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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: How my team at Lightcone sometimes gets stuff done, published by jacobjacob on September 19, 2022 on LessWrong. Disclaimer: I originally wrote this as a private doc for the Lightcone team. I then showed it to John and he said he would pay me to post it here. That sounded awfully compelling. However, I wanted to note that I’m an early founder who haven't built anything truly great yet. I’m writing this doc because as Lightcone is growing, I have to take a stance on these questions. I need to design our org to handle more people. Still, I haven’t seen the results long-term, and who knows if this is good advice. Don’t overinterpret this. Suppose you went up on stage in front of a company you founded, that now had grown to 100, or 1000, 10 000+ people. You were going to give a talk about your company values. You can say things like “We care about moving fast, taking responsibility, and being creative” -- but I expect these words would mostly fall flat. At the end of the day, the path the water takes down the hill is determined by the shape of the territory, not the sound the water makes as it swooshes by. To manage that many people, it seems to me you need clear, concrete instructions. What are those? What are things you could write down on a piece of paper and pass along your chain of command, such that if at the end people go ahead and just implement them, without asking what you meant, they would still preserve some chunk of what makes your org work? Here’s my current best guess at how I would do this for Lightcone Infrastructure, the organisation where I spend the majority of my waking hours. I wrote it by thinking about how the team I'm on has actually operated during periods of high output, and then trying to turn that into a set of rules. Others on the team might disagree about which rules matter and where the magic sauce is, but I think this is at least empirically descriptive of how my team spends much of our time. 0. Blockers are death. Above all else, your job is to unblock anything that prevents you from moving as fast as you can toward your top priority. The organisation has one CEO who’s the final decision-maker on all decisions, unless they explicitly delegate a decision. Consensus is slow and blocking. Having a tie-breaker means you can move faster. Start each Monday with an all-hands meeting where the CEO sets or clarifies the top priority of the organisation. After the Monday meeting, there’s a block of time on everyone’s calendar during which no one is allowed to schedule any meetings in advance. This is the “top priority block”, where everyone’s sole goal is to work on whatever the top priority is, as identified in the all-hands meeting. The point of not scheduling meetings is so that no one ends up blocked and waiting for someone else to come out of a call or meeting (that’s not itself about the top priority). Any person on the team who could unblock someone else’s pursuit of the top priority, is available to do so during this block. Have a single day, e.g. Tuesday, that’s the “meeting day”, where people are expected to schedule any miscellaneous, external meetings (e.g. giving someone career advice, or grabbing coffee with a contact). The reason I find this important is that, if you don’t have it, people end up scheduling their meetings at random, uncoordinated times during the week. And this means that there ends up being very few slots where the people who might unblock each other are both free at the same time. No remote work. Everyone is in the office. If you need to be unblocked by someone, the fastest way is to just go to their desk and ask them in person. People on the same team work in the same room. Sudden questions, comments, or info sharing out loud is encouraged. If people want to focus deeply for a while, they can put on headphones. For...