#151 - Startup School Week 10 Recap - Ali Rowghani on How to Lead and Kevin Hale and Adora Cheung on Startup School 2019 by the Numbers

**Kevin Hale** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going?

**Craig Cannon** (0:01)
This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast.
Today's episode is a recap of the 10th week of Startup School.
I've cut down the 10th week of lectures to be even shorter and combined them into one podcast. First, we'll have a lecture from Ali Rowghani. Ali's a partner at YC.

**Kevin Hale** (0:19)
His lecture covers how to lead.

**Craig Cannon** (0:21)
Then we'll have a lecture from Kevin Hale and Adora Cheung. Kevin and Adora are both partners at YC.
Their lecture breaks down this year's Startup School by the numbers and they share tips on what help companies most. All right, here we go. Good morning, everyone. My name is Ali Rowghani. I'm a partner at Y Combinator, and it's a pleasure to welcome you guys to this lecture.
And I understand it's one of the last ones in Startup School, which in a way is really appropriate because my talk is about leadership, which is something important but probably not top of mind for everyone in here. You've probably got more burning concerns as you're getting your startup off the ground and figuring out what to build and working through product market fit and fundraising and so on. But it's a really, really important long-term question because if any of you is gonna succeed in building a big company in the long term, you've got to really get good at leading, motivating, retaining great people. And so I just wanted to take some time this morning to share some of my experiences and hopefully help you guys develop a bit of an early mental model for how to think about leadership at your startups.
So first, a quick word about me.
Prior to Y Combinator, I had a 15-year career as an executive at two companies. The first was at Pixar, the animation studio, where I spent almost 10 years, and I was the CFO of Pixar for the last four. And then I spent about five years at Twitter, where I started as the CFO and then I was the COO.
And during that time, I had the amazing good fortune of getting a chance to work with and observe some really amazing leaders in action. People like the founder of Pixar, Ed Catmull, the CEO of Pixar, Steve Jobs, Twitter's founders, Jack Dorsey, Ev Williams, Biz Stone, and now some of the really amazing founder CEOs at YC. People like Patrick Collison and Peter Reinhardt, Drew Houston and so on. So I've had sort of a front row seat, being able to observe some great leaders in action. And so what I wanted to do is to share three observations on leadership that I've learned in my career. And as I said before, this may not be pertinent exactly today, if you're just a couple of people working on an idea, but hopefully for most of you, it will be pertinent very, very soon. So three observations on leadership. The first one is that there's no single archetype for a great leader. No single archetype. Great leaders come in all shapes and sizes, all personality types and characteristics. And I say this from personal experience because it was a big lesson for me. I used to think that there was kind of a single leadership persona, like a way you had to be, a way you had to act in order to be a great leader, to be followed by people. But it turns out that all of the great leaders that I work with and got to observe, they were all really different. Some were introverts, some were extroverts. Some were technologists, others were storytellers. Some were diplomatic and very calm, and others were emotional and a little bit hot-headed. Some were nerds and some were cool kids. So if you think about it, it's kind of a liberating idea actually that leaders come in all shapes and sizes, because it means that anyone fundamentally has the capabilities to become a great leader. But the other implication, which I think is also really important, and I'll touch on again later, is that in your quest to become a great leader, in your quest to have other people follow you, you have to be yourself. You have to be authentic to who you are. You can't try to be someone else if you want to be a great leader. You can't try to imitate Steve Jobs and hope that people will just kind of think that you are Steve Jobs. I remember reading a quote some years ago from Reed Hastings, the amazing CEO of Netflix, who basically said the same thing. He said for the first few years of his career as a CEO, he was just trying to imitate Steve Jobs. And he realized, well, that's impossible. I have to be Reed. And it was that simple sort of realization that helped him become a much better leader. So you can only be yourself in the end because humans are very good at detecting inauthenticity. We're really good at telling when someone is being fake. And we don't generally follow or trust those that we find inauthentic. So first observation on leadership is that there's not a single archetype. Anyone can be a great leader. But in order to do so, you have to be yourself. Second, while there's no single archetype, great leaders nevertheless share three fundamental attributes. And you kind of got to be really good at these three things if you want to be a great leader. The first is that great leaders think and communicate clearly. And this really makes all the sense in the world. If you're going to have other people follow you, if you're going to have other people want to do the thing you're compelling them to do, you have to be able to paint a clear and compelling vision of the future for them to be able to follow. And as a company grows, as any organization grows, your communication has to get better and better and better because you've got more diverse people who are hearing it. And your processes that you use to communicate can no longer be one on one, but they have to scale as the organization itself scales.