Harvard i-lab | Startup Secrets: Hiring and Team Building

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Transcript

00:00

Tonight [Music] is going to be fun because you're actually going to have to participate. So, for once, I'm going to get to relax and and watch how you can engage

00:16

yourselves. Uh, but why we're going to do that is because hiring is really not a a sport that you can engage in from the sidelines.

You have to jump right in and be part of the action. And so uh tonight what we'll start with is a series of things that will set up um a

00:32

follow-on from last week's discussion about vision, mission, and culture. And as the basis for hiring, culture, as we talked about last week, is very critical because it establishes who you are and how you behave and what kind of people you're going to want to build around you into a team that can continue that

00:47

culture and can be additive to it rather than dilutive uh to it. So, I can't go over all of that, of course, again, but for those of you who missed it last week, uh, just go to startup secrets or mjscott.com and you'll be able to find that um, material from last week on the culture

01:03

uh, vision and mission. Tonight's focus, therefore, is on what are the practical elements of hiring.

And the reason we ended up splitting this workshop up is because the number one thing I hear from startups is that they're challenged with hiring the right people. And by the way,

01:18

making sure that those hires stick. Both points are absolutely critical.

Uh you might feel like you've hired the right person, but if they don't stick around to be part of your business and actually ultimately, you know, it's success, then obviously it wasn't the right fit. And that can be very costly.

But to bring this to life, I've got two great guests,

01:35

uh both of whom spend their lives doing this. And in fact, uh to introduce them both, uh I'll have them stand up in a second.

Russ is actually a 25-y year veteran of the HR profession. And in fact, although he runs HR at iRoot today, uh his role has been very eminent

01:50

actually in our local community all the way back from Lotus uh when Lotus was one of the giants in our our industry through one of the companies that we were lucky enough to fund Phase Forward that he took public and then now for example more recently at at iRoot and there's a number in between there too. Uh so we're very lucky to have uh Russ

02:06

here and Russ would you just like to stand up so people know who you are? Welcome Russ.

[Applause] Now, um, iRoot might be considered a larger company today, although it was once a startup. So, I'm going to encourage all of you to to, uh, you know, hear that story.

But I also wanted

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you to hear from somebody who's in the thick of hiring, uh, and in fact is the fastest growing startup in, uh, this region at the moment and also has been sort of noticed as the fastest growing software startup in the country and that's Aqua. And so we have Eric Gaffin if you'd just like to stand up and show

02:39

yourself. Welcome, Eric.

Um, so you really would applaud if you I should have told you this first. Uh, so Eric has had to go through 16,000 interviews to make 180 hires in the last year.

So that gives you know that's that

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gives you a sense of uh how quickly uh you know Aquar is growing and that is not an easy task. So we've got Eric here tonight so he can share with you how do you do that?

How do you manage that kind of you know process and what is it that it takes to actually hire the right people. So, thank you both for joining

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us. Uh, you're really the stars for tonight's show and I encourage all of the audience here to just recognize that this is nothing more than a framework for you to get engaged on the topic.

You know my style. I don't believe that I have answers here.

I have a basis for discussion. Uh, I encourage you to ask questions particularly of our two guests

03:28

tonight. Uh, and then as I said, I want to leave time for you to actually engage in a little interviewing yourselves.

So, tonight's agenda specifically, I'll give you some background. I'm going to give you some tools and then we want to get to the workshop and we we've given you out some questions.

You don't need to look at them now, but I will take you

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through some of these so you can get a sense of what the tools are. So, first of all, you know, I always like to ask this question.

Why even bother with this? I mean, why did you all show up?

Why do we have a full house tonight? I mean, there's obviously a reason that you have in your mind.

Uh mostly what I hear from startups is, you know, we just can't find the quality of talent. But I

03:59

actually don't think that's the problem. There's plenty of quality talent around Boston.

The real challenge is finding the fit. Uh, and so as I like to say, the most important capital is human capital.

So it's not this the capital you raise from me. It's what you do to find the talent that enables you to build the company that you really have

04:14

conviction around. And this piece is the most obvious thing I'm going to say and yet it is so fundamental.

You are what you hire. You can try to be 50 things based upon a product, but if you don't have the people to take that product to market, to engage your audience, and to

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build, for example, the relationships with your customers, service, and support them successfully, you have nothing. And so, every hire you make, whether you like it or not, becomes, if you will, a Lego block in the model that builds your business.

And so, tonight is about establishing a premise that is

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super important. And I'm going to start with one which is an oldie but goldies as I would say which is the first thing you should realize is that A's hire A's.

In other words, A players know how to hire Aquality candidates. But the bad news is if you hire B's, if you find

05:01

somebody who's not an A player, they hire C's. They always hire underneath themselves because the very fact that they're a B player causes them to say, "I don't want to be challenged by somebody." So they tend to hire people who are not going to challenge them.

And guess what? They hire C's.

And I don't need to tell you this, but C's cost you

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your company. And it's a very slippery slope.

And so even though you're going to find yourself challenged many times to say, "But I've got to fill this post. You know, we're desperately understaffed in services or support and there aren't enough people to pick up the phones." If

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you find yourself in that slippery slope and you say, "Ah, well, I'm just going to get a body in the seat and I'm going to hire that bee because it'll fill the gap for now." Trust me, that's a mistake. And so tonight is about trying to help you understand how to avoid that mistake and to establish a culture as we

05:48

talked about last week and in particular hiring practice that gets you over that and gives you the confidence actually to look beyond what might sometimes feel like an impossible void to fill of the experience, knowledge and skills and instead look for things like aptitude and attitude which can be just as important actually in finding the right

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hire. So A's does not mean that they're A students and it doesn't mean that it's all about just getting for example the best grad out of MIT or uh you know the the Sloan school wherever it might be.

Um I should have said Harvard but um the point is wherever you come from um you

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know there's this bias around certain talents and skills that people have. So we're going to try to quash that tonight.

Now I also want to make it really clear that this is not just me talking about this stuff uh that the wrong hires cost to your company. You will obviously recognize this.

When you

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lose great people, you lose everything that they know. And that's not just their literal knowledge.

It's also who they know, their networks, their connections with their customers, the relationships they have internally. You basically lose a piece of the fabric of your company.

And if you're a startup and, you know, imagine you're, you know,

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five people, you just lost one person, that's 20% of your entire value as a company. And trust me, even when you get big, and this is a stat from the MIT Sloan Review from very big companies, this is a very significant impact.

In fact, even for just 1% of employees

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being lost, it's a $25 billion assessed cost. So, people can measure this stuff, but I think you know it intuitively.

It's really painful when you make the wrong hires. Of course, it can be fatal if it's something like hiring the wrong founder.

So, I know a number of you, for example, here are still building your founding teams. This is really essential

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therefore that you take time to understand this. And I'm I'm going to put it in the the simplest of senses tonight.

It's about like a lot of things developing both the art and the science of it. The reason I want you to engage in the actual practice tonight is because that's the art.

And we're going

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to try to to talk a little bit about some of the science of it. So, let me jump right in.

Um the first thing I'll say is that hiring sometimes feels like it's ah you just sit down and have an interview and you kind of get to know somebody. Uh but actually it turns out it's really all in the details.

Uh the

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details matter like you know what it is that you're actually looking for in terms of somebody's experience matters because if you don't set them up for success finding a fit for their experience no matter what their attitude is they're not going to be able to apply themselves effectively. So I'm going to start out by telling you the three key

08:12

things that I think we should look for. And literally if I was, you know, forced to say in my experience over 30 years, what do I really want to make sure happens in a hire?

It's first of all, can they be successful at the job? In other words, are you setting up their

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skill set to be in your particular role a successful fit? Will they have the right set of things to bring so that when they engage with you, they can be successful?

If you don't set them up to be successful, you can't blame them. You've got to look at yourself and say,

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"Why did I mismatch? What did I learn from that?

What were the things that I thought I needed but I didn't find?" The second thing is probably even more fundamental and we'll talk about that uh because it's a softer challenge, but will they really love this job? Do they want to come to work every day?

Um fired up about it. And in the end, the energy

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has to come from within them because no matter how much you incent them or no matter how much opportunity you have, if it's not something that they can internally relate to, it's not going to be sustainable. And startups are hard work as we all know and they go through tough times.

So when they do that will be the thing that will be the

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determinant of whether they really are successful at the job is that they still believe in it. They have their own convictions for their own reasons.

Now the last one really is is playing to the the cultural elements that we talked about last time which is you know will they fit and reinforce your culture and

09:32

um as I mentioned last week culture is a funny thing in the sense that you know you may not be able to measure it but as you saw when we talked about it last week it has a massive impact. There's a reason why those companies that are best to work for consistently outperform all others.

When you look over a decade period as I mentioned to you, they

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outperform by 300% uh their their comparables. So we know it has an impact and so obviously we want people who can reinforce that impact and it can reinforce our culture.

So now let's talk about what are the elements that go associate go along with that. I've put

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up EKS, IQ and CQ and I'm going to explain those for you right now. So first of all answering the first question, can they be successful at the job?

EKS is just an acronym and you know I use acronyms u but it's kind of a fun

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one because we could always go around and say okay how was somebody's eekes and it was sort of like okay everybody understood their eeks. Okay, their eekes were what was their experience?

What was their knowledge and what were their skills? Now why do I split those three out?

Anybody got any idea? I mean what's

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different about experience versus skills? Anybody got any ideas?

So, you can learn things and just be intellectually aware but not be efficient or know how to necessarily execute on those things. Well, plus you

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can any knowledge you take in. Some people just compartmentamentalize knowledge rather than integrate the knowledge.

Well said. Very good.

Somebody else had a um a point up the front here. I I would say that

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skills is a method to lead into experience, but they're not necessarily the same thing. So, for example, I may not have a lot of experience in a specific type of coding um or specific facet of the company, but if I have the skills to program, for example, that's

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something that's really valuable. So, it's not necessarily Excellent.

I think both of your comments are really helpful to to bring this to light. So, let's use the coding example.

You might have absolutely the best C programming skills, but you may have had no

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experience building a back-end system for, for example, a huge scalable website using those skills. So, you've got the skills, but you've applied them in a completely different way.

You maybe applied them, for example, in some mobile app as opposed to a huge webcale

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app. So, skills might be very different to experience.

And and the classic thing that we see people doing here is confusing the following. and they say, "Well, this guy was an absolutely brilliant programmer, but we don't actually think about what is that programming experience going to

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line up with in what the task is we're going to set them." And so, you got to think about how to separate those things. Now, skills are a very interesting thing.

Most of these things people go down and they, you know, they're bottom their resume, well, I did, you know, C and I did Java and I did PHP and Python and Ruby and, you

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know, on and on and on. There's this long list.

Okay? Does that mean you're a good programmer?

Anybody? I mean, how many times have you read a resume that they've got a long list of things?

Does that mean they're a good programmer? Lots of people shaking their head.

I'd like a no or a yes. No.

Why

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not? Not necessarily.

Say more. They have a laundry list of uh of prerequisites and they and language under their belt.

Um, yeah, they might have the skills, but if they don't know how to apply that, if they, as that gentleman over there said,

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compartmentalizes it, uh, and they don't have that malleable uh, intellect that they can actually apply it at the at the problem at hand, that synthesis, um, then those skills are really dead to you as someone who wants to hire them like, right, like you could you could access those skills through the through the internet or or through a book. You want

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someone who can me who can who can mold it around the situation problem at hand. Very good.

Okay. So thank you very much.

That was well said and I didn't want to add to it. So now let's bring in the third piece.

This knowledge piece. Let's say that the actual problem that they're solving is a healthcare IT problem and

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it's very deep in the domain of healthcare. Now let's imagine that they actually do have experience building this web back end and they have the right skills because they're good programmers, but they're t tackling a completely different domain to one they've ever done before.

all they've

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ever done before has got nothing to do with healthcare. How does that sound?

That's different, right? So your domain expertise um is or your knowledge, excuse me, in this case, just to be specific about it, might be very important because

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healthcare has a whole sense of a bunch of regulations. For example, one of the companies that uh Russ was involved with phase 4, he might talk about tonight.

There were some very specific domain requirements. In fact, let me ask you if I may to jump in on that.

