#135 - Camille Fournier

Y Combinator Startup Podcast

Camille Fournier is a Managing Director at Two Sigma and the former CTO of Rent The Runway. She’s also the author of The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change.
You can find her on Twitter @skamille.
If you’re interested in doing Startup School this year, signups are open at StartupSchool.org. The course begins on July 22nd and goes for 10 weeks. Select companies who complete the course will also receive 15,000 dollars in equity-free funding.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.
Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/

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Topics
00:00 - Intro
00:47 - Why do many individual contributors (ICs) never experience a good manager?
3:27 - How did the ideology of management being bad become pervasive in startups?
5:27 - What should a new manager do in their first 90 days?
8:57 - Getting better at 1:1s
11:17 - More tips for the first 90 days
13:17 - Remote management
15:12 - Mistakes rookie managers make
19:27 - Letting people go
23:37 - Being a manager and still wanting to write code
27:57 - Feeling overwhelmed as a manager
31:27 - Getting a team to gel
38:42 - Giving people kudos
39:57 - Non-engineers running engineering teams
42:07 - Staying legit technically as a manager
43:27 - Management vs leadership