From what I've observed (in myself and others), many people building startups start off motivated by money, but interest in money alone isn't sufficient to keep them motivated for long time scales (>5 years). In most cases that I've seen, success is inherently motivating and other factors that happen to correlate extremely highly to money (supporting and sustaining a team; caring deeply about solving a business problem; social rewards from being viewed as successful) ultimately takes over as the primary driver rather than purely cash.
Also IME most people who care deeply about money are really looking for independence and autonomy. The amount of money that you need for autonomy can be gotten from a FAANG job.
That's a ton of cash, but I believe that this eye-watering number is based upon the fair-market value of equity _granted_ in a particular year. That is, other executives might actually have higher total compensation based upon vesting if they received grants (say) 18 months ago.
It's still a crazy ass number but maybe not crazy at the level of "this person is more important than the CEO."
In my experience people regularly spend years/decades on the verge of quitting, occasionally even actively interviewing just to confirm whether the grass is really greener elsewhere.
* Is there another reaction? Depends on what "doing ____" is? If it's recreational (e.g. daydreaming) that's it's whole own problem (and it is a problem). If it's another task on the job (e.g. spending more time working with team Y than us - which happens with ad-hoc resource allocation), it's normal IMO.
* More broadly, re: tedium - it depends on the role and the expectations that were set. Some companies have roles that are not meant to be grown out of, but simply left.
* Also, re: just doing a worse job over time - I don't think that's the only option. We all do things that are repetitive (e.g. wash the dishes). Many get better over time, many get worse, many just do the same quality forever.
I come from product/engineering but have been involved in selling enterprise software contracts of various sizes. A few ideas on software sales:
* If you're on the tech side and your company has a sales team, ask them if you can help them on some deals. They usually LOVE this.
* Get involved in recruiting. Past the university hiring stage, recruiting = sales.
* Sales is fundamentally about aligning incentives – you have information on what you can offer, and your buyer has problems that you don't necessarily know about. You need to communicate how what you're offering solves your buyer's problem – that is the root of sales.
* If the prospective buyer truly doesn't need what you're selling, qualify out and don't waste your time. Half of being "good at sales" is allocating your time to situations that actually make sense for both parties.
* You need to be willing to occasionally put your pride aside to sell well – at least, you need to be willing to go into situations and ask for / provide transparency, even if it's socially a bit awkward or you suspect you're going to get an answer that will make people slightly annoyed. Sales is deeply humbling and I have enormous respect for people who do it fulltime.
In my (admittedly limited) experience, Very Successful People say versions of "that will be really hard" very often, and say "that is impossible / won't work" effectively never.
I'm not sure if this is causation or correlation, or even which direction a possible causative link would flow in (eg being positive + open-minded makes you more successful vs. being successful makes you more positive + open-minded). But it's absolutely a pattern that I've noticed.
IME most people will generally appear to be making things up as they go – even if they have significant relevant experience. Every situation is unique, and experience tends to look more like having a list of techniques with varying degrees of expertise, rather than having a playbook for every situation. You have to look for the expertise rather than raw confidence.
In sports terms it would be something like a baseball pitcher being able to throw a great curveball, a great fastball, and an all right slider, and knowing roughly what situations to use them in. There will still be a high degree of randomness and mistakes will be made.
I really agree with this advice, with the added thought that very very specific struggles are usually easier to write about and more compelling to read. For example, this post that my co-author wrote was well-received, I think in part because the advice is so specific ("Don't joke about firing people" as opposed to something like "be a more empathetic manager"). https://staysaasy.com/engineering/2020/06/09/Don't-Joke.html
I also find these types of posts more compelling when the struggle or the solution is non-obvious.
IME if it's inconvenient to write, you'll never do it. My blog co-author and I do our drafting and editing in Google Docs for that reason. Once you're done writing, you're sufficiently emotionally invested that you can handle the hassle of porting the content to a public site.
We also only add images to posts if it's absolutely necessary. We probably get less engagement than we would if we had high-quality imagery, but we have wayy more engagement than if we didn't write at all.
It also has some mild advantages in terms of auto-generating links to their homepage when referring to the company by name in places like Teams or Slack.
Yup and as recently as 24 months ago, $3B would still have been somewhat pricey at their revenue and growth rate. It'd be very hard for me personally to justify investing in a product that is in such a competitive market without product moats. It seems like with an absence of product differentiation Monday.com is aiming to differentiate via marketing, which is a very expensive way to grow.
I imagine that that would be really hard to achieve (or manage for the company) in practice, although I'd love to see a world in which employees could essentially get pro rata rights to purchase more shares built into their employment. That'd allow them to participate more fully in the upside of companies taking off like rocket ships.
They occupy a really strange place in the industry – relied upon by many, but heavily conflicted in terms of their incentives. The ritual and strategy of participating in something like a Gartner magic quadrant is worth a whole post in and of itself.
Author's co-writer here – there are a few common ways to get this information from public sources. Public documentation, press releases, analyst reports from places like Gartner or G2crowd, field reports from a sales team in an enterprise business are some examples.
I think that this is a very reasonable observation. It's definitely weird in theory, but the reasons that I've seen are:
* Very large tech companies build software (relatively) slowly due to their size
* Sort of like a toddler, you don't know what you want until you see that someone else has it. Another company hitting product/market fit + traction proves the value of a product that you might have just hypothetically wanted
* You're often buying a go-to-market motion (marketing, sales, services, etc) that complements a product
* In some cases, you're buying talent that would be difficult to hire + train on your own _fast_. Ie even if you could theoretically hire 50 traffic mapping engineers, you can get them onboarded onto your team faster by acquiring Waze
Also IME most people who care deeply about money are really looking for independence and autonomy. The amount of money that you need for autonomy can be gotten from a FAANG job.