Do you ever feel like your co-founders are not competent even though you can't prove it?

[labbish]

Hi everyone, I hope this can resonate with someone and they are willing to share their feeling or help me understand where I'm thinking wrong.

I've been a startup CEO for 9+ years now with the same group of collegemates. We're all technical and have lots of experience working and even living together.

As the CEO I mostly deal with all things other than code and the other members are all coding various parts of our products.

Recently I can't help but think that my partners are not A players... The reason is that when I ask them for a simple feature like a dashboard with a user settings page or a very standard thing like setting up a subscription and payment through stripe or setting up login through auth0, they always tell me it will take 3 days or 1 week or whatever and it ends up being longer than their estimate too.

I used to code before and I constantly see others who claim they setup an entire SaaS product in 2-3 days but I feel that my team is always slow and wasteful in terms of where they spend their time. It's almost like they are 100% incapable of making a quick and dirty functioning demo.

I know for a fact that if I don't pressure them our final product will be very good and robust (after 6-12 months of development) but in today's age you can't afford to build things so slowly. Specially when you've already done it before and/or when others have done it a million times.

Has anyone ever felt the same?

I'm really torn because on one hand I know how rare it could be to find a group of people who are willing to work and get through tough times together and I like being an entrepreneur. But on the other hand my life and opportunity cost of not working with a better team or even just getting a higher paying W-2 job is beginning to bother me.

If you have any comments or thoughts please share. I don't mind any positive or negative reactions

 

[badams122390]

@labbish First thoughts.
The complexity of adding a new feature in existing apis, while taking care of UX, backward compatibility, regression testing and final deployment is overwhelming for the technical teams.

It's easier to build something from scratch than to add a feature on top of an existing product.

 

[badams122390]

Second thought:

As a ceo it's your responsibility that communication flows. If you feel they are slacking, most likely they feel the opposite, i.e you pressurizing them without understanding the complexity.

The bigger problem you have is lack of communication between cofounders and in the team in general.

 

[badams122390]

Third thought.

Bring in a culture of accountability and goal setting.
Expect delay of 20% in tech. It's natural.
Your external deadline should have the buffer of internal deadline.
Do root cause analysis of why deadlines are missed without finger-pointing. Learn from the mistakes. What could have you done better? Project management? Where was the delay? Be a guy who supports and backs your team.

Your frustration in this msg is so evident, I bet it's visible in your body language.

 

[badams122390]

Final thought. Having a cofounder who is reliable and trustworthy (9yrs?) is more important than the A+ player who would throw you under the bus. 67% of the parter ships fail in startups due to cofounder issue. My last one failed for the same reason. So choose wisely.

 

[delistuff]

@labbish Is this satire? How can anyone complain about a team that delivers non-trivial work in a 3 day - 1 week timeframe? Sounds like you are not a good manager

 

[ezra238]

@delistuff This is what I’m thinking. A fucking week?? Lol.

 

[jaj]

@labbish It sounds like you’re biased because you’re not doing the technical stuff the stuff you mentioned is 20+ hours work easily. At the same time I’m not saying you’re wrong. Ask your cto or tech lead if they think someone isn’t putting in the effort

 

[arul]

@labbish Having a Co-Founder is a gift.

What will help is talking to them, and confronting them with your thoughts. You never know what's going on the background, ans you may lack context.

If your product is fairly large, and complicated, then these simple features you talk about may be complicated to execute.

Talk to them, and get their perspective.

 

[613jono]

@labbish If you're the CEO for 9+ years, think your colleagues aren't competent, and let them stick around (or fix the problem) ..... I'd argue you aren't a competent CEO.

 

[labbish]

@613jono Haha I'm certainly not the most competent CEO. But obviously I've seen so many good qualities in them that I don't want to lose this team unless I absolutely have to. That's why I'm seeking help in these two areas:

1- Are my expectations wrong or unjustified?
2- What can I do to improve this dynamic between us

 

[lovedservant]

@labbish You need to negotiate the scope within your business needed timeline. Make sure that time frame is not gut feeling but backed with reasonable information that you've transparently researched.

