Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth: evaluation

Transcript context

…So maybe just to close out that thread, when you talk to founders, what advice do you give them along these lines? I want to be cautious about this because the first thing I tell founders is that I've never been a founder. And I want to recognize the difference. I joined January 9th, 2006. That's almost two years after Mark started the company. I didn't have to do, I wasn't involved with fundraising. I didn't have to do any of that side of things. And I didn't have to deal with, you know, the board or like the business side of things. I really was lucky in a way to have joined when I did. But the first thing I tell founders is like, you should take my advice with a grain of salt. I have not actually been in your shoes. If I can compliment you really, one of the things I like about your program is there's a whole system of professionals, right? in our industry. And I was when I grew up in technology in the valley, right? You always heard about like the ACM, right, the Association of computing machinery, you're these legendary professional organizations that supported people in our fields. And By the nature of the rapid pace of change in the technology and the nature of the engagement of those institutions, even academics, even academia broadly, kind of are out of touch. The tools that you got from those places weren't useful in our field. So I do think the mentorship that we give each other has been a critical and sustaining resource. There is today now resources like your podcast and your newsletter that are actually really designed to help people who are professionals in our industry in a way that has almost kind of missing for 15, 20 years. And I love to see that because if you're an up and coming PM, literally you used to have to know somebody and ask them a question. And so a lot of times what I'm helping founders with, I can help them with the strategy. I can help them think through the technology choices. I can think through business. I can think through the management, the organization structure. But I also try to be very clear. There's a bunch of stuff that I just was never had to expose to. So even as we just talk about how tough it was for the average engineer joining Facebook in 2006, man, it was even tougher for Mark Zuckerberg in 2004, probably. And that's a story that's been told, I'm sure, but still. So I think these are both, it's just like, it's almost all scale invariant. No matter how far you dial back, the challenges kind of are interesting and are worth talking about. One of maybe your most popular posts is this quote that you share about the advice you often give. What you say is, the advice I find I have to give more frequently than any other in my career as a manager, a board member, an advisor, and a friend is for people to more directly leverage their leaders. Can you talk about that and what that means and what that looks like?…

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