Oct 18 2019

Favorite How I Built This Episodes

I’ve been listening to podcasts before every comedian had one. Back in 2007 I listed my favorite technology podcasts. One of my favorite podcast now is How I Built This with Guy Raz. Guy talks with established founders and entrepreneurs on how they got their business off the ground. The following are my favorite episodes of How I Built This because of the perseverance, determination, and humility described by the guest to launch their successful business.


May 31 2011

CEO of You

I’ve worked for large companies and I’ve worked with small companies. There is a big difference in your day to day responsibilities when working in either of these environments. In a large company, you know your rank, your salary pay, and your place in the org chart. In a large company, you can predict product releases by the conference room schedule months in advance. I remember working on a project in a large organization and I wanted to add a boolean property to a single database table but the there was so much bureaucracy in place that that it took two meetings and the review of the local database expert who used his tenure to carve out a little fiefdom for himself.

It’s completely different in a small organization. In a startup, there is no room for bureaucracies, or org charts with more than two levels, or egos of experts but at the same time everyone is the CEO of something. In a company of less then 10 people, there is no room for middle managers, everyone has to manage themselves, everybody has to be a CEO of something. In such an organization, you may have to be the technical lead, the hiring manager, or the vice president of phone system, or directory of version control, as well as the senior technical writer, and even maintenance guy. In a small organization you have to do it all. In a small organization, when printer is stops functioning you are the printer expert. When the phone system stops functioning, you need to take the lead.

I’ve found that this approach also works for other aspects of life. There are people that wait for a scheduled meeting to to figure out what they need to do next, I like to get done.