#135 - Camille Fournier

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is with Camille Fournier. Camille is a managing director at Two Sigma and the former CTO of Rent The Runway. She's also the author of The Manager's Path, A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change. You can find her on Twitter, at Scamille. And a quick YC announcement. If you're interested in doing Startup School this year, signups are open at startupschool.org.
The course begins on July 22nd and goes for 10 weeks. Select companies who complete the course will also receive $15,000 in equity-free funding. You can sign up at startupschool.org and I'll link it up in the description too. All right, here we go.
One of the things you mentioned in the book that I found particularly interesting was a lot of people, as ICs, never experienced great managers. Why do you think that's the case?

**Camille Fournier** (0:55)
I mean, first of all, I think there's just a lot of bad managers out there. Part of the reason I wrote the book was that I had seen a lot of people who had never had a good manager, and I felt like there were a lot of people who wanted to be good managers but didn't even really know where to try or where to start, especially when it comes to engineering management, which I feel like is a little bit different than just generic people management.
So first of all, I just think there's not that many good managers out there.
And then it's interesting that I'm talking on this Y Combinator podcast because I think the thing that got me really writing a lot about management in the first place when I started blogging about it was actually that there was this really big sentiment in the tech industry and particularly in startups right around 2010, 2011 when I was first doing the startup thing myself, which was that management is bad, management is overhead, flat structures are the best, hire smart people and get out of their way. I think at that time Google still had their 50 people to one manager kind of structure. All of these companies and a lot of successful companies that had started in Silicon Valley that were startups really had this very negative reaction to management and hierarchy. They thought it was bureaucratic and a waste of time. I had worked at Goldman Sachs where there was management. I had come to this startup and I was looking around and I was like, the thing that I'm observing is that actually management is pretty important. That good management is actually a pretty important part of making engineering teams effective, making companies effective. It just simply isn't true that management is overhead or waste.
That I had all these friends who had had really bad management experiences. I was like, I think there's something to be said about this. I think there's something for people to learn about this so that they can appreciate it more. That's kind of what got me into writing about the topic in the first place. That's part of why I wrote the book was that I wanted there to be more good material for people that would help them appreciate management, help them understand that it's kind of a hard and special discipline, but it's also a technical discipline and not just something that any random people manager can do.

**Craig Cannon** (3:15)
Right. It's addressed in the book, but you're like, this is not a bullshit job. This is a real thing and it's important.
Now, why do you think that ideology, because it was definitely pervasive and it still is to a certain extent, why did that become so common within tech and more specifically within startups?

**Camille Fournier** (3:34)
I think the thing is when you're a really, really small startup, like, yeah, you don't necessarily need to think that much about management. When it's a very small group of people that are all just really very closely working together on very obvious objectives, and you've all already agreed to have a lot of skin in the game because you're probably not getting paid all that much money, and it's all about sort of these future rewards. I don't think that management, I'm sure a great manager in that situation who also happened to be a great founder and strategic thinker might be great or super helpful, I don't know.
Realistically, there are other more important things, but at some point you get enough people that you need to really coordinate work amongst people who are not just joined at the hip talking to each other all the time completely on the same wavelength, and that's when structure and hierarchy and some kind of management starts to become more important. And so I think it's really just, I think like when you have a lot of people who have seen success at these very small stages and they believe incorrectly that the thing that made them successful is just like, well, we just got these smart people together and let them do what they thought was right and, you know, success happened. You can take the kind of wrong lesson from that. And I think that contributes to this sort of, you know, not a disregard for management.