When you were recruiting for Phase Forward, how important was the domain expertise of

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healthcare? And maybe you could mention a little bit what they did.

So, Face Forward uh was one of the first companies that took uh the uh FDA process of drug approval, the the uh clinical trial process and moved it from paper to cloud-based uh process so that

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you were enrolling thousands of patients in the program and the doctors used to keep track on paper and then they would forward it on to the uh the drug company and the drug company would correlate the data and do the analysis and see if it had any efficacy at all uh and we changed the paradigm for that uh with

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our company. So uh when we started recruiting for software developers, we we could find the we could find the skills, we could find experience with the skills, but we didn't have the domain expertise because there were there are their regs uh uh and the FDA requirement that have to be coded into

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the software had to be coded into the software. there are uh uh privacy requirements that are how the data can be moved not just within the application but within the application across geographic borders.

So we were had to

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look for people that had that level of knowledge and or in a s either a similar application base or or had worked in a healthcare setting with the with the kind of FDA requirements that we needed to code. Perfect.

Thank you Russ. So, so what you're hearing is and Face Forward by the way was very successful company

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went public etc. But I can tell you it wasn't easy always hiring at exactly as you're going to find to get all three of these things you know to find somebody who was really skilled as a programmer had the experience of for example the kind of web scale that we're dealing with and also the domain knowledge to be

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able to apply and deal with things like these regs. So this is the bad news.

You very rarely get the perfect candidate that has all three. And so we're going to try to help tonight figure out well what do you do in those circumstances.

Now you notice that I put where

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applicable the IQ because it sort of goes without saying that you're going to try to find smart people. I mean nobody wants to hire dumb people.

So that's kind of easy. We all agree on that.

The problem is what does smarts mean? And uh there are lots of different ways of breaking that down.

The typical one and

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the one that I find that is the most uh daunting is you know to try to in and challenge people on intellect but it's very rarely the one that is actually the driver of success. In fact uh I'll now relate my one of my own challenges which is that if you hire only really really

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smart people with the highest IQ and that's all you bring into a team you very rarely end up building a great team. In fact, I've had to fire, unfortunately, some of the smartest people because they precisely believe they're the smartest people in the room and they have no interest in teaming with other people who they think might

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challenge them. Uh, and it just makes them very difficult to work.

Welcome, Gary. Um, he's nodding in the back.

Another HR professional. Uh, so one of the things that's interesting about this is what do we determine to be therefore the right kinds of of attributes for a

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for a hire. So bear that in mind and we'll hopefully hopefully bring it out in some of the questions.

So this is the first setup. Can they be successful at the job?

Do they have the right experience, knowledge, and skills for the job you're looking to to bring them into? Now, will they really love the job?

This one should be easy. And yet,

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it's one that I find people don't spend enough time on. So, I'm going to try to make sure by the end of tonight that if you go home with nothing else, you understand how to interview for this question because in my experience, this can be even more important than any other piece of this equation.

So, first of all, can you find out what people are

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really passionate about? I think you can probably tell from the way I deliver this class, I'm pretty passionate about entrepreneurship, but nobody taught me about entrepreneurship.

I just learned it because I was determined from the early age of whatever it was, uh, embarrassingly teenage age, uh, to figure out what it was that actually

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made it possible to build companies. And so, you know, here I am with absolutely zero qualifications.

And guess what? I figured my way through it.

Somebody has a question at the front here. Oh, thank you.

Um, did your love of entrepreneurship precede your knowledge of coding and your work in web

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development? Like, so for example, did you learn coding so that you could be an entrepreneur or did you just kind of fall into it?

So, my story isn't as interesting as that because I'm too old to even admit this most of the time, but we're going to get to it. Um, the web didn't exist.

There was no such thing as

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a PC. And when I learned coding, I was programming the world's first programmable calculator, the HP65.

And that was the only thing I could program because, you know, it was the only thing I could get my hands on. But my passion for solving problems, as it turned out, translated into, hey, well, what could I do if I could automate that on things

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like programmable calculators or what became PCs later? And and my point is that nobody told me that I couldn't do something and I was passionate enough to just keep at it until I figured it out.

And so if I was just trying to draw out some lesson for this because everybody has their own experience, it's this that

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ultimately passion very often and persistence often overcome almost every other attribute that we were looking for if somebody can be set up to obviously apply whatever they have in their limited experience, knowledge or skills to a problem. So, it's really that and

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and I don't need to say this except to say um when you're interviewing, what you're really trying to do is what I was starting to describe there is find a fit for what they love to do because it's like putting fuel in the gas tank at that point. You know, if you've got that

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energy that they're bringing to the the uh the table, their passion, their real persistence, their real desire, their strong, you know, conviction that they can make a difference, then what you really need to do is put the fuel in the right gas tank and just, you know, set them on the right road. And guess what?

You know, they're going to make it at that point. What I worry about is that I

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see a lot of hires are made the exact opposite way. You hire the best, brightest guy, but they're not interested in the problem you're solving.

They're not interested in the domain that you're working in. And guess what?

at some point they'd kind of like peter out because it's just they can't relate to it. They can't engage with it.

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So this question is actually sometimes the first and the only question I ask in an interview. Now if you think I'm kidding, talk to some of the people I've interviewed because I won't let people out of an interview.

Russ is putting his hand up. I did interview him.

I won't

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let somebody out of an interview until I've understood what makes them tick. And that means what are they passionate about?

So, here's an example of how this question might start. It's, "Okay, I've met you for the first time.

You know, tell me what gets you out of bed in the morning. What do you love doing?

Uh,

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what is it you're excited about? What's your perfect day look like?" I go on and on and on and on.

Now, these should be easy questions to answer, right? I mean, tell me what you're passionate about.

Well, isn't that an invitation to speak forever? Should be, right?

Here's what I find. Unfortunately, very few people

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actually stop and ask themselves that. you know, we kind of get thrown into whatever field of work we're in or guess what worse than that, like a lot of us, we have to take a job because we need to pay the mortgage or we just got out of school and we got to pay off our debt.

And you know what? The job we wanted

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wasn't available and now we're doing something and we're kind of in that rut and next thing we know we're doing something that actually we're paying the bills by as opposed to really living life by. When it really works, you don't even ask that question.

You're having so much fun at work that it is life. And

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you're so excited about your job that your life is something that you're passionate about, not your job or your life. Your life and your work are one and the same.

They feel great. And there are many times I walk around companies and I can see it.

I can literally palpably see that people are coming to

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work because they're so excited about it that they feel this is their life. They build their communities there.

They love working together. So they show up every day, you know, excited about what's the next great thing they can do together.

And that's palpable. By contrast, I can tell you when I go on site visits to see some startups, their stats might be up

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and to the right on their charts. They might be doing great things, but I walk around and I go, I'm not going to back this group because I can tell that basically there's a bunch of employees there who are doing a job.

And at some point, you know what? Somebody else who's got the passionate team with all the gas in their tank is going to run right past them.

It's just the way

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things work. So, here's how this, if you like, becomes a virtuous circle.

People who love what they do tend to take pride in their work. They tend to do it well.

The results and the rewards all follow from it. But I will tell you the reverse is not

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true. So I have never hired somebody who told me I want to get rich.

I've never hired somebody who said that because I don't believe that's the way it works. The way I believe it works and again one person's viewpoint is that when you

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really love what you do, you can't help but do it well. you want to take pride in.

You want to produce great results. And guess what?

When you do that, you feel like you can really make a difference. And if you're plugged into the right situation where what you do can align with what the company needs done, you're going to make a difference.

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And that's what good company cultures do. They set you up for success.

They enable your passion to connect with the mission and vision of the company so that you're contributing in every sense, in every way that you do that. And when that happens, guess what?

You're going to make a difference in the business and it's going to be noticed and you're going to get rewarded from it. and

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you're going to feel great about it and you're going to do more of it. It's pretty obvious that when that circle continues to be fed and it's virtuous in that way, everybody's going to win.

There is no accident associated with with aqua success. There is a specific

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guy who started a project that is now the large largest open source project on the planet, Drupal, that has over 900,000 people following him. Why?

Because he's really passionate about connecting and enabling people to communicate. Jump in.

It's 1 million. 1 million.

Can you say a little bit more?

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Tell us a little bit about what what Drupal is about as a background here. Um, yeah, it's it's pretty amazing and you know, hearing Michael talk about passion.

I I saw it I I got a chance to interview with Dre who is the founder of Drupal. Yeah.

uh who's the uh founder of Drupal

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and this this is a guy who just believes so passionately in what he does and believes that the the open-source methodology is the way to go about business and the way that the world is going to change. I mean it is

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passion. We want people who come into the organization and say I love what you're doing.

I want to be a part of that. I understand where you're going and I want to experience that on a day-to-day basis.

One of the best examples, our VP of engineering, uh the

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question that he asks isn't about school projects. It isn't about experience.

It isn't it isn't about tell me what you've been doing in your job. It's when all is said and done for your day and it's 10 o'clock at night, nine o'clock at night,

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and you sit down in front of your computer. What are you going to do?

What are you doing then? And he wants to hear people say, "I'm messing around with Python.

I'm learning PHP. I'm doing this.

I work on this really cool project on the side." That's what we want. We

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want people who have the passion that are going to that are going to elevate them to levels that they they weren't before. So fantastic.

So if if this is a subject that feels like it's soft, then

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let me make a very hard claim. The hard claim is this.

If you can't find what people are passionate about and connect it to what you are trying to do as a business, you will not make great hires. It's as simple as that because the

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connection between people's own motivation and what you are trying to do needs to be as closely aligned as possible. The minute it's off one degree, it becomes a mile very quickly in a startup because you grow so quickly.

So, uh, I did an interview actually and I won't embarrass the guy

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because he's in the room right now, um, earlier today. And, um, it was a very short interview, but the thing I was very quickly aware of was that this gentleman had a real interest to go do a startup.

And so, when we were talking about, well, what do you want to do? And

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we talked about the potential of this particular role that was coming up, the first question I asked, you know, when we got into it was, well, will this be a deflection? Will this take you off your path?

because if it's going to take him off his path, I'd rather determine that right up front because that path is going to be something that ultimately he'll pursue at some point. That's what

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he's interested in. So don't ever try to sell somebody onto your path.

That isn't going to work. That's not sustainable.

What does work is if you can help them uncover that what you're doing is actually really aligned with your their passion. That becomes a great potential fit.

So what's good about this is when

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you find people who are actually doing what they're passionate about, you get statements like this, you know, it just doesn't feel like work. I never did a day's work in my life.

That's Thomas Edison. That should be you.

This is a the corollery of this is that when

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you're being hired, don't get sold. Make sure that you're authentic about your answers.

Make sure you're explicit about what you really want to do. And if you don't know, guess what?

That's okay. Tell them why you don't know.

Let your interviewer get to understand what it is

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that you're trying to work through. For example, if you're somebody who really, really likes problem solving, but you're not sure that you want to get involved in a technical problem solving role, then explore with somebody, you know, what are other examples of problem solving?

Might be in customer service.

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Or if it turns out you really love conversation and you really like engaging customers, but you're not good at selling. You know, maybe there's an opportunity for you, for example, to work in PR.

There are lots of ways that your vocational talents can be applied. But the most important thing is that you

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authentically both expose them and that the interviewer listen for them and try to match them to what the job at hand is. And that's the great skill in interviewing.

So you heard Chris is the name of the VP of engineering at Aqua who asked that question. One of his questions one one of mine is uh this one

28:20

which is if this was your last day at work what would you want to do? You you know it's all over after today.

What would you want to do? You know you had 24 hours to go just do the craziest thing you wanted to do but it's today.

28:36

Go seize it. What is it?

And you know what? That probably is at the heart of what you're excited about.

And every day should feel like your last day because you don't know whether it is or not. So, you might as well go after it uh like it's your last day.

And you

28:52

might as well find that thing that you are so excited to do that if today was the last day, you'd go out feeling proud. Yeah, I did it.

Thank God. And you know, you got run over by a bus tomorrow.

Sorry to hear it, but hey, at least it was a great news. You know, you can say you lived your passion.

