Opinion
Shanley: New Relic is losing ground to Datadog due to product decisions
“I mean, like Lucerne from New Relic is obviously a great example. Has been successful in building up a lasting company. I mean, they're maybe losing ground to data dog these days, but that's, those are like product decisions.”
Insight
Shanley: Company Growth Is Driven by New Marketable Features
“One it's like new marketable features. That's what drives your business. Like everything, the existence of your company growth, et cetera, is going to be driven off of like new marketable features, basically.”
Insight
Shanley: Big company executives are probably ineffective at tiny startups
“I see a lot of people like they go and just try to get anybody like, oh, this person was good at some big co, right? Like, oh, this is a Nike executive and they'll like, for sure they'll be affected in my tiny little startup is probably not the case.”
Insight
Shanley: There is no shared understanding without written documentation and feedback
“Like there's no shared understanding unless you've written it down and it's like echoed back.”
Insight
Shanley: Founders Who Keep Jumping Across Roles Become Liabilities
“Early days, everybody's a generalist. Then you filled that in with, like, very specialized people, people that are very good at, like, very specific things. If you try to just, like, jump into all these different areas, you just, you become a liability.”
Insight
Shanley: Clear Strategic Priorities Empower Autonomous Decision Making
“Imagine going to your organization and clearly communicating where those sliders are. You can measure what the output was, but you're clearly communicating those expectations so that all of the small decisions that people make that don't get flagged up and don…”
Insight
Shanley: Inexperienced technical founders cannot evaluate business executive hires
“So it's ridiculous to think that suddenly magically you as a technical founder that hasn't been through the process before, hasn't run good market sales, marketing, business ops, like any of that stuff that you're going to be able to evaluate somebody's abilit…”
Insight
Shanley: Healthy founder relationships require operating agreements that avoid consensus
“I think in every relationship, it's healthy to have an operating agreement that you're not going to do it all by consensus. Someone has to make the decision, and other folks, they can disagree, but they can commit.”
Insight
Shanley: Building without sales and marketing feedback leads to wrong products
“In the absence of that feedback. Of like connecting with the team that's out selling it or the marketing team that's, you know, driving organic growth or whatever that is, you're just gonna like build stuff in a vacuum and it's not gonna be the right stuff. Li…”
Insight
Shanley: Founders fixate on specific solutions instead of the problem space
“People fixate on solutions and they don't fixate on kind of like, they don't bubble up to the next level. That is the problems. And that problem space of like what they're trying to solve. They get really like in love with a specific solution and they are look…”
