How I Manage
I’ve managed a lot of people. Not hundreds or thousands, but probably somewhere around 30 to 50 direct reports over time and I’ve learned a lot about management along the way.
I have some hard and fast rules—like don’t hire friends, hire slow, and fire fast. But beyond that, managing people is a craft. It’s a skill that involves building relationships with your reports, setting expectations clearly, and knowing when to get involved—and when to get out of the way.
Building Relationships
When I start working with someone new, I invest heavily in one-on-one time. I usually schedule two or three one-on-ones in the first week, one or two in the second week, then move to weekly, then bi-weekly, and eventually monthly. After about a quarter—roughly three months—most people shift into what I call "team mode."
In team mode, they attend team meetings, do their work, and function as part of the broader group. I’ll check in with them once a quarter on goals, what's going well, what's not, and career development.
There’s been a lot of public discussion about this lately—Jensen Huang, for instance, famously says he doesn’t do one-on-ones and has around 60 direct reports. That sounds extreme, but I actually get it. Your direct reports should be part of the team. Feedback can often be public—it’s faster, cleaner, and avoids the multi-hop miscommunications that come with over-structuring relationships.
Still, I believe that early relationship-building matters. It sets expectations, builds trust, and lays the foundation for everything else.
Setting Expectations
I like to establish clear expectations right away. There's the obvious stuff—payment contracts, benefits, legal documentation. But I also believe in what I call a soft contract.
The soft contract is about how we’ll work together. It’s a two-way street. If you’re doing something great, I have a clear system for how I recognize and reward that. If something’s going wrong, I have a system for how I’ll communicate that too. It’s not fancy—I just follow through on what I say.
This helps eliminate ambiguity. People know when they should be concerned and when they’re doing well. It creates clarity and reduces anxiety, which ultimately makes teams more effective.
High Standards Without Micromanagement
Managing isn’t about micromanaging. But it is about being deeply curious. With my direct reports, I try to stay very close to the details—not to control them, but to understand what they’re working on. I want to learn from them. Together, we make better decisions that way.
At the end of the day, work is about performance. And performance is about goals. I like to set extremely high standards and aggressive goals—especially in product, engineering, sales, and marketing.
For product and engineering, that might mean specific launch targets and hard deadlines. For sales, it’s simple: quotas. Then we follow up. Because goals without follow-up are meaningless. If we’re not measuring, we’re not achieving.