But

29:09

that's exactly what this is about. Now I unfortunately again find that this is hard because you know a lot of what what I'm talking about is more than a science.

So let's talk about this in a more practical sense in uh in a startup. So let's get a little bit beyond EKS and

29:25

IQ. I said to you what can set somebody up for success and and you have to stop and think about what is your situation.

For example, if you're three people it's very different than if you're 300 people. you know, three people and trying to do all the things that a startup does, you're going to have very

29:42

generalist roles. So, you need people who are good Swiss Army knives.

Uh, or as one of my uh founders once put it, they have to be a cross between everything in the kitchen sink and the Swiss Army knife. Or so the Swiss Army kitchen was the way we described it, which was just a joke to say, you know,

29:58

reality is startups have incredibly broad needs. People end up doing multiple jobs.

When you get to be 300, I can tell you people have much more specialist needs. you have to end up specializing in for example specific disciplines or areas.

So one of the things to figure out is do you have

30:13

people for example who really understand how to be flexible? I don't even have this question on here or adaptable for an early stage.

That might be a question that you you put in if you're only three people and you've got to do a lot together. But you need to draw that out, right?

But if you're a 300, you might want to get into much more specific

30:29

things and say, you know what, in this particular role, we need somebody who's got great judgment dealing with, for example, particular major accounts problems or challenges that we have. And that's that judgment is actually more important than their intellect.

So, you know, that might be a question that you

30:45

ask. One of the things that I'm trying to point out here is that it's situational.

It's not specific to um you know the de the task of saying okay I'm hiring a programmer or I'm hiring a salesperson. It's often situational to your particular company.

What do you

31:01

sell? How do you sell it?

What are the expectations that you have for the way that's done? And what is it that this particular role needs?

Is it for example that you need somebody who just absolutely is going to go above and beyond in effort? And that's going to be more important because we're looking for

31:16

a particular kind of customer support agent in this case who just will go above and beyond for customers because we don't know all the answers to the questions they're going to come up with. We're too early in our in our customer de I mean know in our software development.

We haven't got all that the uh knowledge base build up. So we're going to need somebody who's really

31:32

going to go the extra effort to figure out these problems that we've never solved before. Those are the kinds of things you got to think about.

That's the situational piece. And as I said again, probably the single word that's going to be most important tonight is try to find the fit.

Try to think about

31:47

what you're seeing in this person, whether it really fits the need you have in this particular part of the organization. So EKS IQ, we've kind of covered a couple.

This one is the one that's probably most determinant of whether you

32:03

get a successful connection into your organization, and that's EQ. So, I'm sure most people have heard of emotional quotient, but um I'm going to get very specific tonight about why emotional quotient is so important in startups.

So, the the I'm going to pick out three examples, but I'll also be very curious

32:20

if uh Russ and Eric could bring up a couple of examples afterward, too. So, um you know, we'll listen to their experience.

First of all, they're up here, but why do people think EQ is important in a startup specifically? And without reading my slide, I'll bring these up.

Anybody got any ideas?

32:37

Why is it important to start up? Yeah.

Go ahead. And so, so expanding really means connecting with people and I think that a huge part of connecting with people is how much you understand them and how much you relate to them.

Right. Right.

It it's it's so fundamental. I mean, it's it's hard to team with anybody if you can't get along with

32:53

them. I It's like, you know, how how do you do that?

Well, now let's talk about what this means in a startup. I have this term I call speed teaming.

And in a startup, the really great startups are constantly forming and reforming teams around specific issues that are constantly changing in a startup. And

33:09

I've watched it. When you see great startups, people quickly group crossf functionally across whatever particular, you know, rank or whatever they're they're in.

It's independent of that. They figure out how to dig into a problem.

Now, Eric, we actually have a

33:24

piece of our DNA, as we call it at Aquia that we call specifically, I think it's how you dig in. Do you want to jump in and explain what we do at Aqua and why this is so important at Aqua?

Talking about jump in and own it. Yeah.

Yeah. Uh that's it's great.

So, uh and I'll I'll get into some detail uh just I'll share

33:40

a little detail about the Aquia DNA and how we define ourselves later, but jump jump in and own it is a core component of the DNA of Aqua. It I mean it very simple.

We and we try to do these core DNA elements as simply as possible. It

33:57

means you see a problem, go fix it, come up with a solution. Jump in, join a team.

I mean, this this speed teaming is, you know, I' I've been with the company for eight, nine months, and I think I've been part of 20 different teams and we have solved problems and

34:13

then we've dispersed and gone on to other things. Uh, and it's crossunctional.

It's, uh, it's working with finance and with engineering and it's working with product and HR. It's exciting.

Uh, it is very empowering. Um, if you tell your people that if you see

34:29

a problem, you jump in, you get on it and you reward them for that and more to the point, you don't re you don't punish them for failure, then you're going to be successful. And that's a huge component to it.

If they jump in and they try something and it doesn't work,

34:46

we don't punish them at Aquia. At Aquia, it's a it's an idea.

If you're going to fail, do it quickly. learn and do it right the sec and do it correct the second time.

So this is a great example. So let's bring up a specific what would be a an example of a a speed teaming that occurred on a problem.

If you can

35:03

give a real example of a problem that required cross functional teaming. Sure.

I'll tell you I'll tell you one that we're actually right in the middle of. So, uh, one of the big problems despite the fact that we have 1 million folks across the entire world that are in the Drupal community and are part of, uh, Drupal, uh, the Drupal organization and

35:20

contribute to the code and are committed to it. Um, there's a lack of talent.

Shocker, right? There's a lack of talent that we are trying to find here in the Boston area or in Portland, Oregon, or in Brisbane, Australia, wherever we're located.

So we're we're trying to think

35:36

of a way to uh a way to create talent out of almost nothing. And what we're doing is we just immediately in the last like month coming off of an off-site meeting we're putting together uh something we call Aquia U.

And it is a

35:52

cross functional team of HR, of product, of customer solutions, of engineering, uh, to come together and figure out to put together core curriculum that we can use to teach people who aren't in Drupal now to become Drupalists to to teach

36:08

people who maybe are LAMPstack developers and convert them into somebody who we can use for uh for Aquia. And this came up very quickly.

We're moving on it. Uh we're putting together curriculum.

We're putting together hiring plans and it's it's

36:26

incredibly fast and hopefully it will work very well. Um but if it doesn't, we're not it's not going to be the only time we do it.

Great. So here's a real world example of speed teaming that happened in the last 30 days.

And now imagine that you'd made a bunch of hires

36:42

who had low EQ, low self-awareness, didn't know how to connect, didn't know how to communicate, were difficult to get along with. How do you think that team would go?

I don't need to say it. Pretty poorly, right?

It'd be pretty difficult to get Aquiaou to happen. So EQ is incredibly

36:58

important in startups. It turns out specifically because of the need to very flexibly move quickly, which is the great advantage you have as a startup.

EQ is a critical element. Now, let me give you an another example, and I've lived this one many times.

As a startup, you very rarely have the right product

37:14

until version three. Yep, I said version three.

And I can show you many many examples of that. What do you need between version one and version three?

Anybody? And it's pretty obvious here.

Feedback. Feedback.

Say more please. What kind of feedback is it?

Feedback from inside the market.

37:30

From the feedback from the customers or from the market. Okay.

So about your product. So if you're really difficult to get along with, is that going to be easy?

No, it's not going to be easy. Definitely.

You need I mean you need to be you need to be to have this emotional in intelligence in order to to connect

37:46

with the with the customers. Exactly.

It's actually critical that Thank you very much. that you can get a connection with the customer that you're trying to engage with and that somehow you can build a relationship with them when you don't have a solution for them.

In fact, most of the time you're going to be

38:02

probably inflicting pain on them while you figure out how to get something that actually is useful to them. And so you're going to have to figure out how to keep that relationship through this sort of up and down and sideways movement to actually figure out what the problem is that you're really solving for them through version one, version two, and version three.

Uh, and that

38:18

could be a long time. So this customer intimacy is another perfect example of why you've got to have EQ in your startup hires.

Anybody who's engaged in that is going to need that. Now, here's the other thing.

It turns out that in the sort of bigger picture of things, every one of your stakeholders is in

38:34

critical piece of a startup. you know, it might be your shareholders.

The first investors you get in, if they're angel friends and family, whether it's, you know, seed investors is going to be super personal. Um, but even if it's VCs, you know, you need to get these people to work with you as you work through these problems and all the

38:50

expectations, etc. aren't all met because they never are, trust me.

Um, you need that kind of relationship. What about your suppliers?

What about if you really treat your suppliers bad and you have no relationship with them and suddenly production takes off and you can't fulfill and you ring them up and say, "I need a favor. you've got no EQ

39:07

connection with them, that's going to be tough. So, there's just so many reasons.

I could go on, but I think you get the point. In the end, every one of the things that you're doing to build your company is going to be pretty much dependent on you having EQ in your team.

So, it's not optional.

39:23

Now, you might decide how important it is. Certain companies put it in their culture high and others don't.

Some of them decide that their culture is such that they are clear-cut, ruthless, and very very successfully going to deliver on everything that they promise. And so they don't need EQ.

And I'm not going to mention companies that that I can think

39:39

of that are like that, but there are some and that that works for certain people. That's why we talked about culture first.

But if you're that kind of c company, then you don't go hiring people who are, you know, high EQ that that want the kind of touchyfeying relationship. By contrast, you know, if

39:54

you are a very very very wellorganized, you know, team oriented group of people that is determined to have great customer infancy, then you don't hire, you know, ruthless people who are only results driven. Jump in, please.

Sure. Uh I just want to add a couple additional a couple additional points on

40:10

this uh which I think is uh a critical dimension of the hiring and it's one that often gets diminished or ignored. Uh and I I don't I want to highlight that important.

Eric just used a great example about how it plays out at Aquia. If you if you want a more uh theoretical

40:25

evaluation of it, the there's a new book out by Patrick Concion who wrote uh the book called Five Dysfunctions called The Advantage. If you the book is relatively cheap and get an ebook version, read the first chapter to discard the rest.

In the in the first chapter he talks about the difference between a smart

40:41

organization and a healthy organization and that the healthy organization includes what he defines along same kind of definition different words as EQ and and the smart organization is one that has great intellect, great IQ, great EK EKS and

40:58

that the difference is that the ones that have both succeed and the ones that only have smarts fail. It's it's that it's that clear in his organization.

The other thing I just say, I've worked in uh two or three startups as a participant and advised a number of other ones. Uh I worked in a

41:14

services-based organization, startup organization called Nervewire in the early 2000s. Uh and they were so serious about this they because of the speed teaming their interviews were organized around it.

They asked you questions in which you were su in which you participated in a successful

41:30

organization and they listened for the pronouns that you used. I wasn't so important as we, right?

And it was a great determinant of how you organize yourself around EQ and as it related to the team. And the last thing

41:45

I'll say about EQ is and I think uh Michael was was pointing it great around the customer agency and leveraging relationships. Every person you hire in a startup from employee number two, three, four, and five is an extension of you and what you're trying to

42:00

accomplish. It's another asset that you bring to the equation.

And if you have someone who's not aligned or who doesn't contribute to the EQ quotient in your organization, you're actually detracting value uh from from your organization, your ability to be successful. So,

42:17

excellent question. Sure.

So, I mean, what's the weight? What's for a successful company?

What should be the weight of the EQ compared to the other two factors? What should be the waiting?

Yeah. So I think you I think uh you can you can interview a lot of folks and find the same EKS and IQ and I would

42:34

only hire the people with the EQ. So for me it's the determining whether they hire or not.

You know Michael said uh A's hire A's. Uh so in my book if you don't have the EQ if you can't participate in a team and I love the example you said an inch becomes a mile because of the trajectory of your

42:49

growth. If you don't have that at the core of your organization and your organization requires you to have customers or your organization requires you to build a product as part of a team, I I think going to Lencion's book, you can't be successful unless you have it.

So it's it's it's almost rather

43:06

thinking about it as a a waiting, I don't know, you you you feel the same way, but it is cultural, but for most companies, it's a bar you've got to get over. Yeah.

Never mind a waiting. You know, you just if you don't have it, you're not going to get in the club.

