Minimum viable BS.
How to root out and destroy bureaucracy in your startup.
You’ve been hacking your way through a dense rainforest for weeks. You’re cutting vines, you’re fighting off snakes, you’re dodging quicksand. You’re making steady progress, and are starting to see a clearing. Just then, a well-coiffed head on top of a blue buttoned-down torso pops out from behind a tree.
“Hi there! I’m John from HR. Just checking in to make sure you’ve filled out your team’s monthly pulse check! We’ll need all of your directs’ forms submitted for review in Slappling by 5am on Sunday, and - a very important reminder - please be sure to read and follow the instructions we sent via Mouseface.io two weeks ago or those submissions risk being rejected by our HR AI bot, Harold the Dickhead. Also please schedule your review of those reviews with your manager by September 12th so that they can schedule their review of your reviews review with their manager by Octvember 41st.”
You take a moment to digest this information, and ultimately decide the best way forward is to call it a good game and yeet yourself into a nearby volcano.
This, my friends, will not be a screed against HR, not least of which because I’ve had the opportunity to work alongside some of the very best people operators out there.
No, this is a rant-masked-as-a-blog-post about bureaucracy, the institutional virus most likely to sap your fledgling startup of the oxygen it desperately needs to survive.
What will very often happen is that as a startup begins facing headwinds, and goals start getting missed, founders and their teams will take their eye off of their business and start increasingly pointing their fingers at the organization. “We need more seasoned executives,” or “we need to make sure xyx gets triple approval,” or “we need to fire people faster.” That if only they could find the right mix of environmental conditions and controls their teams would come alive and their business would flourish.
Bureaucracy, then, typically arrives at your scaling company in one of three flavors. The first is that to do more things, you start adding more people. And along with those people comes the complexity of aligning all of their opinions, styles, and interests. The second is in more processes and approvals; all your new people are going to want to make sure that everyone else does exactly what they want, and will thus start implementing systems to ensure they do. And finally, all these new people will, somewhat paradoxically, want to add more meetings for the things they care about while simultaneously being a blocker to their peers trying to do the same.
The below are a few ways in which DoorDash tried to combat this omnipresent threat to organizational sanity.
Everyone rows the boat.
First and foremost, DoorDash had a culture wherein “everyone rows”; you’re either executing against the core business (you’re operators running markets, you’re engineers building software, you’re marketers acquiring customers) or you’re working your tail off to help those people succeed.
During DoorDash’s hyper growth my recruiting partner wasn’t just telling me how to self-serve on a new hire, she was drafting job descriptions, scheduling interviews, and shepherding offer approvals. Similarly, my legal partner didn’t exist solely to slap my wrist, but was rather a core member of our team, taking full-ownership over policing our vendors who’d breached our contracts. And maybe most surprisingly, my finance business partner wasn’t just the person emailing me what my budget needed to be each quarter, but instead, was there to help brainstorm how we were going to hit it (or even, on occasion, negotiate it up).
In short, everyone was expected to pick up an oar to propel the business forward, and how much influence you were granted over how others spent their time was in direct proportion to how hard you yourself were rowing.
Incentives over approvals.
I remember, once upon a time, consulting for a large US restaurant chain. That chain felt that millennials were increasingly asking for a wider diversity of beer choices, and as such they needed to expand their bar taps from 6 to 12.
After a year of committee meetings, due diligence, and reviews on top of reviews, the final conclusion was: “sorry, this is impossible.”
The culprit in this case was a labyrinth of unchecked approval processes. The procurement team vetoed it because it would mess with their trade credits from large beverage companies. The facilities team vetoed it because they didn’t want to add the complexity. The people team vetoed it because… I literally can’t even remember why.
My grad school classmate Cassie Young has a great, yet simple framing for this situation, that’s effectively, “marketing can’t be crushing it if your business isn’t crushing it.” Said differently, no one department’s priorities should ever supersede doing what’s in the best interest of the business as a whole, and as such incentives should always be set to orient teams to the company’s North Star objective.
Your stupid software is not my problem, Doug.
As companies grow there’s often this wild phenomenon where functions - especially central functions - mutate from supporting the business to simply supporting themselves. From providing exceptional stakeholder customer service to demanding the following of elaborate, frustrating processes. The zenith of this transition is often when these functions - finance, HR, security, procurement, others - start buying software that, in short, allows them to pester and annoy you and your team, at far greater ease for themselves.
You need to hire someone? Please go add a hiring profile to our new application system, go add a recruiting loop to our new interview scheduling system, go get a salary range from our payroll system. Need to buy some new technology? Please go add it to our procurement system, take a number, and we’ll get back to you in the order in which your request was received. Need a new desk chair? No problem, but first: have you instead considered that it might be easier to just quit the company?
DoorDash, to its credit, did its very best to avoid these pitfalls, with a simple framing that was effectively: if you require an input - a form, a piece of data, an answer - from someone else, it’s your responsibility to go get it. This meant that it was at least unofficially acceptable to ignore the first, second, and third automated request for something because you knew that if the person asking really needed it, they would follow-up with you directly. And that, “Alice didn’t fill out the form I needed” was never an acceptable defense, in the event you ended up missing your own deadline. If you really needed Alice’s input you should have gone and got it from her. In this way, operators could focus on their core goals and cumbersome, expensive, software-enabled processes were kept to a minimum.
Every function gets one chair.
You know that thing where you think you have a grown-up business, so you start hiring senior talent from Google, and then one day you wake up with a Vice President of Whatever walking the halls with an entourage like they’re the Vice President of the United States?
At DoorDash there was the assumption that if you were going to spend budget to hire someone under you, that you were going to hire someone talented enough to represent you, your team, and your objectives in any meeting they might need to be in (without you also needing to attend). The result was that meetings, when needed, could be scheduled relatively easily and they were lean, effective forums for collaboration and problem solving.
Bureaucracy attracts bureaucrats, deflates sickos.
The issue with bureaucracy is not only that it slows your company down, it’s also that it attracts bureaucrats. And why wouldn’t it; there are a whole class of people who’ve made lucrative careers simply out of their ability to load cumbersome, parasitic processes into previously high-performing organizations, and then install themselves at the managers of those processes. And who can blame them; what’s easier than collecting a post-IPO salary while making your entire job simply forcing others to do the things you need them to. But as a founder, your job is to be the headwind against this force; not only because bureaucracy distracts from ultimately achieving your goals, but it also dramatically saps energy from your best teammates, the very teammates your business depends on for its enduring success.