Articles
Turning Your Team by Fred Wilson
A serial entrepreneur I know tells me “you will turn your team three times on the way from startup to a business of scale.” What he means is that the initial team will depart, replaced by another team, which in turn will be replaced by yet another team.
The people you need at your side when you are just getting started are generally not the people you will need at your side when you have five hundred or a thousand employees. Your technical co-founder who built much of your first product is not likely to be your VP Engineering when you have a couple hundred engineers.
Turning a team is not the same as firing someone for weak performance. You are firing someone for doing their job too well. They killed it and in the process got your company off to a great start and growing to a scale that they themselves aren’t a great fit for. They may not be right for the job at hand, but they are a big part of the reason that the company is successful.
Demoting A Loyal Friend by Ben Horowitz
When I started Loudcloud, I hired the best people that I knew—people whom I respected, trusted and liked. Like me, many of them did not have deep experience in the jobs that I gave them, but they worked night and day to make it work and they made great contributions to the company. Yet for many of them, there came a day when it was clear that I needed to hire someone with more experience to run the function I had previously entrusted to my loyal friend. Damn. How do you do that?
The most important thing to decide is that you really want to do this. If you walk into a demotion discussion with an open decision, you will walk out with a mess: a mess of a situation and a mess of a relationship. As part of that decision, you need to be OK with the employee quitting the company. Given the intense emotions he will feel, there is no guarantee that he will want to stay. If you cannot afford to lose him, you cannot make this change.