VC Masterclass

Manager OKRs, Maker OKRs: How Early Stage Startups Should Think About Goal-Setting

Hunter Walk is the co-founder of early-stage experimental venture firm Homebrew, where he is also a partner. 

Google, where Walk worked for nine years as a director of product management of the YouTube rollout, famously uses a quarterly OKR (Objectives and Key Results) system. Each quarter starts with a new set of goals and ends with teams giving themselves a grade on how well they achieved what they set out to do. Q4 includes an additional set of metagoals for the following year, with an emphasis on stretch goals — highly ambitious targets designed to be unrealistic and drive teams to strive for the impossible.

OKRs are, according to Walk, still...