So, but but that's cultural. So let let me what was the book you referenced?

Uh

43:22

it's called the advantage by uh Patrick Lencion Len C. You also wrote the five dysfunctions of a team which is probably more recent.

So you know let me let me summarize on this piece because again I want to move us through to a place where we can actually

43:38

get you engaged in this process. We've basically said look EKS and IQ.

Yeah of course you've got to be able to assess that. But what's really important here is your EQ and CQ fit.

Can you actually figure out whether you've got somebody here who's going to be effective within

43:54

your team, within your organization? And then without going over all of last week's material again, do they fit your culture?

Do they believe in the same things you do? Do they have the same ethics and values and principles?

Do they align with the way you're trying to run your company? Do they believe that how you do business, not just what you

44:10

do, is important? And if they do, then I in my opinion, you're on to the right basis to assess everything else.

But it is to me at least a bar. And for most startups, that's true because you're so dependent on your core team in the early stages.

Now, we're happy to uh we're

44:27

lucky enough at Harvard to have some some great material on this. And uh for those of you who haven't read it, um I highly recommend No Wasman's book uh around the founders dilemmas, which talks about how critical this is in the early stages of founding your company.

And the quote that I pulled out from

44:42

that is uh highly relevant since Twitter went public today uh from their CEO and that's just him stating this in his words that the fit between personalities was so much more important than just finding people who are good. So you know it's it's that that's propelled Twitter

44:58

to the multi-billion dollar valuation is they figured that out. They've got a CEO who gets that that knows how to build around that.

I mean after all Twitter didn't start out with, you know, a multi-billion dollar market cap. I started out with 143 characters.

So, you know, it's actually about what you do

45:15

with the acquisition of talent that enables you to go build big companies. And it's so easy to say it, but it's so hard to do.

So, bit of practical. We're going to give you a bunch of questions, but just to sort of put this in context for IQ, my favorite question

45:30

is uh one that connects with the job that you're actually hiring for. So I always ask what is the most relevant experience, knowledge and skills you bring to this job?

Because that causes the following. It causes them to immediately have to figure out well what is this job?

And if they haven't been

45:47

listening to what the job is right there, they're stumped. And if they've got a high IQ or and they understand, you know, what this job is, they'll be very quick to then pick out what have they done in their past that is relevant to this particular job.

and how well they answer that question is really

46:02

about how well they've understood and how well they can connect. So there are a lot of things that come out of that.

So that's one of my my favorite questions. The other thing is people have a hard time sometimes bringing this out without talking about examples.

Now if you can get them to share with you something like their favorite example of

46:18

a problem they've solved and how they solved it, then you'll get a lot of insight into the way they go about approaching difficult situations or problems or whatever. The fun part about this is the real question I'm asking is what do you consider as a problem?

So some people consider a problem is

46:34

well you know I had a I had a bug and I had to solve it. Other people will say oh the problem I had was that our team was dysfunctional and I had to figure out how to get them back together again to really you know get our product back on track.

Which guy you gonna hire? I know the one I'd hire.

It's not the guy

46:51

who's focused on the bug. He's focused on the team.

So, you know, you have to think about what that you're really looking for in the answer. But at some point, questions like this can draw out all of these things if you if you you know, get the the right question for for

47:07

the particular situation. The important point I'm making here is not that these questions are the questions that they are the kinds of questions that can help you draw out things like IQ and EQ.

Now, this is a fun one. What are you most proud of in your work interactions?

That

47:22

brings out all sorts of things. You know, I hear stories sometimes about, well, actually that I formed a team that actually plays football outside of work and we're incredibly successful.

That was a real answer from a real guy I had. It was very successful guy actually, one of my best engineers.

And and that's exactly what he said. And but then he

47:38

then brought the whole analogy back and said, "And by the way, the way I built that football team was blah blah blah blah blah. And this is how I do my programming, and this is how I brought it into our teams, and this is how we're successful." And I mean, the guy is off the charts.

He's just a great engineer. um but not by the way as a team lead.

47:53

Interestingly enough, he's an individual contributor. Uh and it's because he doesn't actually like managing, but he likes being part of the team.

And so what makes him really special is that he makes everybody else around him successful without being a manager, which I think is an incredible quality. That's a guy I'll hire over and over and

48:10

over again. And by the way, here's the other thing.

He is not the best programmer, i.e. he will not produce the best code.

His code is perfectly good. There's nothing wrong with it, but his products are always going to ship on time.

The quality of them is always

48:26

going to be really high and his interactions with the rest of the team cause everybody else, as I said, to do such great work that the end result is terrific. So, he didn't have the EKS or uh actually EKS, no, he didn't have the IQ that would have beaten everybody on the team, but he certainly had the EQ to

48:41

make his team successful. That's the guy I want to hire.

Now, by contrast, one of the guys that joined at exactly the same time as him had a real cultural misfit with us, believed he was the smartest guy in the room and many times was a problem as part of the challenge to, you know, rise

48:57

to moving from V1 to do V2 to V3. And eventually the team ejected him because he really didn't believe in something we valued very highly, which is that not the customer is always right, but the market's always right.

In other words, it doesn't matter what we think is the best way to solve the problem unless the

49:13

market can absorb it. He was constantly saying, "Yeah, but there's a better way to do it.

There's a better way to do it." Yeah, but who cares if people can't actually take that that uh you know application and use it. So, it was a constant fight with what we have as a c cultural value in the company, which was it's all about what the customer

49:29

acceptance of the thing is and how they can adopt it and how they can use it. It's not about having the best solution because the best sometimes doesn't work.

The best might be, you know, brilliant, but just too hard to adopt, too difficult to integrate, for example. So, you're probably getting a sense of this.

And my point is, you in your own

49:45

particular way have to figure out what it is that you use as your questions to draw out the IQ, EQ, and CQ. But at the end of the day, I want you to have one more little acronym, which is QC.

I want you to have quality control. And your quality control, after you've been

50:01

through all the analysis, should always ask one basic question. And we always did this as a group when we had group interviews.

We came back and we said, "Do we all feel like this is net additive to the team?" Because if it's not, if it's dilute, excuse me, if it's

50:17

dilutive, forget it. If it's dilutive to the culture, if it's not additive to the, you know, spirit of the team, it's not going to work.

If it's, you know, dividing people, if it's as opposed to multiplying their skills, not going to work. Now, some people don't believe in those group interviews, but um I heard a

50:33

really great example. I happened to be out to dinner with actually Tim last night, Tim Bertrren, who runs sales for Aquia, regular check-in, and we're just having dinner and catching up.

And he told me that the three key people who are running sales now, they don't even bother going to the second interview, if any one of them even has a sneaking suspicion that they're not happy, that

50:49

there's something a miss, they don't even bother. They just if any one of the three of them, the head of sales ops, the head of channels, and Tim himself, they just immediately drop it.

And why? So I said, "Look, I'm giving this class tomorrow.

You got to give me some evidence of this." He said, "Because we've occasionally, you know, said, "Ah,

51:06

we'll get around that. H it's just you, you know, hey, Mike, you know, you're you're particular about that kind of thing.

We'll get around it." None of those have worked out. So here's another little obvious thing.

Trust your gut. because if you have some instinct, there's probably a reason for

51:22

it. And if you really just don't feel like it's a fit, it probably isn't.

And you're better off figuring it out up front. All right, enough said on the cues.

And uh I think you've probably got enough cues for this evening. But um please just remember one thing I said at the beginning.

These are frameworks. They

51:38

are not exact things. I'm not trying to say these are the answers and I'm not trying to say these are the questions.

They're just the experiences that hopefully can inform you to think about what you should put forward. All right.

How many people in the room would like to hire A players?

51:54

Okay, we're in the right room. The bad news is that Google introduced plus and it seems like everybody wants to to hire A+es now.

And in fact, that's what I always say. No, I want the A+ players.

So, we're going to talk a little bit about what do I think makes

52:09

for A+ players. Well, remember I said to you we're very unlikely uh to be able to get all of the particular attributes that make up, you know, somebody's perfect EKS and IQ, etc.

So, let's talk about this in in a context that hopefully is practical and

52:25

and let's talk about what does it really mean to find A+ players and how can you actually apply it in practice. Well, my first three A's are aptitude, ability, and attitude.

And ability is in the broadest sense. It's really in the in the sense of suitability for the job.

52:41

So let's talk about these three. First of all, it might be uh obvious what I mean by these things, but let's let's engage um you know you guys in it for a second.

Why is attitude important in a startup? You should always hire for will and

52:57

train for skill. You just can't give you cannot give will to people.

Sounds good. So I like that that uh hire for will not for skill.

Well, um, let's dig in a little bit. Does anybody have an example of where somebody with great

53:12

attitude has made an impact in their startup? Maybe Russ, I I could draw on you if we don't get an answer from the crowd.

Anybody got an example of of uh where a great attitude has made a difference in their life? Maybe you've had as a customer example.

So, I'm the

53:28

fleet manager for Zipcar Boston and uh we have a particularly tough task ahead of us at the moment, which is merging our two fleets together between Avis and Zipcar. Um, and kind of like the toughest part of it is this fleet sharing operation where we have to get

53:44

cars from Avis's side into Zipar's fleet for the weekend because we need to balance out utilization. And basically it's a really quick turnaround with you know getting 85 Avis cars in and then out on the same day.

Uh there's a lot of

54:00

things that need to go in and out in terms of gas cards and easy passes and it's not fun especially if it's cold or you know if you have issues and we were using Avis's labor and you know it they weren't get al getting along very well.

54:16

Um, and we hired our own employee just to kind of make this problem go away and it was a really important hire for us because this person is honestly I was doing it all summer and I it needs to happen. It's the number one priority for the company.

Um, and so the person we

54:32

actually hired was one of the Avis shuttlers and she's been fantastic in terms of manage. She kind of speaks the Avis language.

She understands the admin side at Zipar, which is pretty complicated uh to make all the cars move around. She came in with a positive

54:48

attitude and just crushed everything she did. Um and so in terms of the unique set of skills, you know, she was young, techsavvy, understood the AIS system, she was pretty much the perfect fit.

Um and I thank the Lord every day for giving me her.

55:05

Um he asked how I found her. Um, and basically I just asked Avis, "Who's your best that you could afford to lose?" Um, and they basically said, "Uh, well, here's a list." And I just interviewed them and she just jumped out right away,

55:22

you know, and for attitude or for for a skills or what what jumped out at you? Uh, well, she jumped out for attitude.

Uh, she seemed really eager. She jumped out for, you know, just understanding the technical skills part of it.

It was actually fairly risky because she'd only

55:37

been with the Avis for 2 months. Um, she was fairly new, but and just on her own side, there were some hurdles.

I really had to like push her through our HR process, but you know, I pretty much fought for her. It went all the way up

55:53

to our COO because there were some question marks in HR because they don't like to bring people that were just hired within two months and like promote them cross company and stuff like that. But I was just confident that like this was the person that could do this, speak both languages, make all the problems go

56:09

away. And so yeah, I mean, in that situation, it was perfect.

So it's it's a great story. It's great as much for your willingness to push it up the chain and take it on as anything else and to pay dividends for you, right?

So the attitude is one of those things that,

56:25

you know, Michael said earlier about feeling it in your gut. Uh that's one of the things that sometimes shows up.

You know, it doesn't show it's not going to show up in EKS or IQ. It's going to show it's going to show up another way.

I got one quick story. Uh we acquired a company of some of the most brilliant vision scientists, robot navigation

56:41

vision scientists in the planet. Um we uh f we found them uh on a piece of white paper piece of research that one of them had published.

It was that it changed the paradigm for the way people thought about machine vision. Anyways, we go out there, we do the digitals in

56:57

the company and uh you know the what what businesses do is they look at what the pro profile the uh the spend line is. They say okay so we can probably do without these jobs.

So we're having a conversation with the CEO founder is an idea lab company. Um and um we said so

57:13

this is what we think the integration is going to look like. He says you can't touch her.

I said what do you mean I can't what you can't touch her? She's she's playing like an office manager role.

That's that's something we think we can manage without. He said, "You take that job out, you lose the entire company." He said, "We hired this person

57:29

out of a out of a uh a rehab program uh to come back to work. We hired her uh because of her attitude.

