A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:33:30 · George, Pablo Srugo
[00:33:30] S0: Half an hour. [00:33:32] S1: Okay. That's it. So maybe two hours worth of meetings a week. Yeah. How many people are you? 14. You think this scales? I mean, or are you just leaning into there's an aspect of it doesn't really matter if it scales because you're a startup. Right? You have pros and cons. The con is you don't have that much money compared to a big company. You know, you go to market, all these sort of things suffer. The pro is you actually can do these things. Right? When a big company can't. So maybe there's an element of it, it just it doesn't matter that it doesn't scale, but I'm wondering if you've thought about when you're a 100 people, you know, can you still operate this way?
00:33:32 · Pablo Srugo, George
[00:33:32] S1: Okay. That's it. So maybe two hours worth of meetings a week. Yeah. How many people are you? 14. You think this scales? I mean, or are you just leaning into there's an aspect of it doesn't really matter if it scales because you're a startup. Right? You have pros and cons. The con is you don't have that much money compared to a big company. You know, you go to market, all these sort of things suffer. The pro is you actually can do these things. Right? When a big company can't. So maybe there's an element of it, it just it doesn't matter that it doesn't scale, but I'm wondering if you've thought about when you're a 100 people, you know, can you still operate this way? [00:34:00] S0: I've done something similar in a previous company where doing, you know, 58,000,000 ARR, 42% EBITDA business, roughly a 100 people. But I don't think it's going to scale, but I'm going to hold on to this with my dear life for as long as I can, because I think that I really believe in like flow state and I wanna give the builders the time to do it. Just so you know, like we do have meetings, like we'll meet, but they're ad hoc. I just hate recurring meetings. Like if we need to burn down like a problem, like there's like a visceral issue with a customer or like, you know, I made a big mistake that like we need to fix, then we'll have a recurring meeting maybe until it ends, but no recurring meetings otherwise. And it's totally back to product managers. I typically find that product managers are actually the creators of many meetings, which is like not good for Eng.
00:34:00 · George, Pablo Srugo
[00:34:00] S0: I've done something similar in a previous company where doing, you know, 58,000,000 ARR, 42% EBITDA business, roughly a 100 people. But I don't think it's going to scale, but I'm going to hold on to this with my dear life for as long as I can, because I think that I really believe in like flow state and I wanna give the builders the time to do it. Just so you know, like we do have meetings, like we'll meet, but they're ad hoc. I just hate recurring meetings. Like if we need to burn down like a problem, like there's like a visceral issue with a customer or like, you know, I made a big mistake that like we need to fix, then we'll have a recurring meeting maybe until it ends, but no recurring meetings otherwise. And it's totally back to product managers. I typically find that product managers are actually the creators of many meetings, which is like not good for Eng. [00:34:48] S1: What's the split? Like 14 people, how many are engineers? [00:34:50] S0: Half and half. [00:34:51] S1: Half sales marketing, half engineers? [00:34:53] S0: I mean, most of the team is like a few months old. Everyone's sort of new, but it's like Eng and then like post sales marketing. Sales team is just blowing up right now. [00:35:03] S1: And do you have agents running inside tell me maybe more about that. Like on the AgenTex side internally, what are you using agents for? What are agents doing for you guys as a company?
00:35:03 · Pablo Srugo, George
[00:35:03] S1: And do you have agents running inside tell me maybe more about that. Like on the AgenTex side internally, what are you using agents for? What are agents doing for you guys as a company? [00:35:13] S0: So we're actively trying to kind of AI build the company. I think Graham, again, has done a nice job there. Quickly, you know, we tried terminal for everyone, it doesn't really work. So I think clawed desktop with connectors and everyone has a connector set up and a prompt that I set up as good. As far as agents, there's two things. There's like team wide things and individually people are encouraged to build their stuff. So I can speak to mine for example. I mean, I have email digest, I have a thing that looks at security. So I have a thing that pulls every single one of my sub processors and sees that there's an issue and things being thread. I have another agent that looks at all the sales calls and kind of grades them and spits out like a rubric in common Slack, These are my main ones. We have a we have a nice one for spend, but think it's pretty basic, a call ramp and spit out like all the deltas and where the variance is at, just so we don't get caught with like a big recurring expense report. And then people have their own ages, but I don't really know what their setup is.
00:36:11 · Pablo Srugo, George
[00:36:11] S1: The other thing I wanna talk about kind of as a bit of a segment, like, we talked about, you know, management and and organization and just writing things a lot, building this culture, things have written so that you can have more context, not just for people, but for the agents. The other thing is people. Like, especially these days, I would say I mean, execution was always obviously super important in the world of startups. But, you know, the argument today is if everybody can build anything, like, then the people you have matters even more because they're gonna decide what to build, and they're gonna get you that go to market what you need. Right? So getting great people is just critical. You told me about one actually mistake that you made on recruiting. Maybe we talked about that kind of mediocre hire and how that happened, and then how you think about recruiting today. How do you as a small startup, yeah, you're doing well, but you're small. How do you get the best people on board? [00:36:52] S0: Tier zero question, all of our time right now is spent on this, just to harp on this, everyone is using the exact same endpoint from Anthropic, it's just like what you do with this endpoint, like how hard you work, what's your judgment on the product. I mean, that's the reality, right? So I think it's all about the people. The question is like how we think about building a team, like what we'll look for? [00:37:13] S1: Yes. How do you attract? What do you look for and then how do you get and attract those types of people?
00:37:18 · George
[00:37:18] S0: The main things that we look for is like incredible judgment, like raw smarts and judgment because we wanna trust the person, treat them as a founder, give them a ton of equity, and like give them chunks of the company to run. Especially with LLMs, I think that the person with great judgment that is hardworking is unstoppable. Judgment slopetheir rate of learning, how quickly do they learn, and we look at this throughout their career, but also throughout the interview process, basic things like, you know, can we be with this person, you know, five, six, seven days a week? We are making a bet on folks that are early in their career. This is a very calculated bet that requires a big leap of faith, but also a technical investment because you have to prepare the code base for folks that are junior in their career. And there's a lot of work that goes into this, but I think it's going to pay off for us because the competition for talent is insane. I lose people to the labs, which is a no brainer. Can never compete with the labs. And then some of the best people wanna start companies. And so I think that the supply of engineers is constrained, but the demand is quite high. Like, there's 10 guys like me living for engineers. So the other thing that we do is, yeah, we place bets on folks that are coming out of school. And so I think that, like, at least the way that we're gonna build this company is gonna be a barbell. We're gonna have senior staff, and we're gonna have folks that are possibly gonna be brilliant, but they're early.