Don’t accidentally steer the ship

In the earliest days of building a company, when it’s just you and your cofounders, you can think out loud. You have a deep personal relationship with everyone, and you’re among your peers.

As your company grows, a funny thing happens. You become “the boss,” and everything you say becomes a strict directive, even if it’s something you happened to mention in passing without giving it much thought.

This power can be incredibly valuable. If your company is in trouble, you’re the one person who can cause the company to successfully course-correct. But if you’re not careful, it’s easy to accidentally invoke, in a way that will take you much further off course than you’d expect.

Here’s a lighthearted example: One of our early employees was a guy named Shrav. Shrav was Pilot’s first marketer, and an engineer by training. Shrav deeply embodied the “I’ll do whatever important thing needs to be done” ethos that you really want in your startup team. (Shrav is now the founder of his own successful startup.)

One day, after we’d moved into a new office, Shrav was mounting a TV in one of our new conference rooms. (Why was our head of marketing installing conference room hardware? See above.) I then had a meeting in that same conference room, glanced at the wall, and remarked to myself that the TV was mounted a bit too high. Not in a way that was really a problem, but not where I would have ideally put it.

To this day, I really don’t recall saying anything to anyone. But apparently I did, because I walked by the conference room later that afternoon and saw Shrav, drill in hand, remounting the TV.

“They said you need this lowered,” he explained.

Clearly, I had made an off-the-cuff comment to someone, and that made its way back to Shrav as “Waseem needs the TV moved right now.” I never figured out who exactly “they” was, but I learned an important lesson: even though “remounting the TV” was the literal last thing on my list of priorities, an offhand comment very easily turned into “The CEO insists this is your next priority” for somebody on the team. 

This is a dangerous power, and it means that you need to be extremely careful about what you say about ideas, suggestions, and priorities. People will interpret them as fully-formed directives that you feel strongly about, not just passing thoughts, and will treat them accordingly.

Don’t accidentally steer the ship.