We hired her because she there was nothing that she couldn't accomplish. She she told us she convinced us in the interview there was nothing that she couldn't accomplish.

There's nothing that she wouldn't do."

57:45

And we were a bunch of PhD scientists who couldn't get out of her own way, who made plotting progress, arguing with each other all the time. She was the one who showed up and she when we put up set up test rigs, she was the one ran ran the test overnight and told us the next morning the results.

She was the one

58:00

that that had pizza and food for us when we needed at the end of the day. She's the one that enabled the rest of the team to be successful.

And she had nothing in terms of qualifications in order to do the job. But she had something that we needed which is this idea is when you were talking about this jump in and do it.

This is a jump in and

58:17

do it attitude. Hire for will not skill.

That's exactly what she had. So the these people can be this this attribute is immensely valuable, hard to measure and is but it can be the difference between something working okay and something working wildly well.

58:34

So I'm sure we could have a lot of stories to bring out tonight, but it's one of my three A's that that I always recommend you put top of the list. Now the second one is a really easy one to talk about in the startup world, which is aptitude.

So for those of you who don't really sort of think about aptitude every day, aptitude is your ability to learn something quickly. And

58:51

why is this important in a startup? In a startup specifically, think about this.

If you're really going to do something innovative, you're going to probably move into an area that is unknown. It's a breakthrough.

It's never been done before. So you can't teach

59:06

people it in advance because it's never been done before. So what do you need when you get there and you're on the other side of somewhere that you've never been before and there are no rules and there's no basis for you to be doing whatever your breakthrough is whether it's machine vision or it's you know new way of of uh interacting with customers

59:22

for payments whatever it is you need aptitude. You need the ability to quickly switch into a new gear, learn a new subject, find a new way of working, figure out what it is that's the new set of boundaries and get into a place that obviously you can make an impact.

That's

59:37

aptitude. And for startups in particular, it's really critical.

Now, the sec the third one here is is ability. And I meant it in the true sense of suitability.

So, we've sort of covered a lot of that, but what you want to make sure here is that there's that fit that we were talking about earlier

59:52

that all of these different components now start to feel like this person's really got the package of whatever it is that you need in the way of experience, knowledge, and skills to to be able to do this job. But without these other two, I'd say this one isn't going to do anything.

Because I can tell you many

00:08

many times in a startup, you run into these situations where because of the way things have speed teamed or formed or you facing some new problem you thought of or you got into a difficulty you didn't encounter, somebody with a wrong attitude who just doesn't want to learn, even if they've got all the

00:23

abilities in the world, is just going to drag you down. But by contrast, when you've got somebody like they've come out of rehab and they don't know any better than to just fight their way through something and they have the attitude of can do and by the way they really want to learn, they're the who who are most likely to go to plant that

00:38

flag on top of the hill and get everybody else to follow them. And that's what it takes.

And in many instances, the great startups show that DNA over and over again and that's why they succeed. So quick examples of attitude.

What I look for problem solving, you know, we've already heard

00:53

this from Eric, fail fast and learn faster. You want to be the kind of person that digs in and is not afraid of failure.

You've got to have the attitude that, you know, what can I do to make a difference as opposed to how can I marginally move the thing forward? Marginal improvements don't make great startups.

Big breakthroughs do. And that

01:11

takes boldness and it takes a an attitude that says, I'm okay to fail. I'm willing to do that and I'm willing to learn faster.

I've already talked a little bit about this which is persistence. You know there's the ultimate test of a startup which is how

01:26

well do they do when they really screw up. And when you really screw up you have to have some persistence to say you know what I still believe in this.

I have the passion the conviction the belief and I have the the persistence to go to the next step and to figure it all

01:42

out again if necessary. As you know, that can involve literally throwing away your assumptions and going back and in particular getting to the root of the problem, issue, or opportunity.

I have a post that's it's due to go up. I'm not quite sure when, but it's all about problem solving.

It's about the what I talk about is the eight levels of

01:58

problem solving. So, it'll go up some stage on my site, but what that really is all about is one thing, which is trying to find people who have the attitude that says, look, I'm not just going to fix the bug.

I'm going to fix the cause of the continuous bugs like I said earlier which is that we're not

02:14

working as a team to really understand how to build effectively. That's the root problem root cause of the problem.

And then if you go back and and you start to look at the really great companies, they go one step beyond that. They say, well, why is it that we didn't build the right team in the first place?

Well, guess what? It's probably a hiring

02:30

problem. You you go all the way back and say, we're probably hiring the wrong kind of people in the first place.

We didn't hire people with the right kind of EQ. Then you go back and you figure out, okay, well, so do we have the culture right to do that or do we have the incentives right to do that?

Well, wait a second. Is the management looking at this thing the right way?

People who

02:45

are really good and have the right attitude consistently figure out how to go all the way to the root cause persist to figure out what they can do to make a difference. And they participate in a way that makes everybody successful.

Not thinking about their individual, you

03:01

know, merit or particular award or whatever. They figure out what are they going to do to make everyone successful.

and they know that they'll rise as one of the boats on the tide at that point. And and that's just a great attitude to have in a startup.

All right, the pluses. So these are just purely things that

03:17

I've, you know, experienced myself. And again, I don't mean to say that these are what you're going to pick out, but here's what I've learned.

This is the one if I can find it early, I almost guarantee you I can build it around it. And that is, is somebody self-aware?

03:33

Why is this important? What happens if somebody's not self-aware?

How easy are they to work with? Well, if you're not self-aware, you can't have emotional intelligence because a lot of people when they treat

03:49

people, and you know, I was a former kindergarten teacher before I worked at behavioral health. I'm learning that.

But no, so usually they follow the proverbial rule, treat people how you want to be treated. But emotionally intelligent people flex to where people are at and they treat people how they

04:06

want to be treated. So in order to have awareness without you have to have awareness within.

So that's another wonderful quote you I need to get you up here writing my sort of little anecdotes. So uh but I really love that and and I actually want to take that

04:22

back to the EQ place too because I really believe that's true too. If you if you don't have awareness from within it's difficult to have awareness around you.

Now, when it actually comes to startups, I'll tell you why it becomes super important. Because you're really trying to make sure that you build a team that beca can be successful around

04:39

people's strengths. But how can you do that if you don't know what their strengths are?

And nobody has only strengths, much as we'd all like to claim that. And the first thing I'll tell you is all my weaknesses.

And there's a long list of them. But the good news is because I know what all my weaknesses are, I know

04:55

who to hire to work with. Like the first person I've always hired in one of my companies is the CFO or somebody who's going to run ops because that is not my strength.

It's absolutely my weakness. But guess what?

I know that. I'm self-aware about it.

I've actually been told by enough people how crap I am at it that it's very easy to figure it out.

05:13

But the good news is once you know that, guess what? go hire the best person to counteract for that and actually hopefully find somebody who's self-aware enough to say, "No, that is my strength, but I'm not the guy who's going to go out and be the visionary and champion

05:28

uh, you know, the cause." Hey, Michael, you seem to like to do that. Go for it.

Now, we have a team because we're self-aware about our strengths and weaknesses. We know how to work together.

So, this is so important in a startup because the more self-aware people are, the more easy it is for you to figure out how to fit them together.

05:44

Now, if people aren't self-aware, some reasons, sometimes it can be because they're not comfortable uh to actually get to a place where they can admit their weaknesses, and that can be cultural. So, again, going back to last week, try to build a safe culture.

Build a culture where it's actually okay to say, "I'm crap at X and I need help with

06:02

Y." And guess what? If you could just, you know, see me through Z, that would be great.

Because you know what? That's a basis on which to have a dialogue.

But if you have to keep banging on the door to find out what somebody's good at and where they're screwing up and they won't admit it, it's going to be very hard to work with. So that's one of my pluses.

06:20

The second one's an easy one, which is authentic, but it goes along with this. A lot of people feel like they've got to be something, you know, they've got to be like this or they've got to be like that.

Really, I mean, why? You are who you are.

Accept that. Figure out how to

06:35

get comfortable with it. Establish where it is that that fits and where it can work.

And lots of things can build on that. And then the last one which is is a sort of a fun one for the startup is sort of the athlete in the end.

I don't know how many times we've been part of this and in fact I'm sure one or two one

06:50

of you two could jump in on this. You know you haven't got a talent pool that's going to fill the position for the particular experience, skills and knowledge.

And what do we do at that point? Maybe I could have you jump in.

Russ, you're nodding on this. You you go to the the athlete piece as I call it.

Maybe you have a different word for it,

07:06

but well, I think the Zip Car story is a great example of that as well. I think the Zip Car story is about someone who had a set of capabilities, had the right attitude, and could and uh you know could operate as an athlete.

I think the

07:21

other way to think about an athlete is as someone who's who's proven that they've been successful at everything else that they've done and that they and they may be they may not be the direct customer support person, but they've they've moved up the sales channels. they've uh they've done another uh set

07:37

of work in another part of the organization that's been successful and they've shown the sign I would think of as a combination between attitude and ability and you they they're going to be good at whatever they do. They're going to be able to move one degree left or right to be successful.

Exactly. So, so a lot of times when you can't find that

07:53

perfect skill set or they haven't got the experience, I'll hire the athlete. I'll hire the person who's shown themselves in the past, you know, to have been good at adapting and adopting whatever the particular job is that's that's um, you know, come up in the past.

And when they show those kinds of skills, generally speaking, athletes end

08:09

up adapting to whatever new job you've got and showing themselves to be successful at that. So that's my three A's, that's my three pluses.

And putting it all back together again, what I call the golden triangle emerges. If you get people who've got the right aptitude, the right ability, the right attitude,

08:25

you've checked out they've got the right experience, knowledge and skills and IQ and CQ and they've got all those pluses. You just hit a home run.

You've got the golden triangles I call it. It's the combination of all those things.

And funnily enough, you will find that they can be successful at the job. They

08:40

really love it and they'll fit and reinforce your culture because you've basically checked off those things. Now, it doesn't mean to say, by the way, that all these things are going to be there from every hire.

But obviously what you want to do is establish some tools for uncovering these things and that's what we're going

08:55

to spend a little bit of time on now. Uh and we're going to we're going to set you up for these uh at least one of these tonight which is with some of the questions.

So for EKS largely speaking it's not rocket science. You know it should be on their resume or their LinkedIn profile or you can get it

09:11

through interviews. You should be able to extract that kind of information about what is their experience.

You can read their you can read that on their resume. But don't get trapped and I encourage you to to think about this in your interview.

Getting them to recite their interview their resume to you. That's your job.

You can read the resume. What you're trying to do is get

09:26

behind the resume and in the interview ask the questions that bring forward what it is that's actually enabled that experience to come out as the person that's in front of you and what will it do to help them set to set them up for success going forward. On the IQ side,

09:42

this is something that's specific to startups. So, I'm not going to say this is applicable for for large companies, but it it can be just as applicable.

Look for proof and you are almost invariably small enough, certainly in your early stages, that you can afford to say, "Hey, guess what? If you're looking for an engineer, let's get them

09:58

to do some coding. Let's take a real world example." Eric, I think we do this at Aqua.

Do you want to talk a little bit about that? We'll do a few things.

Then it again another wonderful thing about Aqua is how flexible we are and our uh the different departments will do different

10:14

things. So we do code tests uh we will uh we will give people very creative kind of odd problems to solve and see how uh and see the type of code that uh they get.

Um you know there are some really interesting uh we're in a unique

10:31

space. We're in the open source space.

Uh and there is actually a uh a website uh a that helps analyze open source code right now. It's called Guild.

Uh so if you have a project out there uh and you

10:48

what guild does is it scrapes all the websites out there uh and figures out what type of open source coding uh coding problems you've solved and what you've done and it analyzes it and tell it will tell me how you scored in Python and what you could you could you have

11:03

done better in PHP and fill in the blank. Um and we'll take those as a as a benchmark but then we'll give you a code test.

we will actually we we will say here's a here's a problem we need to solve and we'll make it realistic to

11:19

what we're trying to do we're not shy um you know Drupal again open source it's open for everybody anybody can go in and look at the code they can fix a module they can do bug fixes it's great it's interactive so we give them and we say here fix this problem please and

11:34

oftentimes it's not even necessarily like the the one one point that I think is important to make it's not just about did they get it Right. But I do want to know how they came up with their solution and what was their process,

11:49

what was their strategy, why did they come up with that solution. It might not have been the exact most perfect code, but if they had a sound fundamental reasons as to why they did it in a certain way, that can go a long way.

