Yet another 10 things I learned after being CEO for another year

I have developed a habit of documenting everything that I’ve learned throughout the year and compiling a list of 10 most important of those. I hope you did have a chance to checkout my 10 things learned from the previous year, here are my discoveries for this year.

1. Consistency is the key

Baking cookies consistently provides better results than doing rocket science occasionally. Make sure you are consistent in your pursuits. At the end of the day your customers look for an expertise.

2. Get your plan together

You have to have a plan. The best thing about having a plan is that it gives you a vector and acts as an evaluation tool. You can still move forward without a plan, but you move lot faster when all the effort is aligned towards your goal. Suddenly it is lot easier to answer questions when you’ve got a plan. Should we do this? Yes, because it helps us with our plan, no because although it is great it drags us away from our plan.

3. Plan A will always fail

Plans change, you change directions, or they simply did not work out. Have a plan B, not only plan B, get yourself a plan C. The greatest boxing mind (nope, I did not say the best boxer) that has ever stepped into the ring — Floyd Money Mayweather (boxing record 50:0, haven’t been knocked down in his entire career) was constantly executing 3–4 game plans in a single fight, for the record fight lasts 36 minutes at tops. In fact, if you analyze Mayweather’s performance in early rounds, you will find out that in most of the cases he is losing the opening rounds, meaning that pretty much all the time his initial plan fails, but the record speaks for itself. The biggest asset of Mayweather throughout his boxing career was not his speed, chin or even his defense, his biggest asset is the ability of making adjustment during the fight.

4. Rest API

You need to rest. Every time you think about taking vacation there are million excuses — the clock is ticking, can’t do it right now, too busy, not a perfect time , etc., the truth is if you are running startup there won’t be a perfect time. Just make a plan, pack and go. I’ve seen hundreds of stories with a happy end that started with a failed startup, and very few that started with a failed health.

5. Ask ridiculous questions

While interviewing engineers ask them ridiculous questions. Questions that are interesting from technical perspective, but pretty much do not make sense in the real life. How would you code in JavaScript if suddenly there were no arrays? Only XMLHttpRequest is allowed, how would you implement Promises? How would you implement a C++ IDE for an iPhone? Passionate engineers don’t ask you why, they don’t say it is stupid or it doesn’t make sense, they start looking for solutions.

6. Your gut feeling actually works

I have a very little understanding of what the gut feeling is or how it works. Whatever crazy neural network has been put to work over there, you better trust it.

7.Pain is not a good enough reason to stop

It is unfortunate, but life doesn’t care if you don’t accomplish anything, no matter what the circumstances are. All the emotional ups and downs, all the pain, all the struggling… if you haven’t done it, you haven’t done it, doesn’t matter why. When it comes to life, there are only few basic things you can count on — time goes by, we get older, everybody dies, the rest of the stuff you have to earn yourself.

8. Working with you

Be one of the reasons for people to join your team.

9.Never stop hiring

You should always be hiring. Always look for the best people out there to join your team. Keep a constant pool of candidates. Having no need for new people is not an answer, but it is probably a darn good question; why don’t you need a new people? Is it possible that your company stopped growing?

10.Own your creativity

We — engineers are always looking for a creative work, work that is beyond copying, but rather is an act of creation. Most of the time we don’t realize that it is up to us to make our work creative. Whenever asked to create a complex set of filters, you can either shove in whole bunch of if statements, or create a small rule engine, it is up to you.