Letter 021 - Education & Infrastructure For Startups (back from honeymoon!)
Lessons from the world of economic development
Hey folks!
The three-week hiatus is over, and getting back into my writing groove here in Hotlanta (and it is hot — pretty sure it’s 95 degrees outside right now…). Been super into this book recently, and it inspired some thoughts around how earlier-stage companies could think more about how to upskill current employees and also ensure healthy investment in the infrastructure that they utilize.
While I was escaping the cool this weekend, I spent some time almost finishing one of Ray Dalio’s recent books, The Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed or Fail. As he’s going through the rise and decline of empires over the last 1000 years (Asian, Dutch, British, American…), he writes about how countries that invest heavily in education & infrastructure have a significant advantage in remaining competitive and technologically vibrant.
This is not a new lesson to me. Back when I was in school I absolutely devoured any content related to economic development, and in that course of study you come across a certain set of principles for how countries grow. They’re largely consistent — things like the rule of law, adequate defense spending, well thought-out geopolitical strategy, etc. etc. But I don’t often hear of leaders thinking about education & infrastructure in the context of a company. We probably call them different things, but let me apply it more bluntly.
Education spending = funds spent on the education of a group
Infrastructure spending = funds spent to give people access to physical and digital tools that help them live better lives.
While there are certainly differences between a country and a company, they both — at the end of the day — are a form of organization. Households, Neighborhoods, Cities, Counties, States, Regions can roughly equate to Sub-teams, teams, departments, organizations, and companies (this isn’t a perfect 1-1 match, but you get the point).
Just like we think about infrastructure and education spending at the political level in our countries, so too should we about these factors within our own companies.
Ongoing education within a company is what helps keep it vibrant, and what helps to ensure that a culture remains inclusive. I, for one, have deeply appreciated the education I’ve received on things like unconscious bias, for example
Ongoing education can take other forms too: learning a new software development framework, learning how to become a more effective public speaker, understanding a new customer success framework, etc. etc.
Similarly, infrastructure spending can significantly increase the productivity of a citizenry / employee base. Just like shitty roads and unreliable bridges can disrupt the flow of people to places of commerce, so too can painfully slow internet, subpar software, unreliable cloud infrastructure, or lack of data to improve how people do their jobs (example: try being in sales and not having any data on prospects… not fun!)
I don’t think this is such a novel idea, but I will say that more attention should be given to these two categories of spend for companies that are in the earlier stages…Here are some tactics that earlier-stage companies can deploy across these two categories:
Ensure that your employees have learning & development goals from day 1
and invest in them. This oftentimes can take the form of a company outright paying for you to get a certain certification or take a certain course
Regularly do reviews of IT subscription costs. Noticing that one of your teams is spending $50-$1000 per month on software. Ask them why, and potentially setup a pilot or evaluation period to see if said software could add value to others in your company
When employees start having IT/computer (read: infrastructure) challenges, do a triage to understand why, and then move fast to get them setup with tools that allow them to move efficiently ASAP
Bad example: I routinely would lose 3-5 hours of productivity every few weeks from a painfully slow computer that my former employer would not replace. In those hours, I was unable to finish proposals, attend key calls, or keep my team moving quickly —> resulted in way more costs and/or lost revenue than it would’ve taken to replace said laptop
Invest in opt-in programming for employees to learn new skills or ways of operating. Literally get things on the calendar. Ally.io was amazing about this, and some of the programs we were able to attend significantly changed the way I thought about life and work (in fact, this newsletter partially started after I came across a very powerful idea — leadership from everywhere — in a company-sponsored program
Be careful to not go overboard. In each of the above points, costs must always be considered of course (especially in this market!), but as with most things in life: there’s probably a happy middle… In general, an organization should be able to point to some way they have improved or upgraded the education or infrastructure their employees use every single quarter. The risks of stagnation are too great.
See you next week!