When people ask me how startup life is I talk a lot about the roller coaster. You can be on top of the world and in the pits of the despair in the same day. One of the struggles is that often you are the only person thinking about something and so many burdens rest entirely on your shoulders. I've found these 4 things help:
1. Having very frank and open conversations with your co-founders. Hopefully you have a founding team you can be really honest with. Go on walks. Talk about your feelings. It can take awhile to build this relationship but it's very worth it.
2. Find mentors. Doesn't have to be someone you meet with every month (though those are great too!) but if you're struggling with some imposter syndrome on a new task ask your investors to intro you to 2-3 people who have done that thing well before. Everyone is happy to share advice. I go into those meetings and say "Hey I'm XYZ, I'm working on this ABC task and would love your advice, here is what we are doing today and what we're planning on doing. What would you do if you were me?"
3. Get a coach. You investors can probably intro you to someone. They can run from $250-$1000+ an hour but very worth it. I meet with my coach 2x a month and it's kind of work therapy. A chance for me to be very vulnerable about where I am and to talk out my problems.
4. Show some vulnerability to your company. Every now and then saying hey I'm not sure about this thing or I'm new to this can actually inspire more faith in you because then when you say hey I'm confident in this thing, they believe you more since you were willing to share a time when you weren't confident. Also can inspire them to speak up if they aren't sure. If we all go around pretending we know everything all the time then our employees will do that too and then you have a culture where things aren't optimal but people don't think they can talk about it or get help.
I'm a solo founder. Still looking for my better half/halves while building the startup. And because of this, I spend a decent amount of time reaching out to other founders for advice & mentorship.
Getting a coach is on my to-do list once we have enough traction/funding.
You are either a company who knows how to make remote work -- in which case it doesn't matter where people live and you can afford to pay them the same rates. Or you're a company that can't make remote works and relies on having people go into the office, and if so you can get by with paying local rates. But as more and more companies figure out remote work, I think local rates will mostly disappear, especially for developers.
The answer is yes! 1000% yes. Coaching has been the most valuable resource to me in becoming a leader. I have my own coach but my team uses Torch.io and really likes it.
Streamlit for Teams is in private beta, so prices are still negotiated case by case. When it is open to everyone in a few months, the prices will be on the website. And the goal is to make it so that it's affordable for even very small companies.
I would start with going back to what has and has not been working for your company during the pandemic. Check with your employees on what their feelings are. Try to distill that into what you want culturally. We were an almost entirely local company before the pandemic and have now embraced remote. So returning to the office for us means being very mindful that over half of our company will always be remote and making sure that they are still involved in decisions, team building, etc. as opposed to an ad hoc office culture where bonds and decisions are made in hallways.
Check the GitHub repos of people who are on the team. Company code might be private but you can get a sense of who is on the team and how they code. Also see if you can talk to teammates before joining to get a sense of what the day to day is like. There are great engineering teams in the sense of eng practices but horrible culture in terms of management, getting along well with other orgs, etc. So you want to make sure you have both.
