Rob Walling

They were willing to collaborate.

They had a desire to improve and we worked with them.

well together, even if they weren't the best engineer on the team.

And learning to evaluate other coworkers trained me to evaluate candidates when I started getting involved in the hiring process.

And I'm going to talk about that in a second, but being able to be involved in the interview process and hiring for engineers was such a boon for me later on when I started my own companies because it translated directly into

into hiring people to work for me.

So even before I was helping with the hiring and doing interviews and such, I was honing my skills of evaluation, of evaluating other team members, sometimes engineers, sometimes business analysts, whatever role it was, I was learning what makes a person really great to work with.

And that skill set and kind of that mental model helped me for the rest of my entrepreneurial journey.

Lesson number nine is that managing and motivating humans, for me, was a learned skill.

I didn't do it naturally.

And this started coming about when I started managing engineers.

I became a team lead, a tech lead, and started managing.

And of course, I then reviewed a lot of the management books I had read years prior to that.

And I realized, for me at least, managing people is not instinctive, that it is a learned skill.

And I think if you can't learn to manage and have hard conversations and to motivate people and to paint a picture of why they should be on your team and what you're building and get them excited about what you're doing, I think it can cap your growth as an employee if you're not going to manage anybody.

But it can also negatively impact your journey as a founder.

Because this is a core skill set, right?

Is to figure out that vision.

Why should people be excited to work for you?

They can go work for anyone.