Discussing “Role Dilemmas” by Noam Wasserman

Written by Lance Hillis

I hope y’all have spent some time watching “Silicon Valley”. If you haven’t, its a comedy series on HBO created by Mike Judge, which goes through the life cycle of a startup in Silicon Valley. Well, the show explores a lot of founders obstacles, such as equity splits, founders working for absolutely no money, and right from the beginning they “discuss” role dilemmas. They have a scene where they’re interviewing other folks from within the business incubator where they all work, for the company of focus, “Pied Piper”.

Here is a scene where the founder Jared, is interviewing the other potential cofounders, Gilfoyle and Dinesh, both of whom prove instrumental in the success of Pied Piper but also butt heads at every instance: (NSFW for language). In this show, they each have defined roles, but constantly argue over who has more equity, and who is the CTO as they find further success in a pretty hilarious way. With that said, they face many of these issues throughout the show, including overlapping responsibilities and division of labor.

Overlapping Responsibilities: Pros and Cons

Overlapping roles can allow flexibility to Founders. The Smartix Team had three cofounders with overlapping responsibilities, which allowed them as three highly educated and experienced engineers to work fluidly together with no defined responsibilities. It also gave them the advantage of a homogenous mind-meld, where they could all draw on each other’s experience in building the company. However, as the company grew and the challenges became more complex, they began to butt heads about their approach on different problems, and having their egos battle over fulfilling client’s needs.

There are multiple ways to avoid some of the overlap in responsibilities weaknesses, namely, by bringing individuals in as employees rather than additional founders. In my previous post, “Avoiding Fallouts Between Founders By Defining Roles“, I discussed the book “How To Hire A-Players by Eric Herrenkohl. and one example of avoiding overlap of responsibilities was when the Herzogs, the owners of a Fleet Feet Sports franchise location, brought in Eddie as a general manager in their store. This one hire freed them from being the single linchpin that held this location together.

Roei Samuel, a Youtuber and Serial Entrepreneur, warns in his video, “7 Founder Mistakes to Avoid that Nobody Warns You About” to avoid giving Senior Titles away too early. Samuel understands the instinct to assign titles to give your company credibility and reward individuals for their work, but he argues that you should focus on figuring out what others do well before making these decisions. He notes an example of giving someone who’s talents were more aligned as a mid-level marketing lead the CMO position, and that he later figured out that maybe he was a bit too green for the role, and would have rather brought in a more experienced individual to fill in as a CMO.

Division of Labor: Pros and Cons

In a “division of labor” approach for founders, there’s a number of advantages, especially as your business reaches scale. First, the delegation of responsibility becomes much clearer. Titles, departments, and teams for founders begin to develop under a department head’s vision, and it’s easier to hold those individuals accountable, and measure performance more accurately and provide adequate incentive.

Division of labor does have its faults though. Collaboration could be harder and can lead to disconnection. I’ll point out an issue that came to mind that wasn’t related to collaboration issues between founders, but between departments. In one of the companies that I used to work for in e-commerce, they had acquired a number of other smaller companies in an effort to establish various departments to gain competitive market share in its industry. However, there were some very distinct issues with collaborating across different departments because each smaller company had already established a culture, habits and connections within their own territories. This led to a number of communication related issues between departments as the company worked to establish a collaborative national identity for all of these smaller, regional companies.

One other consideration is that roles are defined and redefined over time, meaning that a business may shift from having one role approach to another. Overlapping roles will typically shift towards a division of labor over time, as founders experience grows, the company grows, responsibilities are shifted and become clearer to their respective founders. This is a positive development, but what this means is that homogenous teams inevitably face role dilemmas, as their talent eventually doesn’t match their respective responsibilities. This can lead to further disputes, and potentially removing founders from their roles.