Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:45:35 · Brendan Foody
[00:45:35] S0: It totally is. So I'll give the three and maybe a brief story associated with each of them. So the first one is having a can do attitude, which Everett gives me a little bit of a hard time for because it's sort of a funny saying, but we've always set these ridiculously ambitious goals And then somehow the trajectory of the company forms around those goals. Where I remember when we were talking to Benchmark, before they led our series A, we were at 1,500,000 in run rate. And I said we'd be at 50,000,000 in run rate by the end of the year. And they said we were absolutely insane, right? As anyone would. And plus or minus two weeks, we hit it. Right. And then we've now well blown past, you know, the tracking to 500,000,000 in run rate, which was initially our goal for this year. So setting these incredibly ambitious goals with respect to the revenue scale of the business, the caliber of experiences for talent, all those dimensions is super important to first have a can do attitude. The second thing is really high standards, which is who we hire and what we expect of them. Like we have an incredibly high hiring bar where we hire tons of former founders, people that have incredible experiences. We just hired or partnered with Sandeep Jain, who joined us as president, who's previously the chief product officer and chief technology officer at Uber, and joined our relatively small in the grand scheme of things company to help scale up all the processes where Uber is of course the largest labor marketplace in the world. So super high standards is of paramount importance. And then the third one that we really lean on significantly is intensity. And that if you look at the early cultures of the legendary companies, thinking of Meta, Google, they have these incredible, intense early stage cultures of people just moving heaven and earth and doing whatever it takes to push the frontier of model capabilities. And so still very much output oriented of what do people achieve rather than input oriented of the specific hours they work, but recognizing that it takes a lot to build a legendary business and that's ultimately what we're optimizing for.
00:47:49 · Lenny Rachitsky, Brendan Foody
[00:47:49] S1: I could see why this works. Can do attitude plus high standards plus intensity. I could see how that leads to success. There's a lot of talk these days about this six ninety nine culture, working six days a week, 9AM to 9PM. You know, a lot of people are like, why? That's terrible. Why would you make people do that? But at the same time, I'm just constantly hearing this from the most successful AI companies. This is just the way it is to be successful. Things are moving so fast. This is an opportunity you'll never see again. Just talk about your thoughts on that. [00:48:21] S0: Yeah, well, clarify, we've never mandated ours. It's more of been a byproduct of people that care a lot, where we care a lot about the trajectory of the business. So a lot of people come into the office and stay late, but if they need to leave early and get dinner with their kids or travel on the weekend, of course that's totally fine. And for us, it's much more about finding people who have a lot of ownership and are really bought in, less so about the specific hours in the office, even though we found that oftentimes it's the people that are most bought in, not always, but oftentimes it's the people that are most bought in that, you know, sort of burn the midnight oil with us. [00:49:01] S1: When you say high standards, is there something you could share that gives us an example of what you mean there? Because a lot of people think they have high standards and they don't.
00:49:01 · Lenny Rachitsky, Brendan Foody
[00:49:01] S1: When you say high standards, is there something you could share that gives us an example of what you mean there? Because a lot of people think they have high standards and they don't. [00:49:08] S0: If you are very patient, there's always some trade off between speed and quality when hiring. And I remember, especially for our first 10 people, we were just so patient and disciplined about finding some of the best people in the world. Like, you know, half of them are, our second employee Sid, as an example, our second employee in The U. S. Sid, was previously the head of growth at scale, you know, who joined us when we were a seed stage company. Daniel, who joined us, was previously, scaled two consumer apps to over 100,000 users and all sorts of just extraordinary backgrounds of our first 10 hires. And I think that that initial talent density shapes so much of what the rest of the org looks like as you scale it up. [00:49:59] S1: I know you also have this perspective that people talk about waiting to hire hiring really slowly, but it's actually not necessarily the right advice. Talk about that.
00:49:59 · Lenny Rachitsky, Brendan Foody
[00:49:59] S1: I know you also have this perspective that people talk about waiting to hire hiring really slowly, but it's actually not necessarily the right advice. Talk about that. [00:50:10] S0: It's painful because it's a double edged sword. Like on one hand, I'm thrilled that our first 10 people are like so phenomenal, and I think that that has paid dividends for the business. But on the other hand, I think that companies do get to the point where you just need to hire really fast. And there's some things where you need a lot of people to do them and you need to recognize that there's going be some variance associated with hiring, but moving quickly is the priority. And I think that in some ways we move too slowly with how we scaled out the team. And so the benefit is that everyone is extraordinary. We have this super high bar and we want to maintain that over time. But I think the downside is that while the company has grown incredibly quickly, we likely could have grown even faster if we had moved a little bit more quickly with especially ramping from call it like 10 to 100 people. [00:51:08] S1: Okay. I was going to ask, so it sounds like the first 10, be very careful, take your time. 10 to 100, maybe speed up a bit.
00:51:08 · Lenny Rachitsky, Brendan Foody
[00:51:08] S1: Okay. I was going to ask, so it sounds like the first 10, be very careful, take your time. 10 to 100, maybe speed up a bit. [00:51:16] S0: Yes, though I wouldn't say it's necessarily 10, it's determined by the point where you know it's really working. And that's... I know that's still not like a bright line, but it's like once you know that there's so much more demand than you can handle, that's when you want to step on the gas and optimize for speed in a lot of ways. But I think especially until then, it's important to be patient, be disciplined, get the best people is always important. But speed becomes more important once you find the market opportunity, the market vacuum. [00:51:52] S1: I know you've started a couple of companies in the past, smaller scale. In this new role as CEO of this massive hyper growth company, what surprised you most about where you spend the time most, or just what the role involves? Because a lot of people wanna start companies, dream about being in your shoes. What are they maybe not understanding about where a lot of your time goes?
00:51:52 · Lenny Rachitsky, Brendan Foody
[00:51:52] S1: I know you've started a couple of companies in the past, smaller scale. In this new role as CEO of this massive hyper growth company, what surprised you most about where you spend the time most, or just what the role involves? Because a lot of people wanna start companies, dream about being in your shoes. What are they maybe not understanding about where a lot of your time goes? [00:52:13] S0: Yeah, it's actually not too surprising. Like the top two buckets are always working on hiring, and time with customers. How do I really deeply understand what customers need and how we can support them? And then how do I build the team and a lot of the processes around that? Of course, there's all the ad hoc things I didn't expect of, you know, dealing with the people questions of how do we set up our levels and our comp bands and all of that, which you sort of learn as you scale a business. But I think that the core places that I spend my time are in line with what I expected as well as what I love doing, which is very fortunate. [00:52:59] S1: So these two companies you've started in the past, maybe share what they were because they're fun. And then what, did they help you be successful in this? Like, what's something that they taught you that helped you in your current role?