not going to get invited to every meeting, but they want to go to every meeting. The way you scale that is you create notes for every meeting and you send it to the entire company. So we created a "notes@" alias for every single meeting involving more than two people. Someone would write notes and send it to the entire company. So people felt like as the company added employees, they could continue to monitor and track what was interesting, what was going on, and they never felt excluded, hopefully.
Even the details around conference rooms. Every conference room at Square has glass walls, because as soon as you have regular walls, people wonder what's going on. It's amazing - if they can see who's actually in the meeting, and who's meeting with who and when, they don't worry nearly as much as what's going on behind those closed doors.
Stripe, you may have seen a blog post, I think Patrick wrote it, about email transparency, about actually allowing everybody to have access to email. That's pretty far out there but it's actually got interesting merits to it.

I would call the tactics that you read about here about as sort of minimal viable transparency. I actually think you could push the envelope a lot more. Steve Jobs tried this at NeXT. He actually tried transparent compensation. I actually think, although NeXT didn't do extremely well, the real reason wasn't because of the experiment around compensation transparency and there's a lot to that. The critique of compensation transparency is often "Well, we want people to be teammates and work together and collaborate". But if you look in the sports world, where people are actually teammates and they do have to collaborate, all of their compensation is completely public. In fact, each of us can look up anybody's compensation in the sports world and get it exactly accurate, and somehow it seems to work. So I'm not totally bought into the idea that you need to keep compensation non-transparent.
Metrics Finally, metrics. You want to measure things. You want to measure outputs, not inputs. And again, you should dictate this yourself. You should draft the dashboard to tie this all together.
One important concept is what are known as "pairing metrics" or "pairing indicators", which is if you measure one thing and only one thing, the company tends to optimize to that, and often at the expense of something else that's important.
A costly example in payments and financial services is around risk. It's really easy to give the risk team an objective and say, "We want to lower our fraud rate." It sounds great, until they start treating every single user as a suspect user because they want to lower their fraud rate. So they require each user to call them up on the phone and give them more supplemental information and fax in things. You have the lowest fraud rate in the world, but you also have the worst customer satisfaction score.
So what you want to measure at the same time as your fraud rate is your false positive rate. That forces the team to actually innovate. Similarly, you can give recruiters metrics around hiring, and guess what? You'll have a lot of people come in through interviews. But if you're not tracking the quality of hires, you may be very unhappy with the quality of people you're interviewing or the people you're giving offers to.
So, you always want to create the opposite as an indication and measure both. And the people that are responsible for that team need to be measured for both.
Finally around metrics, one insight I've had over my career is you actually want to look for the anomalies. You don't actually want to look for the expected behavior.
A famous example was at PayPal. None of the top ten markets that the company was planning to go after included eBay. But one day, someone noticed that 54 Power Sellers had actually handwritten into their eBay listings, "Please pay me with PayPal", and brought this to the attention of the executive team at the time. The first reaction of the executive team was, "What the hell's going on? Let's kick them out of the system. That's not our focus." Fortunately, I think David Sacks came back the next day and said, "I think we found our market. Let's actually build tools for these power sellers instead of forcing them to write 'Pay me with PayPal' into their listing. Why don't we have an HTML button that they can just insert?" Well that started to work. And then he said, "Well actually why do we make them insert it? Why don't we just automatically insert it for them? So they could just insert it once and then every single listing they have forever, it'll just automagically appear there." So that became the success for PayPal.
Similarly, when I was at LinkedIn, I saw this stat that made no sense to me. The UI for the site was a little bit different back then, but 25% of all clicks, maybe 30% of all clicks from the home page were people going to their own profile. And that made no sense whatsoever. It was in the settings. You had to literally go to the right margin, find a link, and it was 25 to 30% of every single click at scale. This is like statistically significant stuff. And it made no sense whatsoever, I'd never seen the UI perform that way.
I kind of went around for weeks trying to figure this out and then someone very smart, Max Levchin, said something to me and I was like, "Vanity". People are looking at themselves in the mirror. That's a pretty good answer. Because they weren't editing their profile. Nobody has something to edit every day in their profile. But they actually were just looking at themselves in the mirror every day because it made them feel good.
