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.
01:14:35 · Chris Power
[01:14:35] S1: And you were running at twelve, and then you gotta be at eight for a little bit. Again, I think it's down to like what algorithms of the company are running that you're very happy to let run for eight to twelve weeks, and what has to be fixed tomorrow because it's gonna trail in a weird way. And then the the meta game I found honestly is energy management. And what I mean by that is like everyone is... What I find is I can basically work as hard as possible. I think that's a wrong way to think about it. I think it is through all the problems of the business, what are you... What gives you more energy or neutral energy to solve so you can keep going as fast as possible versus what, like, ties you out. And I think it's honestly... This is a very human thing. Like, let's talk about the gym. You talked about a treadmill. Some people, they get on the treadmill, and they can run twenty, thirty, forty, sixty minutes, and they feel great. Some people can lift weights for sixty minutes, and they wanna they wanna do more. Some people, it's the opposite. You know? Yeah. I hate cardio, if but you're sitting in front of a dead lift, I can go all day. And that is a bit like business. Like, I can do complex product management every single day of the week. I've got about three days of high switching cost in me, and then I'm cooked. So I I really do structure the things that I'm working on based on some things I work on for an hour and it burns me the hell out, and I'm like done with the day. Or at least I'm at 50% speed, and that's unique. I think it's the same with your people, I think it's the same with your organization, like what are you doing, like where you kinda at energetically. Not to be woo woo but I I do think this is like a real thing. And honestly like there's a 100 difficult problems to solve in a day. And I think you got... Gotta get really really good at like not taking it personally. So if you're gonna do the hard thing like what what I found actually Sam taught me this which was my number one thing is something goes wrong, I gotta fire someone, you know I gotta do something hard, empathetically difficult, let's call it that. And I think your gut instinct is write it down, schedule it for Thursday, and you blow the whole week. The kind of...
01:16:57 · Chris Power
It seems flippant at the time, but like flicking someone email being like, hey, we gotta talk tomorrow. It's about this topic. No big deal, and it's in the calendar. You remove... Like as soon as you find problem, you gotta start actioning it, and I think your life gets a lot easier. So my main my main thing on this velocity thing is is effectively like, if you're the type of person that puts things to a side because they're emotionally painful or they're difficult, then for some people this is engineering, some people this is HR stuff, some people this is you know, they don't wanna tell the CFO they spend too much money, whatever it is. Kinda just do it in two seconds as soon as you see it and don't think about it. I will go to extensive like working until midnight, drafting everything, and leaving it all in drafts. So the only thing I have to do in the morning is send all the hard stuff out of drafts. It works. So that's that's that's some of the things I found of like keeping up velocity where like how much pain can you bear in a day. You kinda gotta trick yourself into like, well, you know, Ty, you're you're a lovely guy, but I I don't think we're gonna give you an internship. Right? If I stew on that and like I tell you on Friday, like I'm probably gonna reschedule a meeting. If I flick you a quick note saying, hey man, like, not sure not sure if we're gonna give you a return offer, let's chat about it tomorrow, and I cc someone and say, let's make sure it's on the calendar at 9PM, I I can't avoid it. So there's there's a lot of stuff like that where you you gotta really know where you're at. You know?