Category Archives: Leadership

Moon Shot

Lessons on Failing from Dr. Astro Teller

Leadership No Comments

During the final SXSW keynote with Dr. Astro Teller provided a number of great thoughts on the value of “moon shots,” and also on failure. Key quotes from the session below belong to him. I’ve sprinkled a few thoughts of my own after each quote.

Dr. Teller currently oversees the Google[x] work, swinging for the fences in a number of areas. They’ve had some big wins and some big failures too. He clearly has some great insight on the value failure when these types of quotes just flow out of him during a keynote.

It’s not about having the bumps and scrapes, it’s about getting the full value from them.

This is the value of an only new mistakes philosophy. Take each mistake and learn from it. Don’t repeat it. You should have no need to repeat it, because you’ve already learned everything you need from it. He talked about sticking with some failures even longer than you might want to in order get all the learnings from it.

If you’re not failing at least some of the time, you could be learning faster.

The startup environment inevitably forces this out of you. You’re going to be making mistakes, so you may as well be learning from those mistakes. It’s better to run fast, in the real world, with the safety off and learn from the mistakes than to build slowly and not learn the mistakes until much later.

Failing doesn’t have to mean not succeeding.

Your failures are nothing but pitstops on the highway to eventual success.

Failures are cheap if you do them first. They’re only expensive when you do them at the end.

So true in software development it’s not even funny. All the more reason for good quality engineering, quality automation & quality processes.

Having people from radically different backgrounds will give you a radical mental diversity.

According to Dr. Teller mental diversity has proved tremendously useful in bringing all the ideas to the table. I’ve loved building as diverse a team as possible to bring all the expertise and ideas into the open. I love the fact that building a racially/seniority/gender diverse team provides better solutions.

Recruit ALL the Time

Leadership Recruiting No Comments

Budgets don’t always allow this, but having been part of a business that wasn’t able to continuously recruit, vs one that has been able to hire for 18 months plus I can say for a fact that keeping a warm pipeline and an open role at all times is dramatically better. Let me explain a bit about why:clock

  1. Constantly filling the pipeline. They’ll be sourcing and adding new candidates regularly, so that if at any point you need to fill a bunch more req’s you’ve already got a pipeline and you can ramp up the things you’re already doing.
  2. An open role for opportunistic hiring. If you find out that a great developer is available, you’ll have a role. You may have to pivot your budget a bit to change what role you’re hiring, but at least you have a shot at great talent.
  3. Reputation as a hiring organization. If you continually hire, you’ll become known by engineers and other hiring partners (e.g. the key networkers & recruiters) as having roles, and more people will show up at your door.

Obviously, there are downsides to all of this. You’ve got to plan for your hiring to be spread across the entire year. You’ve got to have a budget that is reliable enough that you can count on it for hiring quarters in advance. Of course your budget will change, but you need some confidence. I’ll cover in a future post how to think about budgeting that will allow you to have a high level guess at your hiring all year long.

 

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