Google’s parent company, Alphabet, recently announced 12,000 people were laid off. Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Twitter have all announced similar downsizes. Accenture just last week cut 19,000 jobs. The list goes on. As companies prioritize profitability in this macroeconomic environment, you might think: Is anyone really indispensable?
Most ambitious young people have heard a variation of the same career advice: “Want to succeed at work? Make yourself indispensable.” This advice is given frequently and with great conviction. It’s well-meaning but also vague: most advisers don’t offer tactical advice on how to become indispensable. And yes, in fact, no one is really indispensable: Jeff Bezos was replaceable. Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer (happily for MSFT shareholders) were replaceable too.
But, especially in this macroeconomic climate – which has impacted startup environments in addition to Big Tech – there are ways to make yourself as indispensable as possible with intellectual and collaborative capital.
Intellectual Capital requires knowledge and insight that is scarce, distinctive, and measurably valuable. In startup environments, it starts with the ‘why,’ ‘what,’ and ‘how.’
The Why: You must see a larger picture when helping build a company. This includes seeing around corners and shifting directions accordingly – the type of scrappy, nimble iteration essential for startup success. You must have intuitions and insights about the movement of markets, customers, and technologies. Ask and answer: Why should a product or service exist? Why would competitors move this way vs. the other? Why does this investment thesis hold water? You must constantly push to be a deep thinker and unafraid to have a contrarian point of view.
In tech startups, you build your ‘Why’ muscle by delaying gratification and working in relative obscurity for years to build extreme context in particular problem spaces (in technical disciplines such as infrastructure, AI/ML, data management, SaaS, or specific domains such as security, privacy, ecommerce). The builders behind Snowflake, for example, toiled for years to achieve the clarity that legions of developers would need an abstraction layer offering the scale and flexibility of cloud data systems, but operationalized via the familiar, 30-year-old technological standard of SQL. They couldn’t have achieved this insight by reading articles or going to conferences; they had to experience the problems and accumulate an informed perspective on how to solve them in an up-close-and-personal way.
The What: This element centers on the product or solution you are building or are a part of building – and figuring out how you sell it. Who is the buyer? Who is the user? What's the thing that makes their life better than it was before? Is it feasible to build? What capabilities does it comprise, and in what order? If you are the one to lead the thinking on – and ultimately answer – these questions, you are becoming an indispensable part of an early-stage team.
The How: Frequently, this comes to life if you have a role in building the product or solution your company offers from the ground-up. You know how to do it better, faster, smoother, stronger and cheaper. You build customer relationships, close deals, and drive down costs. Clients and customers write unsolicited letters and emails to your CEO to let them know that, without your contributions, they wouldn’t have succeeded.
So, how exactly do you gain Intellectual Capital? In the early part of your career, the only way to accumulate Intellectual Capital is to prioritize learning above all else. If you’re in your 20s and early 30s, my general rule is that you be at least 5X less accomplished in whatever you’re doing than the next best member of the team to which you belong. If you’re at parity or even better than your co-workers, you’re definitely in the wrong place. This can be uncomfortable. Ambitious people want to feel like the best in the room – but you hurt your growth when you’re not surrounding yourself with people you can learn from.
If you’re not just looking for a job but rather a long-term career trajectory, you’ve got to delay gratification at the beginning and commit to the accumulation of Intellectual Capital.
Collaborative Capital requires the skills to catalyze, coordinate, and contribute to creating Intellectual Capital via your participation in teams.
Here’s where to start:
While prioritizing only intellectual capital can undoubtedly be a successful strategy, it’s a near-impossible strategy to execute when you’re early in your career. Intellectual Capital will take time to build and refine – so it's equally important to focus on Collaborative Capital.
Quick caveat: What follows is only actionable if you have a good boss who wants to see you steadily improve and succeed. If you don’t have that, my main advice would be to stop reading and start trying to find a better boss.
Manage your boss. Early in my career, I expected that my boss would manage me by prescribing what needed to get done and by when. I thought my job was to fall into line. What I wish someone had explained to me then was that, in fact, I was supposed to manage my boss. Once I figured that out, I came to our discussions prepared and explained what I was doing and why I thought it was important. By making it easy for my boss to understand what I was doing, I got actionable guidance, achieved more impact, and got a raise a lot sooner. Later on, find the Goldilocks point in your results-to-oversight ratio, balancing the need for guidance and feedback with the necessity of initiative and execution.
Show empathy for your coworkers. Understand that your success is their success. Everyone I know who has succeeded in their career can map back to co-workers and bosses who saw their potential early on and cultivated their possibility when new opportunities or career branch points occurred. One conversation leads to another. One collaboration can be the seedling of other, even more fruitful ones.
At Sun, where I was employee #35,642 many years ago, I worked alongside someone who took an interest in my potential. When I was getting ready to leave and start my first company, she was absurdly supportive and empathetic – eventually introducing me to Howard Charney – the Co-Founder of 3COM and Grand Junction and one of the three leaders at Cisco in the late 90s. Howard was instrumental in my jump into entrepreneurship and is an important person in my professional and personal life to this day. As I reflect on how that evolved, I’m pretty sure my Sun colleague helped me because I’d been helpful to her. Insisting that I meet Howard was a natural way for her to pay it back and forward.
Make the news. If you want to be indispensable, find a way to change the odds, punch through, fix the product or delight the customer when everyone else decided it was impossible. Don’t tell your boss or your coworkers what’s broken. When faced with a problem, your first impulse needs to be, what will I do to fix it?
Don’t report the news. Make the news.
Don’t hub-and-spoke your boss. Your boss, if they know what they're doing, doesn't want to be in the middle of every little thing. They don't want to resolve every little misunderstanding you have. They depend on you to just do the work. The more you require them to break ties, the more brain damage and point-to-point cleanup you create for them. Your boss wants leverage; they don’t want to pick up the shovel for you. They depend on you to work it out and call them in if and only if you’ve thoroughly applied your ingenuity in pursuing all the available options.
Collaborative Capital is a poorly understood, underexploited source of professional power. Cultivating it makes you more effective and more influential. It also endears others to you, which increases your ability to accumulate the Intellectual Capital required to build a nourishing career. In an industry that has long lauded lone geniuses for too long, the future belongs, in my opinion, to world-class collaborators.
