Zero Drives Accountability

A story about how Shaan used an unconventional management technique to get founders to focus on their user metrics.

"We had these founders in Y Combinator and we'd ask them 'How many users you guys got?' and they didn't know the number. So Furqan and I looked at each other and made a new rule - if we ask you how many daily active users you have and you don't know the number, you do 10 push-ups.

They still didn't know for 2 more days, so we took it further. We took a marker and started writing a giant '0' on the wall behind them. We said 'This is the number of users you have according to us because you don't know. It's your job to change this number every day when you come to the office. You're gonna see this giant 0 above your head until you change that.'

This actually worked - they started thinking about how many users they had because they didn't want that giant 0 hanging over their head.

I've heard Peter Thiel did something similar at PayPal. His values were all about focus. Everyone at PayPal would have one thing they were responsible for. If you tried to talk to him about anything other than your one assigned thing, he would literally just leave the room. He'd say 'We decided what's important, so by definition this is not important, so I'm not going to talk about non-important things.'"