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Sep 3 2020

Communication & Documentation are Key 🗝

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I understood the importance of communication and documentation while I was at sea. We had processes documented for everything, be it turning the ship to the starboard (right) or port (left), or saying "over" to end communication over a walkie-talkie.
Translating my learnings into the startup ecosystem seemed confusing at first. For a founder, every day seems to have different challenges. You can't have everything set in stone because of the variability of the startup ecosystem. However, one thing which you can and maybe should document is the problem you're solving, and why you are solving it.

In my first podcast, I spoke to Aditi Sinha, co-founder of the recently launched Locale.ai, about her journey and her daily hustle which got her startup to where it is now, and one thing really stood out: how communication and documentation were integral to her building a strong team.
Building a team can be challenging, frustrating, and time-consuming. Also, even after you hire, getting the team to breathe the same values is a different challenge altogether. Spending half your day with the wrong set of people drains you more than you’ll know.

Aditi solved this problem from the get-go. Check out her hiring page.
Well, I'll leave the rest of her journey for you to listen to on the podcast. This is the first time I hosted a podcast and would really, really appreciate your feedback on this; even a "Maanav, you say the word 'like' a lot" or "can you ask more details about the business", everything will help make me better.
ज्ञान
As a founder and CEO, your role will increasingly turn to two major areas: hiring the right people, and ensuring they stay. We're going to tackle the former area in this article and discuss a good framework for hiring engineers.
Every company's hiring process is slightly different, and yours will likely evolve as your company grows. However, it's important to set the right foundations in place since hiring the right people is crucial; it will make or break your company.
It’s been just over a week since Fortnite developer Epic Games initiated an unprecedented antitrust legal fight with Apple over its App Store rules, and the lawsuit is shedding new light on how the companies came into conflict.
Today, Apple entered into evidence a series of emails from Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, in which he asked top Apple executives to exempt Fortnite from its standard 30 percent cut and to allow Epic to offer its own mobile app store. Beginning in June, the emails show extensive discussions between Sweeney and Apple before Epic took action to incorporate an alternate payment mechanism into the Fortnite app, which resulted in it being ejected from the App Store last week. The emails show Sweeney lobbying Apple for the power to include this option months in advance, and also requesting Apple extend this courtesy to all iOS developers. Sweeney was effectively asking if Apple would restructure the App Store and iOS as we know it, likely suspecting Apple would not entertain the request in the slightest
Value is created through innovation, but how much of that value accrues to the innovator depends partly on how quickly their competitors imitate the innovation. Innovators must deter competition to get some of the value they created. These ways of deterring competition are called, in various contexts, barriers to entry, sustainable competitive advantages, or, colloquially, moats. There are many different moats but they have at their root only a few different principles. This post is an attempt at categorizing the best-known moats by those principles in order to evaluate them systematically in the context of starting a company.
I’m frequently asked by entrepreneurs, investors and friends how to find and select a coach. It turns out there aren’t a ton of useful resources out there. I figured this was a timely opportunity to create and publish a comprehensive guide to help those leaders committed to professional and personal development.
I’m clearly biased but I believe that every leader (and person for that matter) can benefit from working with a coach, especially in times of crisis. I’ve seen first hand the impact that coaches and mentors have had on my own transformation. I’ve also witnessed the growth that other leaders have experienced. This includes countless founders I’ve partnered with, close friends and even my wife.
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Quotable
"None of us is as smart as all of us."

-Ken Blanchard
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