🍲 Announcing Startup Soup: A Pragmatic Take on Startup Operations
A story of two friends, three startups, and one just-launched newsletter on running early-stage companies!
A few months ago, I sent my friend Jen Dennard a voice memo about an idea for a newsletter. Since leaving my full-time job last year, I've had a lot more space in my life, and I’ve been delighted to discover the unexpected creative impulses that have emerged.
“I’m just going to put this out there, and who knows what’ll come of it, but I think it’d be pretty fun to write a newsletter together.”
Jen and I go way back, our friendship forged in the fires of THREE early-stage startups and managing people during a pandemic. Our work together has included Medium’s Holacracy period and the startup Jen co-founded with our longtime friend and colleague Dan Pupius. She’s been an incredible friend and collaborator, and I’ve benefited from her wisdom in so many walking phone 1:1s—when I’ve shared a problem I feel stuck around, she often has the perfect approach that is both direct and kind.
I remember joining Range in 2020 with two kids distance learning at home, and just being so impressed with Jen’s steady leadership as a co-founder. Through challenging times—pandemic isolation, layoffs, unexpected contract cancellations, to name just a few—Jen has always demonstrated an impressive ability to balance business needs with genuine care for her team. She's someone I'm truly proud to call my friend.
That impulsive voice memo turned into many more voice memos back and forth, and a few working sessions calls during kids’ nap times or after bedtimes, a bunch of async work…and now I’m so excited to share the launch of our newsletter, Startup Soup!
Here’s what Startup Soup is about.
Every startup has two sides: the business metrics like product-market fit and revenue growth, and the operations that keep everything running. But when we say “operations,” we mean much more than just payroll and insurance. We're talking about how to build out a team and get the work done—team cadences, remote work practices, hiring, talent development, feedback cycles, compensation philosophy, etc.
As an ops leader and engineering leader, we’ve tackled these challenges together in early-stage startups. We noticed that most existing books and frameworks are designed for large companies with thousands of employees, not the10-to-150 person startups we know so well. In fact, a lot of the problems at early-stage startups come from people joining from much larger companies and trying to implement what they’ve seen work at a big tech company, or what they’ve heard is the right way to do things.
Our approach has always been pragmatic. We talk to people, understand their pain points, and do what makes sense, and can bring some stability and predictability to the already messy world of startups.
We both believe strongly in “good enough,” which can be frustrating for perfectionists, but for early-stage startup operations, it’s often the ideal approach. The goal is to have operations that are smooth enough to not distract from the work, but not so complex that they become a time sink.
Through Startup Soup, we want to share the insights we've gained, the lessons we've learned, and the practical strategies that can help small teams work more effectively.
If this sounds interesting to you, head on over to Startup Soup and hit subscribe for new posts every other week! We also share a love for food, so our first post is about how minimum viable startup operations is like getting weeknight dinner on the table…it just needs to be good enough!
