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Thinking about joining a fast-paced, high-growth startup? Trying to hire the right team to accelerate your growth? Aiming to build a high-performing, low-ego engineering team? Then there’s probably one key character trait to focus on — and it has nothing to do with engineering talent.

Just over a decade ago, Satya Nadella took over the helm at Microsoft from Steve Ballmer and instrumented perhaps one of the biggest recent turnarounds in Big Tech.

Prior to Nadella’s turn at the helm, Microsoft’s business model was still tightly focused on Windows licensing with cloud seemingly an afterthought. Over the last decade, Microsoft’s transformation has been nothing short of spectacular as Nadella drove a rapid pivot from the desktop era to the cloud computing era while playing catch-up with AWS. Had Nadella not righted the ship at that moment in time, it’s safe to say that Microsoft could have gone the way of IBM before them.

At first blush, it may seem odd to correlate Microsoft’s trajectory with startups; after all, what does a multi-trillion dollar behemoth like Microsoft have in common with startups?

It turns out that many startups can probably learn from Nadella’s embrace of growth mindset. In an interview with Inc., Nadella shared that successful people are defined by 3 words: Learn-It-All

[Say] you have two students — one of them has more innate capability, and the other has less. The person who has less, but is a learn-it-all, will ultimately [become] better. That applies to CEOs, and that applies to companies. I think it has been a helpful cultural metaphor for us to say that you can’t act like a know-it-all; you have to be a learn-it-all.

This he had learned through the work of a Stanford psychologist: Carol Dweck.

Growth Mindset

Dweck’s book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success introduced this term and defined the difference between a “growth mindset” and a “fixed mindset”.

Through her research, Dweck differentiates individuals who view traits like ability and intelligence as innate and immutable (fixed mindset) and those who view these traits as flexible (growth mindset). While it may seem a simple and trivial distinction, in fact, it is probably one of the key discriminators of those who will thrive at startups and those who will wither.

Listen to enough episodes of the How I Built This podcast, and it is clear that successful startups and founders are those that embraced the growth mindset. Intuitively, this makes sense: just about every successful startup zig-zags their way through a maze of failures, rejections, pivots, and crises. Those who approach this with a fixed mindset will capitulate before finding traction.

What This Means for Engineers

One of the challenges for engineers when joining a startup is that it can often be quite chaotic and overwhelming. Unlike Big Tech where there tends to be more well-defined processes, isolated teams, stable tooling and platforms, and carefully planned on-boarding flows, startups more often than not require individuals to jump right into the fire.

For many engineers (especially more senior ones), this can often lead to fast burnout and feelings despair with a heavy onset of imposter syndrome that can lead down an irrecoverable path of self-defeat. One hypothesis why this might have a stronger effect on more senior engineers is that they might have moved on from their growth mindset phase. This is why individually having a growth mindset (and organizationally embodying a growth mindset) is key: because it helps otherwise talented engineers find their footing.

When

reached out after joining Motion, he sought guidance on how to be productive and how to cope with the incredibly complex, multi-million line codebase at Motion. He had already been a high performing engineer (despite his short resume) that had tackled multiple complex projects across a variety of stacks (Next.js, React, Vue, Astro.js, C#, Postgres — he tackled them all with aplomb!). But at Motion, he found himself struggling to gain his footing; he started to question his own ability and competency.

To help right his mindset, I sent him the following LinkedIn post and left him with some simple advice: “embrace looking like an idiot.”

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“Embrace looking like an idiot” is perhaps one of the best pieces of advice any engineer can internalize as they prepare to jump into difficult and challenging problems.

This advice embodies what it means to have a growth mindset and is the key to finding success in almost any undertaking, but holds especially true for startups because there is simply less of a support apparatus in most cases. To get a footing and rapidly contribute requires simply letting go of ego and putting in the work while reflecting on the feedback.

Scott Brown — a carpenter with a fantastic YouTube channel— has one of my favorite clips on this that I often share as well when folks ask for advice on how to get better:

That’s not how you get better. The way you get better is by putting something out and going “Well, I’ll do better on the next one”. And then you do that week after week, month after month. Before you know it, your first video and your most recent video don’t look anything alike.

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Scott Brown reflecting on his 100th video and how he progressed from his first videos. https://www.youtube.com/clip/UgkxIwf3Yhmr4Pb3KlcBWE4DPghq9PPVgSSP

This perspective is important as engineers can view their current state and their current expertise as “fixed intrinsics” and that their value is in this existing expertise whereas thriving in a startup actually requires engineers to frequently step out of their comfort zone, learn new skills, deal with new complexities, and grow rapidly.

What This Means for Startup Teams

Many teams fail to foster this kind of environment and end up creating the opposite: an environment driven by the need to protect one’s ego. When this takes hold across the team, it will find itself accidentally oriented around a fixed mindset driven by ego — the exact opposite of what is desirable in a fast-paced, high-growth environment.

Gather a group of smart founders and talented engineers and it can be easy to create an environment where “I don’t know” or “Why? How?” become sacrilegious phrases when, in fact, these are some of the most powerful phrases in a team’s common grammar — so long as the team is oriented around a growth mindset.

Motion’s Culture Document explicitly emphasizes this mindset:

We encounter a lot of hard problems, most of which don’t have obvious answers. We aren’t constrained to any particular solution, and sometimes the best solution may sound crazy at first. We want an environment where every member of the team feels excited sharing new ideas, which will be respected and challenged by others.

