Building a Successful Company, Sharing Ideas Online, and Career Cheat Codes
Thursday Three: Episode 2
read time 4 minutes
Here are three interesting ideas you won’t find doomscrolling.
TL;DR
Four secrets for building a successful company from Mårten Mickos
Why you should share your ideas online from Daniel Miessler
Two career cheat codes from Shaan Puri
Four secrets for building a successful company from Mårten Mickos
I’m currently in Philadelphia for HackerOne Revenue Kick Off.
Our CEO, Mårten Mickos, started off the event by giving a speech about where we are at, where we are going, and his four secrets to building a successful company.
Mårten has been the CEO of HackerOne for eight years, but formerly worked as the SVP and GM of Hewlett-Packard's Cloud Business, CEO of Eucalyptus, EIR at Benchmark Capital and Index Ventures, SVP and GM of the Database Group of Sun Microsystems, and CEO of MySQL AB.
CLEARLY, he knows a thing or two about building a successful business…
What are his secrets?
Get the right people on the bus: Identify the roles your company needs to succeed—the seats on the bus. And then fill those seats with the great people.
Demonstrate category leadership: Everyone should be able to easily explain what your company does. If you can’t explain it to your grandma, then it’s too complex.
Create an unconventional product: This doesn’t necessarily mean building the shiniest most innovative new technology. It means building the systems and processes—with the right tools and people—to deliver a spectacular product. For example, there are a few companies that offer bug bounty. But bug bounty is just a product. And successful companies build unconventional products. An unconventional bug bounty program is one with the support to continue to deliver value over time—which is what HackerOne does.
Everyone in the company needs to be selling: This is pretty straight forward. But everyone has to be all in. You can’t have those people who are like “I don’t want to sell. I don’t like selling.” People who work at successful companies understand they’re always selling. Hiring someone? You’re selling the candidate on the role. Selecting a new vendor? You’re selling your leadership on the vendor. Everyone sells.
Why you should share your ideas online from Daniel Miessler
Daniel Miessler writes one of the best and most recognized newsletters in the security industry called Unsupervised Learning. He recently published a newsletter sharing how he went from a $350K FTE to $700K+ doing his own thing.
He shared one bit of advice that got me particularly fired up. I read it and a lightbulb went off in my head—“This is why I need to write. This is why it’s important for me to share my ideas with the world.”
What I’m saying is that it’s fine to be part of a startup, or a business, or a job, or a corporation. Fine. Not a problem. All good.
But you have to be yourself first. The true version of yourself. The powerful version of yourself. You have to be that named, super-talented version.
And that requires that you focus internally, on yourself.
In other words, you need to focus on your identity. Your mission. Your goals. Your metrics. You have to know what those are. You have to figure them out and be able to describe them to others.
Then you grow your skills. You learn in public. You share things on a website. In a newsletter. Etc. Not so you can become some blow-hard “influencer”.
No. So you can become the full version of yourself. The version that doesn’t hide. And feel shy. And stay quiet when you know the answer.
Once you become that, only then will you be ready to go into a corporate job in the proper orientation. And then you can have a wonderful, healthy, and fruitful stint at the company.
Maybe that lasts 2 years. Maybe you stay for 12. But you do it on your terms, without being treated like a goddamn stapler.
Two career cheat codes from Shaan Puri
Last week, I was listening to an episode of My First Million and Sam and Shaan shared their 16 fastests ways to get promoted. Two strategies stuck out to me:
Start an internal newsletter: This is something Shaan did after his company got acquired by Twitch. It doesn’t need to be anything crazy. Shaan modelled his newsletter off James Clear’s 3-2-1 Newsletter sharing three ideas, two quotes and a photo. The benefit of creating a newsletter—and why it would help you get promoted (especially at a larger company)—is that it’ll help you build relationships and stand out.
Create a list of what you want out of the company you work for: Shaan talks about how most people go to work for companies, and just sit back and expect their company to give them everything they want and magically promote them over time. That’s not how it works. The best employees are the ones who understand what opportunities and skills they want from their company. For Shaan this came down to three things:
Respect from his CEO
Learning skills to help him reach the next level of his career
A team of five people he could steal if he were to switch companies (or start his own)
Austin’s Recommendations
There’s nothing I nerd out on more than personal finance. Okay, maybe CrossFit… But I love jamming on personal finance too.
If you’re semi-interested in personal finance, you’ve heard of Mint—Intuit’s budgeting app they recently decided to shut it down, which left me scrambling to find a new app!
Luckily, my boss is a huuuge personal finance guy and recommended I check out Monarch Money. So I used it for a month and fell in love with it. They make it super easy to categorize transactions and track your net worth.
I actually like it better than Mint.
If you want to try it out, Monarch is offering a free 30 day trial. Grab it below and let me know what you think.