That gives us an indication that they

12:05

have the right mindset. They have the right analytical tools that we need to to move forward.

Super. And so you've got plenty of ways you can do this and and I really encourage you to make them practical so that you're not guessing about whether somebody's got these uh particular skills and whether they're actually going to be able to do the job.

12:20

Get them engaged in it. You're small enough I would say actually until you get to be, you know, over a thousand people or more and even then you can break it down departmentally and think about how to do this.

Now the CQ piece is one that's less uh easy. And so you know how do you ensure that somebody's a

12:36

good cultural fit? Obviously, there's that gut uh check that I talked about, but the one I'm going to encourage you to think about is the process itself.

So, here's a simple example. You know, we all know to show up for an interview on time, right?

Pretty basic. However,

12:52

how many people thank you for an interview? How many people actually then follow up and say, you know, hey, I've got some questions for you or engage you in a way in the interview that you feel like, hey, I'd really like to have a conversation with this person.

Well, I'll tell you a funny story. the best hire I ever made.

I threw all my

13:09

questions away and actually forgot I was having an interview because this person ended up engaging me so well that they completely took the process over for me and I realized, oh my god, this is just somebody I want to work with. Well, that's sort of the observation I'm trying to get you to think about here is

13:26

what are the interactions you're having with this person? Is it really hard to get the answers out of them?

Is this feeling natural? Is this a conversation or is it really a torturous interview process?

These things help you observe whether you think you've got a cultural fit. And so I'll always ask my team at the end,

13:42

you know, did this feel like it was an easy process that we really enjoyed and this person naturally would just, you know, flow right along with us. And if the answer is yes, you're probably observing a cultural fit.

But I still encourage you to ask all the questions I mentioned earlier about from a cultural standpoint. But this is sort of the the

13:58

softest piece of it. So I have some things that I'll I'll bring to the four in a minute on this.

Okay. Okay, so the tools around this have to be supplemented by one very practical thing and I really believe you should not ever skip this step and that is go and get what I call real references.

What's the

14:14

difference between a real reference and the reference they give you? The answer is the real reference is not the one that was rehearsed.

And anytime anybody gives you a reference, I'm not going to pay any attention to it. The references I care about the ones I go find out about that are not on their resume.

They're not the

14:30

ones they gave me. So I will go and try to find the references of peers of people who worked for them and people who they worked for.

And all three of those are important but pay attention to the details because for example when somebody says yeah know this person was great that usually means if they stop

14:48

right there they're trying to get you off their back because there's something else they were great and would you hire them again? Yeah, I'd hire them again.

within the intonation. Was it, "Yeah, I'd hire them again." Or was it, "Yeah, I'd hire them absolutely in a heartbeat.

And here's why." And references are

15:05

tough because most people don't want to tell you what they think about people. So, you're going to just have to develop a skill to actually be a Columbbo because really that's what it takes.

You got to play dumb and say, "Well, what did you mean by that?" Or, "Can you tell me an example?" Or, "What was the experience you had? Can you be specific?" Come up with 20 ways to get

15:21

behind what somebody's saying because it's not easy. And when people approach you for a reference, if it's somebody you like, you probably want to say the right thing, but they might not be right for the job.

So try to be specific about why you like them or what you think they're good at. And here's the thing I'm going to encourage you.

If you're

15:38

either giving or getting a reference, remember in the end, you don't serve anybody well if you don't actually tell the truth because they've got to find the right fit. And so if you get them a job that they're not a fit for, you actually didn't do anybody a favor.

You didn't do the person a favor. didn't do

15:53

the company a favor. Real references to me are authentic, very specific, and they get to the heart of what this person really is.

So, there's no shortcut to that. That's just plain hard work, and it's really worth doing the work on it.

Eric, just another thing. Always have the hiring manager do the references.

It's okay. It's okay for uh

16:10

for HR to assist or recruiters to assist, but always have the hiring manager do the references. You're you're going to get more information.

Um, one great question. Ask the reference, what skill are you missing now that this person is gone?

What's lacking? What's lacking on

16:28

your team now that that person is gone? And if they don't have an answer, how valuable were they to that organization that they left?

So, I'm going to have you stay right up here so we can skip right to the Aqua piece. Oh, okay.

Um, so we've covered a lot of this, but to give us two minutes background on on

16:44

Aqua and how you're hiring at the moment. These are these are your slides, so you hop through.

Great. Thank you.

Um, so I'll tell you just a little bit about Aqu and I'll just tell you a couple quick stories. I know we're uh we're running up against the time.

So, uh, one one of the key components to,

17:00

uh, to what we do in delivering great digital web experiences to customers, uh, Warner Music Group is the perfect example. Um, we're we're able to put together websites like two these 250

17:15

artist websites on only three templates. But if you look at each of those 250 websites, you probably can't tell that they came from three three templates.

They're customizable. They can be changed around in any way that you want.

They're incredibly agile. They can they

17:31

can they can look and feel however the individual wants them to feel. You see David Bowie up there.

Um, one of the things is when you need to move fast, you need to move fast. David Bowie, no songs for 10 years, calls up Time Warner

17:49

and said to Warner Music Group and says, "I have a new song." Guess what? It's coming out in four days.

Be ready. What does Warner do?

They say, "No problem." Boom. They go in, they change, they change their entire website.

They're ready for the commerce so that

18:04

they can sell the music and they can launch. The two most Anybody Anybody?

This is always a fun one. Anybody know the two most important days for an artist page?

For a musical artist page. I already gave you one.

When they die. And when they die.

18:22

Absolutely. That is the that is the most important.

When somebody dies, their web pages get hit again and again and again. Um, another one, uh, a little bit more not not a little more serious.

Uh, during Hurricane Sandy, the MTA

18:38

had over 30,000 concurrent users on a regular basis. This is per second people trying to access information.

Think about that. 30,000 pe 30,000 requests every second.

Boom, boom, boom.

18:54

Critical information that people need during a massive emergency. What previously happened with the MTA is that anytime they had a they had a hurricane or they had a uh a shutdown or anything, they couldn't do this and

19:10

their website turned into basically just a text page. It just kind of said, "Please check back later." Now they're able to deliver important information.

And it actually turned into a place where people went for information about where to go for housing, for where to go

19:26

for food, for shelter, and it became just one of the a huge success story for how you can be resilient, how you can make sure that your website is is doing everything properly. Um, I'm actually going to skip Whole Foods, uh, and I'm going to go straight into our Aqua DNA.

19:43

And I'll I'll I'll do this kind of quickly as well because we've talked about a little bit of it. Um, committed to awesome, do the right thing, jump in and own it, give back more, and inspire a little crazy.

Um, I'll I'll talk about inspire a little crazy because it's a

19:58

fun one. We just did this yesterday.

Uh, we we went uh Michael Scott was there. Uh, we spent crazy in of itself.

Yes, it was crazy in itself. We Anybody here of lunchbeat?

Basically yesterday, Aqua sponsored

20:14

lunchbeat which about 150 people showed up at District Hall in the innovation district. We danced from 12 to 1.

DJ was on. Actually, our co-founder uh founding member of Aquia, Jay Batson, was

20:29

spinning the tunes. Everybody just danced.

No alcohol. No alcohol.

Imagine that. That was the hard part.

But you know the these these are the things that we fundamentally believe make Aqua a fantastic place to work. These are the things we look for when we

20:44

are hiring. Um and then the other pieces we we talk about Plei which is passion, integrity, intelligence and initiative.

And I'll just talk one a little more briefly about uh passion. I'll leave the

21:00

other three out there for you guys to noodle on. Passion doesn't just come from what you're looking for.

It's not just about I want to see passion in the person who I'm interviewing. It's about you exuding that passion to that person because you need to match their passion.

21:17

They need to match yours. If you're passionate about what you do and you're passionate about your startup idea and your company, that's going to come through to the candidate.

That's going to come through to that prospective person who's going to help you get to where you want your company to be. And if you're not passionate about what

21:33

you're doing, then they're going to see right through that. They might not want to join your company.

It's not it's not just about you selecting them. It is about you.

It is about them selecting you. So we always put passion first.

That's the most important thing that we believe in. Um integrity, intelligence,

21:49

and initiative. A lot of those things are, you know, we have the three eyes and Michael has the three A's and combined we have uh AI.

There you go. I like it on the fly.

Thank you very much, Eric. Okay, so uh the next section

22:05

is up on my site and I've written it up specifically so we don't have to go through it tonight, but it's because there are questions I always get asked by startups about hiring. So they are, you know, should I hire known quantities?

Should I, for example, figure out um how to b you know hire

22:21

youth or should I always hire experience? Should I be going for one or the other?

Uh you know, how do I actually make sure I sell my company but listen to my interview interview? These are really tough things.

So, I I'm going to just turn it over to Russ for a second to to give us a few words of wisdom before we kick off the actual um

22:38

session. We got a few more minutes before we we'll have you actually doing the interview.

Russ, what would you share from all your years of experiences? Some of the important things for people to think about before we get off kick them off to do their interviewing.

Um I think I I uh I've known Michael for a few years and I've uh I love I've I've

22:53

seen parts of this presentation before. Uh, part of the reason I love it is because the parts he talks about are the parts that often get ignored.

When you're starting a company and you're work and you're working to try to create something out of nothing, uh, you tend to focus on the content expertise that you need. You tend to focus on the on

23:10

the things that have to get done, but not the company that you're building. Last week, it sounds like you talked about mission, vision, and values.

Uh, this week is the expression of those mission, vision, and values through people. My I' I've been lucky to work for some interesting companies.

I've had uh a couple of startup experiences in

23:26

there. I've seen three industries start, grow, and begin to mature.

Uh I'm, you know, delighted that I', you know, at iRoot, I'm, you know, people think I have a robot as ground zero for the robotics industry. 20 years ago when the company started, uh there was one

23:41

robotics company in Massachusetts called iRoot. Now there are 127.

Um, and our challenge right now is to find a great find the greatest talent that wants to contribute to our mission which is build cool stuff, deliver great products, make money, have fun and change the world.

23:58

Uh, it's a each of those attributes we talk about in interviews and we find out the passion that each person has around each of those topics. Uh, we also get we also do a lot about giving back.

We look at their we look at their interest in contributing back. We're trying not just to to be be creative and successful.

Now

24:15

we're trying to grow the next generation of engineers. We uh we have a we give employees two days a year to go teach uh STEM education in schools or to do robot demonstrations in high schools or to get

24:30

in front of the Girl Scouts and talk about why girls are needed engineering. So it's part of what it's part of our dimension of change in the world.

The one thing I'll say and I'll step down because the real work is next is that you can't underestimate the importance of the people that you hire from the

24:46

beginning there. I I I have corporate marketing now, which is which will shock Michael, but I have uh I I have corporate communications, PR, web.

I I own iRoot.com. Uh and I have the creative services team.

And part of the reason I think

25:02

that is is because when we started hiring, I joined three years ago. I said I wasn't going to let anybody in who couldn't represent iRoot's brand in their world because everybody is a network connection.

I we we sell a consumer product, right? If we we we

25:18

architected the the the process of interviewing so that even if people got rejected, they get they would came away with a great experience because when they went into the store to buy something and they saw iRoot next to it, if they had a lousy experience with iRoot during the

25:34

interview process, they were less likely to buy our product. We knew it.

Uh we've uh Michael and I had a conversation about a couple months ago that inspired me. Now, people who come to our website who are interested in our products, we also try to find out if they're interested in working there as well.

And we're trying to we're trying to extend

25:49

that as well. But everybody is an extension of the brand that you're trying to build.

You have a brand yourself. You have a set of values and your set of passions.

