Evan Williams: What I Learned Building Medium (So Far) (opens in new tab)

I know a few founders that have had to let people go after aggressively hiring. They've ended up fine but when they first raised their seed round they went out and hired a load of people. I do also know a few that are incredibly slow at hiring and it's lead to slow product development and an odd balance in the team (They have more designers than developers). I think sometimes if you hire too slowly it's hard to add more people when you start to need them. Because you have such a tight knit team that can't really change how they work to allow a few other people into the mix.

Somewhere in between seems best, only hire folks that really understand and fit in your vision and hire people that are going to be key for where you are slightly ahead of now over the people you needed a month ago. The team I spoke about needed designers then but now that the team has more designers than developers there's an odd balance that has lead to a beautiful but not very functional product. Their homepage changes more than their product.

I really admire Ev's transparency. It's relieving (and a little scary) that starting a new company seems only slightly less difficult for him as for the rest of us. Money, team, reputation, network are all nice things to have. But none of it matters if unless you make something new that people want.

clicking the "looking to grow" link to their jobs page with middle click (which means it should open in a new tab) causes it to open in the same window (in google chrome). It seems that medium is hijacking clicks and forcing them into the same window, I wonder why...

He mentions Steve Jobs, and the parallel I see is NeXT. Too many people, too much money, and too much focus on one-upping his previous success.

Then again, maybe in a few years Twitter will end up buying Medium. We'll have a second coming of Ev, followed a Twitter renaissance, wherein he expands on what he learned doing Medium.

He has access to everything he could ever want... While it's a nice piece, this isn't the startup life everyone else lives. Hopefully this isn't another Airtime.

Sounds like scrum would fit you