Long Strange Trip: CEO to CEO with Brian Halligan
00:14:07 · Anton Osika, Brian Halligan
[00:14:07] S0: I'm looking for experience. And then, so at least to run them. And then, one, if you have capacity to also hire people with high slopes and who are like generalists, you also find a good way to be able to move them around in the company, that's something that has worked really well for us. I cannot predict how it's going to work when there's more structure in the company, but I'm committed to finding a good experiment. Any these high slope generalists [00:14:36] S2: who you're moving around on your senior team, direct reports senior team? [00:14:39] S0: To senior [00:14:40] S2: team. Are any of your direct reports any of these? Currently. No high slope people moving around? [00:14:47] S0: Not on my actual leadership team, but many of the ones I work with day to day who like to feel like they're reporting directly to me on many things are more of the high slope. How [00:14:57] S2: about you on the team? You've got a few 100 employees, you're less than 100. What do you think about the senior team? What are you looking for? Have you had any misfires?
00:14:57 · Brian Halligan, Mati Staniszewski
[00:14:57] S2: about you on the team? You've got a few 100 employees, you're less than 100. What do you think about the senior team? What are you looking for? Have you had any misfires? [00:15:07] S1: In our case, have over 300 people, but inside of the company, it's effectively a lot of small teams. It has 30 teams of five to 10 people. And it usually is a combination of depending on the space, either few with the past work in that space, and then usually infused with some of the high slope. And we like that because, A, you get the generalists that can adopt a lot of the new tooling and kind of do new work. And second, we try to bring out the engineers across in some of those teams. So even in traditional growth team, we have growth engineers and the ops team will have operations engineering to help automate a lot of the process. Sometimes use Lovable in the process to help with that work. And that has helped tremendously to get the experience, the domain expertise while creating the new process. Across the leadership, so then all those teams roll up to each effective lead. So we have a go to market leads, then the engineering leads. [00:16:08] S2: How many direct reports do you have? [00:16:10] S1: I have 15 direct reports. [00:16:12] S2: That's a lot. Okay. And that crew of 15, are they kind of young, hungry, grow up at the company high slope? Or are they kind of been there, done that?
00:16:12 · Brian Halligan, Mati Staniszewski, Anton Osika
[00:16:12] S2: That's a lot. Okay. And that crew of 15, are they kind of young, hungry, grow up at the company high slope? Or are they kind of been there, done that? [00:16:23] S1: Almost exactly half half. So half half have done it before, usually are growing with their role. Of course, are growing extremely quickly. So we grew from... We started 2022 from zero to now over $200,000,000 in revenue. So that growth has been quick for everybody, so everybody's learning at the same time. But half of them have seen that before and the other half [00:16:43] S2: Do think that's right? Yeah, I have fiftyfifty. Like at HubSpot, we were kind of the same. I was, I'd look around the table about half grew up with the company, very high slope and half had a lot of experience. That felt right to me. Does that feel right to you? [00:16:59] S1: It does. In many ways, the people that are there have grown with the company incredibly. Victoria, who leads our ops team, has never done anything like this before. And also from Palantir background, so also physics background, so trying to create a process as we go across and has grown incredibly with the company. And then others kind of are still super important for the company, but will stay in more of the product teams or on the IC roles in other parts. [00:17:27] S2: How about you on the on the... You know, what's your mix of kind of homegrown and been there, done that? You're probably just starting to hire execs, I guess, from the outside. [00:17:36] S0: Yeah. So I built out this this leadership team, which is like seven people with my
00:17:36 · Anton Osika, Brian Halligan, Mati Staniszewski
[00:17:36] S0: Yeah. So I built out this this leadership team, which is like seven people with my [00:17:41] S2: coffin. Okay. So you have seven direct reports? [00:17:43] S0: Yeah. So with without me and my coffin, it's five direct reports. Yeah. And officially everyone else reports something into them. Yeah. And do you [00:17:52] S2: feel like you got that right or over time it's going get much bigger [00:17:55] S0: or where you at? Like [00:17:57] S2: I think if Jensen Huang has 45 direct reports and You did [00:18:00] S1: a lot too, no? [00:18:01] S2: No, didn't. I had like 10. No. Yeah. And it's amazing to me that they get people with 45 or 50 and people with three. There's such a range. Anyway, was the five intentional or it just kind of happened? [00:18:15] S0: It was intentional, very intentional, to add more a structure. And then I think generally, like if you say, okay, let's try to have a lot of structure and then it's easier to add more like chaotic things on top of that. Yeah. And see how that works. [00:18:30] S2: Okay, so you're hiring, we kind of worked together on that head of sales search. How are you thinking about these senior searches? How are you deciding? You know, you never run the sales org. It's a hard it's a hard thing. Like, lots of people are in your shoes. Like, how are you making those calls? [00:18:47] S0: Yeah. So with the head of sales, I worked I worked closely with Jenny Adixael, who had done this before many times. [00:18:54] S2: Okay. Dani Hirsberg from Spain.
00:18:54 · Brian Halligan, Anton Osika, Mati Staniszewski
[00:18:54] S2: Okay. Dani Hirsberg from Spain. [00:18:56] S0: Yes. Jenny Adexel, exactly. And they coached you. They got got to give me a lot of impact input on it. And I mean, in the end, it was me spending a lot of time with these candidates and then spending time with the team and presenting how they would do things. And that felt like that gave a lot of instilled a lot of confidence. Okay. [00:19:19] S2: So you had a bunch of help. [00:19:21] S0: Yeah. I spoke to many people. [00:19:23] S2: And how about on your side, same thing. You hadn't run a sale... You haven't... None of us have done what we did, but you hadn't run a sales award. You had to make a decision on the sales leader. You had a lot of qualified candidates. How did you go about it? [00:19:35] S1: Yeah. It's it's a tricky one. And especially, I think, for sales, the salespeople know how to sell themselves. [00:19:40] S2: They
00:19:40 · Mati Staniszewski
[00:19:40] S1: need Very to reliable. Be So you're going need to filter through, do they actually know how to sell, but they are all good at it. So we are in a good setup where one of the salespeople was our investor. We've seen him actually help us advise before he became a salesperson. So when we started the company, we started getting enterprise inbound. We realized, okay, we can start something very quickly. And he already has spent so much time with us. Then it became natural. We want to bring that person in. And then as we've hired other roles, we have of course amazing investors across like Sequoia and Andreessen team who are helping us on that hunt. So we would partner very closely with the domain experts to help us through the network, the back references to make sure that they are right ones. I think the back references really helps across that beyond the spending time with the team, I think is crucial. And then the other part, I haven't realized until later, that for sales specifically, is that you are hiring, of course, a great individual for creating the sales playbook, helping you sell into the enterprises. But then ultimately, the person you hire, they will set the culture for the sales team too. Like a lot of the people they will hire will be so similar in their approach to that work which I didn't appreciate until after the fact. So, I was happy that the culture was very aligned, but then you can see they are very much similar. And we have Europe and US sales team. They're slightly different. Europe is a lot more confident, a little bit like a lot of European versus US are bringing. So a lot more confident than our European counterparts that take more of like partner sales approach. But they have core similar values, helps.