Insight
Brescia: Saying 'yes' to everything is terrible advice for startup founders
“Honestly, it's terrible advice. Saying no to most of what comes your way is key to maintaining control over your time and focus.”
Opinion
Brescia: Most founders waste excessive time on low-value operational chores
“Virtually every founder I know spends way too much time on operational items such as scheduling, finding and maintaining office space, setting up payroll and other things that are necessary, but not what really adds value to the business.”
Insight
Brescia: Founders will not get more free time as their companies grow
“It's really, really hard to take time off when you're building and growing a company, and I'll tell you that if you believe you'll have time someday when the company is larger and more established and has more employees, you're wrong. It's never the case.”
Insight
Brescia: Leaders must repeat important messages five times across five different formats
“Someone once told me, if you want folks to remember something, you have to tell them five times in five different ways, and I think that's a great way to think about it.”
Insight
Brescia: Keep acquisition discussions limited to the smallest possible group
“So it's best to keep the discussion within the smallest group of folks possible so you don't disrupt the business and create unnecessary stress and uncertainty for your team while you're working through the details.”
Insight
Brescia: Big-company sales leaders are often wrong for early-stage startups
“Someone coming out of a very large company not, might not be right for leading sales at a very small one where you need to develop a whole new playbook or build a funnel from zero. You need different types of skills at different times in your company's growth.”
Insight
Brescia: Extreme founder frugality and DIY chores severely slowed Bitnami's early growth
“You know, when I reflect on Bitnami, we tried to do way too much too early in the early days. I was literally doing everything. You hear this a lot, like, you know, founders take out the trash. I definitely did that. I did everything. I even cooked for the tea…”
Insight
Brescia: Scaling startups cannot give new executive hires time to level up
“You really don't have time to give a lot of time to executives to kind of
Get up to speed or level up.
Unfortunately, that's just not what you need an executive leader as you're as you're scaling a company and it's just time you can't afford to take.”
Assertion Supported
Brescia: GitHub doubled headcount to over 2,300 employees since her arrival
“It's also been quite a whirlwind, as on top of everything that we've had happening in the world in 2020, we've also doubled in size since I joined, to over 2300 employees spread all over the world.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Brescia: GitHub managed 2,000 remote employees and 50M developers in 2020
“We have offices and co-working spaces worldwide that had to close, eight active real estate projects to put on hold and redesign, over 2000 employees working remotely, vendors who are important to our culture but could no longer come to our offices, customers …”
Insight
Brescia: Interview unhireable top executives to define criteria for your open roles
“Go and meet as many exceptional folks for whatever role you're trying to fill as possible. Find the folks that are really at the On top of their game, even if there's no way you'll be able to hire them, and ask them about their roles, what it makes takes for s…”
Insight
Brescia: Obsessing over competitor moves usually just holds early startups back
“I think it's easy to get kind of tied up and too worried about what your competitors are doing and obsessing about them. And most of the times it will just hold you back.”
What-if
Brescia: Centralizing COVID decisions would have crippled GitHub's response time
“If I had made every single one of the decisions on how to respond across every aspect of our business, it would have taken far too long to execute, and our customers and employees would have been left wondering where we were and what we were doing. We could ha…”
Disclosure
Brescia: Bitnami almost raised funding for an enterprise launch before its acquisition
“In the case of Bitnami, we were at a point where we were going to launch an enterprise Product. And we had been bootstrapping for a long time, and now we're going to need to raise funding or basically sell the company. And we went out to do the funding round i…”