1. Expectations - you need to communicate clearly and make room for them respond. This is a two way negotiation every time.
2. Complexity - When your expectations don't align, pressure will only result in a feeling of lack of trust. Focus on the needed outcome and timelines. Complexity will dictate scope within those timelines.
3. Experience - has your team built this before? how about from scratch? In the timeline you're wanting?
4. History - how often have you worked with them, built prototypes on prototype foundations? If this is your mode, expect longer time frames and more push back. Tech debt is a freight train that needs to be paid down every cycle.

 

[halltc]

@labbish Tech people often give/accept unrealistic deadlines because they have been routinely pressured into those low numbers. Good tech people know that a quick and dirty demo is often expected to evolve into the real thing, with expected low number estimates pressuring them all the way.

Taking shortcuts backfires on devs who are left to explain why the quality of tech isn't good enough. Why aren't they up to scratch, right? Those complaining at that late stage forget about how it started.

 

[mormarw]

@labbish I've worked in a startup where there were only 3 frontend devs, but they were absolutely fixated on bullshit work like building their own component library completely from scratch, or migrating from Vue to react because it was a better framework. This was completely supported by the cto confounder who saw his job as delivering quality software.

Another startup had 3 react devs, 3 swift devs, and 3 kotlin devs. Every change needed to be built across Web, android, and ios. The ceo founder said that this was absolutely necessary because they only alternative would be a Webview app that would be slow. Somehow building native apps was a competitive advantage, even though we were a company of 25 people.

What no one could see was that this work/engineering culture was completely stopping our ability to build anything of value for clients.

None of these people were necessarily wrong, but they could not see how their perspective was completely incompatible with the reality of the business. Both companies needed to find a way to scale back their ambitions and start shipping more.

As the CEO, this is 100% on you to set, communicate, and enforce expectations about what and how the business operates. This is not on incompetent cofounders (because they are probably doing things right in their head).

 

[labbish]

@mormarw Thank you. I think out of all the replies so far this one is the closest to my situation. Of course I do take a lot of the responsibility for this situation and it's very possible that I'm not as good of a CEO as I could be. However, I don't think our issue is lack of communication like others have mentioned. It's this... The technical founders think they are doing the right thing and are insistent on it. But since they are not the ones seeing the customers or the grand vision of the product they sometimes waste their time in perfecting a minutia that will never be used. Thank you for your input

 

[mormarw]

@labbish Not that it will help you at all, but it's a very difficult situation - the two above scenarios were never solved during my tenure at those companies.

In the first case, I spent six months trying to show the CTO why we needed to ship more. He seemed to understand, but then would tell me we needed to wait 6 months to finish some technical project before we could start the next customer-facing feature. He was selling the engineers an environment where they could master their art, but refused to believe that engineers would get joy from chasing commercial outcomes so build a culture of technical perfection. In this case, I think he needed to be replaced because he just never got it and we were never going to change behaviours without strong leadership.

The second case went slightly better, but they'll never fix the path dependency. I managed to change the CEO's mind and get the CTO on board. We shifted to building some features in a language that could be transcoded to the 3 platforms, but they are stuck with huge platform-specific codebases, and it is always going to be slow/expensive to build user-facing things. Rather than a big rebuild/migration project, we moved to cross-functional/fairly isolated teams (modelled on Kahneman's book) and tried to get them shipping relentlessly. We eventually managed to get all three flavours of devs contributing to each other's codebases - this was the biggest factor in unlocking speed.

Approaching this again, I would bring in an external trainer, do a long (3-4 day) retreat and try to reeducate the leadership / jointly come up with a New Deal. If that doesn't solve it, consider moving them away from technical leadership/replace them if you can.

 

[labbish]

@mormarw Thank you so much for the detailed response

 

[aachen_hexagon]

@mormarw

migrating from Vue to react because it was a better framework.

yo dats a downgrade homie

 

[mormarw]

@aachen_hexagon Give me jquery all day every day. Let's ship that shit brother.

 

[newbie2016]

@labbish you'd have to give more info about your coding background for context. Were you a hobbyist doing it for a short while (less than a year?) or were you a professional who did it for several years? That context matters.

It's almost like they are 100% incapable of making a quick and dirty functioning demo.

I'm not a betting man, but I would bet that describes you more than it does your technical cofounders.

So is the team lazy, or are your expectations unrealistic? Hard to say w/o looking at their code deliverables; However, based on this thread I would guess you are the type of person who wants all three (good, fast, and cheap) when everyone knows that you can only have two.