Those have to be expressed through everybody you're building. The most the see the single most important person in the development

26:05

of the culture, you learned this work last week, I'm sure, is the leader, right? And that and as a startup the value I said about it earlier the value you're generating includes the relational the equity value the emotional intelligence of the people

26:20

that you have on your team and the relationships that they build and the relationships that they have. So I'll leave it at that.

Thank you very much Russ. For those of you who weren't here um for one of the sessions where actually we did this in go to market um we talked about in startups the brand is

26:36

you and last week we talked about leadership and culture and that leadership and from the top comes the culture. So uh you just heard Russ reinforce that and it's actually great to hear that you're doing that

26:52

that that you're taking over that literally by leading from the front. That's fantastic.

really is. All right.

Um, sorry, we have one more question, but I really want to get to the workshop right after. So, jump in.

Uh, when you are hiring, when you are interviewing, you you say I, but you imply there's

27:08

also a team of people in the room interviewing these people. Is that is that true?

Is it a group interview? Is like one potential hire and three or four people from the company or is it just you oneonone?

So, I'll I'll let both Russ and Eric uh answer that because everybody's different. Um, I was

27:24

answering in the very simplest of senses saying that many instances I'm doing one-on-one interviews. I do know that some people do it differently.

Jump in. It depends on the It depends on the role.

So, uh, there's sometimes we will we'll do it uh, serially where we have, you know, a series of people interview.

27:40

We always coordinate the beginning and the end. Michael talked references it a couple times when he sits down with the team and he says, "Is this really someone who's going to be additive to our team uh, or dilutive to our team?" So, you do it that way, but you start out as a team and you end as a team.

Sometimes uh we do this a lot. Robotics

27:55

is really the integration of a number of capabilities and technologies. So it's hardware, it's it's mechanical, electrical, uh software.

We will some depending on the on the role, we'll have the team interview that as part of the process. We the manager will will like the systems engineering guys will the

28:12

leader will take the small pile of candidates and window it down to one or two and then they'll put them in front of the team. So it can be role dependent or it can be cultural dependent.

If your culture is open and team- based, you may want to make it a team- based interview at Nervewire. You know, the first interview was with the competency lead,

28:27

the second interview was always with the team. And uh so it it re it can really depend.

Excellent questions. So, let me kick off the workshop.

Um we've got about 15 minutes to do this. I know we started about 15 minutes, so people are late.

So, if people want to stay late, we can do it for a little bit longer,

28:43

but I want to try to to give you all a chance. So, uh, you should all have a copy of one of these sheets which has got a series of questions on the top.

And if you don't, just stick your hand up because Jennifer will get you one. So, uh, in there are a series of questions and each of them are divided

28:59

by things like the IQ and EQ and CQ that we've been talking about. So, what I'd like you to do is just find one person.

Could be either somebody next to you, but just, you know, pair up. So, for example, if the two of you at the front and the two of you at the front would like to just get together, what I'd like

29:14

you to do is just go through these questions, a lot of them I've already hinted at, and pick one of them that you think is the most important if you if you had to just start with one question uh to start an interview out with. Imagine you're a founder and you're trying to find a co-founder.

That's as

29:31

that's written at the top of the instructions. What would you look for?

And just interview each other. I'm going give you give give give you about 5 10 minutes to do that and then I'm just going to ask for a couple of you to share your experiences and we'll we'll have a discussion about it and draw some of that out.

So uh jump in make sure you've got paired up and u and and give

29:47

yourself a chance to sort of ask some good questions here. All

30:18

right, the good news is uh you've got the rest of your lives to figure out how to ask these questions and answer them. We just wanted to give you a flavor of some of this tonight.

Uh so we've got five groups that have volunteered to to share their experiences and uh Russ and Eric are going to take a moment to uh

30:35

give you a chance to share what did you learn what what question you pick first of all on why and then what did you learn by asking that person. So let's start on the right Eric why don't you jump on it.

Sure. Um so why don't why don't you share with us uh what what question you asked uh your your partner here.

Well, one of one of the questions

30:52

that I asked him um were, "What legacy do you hope to leave?" And I found it very interesting. Um he said that, you know, he wasn't he wasn't going to be Bill Gates.

I thought that was very humble of him. Um

31:08

but um that he he had he still pushed for higher standards and higher stability. So, you know, that humbleness and also his willingness to still move forward.

Was it a uh was it a complete answer? Did you feel that at the end of what he

31:25

described to you that you felt satisfied with that answer? I thought it was it was very honest and it also gave me a feel of um you know his personality.

as the, you know, conversation progressed, I learned a lot about how important family and community and other values

31:42

are to him. And that translated um very very influentially to team building with me.

So I felt like, you know, if he was ever in a management position that he would do what it takes to sustain that team. And it sounds like that came out organically, like not as a result of a

31:59

of a of a specific question about what you what your fundamental values are. It just came out as part of that initial question.

Yeah. Great.

So that's that's good. So I'll ask you now the same thing.

What what question did you choose and what did what did you kind of learn from it? Yeah.

I asked her um you know

32:17

uh what's your passion in life? And uh she she she uh um said that she loves to create and and also um from other aspects.

And I asked her um the balance in the balance in life and she um she treasured

32:34

the um the contribution to the community and society and also the uh the fact that kind of you know impressed me that she is willing to sacrifice for the next generation and um I see that very

32:50

sincere uh you know from you know what she she talked um and she said she likes to talk and So, so the I I see honest assessment, right? So, um being eloquent and u articul articulated is good um you

33:08

know in the in a good way. So, I think in general I say that she can be a very good managerial um uh uh uh resource or type for the organization.

Great. So what I'm hearing here which

33:24

was great just to sort of pull out a couple of examples is when you ask the question about you know what's the legacy that uh he wanted to leave behind you know that tells you a lot about somebody because it's a chance for them to say well you know when everything's said and done what do I want people to remember me for and so that probably gets to some core issues and it was

33:39

great that you asked that question and brought out a couple of CQ issues like his values and EQ issues like how he wanted to work in a team and then when you flipped it around I thought it was great what's your passion is of course you know that's my favorite question that can lead to a long discussion uh the fact that you started talking about community, you could have talked about anything, right? You could have talked

33:55

about work, but you chose to put that first, talk to your, you know, CQ and EQ, the fact that you you want to engage in that way and, you know, your sincerity and the fact that you open it up to say, "Hey, I'd like to talk." It's awesome. So, anyway, thank you both very much for participating.

That's great. So, on this side, you two are team.

Did

34:12

did you ask more than one question or just one? Yeah, we asked a few questions actually.

So, I didn't I'm not sure if I judged the time right. I guess I can speak into the mic.

Um, and I only have got a chance to So, my name is Tim and this is Elise. Um, and it was mostly me interviewing her because we ran out of

34:29

time at the end, but I think we both learned something from, uh, from the roles we were playing. Tell me the question that you learned the most from when you were interviewing her.

Uh, sure. I mean, I started out with the question, uh, what are you passionate about?

Because it's Michael's favorite

34:44

question. Okay, you broke the first rule.

This is about you. You choose the questions.

and it seemed like a good intro question to kind of learn some general things about her. Um, I think I picked up right away that she's a very uh intuitive um person and it seemed like she had a very high

35:00

emotional IQ. She started out by saying um, you know, that she's passionate about problem solving and meeting new challenges and and making people feel good, you know, like doing things that affect other people in a positive way.

Um, and so we talked about that for a little while and and and on the

35:15

emotional quotient side, I didn't ask her any of these in particular, but just asked her straight up, you know, do you consider yourself to be a person with with a high emotional quotient and um, you know, are you perceptive and do you do you pay attention to other people?

35:32

Um, and are you in touch with that? And she was able to uh, genuinely talk about that for a little while.

Um and again, so I think she I think she is um there is one more actually. Um on the values, um this is one that I don't hear people

35:48

talk about too much, but it's uh it's something that I have feelings about. It's the you know, what does what does balance mean to you in your life?

Um, I was happy to see it on this this list because I think people can kind of they they tend to um automatically air on,

36:06

you know, working a lot. Right.

That's right. Uh, and I'm I'm kind of of the opinion that um that there can be drawbacks to that.

And so I asked her about that. Um, and I and I thought, you know, if this was somebody I was actually interviewing, I would be happy

36:21

to get these sorts of responses because she uh she, you know, she was saying, well, work and and life are connected and if things are out of balance, it can have bad effects on both. And I thought, well, this resonates with me culturally.

Uh, and if if I was going to be in a position of hiring her, that would be

36:37

that would be important. So, you asked three questions.

You asked about passion, you asked about EQ, and you asked Yeah, I think other ones, too. I'm just hitting the highlight.

Those are so those are those are the three you learned the most from. Yeah.

Right. Would you hire?

Yeah. I mean I mean I

36:52

would have to ask a couple more questions but basically on that thought she was charming. Right.

Would you take the job? You Well, she's got to hire me.

She's got to interview. Oh, she didn't get a chance to interview.

That's right, too. But I mean is is there anything you want to share?

Um and yeah, can I please?

37:10

So um I am Elis. I would like to share a little bit about um to be interviewed.

So my last be interviewed was happened like five years ago. I haven't been interviewed for a long time and five

37:25

years can happen a lot. So when you ask me about the passion and there are two or three seconds my brain has nothing to to say and then I found okay let's think about what happened in the past and the the moments and there are two moments come come to my mind and I think that's

37:42

my passion so I I just want to thank for this chance to you know I feel like maybe I should be interviewed every like month to keep myself calm and you know be be selfawareness And I ask you ask uh my partner a

37:58

question about uh what do you not doing daytoday. So for me I feel like people when you come to interview a job you are really in a very excited moment and you prepared um prepared a lot but the life is always peaceful.

So the day by day

38:15

the every day maybe can make some people's passion really drop down and some people can really keep a very high level. So I want to know what what happened to its b day by day time.

So that that will make me say the common

38:30

and normal and as a human being and not a hero or something. So that that's what I ask you that question and uh yeah he talked me more information than I asked and yeah so I was satisfied with this

38:46

this interviewer. Thank you very much.

You're welcome. the the I think the essence of the of the learning is the is that when you get beyond in some ways I really liked what you said about you weren't prepared for the question about passion you hadn't thought about it in some ways you're not when Michael asked

39:01

me that question the first time I met second time I met him he asked me that question I wasn't that was one of the questions I wasn't prepared for but it but the reality is is it it what comes out in that moment is really essential to who you are it's really it's not

39:16

practice it's not audition I you know one of the things about interviews you'll learn is that people reveal themselves in moments and if you can ask the question that they're not prepared for rather than the question that they are prepared for you learn more and so you both learned something about each other that was valuable right

39:32

yeah fantastic I also want to you shared something that that I hadn't revealed tonight but it was a an excellent point you made which is being interviewed is actually an experience that you very clearly remember and so if you've had a good interview that obviously tells you something about the company. If you had

39:49

a bad interview, that tells you something about the company, too. And I'm amazed how many times that is ignored.

You know, people start selling that company. You know what?

The best way to sell your company is to have a great interview. Ask great questions.

Figure out how to really listen. So, thank you for bringing that up.

That was great. All right.

Want to move one more

40:07

down the line here. You Okay, here you go.

So, talk about the question that I guess you learned the most from when you interviewed him. Sure.

Uh, hi I'm Vishi. This is Vern.

So the question that I asked Verun was Michael's favorite yet again. What are

40:23

you passionate about? Because I I actually I think there's a good reason why it's his most favorite question.

Like I think it does reveal quite a lot about a person. Um, so Verun's answer was really interesting.

He said that he likes to build things and see the impact from those things. And the example he

40:39

gave was really cool, which is that when he worked at Microsoft, he worked on the photo function in Windows 7. And the cool thing about that is that everyone uses Windows.

And so he was in Rwanda on a project talking to some children and he was able to point out to them all the

40:55

way in Rwanda the specific product that he built. And I think that reveals quite a lot about what, you know, what motivates him and what drives him.

That's right. Great.

Um yeah, so I'm Vun. I asked actually

41:11

Vidushi uh the same question. Uh yet again, what are you passionate about?

And you know, I actually from the kind of the general category of questions, I really like that question. It I feel like this is a good question about like, hey, what's your north star?

