Paul Graham: Optimal Corporate Structure Resembles a Holding Company of Autonomous Units
Harj Taggar · 20VC: Biggest Takeaways From Working With Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston, Why You Should Put Off Hiring For As Long As Possible & Why Seed Stage Investing Is All About Optimising The Top Of The Funnel with Harj Taggar, Founder & CEO @ Triplebyte · Jan 20, 2017 · at 13:21
Harj Taggar, former Y Combinator partner, shares YC co-founder Paul Graham's overarching theory of organizational design and how it shaped YC's strategic growth.
0:00 / 0:22exact quote · 22.9s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“He genuinely believed that the optimal structure for a giant corporation is one that's more like a holding company that's, like, composed up of lots of more autonomous units are each doing well, and each of those units has operational control and is, you know, making its own decision, but, you know, it's sort of, you know, it has an infrastructure of a larger company behind it”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Harj Taggar
Taggar Predicts In-House Developer Recruitment Will Be Obsolete by 2022
“And so five years from now, the grand vision would be To think about like running your own hiring process versus just using triple byte as being as outdated as hiring engineers to build a database from scratch versus just using MySQL or Postgres.”
Taggar: Startups Should Not Scale Their Team While Finding Product-Market Fit
“You either want to be focused with the smallest possible team on finding product market fit, or you want to be Realize you have product market fit and just be in full on growing, scaling the team and making a functioning organization. You don't want to do both…”
Taggar: Venture Investors Need Operational Experience to Develop True Founder Empathy
“I'm a pretty strong believer that operational experience is pretty important to have in investors, and the reason is, and I think this is another thing that made sort of Paul and sort of Jessica great founders of YC or great investors of Y Cominature is that t…”
Taggar: Founders Must Experience Functional Pain Before Hiring for a Role
“If you raise around prematurely, if you raise like ten million dollars before you've kind of gone through that pain, now you're under pressure to hire people, and you might not have a clear sense of exactly who you need, because every, you know, you keep using…”
Taggar: Every Startup Faces Existential Threats Despite Positive External Optics
“And what I realized is that actually what happens is no matter how problematic or screwed your startup is, Everyone always presents externally that things are going fantastically. And so as a founder, you don't often realize this, that everyone starts up at pr…”
Taggar: Internal Execution Mistakes Kill Startups Far More Often Than Competitors
“You are just far more likely to not succeed because you make a mistake internally, right? Like either you know, you build the wrong product, you don't pay enough attention to your users, you hire the wrong people, or all of these things are far more likely to …”