Words Your Team Lives By
Great founders are known by their words.
Great founders are known by the public through their work.
But as I’ve come to learn, they are also known by their teams through their words.
The greatest founders of all time are so repetitive in their words and thought processes that their teams could guess what would come out of their mouths before they even said it.
It sounds cult-like, but it’s effective.
Recently, our company has outgrown my natural style of productivity.
When there were 3 of us in my garage in South San Francisco, and then in our small office right off Market Street, “project management” was straightforward: we would meet once on Monday to align for the week, and then verbally declare tasks as they were done throughout the week.
If someone needed help, we could literally just turn our monitors around without getting up from our seats.
That is no longer the case.
So I went into research mode. I read about org design, standups, project tracking,
whether anyone actually uses Notion.
And the thing that stuck out was simpler than any of that: the best founders repeat themselves constantly, and their people internalize it so deeply that the founder’s logic becomes the team’s default logic.
I’ve noticed this happening at Alif.
We have a few principles that everyone really sticks to if they’ve been around for more than a year.
Here’s what they are:
1. people don’t know what you know.
This one applies to everything.
Context is important and easily lost.
When you’re making a video - remember that people are probably hearing about that idea for the first time. And if they’re not, they already forgot anyway.
If a piece of content doesn’t seem like it’s worth a standalone post, remind yourself that most people consuming that content have not lived through the life experiences that seem trivial to you. And if they have, they’re happy to hear a reminder. Or they aren’t, and they’ll swipe off, and that’s okay. Post it.
When you’re asking someone for help with a task, explain what the goal of the overall project is before asking for help designing something in Figma. It’s easy to Slack someone, “Hey, can you make this graphic look nice?” It’s harder to share what your visual inspiration is, whether you’re using it as a Partiful cover or a LinkedIn post, and when it needs to be done so that there’s enough time to share it around.
When you’re frustrated because someone isn’t moving fast enough, do they know what pace they’re expected to work at?
When someone isn’t doing something that seems like common sense, remember that lots of everyday things you do at a job may seem nonobvious to someone who has never held one before.
2. who matters more than what.
This applies to life, but especially to hiring and project management.
Most of our team crossed paths with me years before I ever considered them for Alif.
Mustafa was a housemate and teammate when we were both at Founders Inc. Maz was also a housemate, friend through Buildspace, and participant in Alif Batch 0. Imran and I met through social media 8 years ago, and he was the first angel investment I made, ~4 years ago. I knew Afra through the SF Muslim scene, and she participated in Alif Batch 0. Hassaan, through the masjid we both grew up at.
Ideas always change, but people rarely do.
So, who you work with is far more important than the project you actually build with them.
The same goes for projects: there are lots of things we could theoretically build at Alif. We prioritize what we build based on who we can pull in from our orbit to run them.
Alif Summit wouldn’t have existed without Afra. Alif Sessions wouldn’t have existed without Imran. Alif’s story wouldn’t have been viral without Yacouba.
3. one big thing (OBT) at a time.
In my first months at Founders Inc., I got some advice from Furqan, the founder, on how to effectively build a company, quickly.
“Building a company is just a sequence of pushing boulders up a hill.”
Every week, you find the heaviest boulder you can move, and you push it up the hill until it reaches the top, and starts rolling downhill by itself.
Then you move on to the next boulder, and the next one.
Until you look up and you’ve built something real.
We treat our own projects at Alif the same way - at our weekly all-hands, we share the OBT we’re working on for the week. At our daily standup for project leaders, we each share the OBT for the day.
None of these principles are complicated, but I’m learning that they must be repeated.
The hard part of company culture is saying them so often that they stop sounding like an opinion and start sounding like the way things work around here.
You can’t assume that smart people will arrive at the same conclusions you have just because they’re smart.
They haven’t lived through the same decisions, they don’t carry the same context, and they’re busy solving their own problems.
The founder’s job is to make the principles explicit, and then to repeat them until the team can think in them without being prompted.
It’s all about the words you repeat.
~ Omar
h/t to Jihad Esmail for edits and pushing me to get this post across the finish line.