Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:59:58 · Lenny Rachitsky, Adam Ward
[00:59:58] S0: How just mind-blowing are these comps these days? I imagine you've seen so many. [01:00:03] S1: Yeah, I think it's all true and worse or higher. I think the open question, a lot of us AI companies are like, "How does it go from here? How does this end?" Nobody knows. But it does feel like the unit of measure that matters the most is the most fixed and finite, which is time. It is a race against the clock to get the model, the talent. And that is the thing that matters the most is the most precious. Clearly for some companies, there's more money and there's more other things, but time is the most fixed and important asset right here in this market. [01:00:48] S0: Just coming back to the AI researcher trend, it's crazy how these people used to be just off on the side building these AI models, ML models, not that exciting to anybody, and now they're the most in demand. [01:01:00] S1: And I remember I helped build out the research group at Facebook before... they'd just not hire PhDs, even advanced degrees really much at all. And this is 2010 or something. And I remember meeting just this set of academics really who were getting this growing frustration of their work, not ever making it outside of the halls of academia. And so I'm very excited for that population to have this moment. They've been arguably the underpinning of technical innovation for decades and they're having their moment and well-deserved. [01:01:51] S0: Kind of along those lines to close out the funnel of, let's call it the funnel of joy instead of the funnel of doom.
01:01:51 · Lenny Rachitsky, Adam Ward
[01:01:51] S0: Kind of along those lines to close out the funnel of, let's call it the funnel of joy instead of the funnel of doom. [01:01:57] S1: Yeah, love it. [01:01:58] S0: I heard from one of your candidates, here's the quote that I got, that you and your team's ability to close and convert candidates with offers to accept is extraordinary. What are some things you do that help get someone over the line that are kind of on the fence?
01:02:12 · Adam Ward
[01:02:12] S1: Yeah. So I think there's a couple things there. One, I'll just re-mention quickly, which is that the closing is happening throughout the process in terms of who they're meeting and motivations and removing objections along the way. So that's one. I think the second is closing is a team sport. And so when we have a candidate, particularly a high profile, high caliber, there are often daily standups around that candidate about what we're doing to get them to yes. And that might be 10 minutes, but it's not the amount of time. It is a focused energy every day around what we are collectively doing. And so that could be the hiring manager recruiter, but also could be former peers. There's lots of people who influence that, and we try to just be very intentional about making sure that person feels cared for and coming here and staying on top of things. The third thing I think is we just try to make it very personal. And so just this week, two days ago, I just saw, and we try to share these stories internally too, because this is how it builds the culture of recruiting. We kind of share these stories back to the company. But someone was sharing, we were working on a candidate in New York and we learned that through getting to know them that they went to a performing arts high school and were a classically trained violinist and was just very into stringed instruments. So this person found this specialty store in New York City and bought this kind of unique Turkish guitar, almost violin guitar thing. And they're meeting for a dinner where they got the offer and he presented that gift to them. And so it was a couple hundred dollars maybe. Not a lot of money, particularly relative to the size of offer and the size of impact that we thought that someone's going to have. But it's the thoughtfulness and the touch and the uniqueness of it and the personal moment of that that I think stands out. And I think when a candidate thinks about having the best candidate experience, often they feel like, "Wow, this felt tailored to me. This felt unique to me."
01:04:29 · Lenny Rachitsky, Adam Ward
[01:04:29] S0: I know there's also a Slack channel that gets created for each candidate. Can we discuss this for a second? [01:04:33] S1: Every candidate. Yeah. So I think when you talk about the standup, sometimes that's also strategy and updates. And so there's the same rallying effect to activate is no different at that close. And each candidate has their own channel. [01:04:45] S0: So much of this just keeps coming back to intentionality around every specific candidate and not treating it like the funnel, but just this is the atomic unit, this person, what can we do throughout the entire process to make them get excited and see if it's a fit? [01:04:58] S1: Which is hard to do when you're doing at scale at the funnel of doom. So when you are thinking about a hundred candidates for every role, then that does not scale. But when you're narrowing that down to a small percentage of people that you've been laying groundwork with over time, because now people are moving faster through those steps and it's a smaller number of people. So the time that you're taking holistically for that funnel, you're just displacing and putting it in different places. [01:05:27] S0: It's so interesting. And it's such a different approach. I've never heard of anyone hiring this way.
01:05:27 · Lenny Rachitsky, Adam Ward
[01:05:27] S0: It's so interesting. And it's such a different approach. I've never heard of anyone hiring this way. [01:05:31] S1: Yeah. And we had this thesis when I was at Growth by Design around, we think there's this different way to do this. We'd seen all these companies over time and worked with labs and all these things. We're like, "Wow, these companies are literally at the cutting edge of a technical revolution here." Probably the most exciting one we've seen in millennia. And they are recruiting in a web browser way. And we're like, "If a company had this willingness to commit this time and effort as this collective force, they could really have an unfair advantage when it comes to talent." And when you think about companies over time, whether they become this iconic logo or one that we no longer recognize, it often isn't the first company, the fastest to market, the first idea. It's actually execution. And execution comes down to having the right talent at the right time. And when companies figure that out, they're like, "Ooh, this is the most important thing and this is how we're going to approach it." And so when we met Cursor, we're like, "This could be fun."
01:05:31 · Adam Ward, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:05:31] S1: Yeah. And we had this thesis when I was at Growth by Design around, we think there's this different way to do this. We'd seen all these companies over time and worked with labs and all these things. We're like, "Wow, these companies are literally at the cutting edge of a technical revolution here." Probably the most exciting one we've seen in millennia. And they are recruiting in a web browser way. And we're like, "If a company had this willingness to commit this time and effort as this collective force, they could really have an unfair advantage when it comes to talent." And when you think about companies over time, whether they become this iconic logo or one that we no longer recognize, it often isn't the first company, the fastest to market, the first idea. It's actually execution. And execution comes down to having the right talent at the right time. And when companies figure that out, they're like, "Ooh, this is the most important thing and this is how we're going to approach it." And so when we met Cursor, we're like, "This could be fun." [01:06:37] S0: Cursor is actually such a great example of exactly what you're describing because it feels like throughout the entire history of Cursor, it was always just like, how are they going to survive? There's these model companies building these things, the IDs. People are moving away from IDs. And it's been incredible to watch Cursor execute and get ahead of each of these shifts whenever people doubt that there's an opportunity here and it just keeps growing and killing it.