There are many systematic ways that teams can right the ship and foster this culture:

• Leaders have to embody this and be ready to say “I don’t know” and always be openly seeking the expertise of others. This sets the tone that “not knowing” is not the same as “not capable”. “Not knowing” is always the first step on the path to true knowledge.
• Shape the onboarding process so that new hires understand that they are expected to **“embrace looking like an idiot” **for the first few weeks. Candidates may not have the right perspective that they were selected through an expensive and time consuming process and the team is making a bet on them. They may hyper-focus on their current ability rather than their ability to grow as the key reason for their selection. Make it clear that the goal is for them to learn fast and the best way to learn fast is by asking questions and making some mistakes along the way rather than protecting their ego. The more senior a hire, the more important it is to focus on this messaging because for these hires, they likely have their own high expectations.
• Foster a low-ego culture where even the most senior and capable resources (perhaps especially these) openly probe with genuine curiosity rather than probing maliciously with an attitude of self-preservation of the ego.
• Focus on a culture of documentation and sharing of responsibility (rather than singular ownership) as this creates an environment where knowledge is not siloed. Siloed knowledge can become a precursor to an ego-driven culture because it inflates the importance of the individual rather than the prosperity of the team. Documentation and transferability of knowledge are systematic ways to curtail this. Some engineers take the wrong view on this; they see siloing as protecting their job security and self-importance by creating a closed region of the company. Instead, they are simply falling into a fixed mindset of guarding their small empire. Successful leadership will ensure to equate growth with transferability of responsibility; to take on new and impactful work necessarily requires handing off established and stable work.

Teams and leaders should actively foster a culture of open comms, asking for help, and visible collaboration (especially important for remote teams) as this creates an operating environment where individuals focus on moving the ball forward rather than protecting their ego.

Shifting Hiring

One key mistake that many startups make is to confuse “badges” for “technical competency”. This is not to disparage the many supremely talented and capable engineers at Big Tech, but a caution that competency at a Big Tech may not transfer to a fast-paced startup environment because of the mindset shift.

(Author’s aside: I call this “badge dropping” and is one of my biggest pet peeves as badges can sometimes be a sign of being a good interviewer rather than being a great engineer.)

In fact, Harj Taggar, a YC partner dedicated a slide to this in one of the Startup School sessions where he discussed his experience coaching hundreds of startup teams:

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Harj Taggar cautioning teams from over-indexing on “badges” when hiring founding engineers. Harj advised teams to focus on builders instead.

Harj’s key point: many FAANG engineers will not thrive in a startup environment not because they do not have the technical ability, but because they have the wrong expectations and mindset.

Intuitively, there are several reasons why this approach of badge-driven hiring can be a flawed approach for high growth startups:

• In Big Tech, there is a lot of scaffolding already in place for most engineers to take advantage of. Many engineers are thus not broadly skilled in various areas of software delivery (e.g. CI, databases, actual implementation of systems architecture, etc.). In startups, everyone needs to be able to pitch in, even if outside of their technical comfort zone. To do so successfully requires one to oriented their mindset towards growth.
• Big Tech generally has many processes and procedures in place that are shaped for their specific operating environment. Those processes and procedures are more often than not antithetical to how high-growth companies like startups need to operate and individuals can bring that culture with them.
• Career growth in Big Tech often demands siloing — a dangerous trait for startups.
• Big Tech approaches to solving engineering challenges are often too heavy and complex for the needs of fast moving startups where teams should favor flexibility and seek approaches that bias towards adaptiveness.

Indeed, at one e-commerce startup which received an $8 million seed round* *partially predicated on hiring an all-Amazon engineering team, it quickly became clear within the first two weeks of joining that half of the engineering team simply had the wrong mindset to thrive at a startup. While some individuals embraced the autonomy, speed, and occasional chaos, others were clearly lost in that transition and required either a lot of hand-holding or would end up creating overly complex solution approaches that lacked flexibility and adaptability often required for meandering paths that startups undertake.

The other half? These were the engineers that embraced a growth mindset and quickly adapted while learning new skills, new platforms, and new technologies. Case in point: the team started with cumbersome Elastic Beanstalk based deployments driven by AWS CodeBuild because it was what the team had used in Amazon. But in a highly agile environment, a container-based deployment approach on Elastic Container Service better suited the fast-changing needs of the infrastructure as the product bounced between pivots.

Many hiring teams perhaps over-index on “badges” and under-index on “growth mindset” (which carries with it some other character traits like low ego and high adaptiveness). For Motion, a key objective is to find the individuals who are not only talented, but also bring with them a low-ego, growth mindset to help rapidly ship products to our customers.

Closing Thoughts

Motion’s Culture Document is one of the key reasons I made the choice to join the team as it aligned with my own ideals of an operating culture. Having speed run multiple startups over the last 5 years, one key lesson I take away from those experiences is the importance of “vibes” or culture.

As Brian Chesky of Airbnb opined in his essay Don’t Fuck Up the Culture,

Why is culture so important to a business? Here is a simple way to frame it. The stronger the culture, the less corporate process a company needs. When the culture is strong, you can trust everyone to do the right thing. People can be independent and autonomous. They can be entrepreneurial.

For Motion and other startup engineering teams, this can often be one of the biggest hurdles to get right and one of the easiest to stray from. Even a few bad hires or the wrong growth framework can lead to a virulent degradation of culture. Fostering a culture focused around a growth mindset and actively seeking “learn-it-alls” can right that ship.

For candidates and new hires joining startup teams, simply “embrace looking like an idiot” for the first few weeks and get as much feedback as you can. If an organization doesn’t foster, support, and embody that mindset? Then you’re not going to have a good time and better to cut your losses early!

If you have a growth mindset and you want to work with a low-ego, high-autonomy team, check out Motion’s Careers page and hit the apply button! We are growing rapidly; building greenfield projects in C#, TypeScript, React, Postgres; and always exploring creative (Grug-brained) engineering approaches to solving high-value business problems!