01:05:31 · Chris Power
[01:05:31] S1: In any industry, there are many false doors. And what I mean by that is... I'll use an analogy. Let's say you go into a party, and it's a really great party full of really great people, and you really... You're, you know, you're young and 22, you wanna make friends, and you really wanna have cigars with the people at the, you know, in the balcony because that's where the cool people are. Many people I think manipulate the social sphere or you can stand next to a certain person and signal some friendship or insider basis and and then you get invited to have drinks with the host, for example. And you're fully convinced that you're like in the club now. In reality, you've taken door number b. Because most long value families, the government, enterprise customers, people that you wanna hire, people that you wanna be friends with, at a certain point of scale or success or credibility, you are forced to build these trapdoor immune systems such that you're catching disingenuous people. And I think an unspoken reality is that most people who are disingenuous and are trying to seek power genuinely believe they are in the room, and they have simply just fallen into the abstract door number b trap. And once you really understand that and come to terms with the fact that the only people who should be in the room are the genuine people who are not seeking power, they just wanna do the thing, and you just do that, you will accidentally find the right people who you wanna be with, or the right customers. So when anything is going on, I I think if you're a truth seeking organization, if you're a honest broker, and your job your job in enterprise sales is to advise and provide solutions to the customer as an expert and only bid on contracts that you genuinely believe that you are the best to deliver to and you act like it, then the market will adopt your vision for the world Versus, hey, we're gonna throw up all the marketing copy like we're the thing, but we're not really the thing. Again, I think it's a very fast way to build a billion dollar company or a fake marriage. I think it's a very slow way to build something real. Because I do think that honesty and seriousness compounds in strange ways that are not... You can't write down on paper.
01:08:13 · Ty Morse, Chris Power
[01:08:13] S0: Do you have any examples of an experience that occurred due to this compounding? The entire company. [01:08:21] S1: Every round gets easier for us, not because we're good at fundraising, because in every round we have provided more objective data and more honesty around what is gonna happen the next time around. That people pass on rounds and then they come back around. It's not because of the hype cycle, it's because they realize like what you said you would do in the last twelve months seemed like absolute horseshit, and 80% of it came true. So because what you're ascribing to in capital allocation or large government contracts through talent is trust. That gets built over time. What people mispredict is how fast that compounds. And like there are no hacks. You just gotta do the right thing. And generally the market will work that out. [01:09:12] S0: Ideally, you spend almost all your time on, like, the highest leverage activity that you possibly can be working on. But at least in my own experience, I've only been able to really understand what the high leverage activities were by doing a bunch of stuff that wasn't high leverage Yeah. And then realizing in hindsight that is not what I should be focused on. How has your kind of, like, time and focus shifted over the past couple years to the things that are actually high leverage versus the things that you thought were high leverage?
01:09:37 · Chris Power
[01:09:37] S1: It changes every day. And there are different there are different, I think, inflection points. And I'll give you a tactical example. So I've always thought our onboarding process was like, okay, at best. No one's fault. Leverage point number one is you say like, hey guys, I think this is shit, we need to fix it, but not that fast, k. Now I think it's one of the most important things because we're in the process of firing 2,000 people. So spending an extra hour on onboarding means that the productivity or mission orientation of vector of 2,000 people is massively impacted by that hour. So that's a... It just depends. Sometimes the business surprises you with like things are really stable, things are not stable and you need to massively intervene. It's mostly about what you can pay... What you can fix in three months versus what you gotta fix tomorrow, and where the asymmetry of that plays, and that's that's not obvious. You know sometimes it is writing a better performance management document so the whole company does it better, and sometimes it's performance managing an individual contributor that reports four layers deep. It depends, it's a hard call every single time. And I'm nowhere near good enough at this.
01:11:04 · Ty Morse
[01:11:04] S0: I think right now you're probably kind of experiencing like one of the best bottlenecks or problems that a startup can ever face, which is like insane demand, and it just keeps on ramping faster than you think it will. Same thing with Keller's business. When you start to see the curve go like this consistently, you need to stop planning for a linear growth curve, and you need to figure out, like, okay, here is where our actual projections are going to go Yeah. Or our actual business is gonna go, and then project even further out and really shift the way that you think about things. How have you kind of done that? How are you for... How are you predicting an unpredictable future better than you used to?
01:11:43 · Chris Power
[01:11:43] S1: It's all vibes. I think that what you wanna do is not predict things at all, is that you want to massively invest in velocity, and and let the market and the company show you how fast you can grow. So I I guess a way of saying this is how many engineers can we hire because our current productivity rate is x, and they... Therefore we... Okay. When you've got infinite demand, the number one thing you should work on is where are we not at max velocity today and let everything accelerate past the business. Business. You know, I remember seeing this interview with Sam and, you know, he's running the org. Right? The org is this whole other thing. And he was always fundraising ahead of the org. And I think this is a great phrase. Because you can always find... You you can always slow things down. You can always find more customers. You can always say, like, hey. 200 engineers going and working on this. What you can't change is that what you can't... When you wanna speed up, you can't as the velocity of the org. So when you've got infinite demand, I think the thing is just, like, work on the... Like, maximize the velocity and orientation of the org and let it go as fast as humanly possible. But, like, don't plan what your... I think Ramp does this brilliantly. There's like, we need to ship this product by this date because we've got some like hair brained VP of product scheme. No. No. No. Just have the highest product and engineering velocity and the highest taste for what products are shipped next. Ship the products as fast as possible, and then announce them as soon as they're ready. Versus like this kind of we need to do this Salesforce release by December q four, and therefore... I don't know. Just go as fast as fucking possible, and focus on the cadence of how fast you're shipping stuff, and then let... And then announce it when it's done, and then they... You see this clip break go up, up, up, up, and then try and build a lot of... Like, try and build a lot of leverage. That's kinda how I got to this.
01:13:59 · Ty Morse, Chris Power
[01:13:59] S0: Imagine that as the CEO of an organization that's moving like this, you are effectively... When you start it, you're on this treadmill and it's set to one. And then as time goes on, it gets reset to two and then three and then three and a half and four. Yeah. And it just keeps on moving up and up and up. What does it actually feel like when the organization and the company starts moving into pace where like running at five miles or six miles or seven miles an hour, and then you're like, oh, fuck. I wasn't... I haven't trained for, you know, eight or nine or 10. [01:14:30] S1: Yeah. I think the other funny example is the treadmill's going at ten. [01:14:34] S0: Right.