Thanks so much for your kind words, Ravi!
I feel under qualified to offer you too many answers on these questions, Ravi, but I’ll do my best to share my own experiences here, and you’re free to take whatever you want from them!
Converting doers into thinkers
I feel very fortunate to have an amazing team around me.
I have not previously made this separation between thinkers and doers as I believe the two can coexist within one person.
I am more familiar with going from a “maker” to a “manager” – a process I have been through with mixed results.
I think first, as I alluded to in answering another question, not everyone wants to be anything other than a doer – they want to be freaking amazing doer, and ideally you can accommodate that.
In terms of having great managers, I think the best advice to start that I have been given is “manage yourself first” – most of us struggle with that, so we end up making pretty poor managers of other people.
I also would say that my approach to managing people is to aim to set a vision and goals as clearly as possible (they can always be clearer), and to be there to listen, and to address the blockers people face from achieving those goals. Other than that, I try to get the hell out of the way.
Early on I mad too many mistakes by getting too involved, by mixing the making and the managing. You have to learn to let go – I am still learning this.
Finding great people to join you
It is always a challenge to attract talented people. I spend a lot of my time talking with people a lot smarter than me. I think most founders hope hiring will happen very quickly, but I look at companies like Stripe, and take a lot from their philosophy on hiring – good people are not usually looking for a job.
So finding good people for roles relies on having a big existing network of really great people. And you don’t build that over night. So in terms of finding and persuading people to join your team, I would look less at the money, and more at your network, and your own vision and why it’s so compelling that the smartest people you can think of should join.
When you’re small and early, the biggest thing you can offer is the potential of what could be – if you can’t sell that convincingly either to others or to yourself, then I’d push to figure that out, before worrying about the financial constraints. The smartest people definitely have financial needs, as do we all, but they will also need to understand the upside and risks of joining you.
Hope this is valuable – let me know if I can expand further, Ravi.