And then you can actually test that hypothesis and say, "Well, if I had more content, do I look at myself in the mirror more often?" Turns out you did. If you had more endorsements, did you look at yourself in the mirror more often? Turns out you did. So, we actually figured out like what was underneath this utilitarian product that the product team thought they were building was actually a lot of emotional vanity. They didn't exactly translate it to the best possible feature, like the PayPal example, which you couldn't easily put a button that said "Be more vain today" on the homepage. That would probably not work perfectly. But it clarified what users of the product really wanted and we wouldn't have found that without looking for anomalous data.
Details Matter The final topic I want to talk about is details. In my assigned reading, there's a great book I really like by Bill Walsh called "The Score Takes Care of Itself". The basic point of the book is that if you get all the details right, you don't worry about how to build a billion dollar business, how to have $100 million of revenue, how to have a billion users. That's a byproduct of getting all the details of what you do every day to be excellent.
So the example he talks about in the book that really resonated with me was he took over the 49ers in 1979. They were the worst team in football. I believe they were 2 and 14 the year before, which is really bad for football. In the next ten years, he managed to transform the team into the NFL's best, won three Super Bowls.
And what's the first thing he did to start going from a terrible team to the best team ever in many ways? He actually taught the receptionists how to answer the phone properly. He wrote a three-page memo about how to actually answer the phone. Now, that may sound absurd. But his point was, if the organization as a whole does everything exactly the right way, then receivers, for example, will start running their routes at seven-and-a-half yards, not seven yards, not eight yards. And that actually will matter. And then everybody on the team executes exactly up to the same standard of performance. You will have an organization that is performing at the highest possible level, and then with enough random variation, the highest possible performance team will do the best.
So the way you translate this to a company are to pay attention to a lot of details that may not seem to matter. Most people would agree about the details mattering when it faces the user. But where the real debate is on things that don't face the user.
So Steve Jobs famously in the Mac, insisted on an immaculate circuit board design. You can read about this in various books. The Mac, for those of you who don't remember it, actually couldn't be opened. So the circuit board design couldn't be seen by any single person in the world. There was no way to open the Mac except for the people who worked at Apple, and Steve insisted that it be absolutely perfect and beautiful. That's the kind of detail obsession that this sort of philosophy of building a company requires.
Examples that may be more practical for you instead of circuit boards are things like what food do you serve people. This actually matters more than you might guess. When people don't like the food you serve them, what do they do? They go gossip. They go complain to their friends. They go walk over to someone's desk. And all the sudden at lunch, what they're doing is mostly spending time gossiping and complaining instead of brainstorming. So you don't have this serendipitous idea, that spark. Instead they're all wallowing around. So the best thing you could do is actually give people the food they want or food that's good for them, that makes them more productive.
So it may seem like this glorious job that you thought you had is actually more like running around being a task rabbit for people. But it's to take the things off their plate that are a distraction, so that they can be high-performance machines. And if you take enough things away from people that distract them and give them the tools to be successful, all of a sudden your organization produces a lot more.
Similarly, another example that's often got wrong is office space. One natural instinct is when you need an office is to have an office manager or someone on your team go out and find offices. And they'll go on tours with agents and they'll come back with photos and ideas. You need to do that yourself. The office environment that people live in and work in every day dictates your culture and how people make decisions, it dictates how hard people work. There's almost no more important decision, other than what company you're going to be, than what's the office environment you're actually in. Most people don't do that themselves. And then you can tell a lot when you walk into a company's office.
Roelof Botha at Sequoia made a point to me about YouTube. When I invested in YouTube in the very, very beginning, it wasn't obviously going to be successful. And then, Roelof led the Series A investment for Sequoia in YouTube. And we were at a board meeting together and he said, "You know, I think YouTube's really going to work." And I said, "Why?" And he said "Well, every time I go to one of my portfolio companies, half the office is watching YouTube at lunch." And I was like, pretty good sign. So like, if you pick up on these little things you can predict a lot.
Lead By Example with Effort And the final thing, and then I'll take some questions, is around effort. Ultimately, I don't believe that you can build a company without a lot of effort and that you need to lead by example.
So Bill Walsh, the first chapter of his book, gets asked this question of how did you know whether you're doing your job? And this is the answer he gives coaches that used to ask him that question. So if this is what you feel like every day, you're probably on the right track. And if that doesn't sound appetizing, you probably shouldn't start a company, truthfully.

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