Does your team have the right size?
Plus: A test for you on whether to keep underperforming employees
· 796 words
Melanie Gabriel & Christian Woese
October 22, 2024 • Read time: 4 minutes
Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,
Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati is reportedly raising funds for a new AI venture. A retirement pattern seems to be emerging among OpenAI veterans: announce on X you are leaving, say how much you admire Sam Altman, then go build your own AI startup and compete with OpenAI. We’re certain she will find investors - but if things get tight, she can always turn to those who were left out of Perplexity’s current $8bn funding round. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.
PS: Has this e-mail been forwarded to you? Sign up here.
Your talk track for this week’s cocktail party
Is Lilium grounded for good?
Germany’s parliament has rejected a state rescue package for Munich-based aviation startup Lilium, sending the company spinning rapidly down the path to bankruptcy. The decision follows a heated debate. Advocates say it's a failure to support homegrown Deep Tech, while critics argue it’s not the state’s job to save a company that private investors are avoiding.
Uber - the next super app?
Uber is considering acquiring Expedia, aiming to strengthen its bid to become a super app like WeChat: “Anywhere you want to go in your city and anything that you want to get, we want to empower you to do so.” The deal would be Uber’s largest acquisition yet, but there’s a twist — CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, with close ties to Expedia’s executive chairman, has recused himself from negotiations. Can Uber pull off such a big merger without him at the helm?
What do you meme?
Food for thought
Hire grown-ups, treat them like children - remote work or back to the office?
“You can’t spend a lot of time hiring grown-ups and then treat them like children” - Spotify’s CHRO Katharina Berg is clear on why employees should be allowed to work remotely. After recent moves of Tech giants like Amazon calling their employees back to the office in pre-Covid policies, the Swedish firm seems like an outlier. Is the home office an invite to procrastinate, or does it allow mature employees to exercise the independence they require and boost productivity?
Design your org for the conflicts you want to hear about
Organizational design can be a hassle - who reports into whom, which teams should you combine? Dave Kellogg of Balderton provides a refreshing perspective: Think of which conflicts you want to hear about. When you combine two departments, you're essentially putting one person in charge of handling the tensions between them. But maybe you do want to hear about these issues firsthand, to better understand problems and expose weaknesses that need fixing. So design your org to surface the right tensions.
How large is a normal team for a SaaS company my size?
Here are benchmarks from 700+ SaaS companies
(Note: the author itself expects these numbers to drop significantly in 2025)
Mark your calendar
Bulgaria
Web Impact Forum in Sofia, 23-24 October [Agenda]
Germany
Personalmesse in Munich, 23-24 October [Agenda]
Smart Manufacturing Summit in Munich, 23-25 October
Slush Heilbronn, 24 October [Agenda]
Spain
Valencia Digital Summit, 23-24 October [Agenda]
UK
Fintech Live, 22-23 October [Agenda]
Hug by Personio in London, all things HR, 22 October [Register]
Did we miss an important event? Let us know by replying to this email.
Do you like what we do at Follow the Gradient? Help us grow this community and share a like and add a comment to our LinkedIn post that just went live:
Smart advice
Handling underperforming employees is one of the toughest challenges for any manager. Here are three essential tests to assess the situation and boost confidence in decision-making:
The Keeper Test: If the employee were leaving, would you work hard to keep them? If not, that’s strike one.
The 20/20 Hindsight Test: Knowing what you know now, would you rehire them? If the answer is no, that’s strike two.
The Replacement Test: Could a new hire outperform them within six months? If yes, that’s strike three.
And as they say, three strikes and you're out. Remember: tolerating subpar performance too long means you’ve just set a new, lower standard.
One good read
The State of AI Report 2024 - written by the two AI experts Nathan Benaich (Cambridge University) and Alex Chalmers (Oxford University). The two summarize the most important AI developments in the categories Research, Industry, Politics, Safety and Predictions.
💡 Our Pro tip: Instead of reading the 300+ slides, drop it to NotebookLM and listen to it as a podcast.