This guy needs to get up to speed fast on startups, product management, engineering, hacker culture and so on after a lifetime of hierarchical command and control in the financial services industry. What are the most concise and illuminating introductory texts I can refer him to?
Thanks!
- Start here: http://www.ycombinator.com/resources/ There are many wonderful articles written by Graham himself.
- The Four Steps to the Epiphany, Steve Blank.
- The Art of the Start, Guy Kawasaki.
- The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-by-Step Guide for Building a Great Company, Steve Blank and Bob Dorf.
- Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future, Peter Thiel.
- ReWork: Change the Way You Work Forever, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson.
- I haven't read the Founders at work series yet, but everyone seems to find it very valuable.
Obviously, someone who's actually read both could comment better than I.
Not because it's probably true (it's as likely the asker's friend has as much to contribute from a different background as they have to learn for their new situation) but because they're likely to hear more of this from people who'd prefer to occupy an echo chamber, so it's probably best to get a certain thick skin up now.
I know about the studies showing that diversity is beneficial, and I've seen it anecdotally in my own career.
But "culture differences" are not the same as having no idea what your coworkers are talking about (which OP mentioned).
There are many instances where big corporate culture and startup culture clash. Those two environments operate very differently, and if you've spent your whole career in one, it's very hard to switch to the other. It has nothing to do with diversity. (Those studies were about race and gender.)
Some companies are crazier than others... a lot crazier.
- https://model-view-culture.myshopify.com/products/your-start...
- https://modelviewculture.com/
- Something by Don Reinertsen, maybe The Principles of Product Development Flow, maybe something else.
- Valve Employee Handbook http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...
- http://thinkrelevance.com/how-we-work
- Ries, The Lean Startup
All of these sources hide lots of dysfunction, so as always take them with a grain of salt. Take Ricardo Semler's fun books. In one of his Harvard Business School lectures, he mentioned how his books are artificially optimistic, because publishers want to sell more books.
A bigger question is why was he brought in? Does he need to do a turnaround? Has something gone badly wrong?
What stage are they at? Is there a user base? Do they pay, or is this ad based? Who's the competition? What do you have that they don't? First look at the business from a user perspective, then the technology used to service it. If they're not doing something technically hard, the technology end is about keeping the users happy, scaling and not screwing up.
All I need to do now is invent a time machine to send it to myself 20 years ago... :-)
It's also very prescriptive about the activities a startup management team should be focusing on which I suspect is a great place to start if you are coming into a new team in a leadership role.
For me, I've been bouncing off the walls for 12 years in a large bureaucracy. Reading Eric Ries's Lean Startup and finding Paul's blog was like drinking water for the first time. I hope he has the same experience.
It's 20 years old, and dated in terms of technology but a good overview of valley culture in the mid 90's.
http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html is probably the one that had the biggest impact on me and is sort of a manifesto for startups.
- Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
- Neuromancer by William Gibson
Both books have had a huge impact on hacker culture, as well as doing a good job of documenting it. They will convey aspects of the culture that more traditional startup books can't convey - hacker language, attitude, motivation etc.
They are both great reads too.
Startup culture: http://www.wired.com/2014/04/no-exit/
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Computer...