What are you kind of aiming for? Um, and then,

41:28

um, amongst these other ones, kind of the day-to-day ones or the previous job ones. I'm not such a big fan of those just because I feel like sometimes those are very contextual, like your previous job, there might have been other million reasons why, you know, why you enjoyed it that's hard to bring out.

And then

41:44

also on the day-to-day one, like, you know, sometimes it's like, well, I it's hard to say like um, you know, what you would love doing daytoday because each day would be different. So, I I I wasn't that big of a fan.

But anyways, Vidushi's answer was I actually really

41:59

appreciated. She was like, "Hey, you know, I I actually don't know what I'm passionate about yet.

Um I'm still in the process of figuring that out." And like that was her first sentence. And to me, I thought that was actually really great because I it revealed a great deal of self-awareness saying that, hey, I don't know what I'm passionate about, but here are the And then she went on to

42:15

figuring out what they are. Um so she's like, I really like interacting with people.

I like working with smart, genuine, you know, kind of authentic people. Um I think you talked a little bit about um impact and and and that stuff as well.

Um so right great right great right great right great right great right great right great right great right great right great right great right great right great right great right great right great right great right great right great right great right great right great right great right great right great right great right great right great right great right great right it's interesting

42:30

again it's s similar example I think the passion question has a great opportunity to distill out the essence of the person you really find out the core you found out a little bit about his core and he found out about your core in ways that you might not get in any other kind of question right and the importance of EQ

42:46

and the importance of how that aligns with what you're trying to hire for right so great thank you awesome thank you guys so I'm going to ask these uh the last two couples uh here did you ask uh other questions besides where do you passionate?

43:01

Oh, we did we asked. You did.

Okay, great. You have the mic.

Okay. Uh I guess I'll skip the passion one because we we did ask some but but that was first.

Um I I think it went into values but but then

43:17

we went on to legacy like what kind of legacy would you like to leave? And um it here um left um told told me that he's he's working on a tea health um startup and he wants to um he basically

43:34

wants to leave um he knows that he's not going to be in his words Oprah Winfrey um going out you know to different places um being famous on every public channel but he wants to improve the lives of the people he u meets in person

43:50

and he was talking about how he wanted to um help people um like say in rural areas like rural Nebraska um see um basically get um connect with um doctors in in Boston and bas basically

44:07

facilitate that. And he also um in his values he values education um his family values education and um especially for girls um for people who wouldn't have the opportunities

44:22

otherwise. So he um he talked a bit about those but and then we talked about management and um he basically said that like a management should facilitate uh the work of ever of others and make basically not micromanage but make more

44:38

possible. So it seems like he's a someone who really wants to um improve and and change the world and would be and I really got a picture of uh what his goals and his personality were.

44:54

Um, so, uh, I asked Marcella, um, you know, as I started off, I asked her, um, what do you value most? And one of the things that she asked me was, in what context?

I thought that was really important because, um, if I were going into an interview for a for a summer

45:09

camp and you asked me that question, I tell you I love to bike and then I'm an avid biker. But if I were going into a healthcare interview, I would say I value access to care and um, underserved populations and so forth.

So I think it was very good of her to ask that question. Um I did ask her about management and um she gave me a answer

45:28

that was kind of parallel to mine in that um you know she felt that a manager was there to kind of help support um you know a group and kind of be there for them when they needed something but not to you know guide them there because it you know kind of stifles them. Um, so I

45:46

think that she answered the questions very well and they were the answers I wanted to hear. Um, if I have to say anything, I could say that maybe those answers could have been a little bit more personal.

Um, because they were they were basically like what I wanted to hear and not more like why it was

46:01

about like why her why she was saying this, like what experience she had with it. But um, but yeah, overall I thought that was very insightful to start off by saying in what context.

So just to to pause for a second, what you asked something there that was

46:16

important. How could she have got more personal?

How could you have helped her? Because one of the jobs of the interviewer is to actually make somebody comfortable enough that they will share what their you know real personal sort of like values and stuff.

How might you have done that? So you could have asked her to give me an to give you an example of a time where she felt that she was

46:32

managing a group of people um and see what her response was. But we didn't we didn't get to that point.

But um but yeah, I think that's something I could have asked her. So yeah.

So, if you ever get to reading the website, somebody did ask me where all the materials are. Again, it's all up at startupsecs.com or mjscock.com.

The bottom line is um the

46:50

interviewer's job is to make sure that you set the stage for somebody to be become authentic. And sometimes I find that that's actually hard.

Like people are so tense and they're so nervous or they're so unpracticed or whatever. In which case, change the scene.

Like literally walk them out the building if they need to take them for a walk or take them to the cafeteria, buy them a

47:05

coffee or if you need to just say, "You know what? Is today a good day for you?" And maybe the answer is no.

And actually, you know what? If it's an important position, let them come back, right?

Um, it's it's actually your job to figure out how to get that, you know, to the right. I don't know whether it's I just going to jump in in a second and

47:20

just say how critically important that is and difficult, right? It's I mean, when you're hiring, you're especially at this stage in in an organization's life.

I I said it earlier, every person you hire is an extension of your mission and your what you're trying to accomplish. And so as the interviewer, it's kind of

47:38

your responsibility to make sure you can authenticate them as as who they are. People show up often times suggestion happened here.

People show up at times for interviews like it's an audition, right? They study the website.

They study the market. They look at the they look and see who else is in the

47:54

company who they might know. They try to make connection.

But it's it's it's a they show up as an addition. It's your job to strip the strip away that veneer to try to get to the to the person and I you know uh take a walk right instead of

48:11

doing it in your office walk them around the location you're at and you know observe them you know that's my earlier comment I said people sometimes reveal themselves in moments um and that you'll get you'll get their authentic self in a splash and if you're attending to them

48:26

you can just use that moment to leverage into uh to discover more about who they are. Great.

Thank you. Like last but not least, last but not least.

Yes. Okay.

You got to smooth. You got Yeah.

Um, so this is Chris. I'm Elina.

And I asked him a similar question to what are you

48:43

passionate about but not quite, which is what do you love about your life? And I was trying to capture I thought, you know, a good answer would kind of indicate what you're passionate about, but also reflect his values.

Um, which is the reason I asked that one. Um, and I thought his answer was really, really

49:00

interesting, which was that at the moment he loves the focus he gets from his work, his research in a biochemistry lab. Um, but he added for now, which I thought was quite interesting because it's not, you know, a lifetime love necessarily.

Um, so we talked about it

49:17

more and he talked about how he built they've built this team over four years and it really started as a very risky venture and really just him and over the course of four years it's grown quite large and gone beyond the research that he's doing to be something that other

49:32

researchers are able to tap into. And so I thought that was really interesting because it reflected that he was interested in work beyond his own.

Y um and then I thought the fact that he was saying that this is what he's interested in for now but is willing to change and also how his research had kind of

49:48

changed over those four years were both quite interesting aspects of the response. Um before we lose the thread I loved your question.

I thought it was great. What do you love about your life?

But you also get an A+ at my book for the way you were listening because you picked up some nuances like you know he

50:05

immediately jumped to work which tells you he's passionate about his work but the for now nuance was very key. I would give you a lot of kudos for that.

Very good. Nice.

The the other piece that I particularly enjoyed was that she asked the question and she had already thought about why she was asking that question.

50:22

Awesome. You know, you don't want to go into an interview and just have your list of 10 questions you're gonna you're gonna lay out there without some sort of expectation as to why you're asking those questions.

There should be a purpose behind those questions. And she specifically said right up front, why do

50:39

you what do you love about your life? Here are some here's some things I might get out of this and it might it might give you those those glimpses into the authentic self.

And she's looking for that. So if you go in with some expectations of why you're asking those questions, it's it's much more helpful

50:56

than if you're just going in and you're just asking a question blindly. That's right.

Thanks. Thanks, Eric.

Yeah, I started with what are you passionate about question as well. And it turned out that Elina is working at

51:11

the uh school of public health and it's sort of obvious that you can be very passionate about this type of work because other people benefit from what you're doing. And so that's how it started and then it went more into problem solving.

So what type of

51:27

problems she's passionate about uh how she likes to apply her specific skill set to break the problems into smaller pieces and then solve these kind of problems. Mhm.

So I learned uh how she approaches her work and why she's

51:44

passionate about this and how she thinks she can make an impact by finding the problems she can address with her skill set and then make a difference based on uh on the results of this work. So uh I think I got to the to the bottom of what

51:59

drives her in her day-to-day like environment. Motivations, right?

Fundamental motivations. Great.

Fantastic. Well, I want to thank all of you for for participating in this was this uh we did this the very first year in the workshop, but it was uh nowhere

52:14

near as much fun as you made it tonight. That's right.

Uh so this was great. I also want to thank uh Eric and uh Russ for for joining us.

And um I'm going to just try to wrap up briefly. You don't need to move.

Uh by saying there is uh one thing that really stood out for me. If you look at all the answers that we

52:30

got, how many of them were really about IQ? almost none of them, which to me means tonight was a success.

Uh because the IQ is the easy part. That's the piece you can figure out.

But it looks like frankly uh all of you found your own way

52:47

to bring out EQ and CQ and figure out what was this person really about. So I really congratulate.

I think it's fantastic. It makes me feel proud to uh to be part of this.

So great great fun. Now I'm going to uh leave you with my final question which is an an open question.

and it's up on the screen uh

53:04

which is what else should we know about you and and the reason that I always have this question at the end is that it's sometimes difficult to actually give somebody a chance to tell themselves about you no matter how many questions you ask and so by asking this last open question you kind of leave the

53:20

catch all it's like okay I might have missed something about you or what if you leave this room and you go damn I wish I'd told you know Vid about this or I wish I'd told Elena about this or I wish I'd told Ross about this this question allows you to do that. It's the, you know, it's the catchual.

So,

53:35

I'll leave you with that. The other thing that you already did, so I left this to the end just to point it out, is that you can tell, you know, there was a lot of this in the uh the workshop that came out.

We were trying to discern three things. You were trying to make sure that you were listening to uh what

53:50

their responses were and observing how they responded uh through your questioning and and you did all of that very very well. Now, the piece that's not so obvious is the little subtlety behind this.

People have needs, wants and loves and many other things but separating them is important. So the

54:06

observing I thought you did very well but uh let's just get to the specifics of the needs, wants and loves. So sometimes people need to get paid a certain amount.

Does that mean to say they love you know their job? Not necessarily.

They may want for example uh and and need to be recognized. Uh

54:23

they may want for example to learn. That may be a different thing.

Um and they may love to contribute to make a difference. for example, those are all different things.

So, here's an example of what gets very difficult in interviewing, and it's it's what I thought you guys were doing very well, which is a nuance, which is somebody says, "I really want this job."

54:41

How many times do you hear that? Okay.

But why do they want the job? Is it because they're going to get paid more?

Uh is it because they really love the work or is it because they absolutely have to get a job at this particular point, you know, to meet some, you know, uh green card, for example, requirement,

54:57

by the way, which has happened to me. uh that exact problem and so they're convincing you and they're convincing you because you know it's a genuine need but it doesn't really get to the heart of what they actually want to do or how they want to contribute.

So just try to separate those things. Um my my pure view on this thing just to having paired

55:14

you up is that there's only one secret that I really want to leave you with that's that's um most important. It's all about finding a mutual fit.

In other words, not only are you trying to find a fit for that candidate that will meet your needs, but you also ultimately want to make sure that it's what they are

55:31

going to have to meet their needs. If it's a true mutual fit, it meets their needs, it meets what they want to do, and it's going to ultimately put them in a position where they love it, I think you've made a great hire.

And uh I would never sell if you don't find that because ultimately it's going to come undone. It just won't be sustainable.

55:48

And particularly in startups when you have you know small teams and as Russ said so well where these teams really are the core and the defining essence of what your company is it makes a huge difference. And so one more to to uh you know follow the jobs theme always one more thing uh that is be patient.

Hire

56:05

the right person not the right the person right now because it'll always feel urgent. It'll always feel like you've got to just hire that person.

You've always got a hole. But if you can hire the right person and make that difference, honestly, you will see your company sore from that.

So once again,

56:23

thank you to Russ, thank you to Eric, thank you to all of you, and look forward to seeing you next week. [Music]