Karri Saarinen, co-founder and CEO, on taste over metrics, product teams over product managers, strategy over OKRs, plus craft, profitability, and ownership
The Perks of a High-Documentation, Low-Meeting Work Culture
We get a lot more done in way less time at Tremendous. Mostly because of our high-documentation, low-meeting work culture. We'll tell you exactly what that means.
Overcoming The Valley of Death in Growing Businesses
The idea of growing a business is romantic. That spirit of entrepreneurship, leadership and scaling have a wonderful image of adventure and nobility. In the trenches, when a firm decides they want …
Software and online-services companies can quickly become billion-dollar giants, but the recipe for sustaining growth in technology companies remains elusive.
A few weeks ago I watched a talk by Keith Rabois called, How to Operate. Keith is a venture capitalist with Khosla Ventures, the former COO of Square, and a member of the PayPal Mafia. The talk was…
Managing teams has taught me a lot about my own behaviors and motivations. For example, I overworked for a long time. This left me continually teetering on the brink of burnout, and I had no energy left to absorb the typical sorts of organizational changes that happen at any company. Despite doing good work, I handled change poorly, and I picked up the reputation for being difficult to manage.
I’d like to say that I learned from my mistakes directly, but the honest version is that I came to understand this dynamic mostly through working with folks struggling from the same issue.
Before joining Wave four years ago, I spoke to a former employee about his experience. He said something that has stayed in my memory ever since: “Wave is really good at execution, so by working at Wave, you’ll learn how to execute very well.” Now that I’ve been here a while, I thought it would be good to write down what really good execution actually looks like in practice and the counterintuitive lessons I’ve learned along the way.