00:40:46 · Luca Ferrari, David Senra
[00:40:46] S1: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. [00:40:46] S0: When I was with Kareem the night that one of their main competitors, who they didn't even view as a competitor anymore, but everybody else said Brex got acquired. Kareem said something interesting. He's like, oh, you know, was like, oh, how do you think about this? He's just like, well, you know, there... People thought there was, like, a war between RAMP and Brex. He didn't. And he's like, well, if there was a war, it's definitely over now. And I go, why? He goes, best talent's not going to go to Virginia and go work for Capital One. He's like, we're going to keep getting better talent. And even if that, like, in that gap between, you know, the talent that we have and the talent that they're going to attract there, it's just like, it's like, you've played it out year one, year two, year three, five years from now. It's like, it's over. It's all about people. It's very similar to what you're saying. [00:41:25] S1: Yeah. I don't know their industry well, but it sounds possible. I I tend to agree with that.
00:41:29 · David Senra
[00:41:29] S0: Deal is how the best founders turn the world into their talent pool. I've been studying how history's greatest founders operate for a decade, and one thing they all have in common is they understand that recruiting and hiring the very best talent is your most important priority. A players recognize other a players, which is why top companies like Ramp, Shopify, Eleven Labs, Uber, and DoorDash all use Deal. Many of the top founders I know have personally invested in Deal after using their product. And what they discovered is that Deal is the best company in the world at building infrastructure for global hiring. Deal will help your business hire, pay, and manage any worker anywhere in the world so you can retain the best talent anywhere and spend the rest of your time focusing on what you do best, delivering value to your customers. The founder of Eleven Labs has a great description of the value Deal can give your company. He said, we built Eleven Labs to break down language and communication barriers. With Deal enabling us to hire and support exceptional talent anywhere, we can accelerate our innovation and bring more voices, stories, and ideas every corner of the world. Deal is trusted by over 40,000 businesses. Learn how they can help your business today by going to deal.com/senra. That is deal.com/senra. I wanna go back to this idea of saturating their capacity, because it's still one of the most interesting things you told me when we had lunch. So like, can you give me an example, okay? You talked about, you know, it's better to have no habits than bad habits. I'm gonna find graduates or, in some cases, people that haven't even graduated yet. They might start as, like, an intern or very entry level at Bending Spoons, and then you're like, oh, we identified this talented person. And what do mean by saturating their capacity? Like, give give, like, concrete examples of how you've
00:43:07 · Luca Ferrari
[00:43:07] S1: done this. Yeah. Everybody at the company, certainly the people who have shown promise, they should have way more on their plate than feels even remotely comfortable. The reason why you should do that is many fold. The first reason is every time you choose what to work on, whether you do it consciously or unconsciously, you're prioritizing a set of work items, each with its own return attached. Again, you may be unaware of potential returns or very deliberate, but either way, that's what's happening. The bigger the universe of, let's say, work items that you can prioritize from mathematically, the higher the returns on your time you'll deliver. Let's say you have 10 possible tasks. If I add an each with a certain, let's say ROI attached. If I add the eleventh, it's impossible, assuming that you select well, it's impossible that adding an eleventh task will lower the ROI of what you choose to do because still have the other 10. So if this is lower ROI than the others, you're still going to do the others. But it's possible that it happens to be the highest ROI of all, and so you end up doing something more valuable. So the more work you give people, the better the opportunity for them create value. Now that's especially true if they choose well, and therefore it's very important to work with people who are smart. And it's very important for managers, for leads, probably the number one thing they can do, or certainly one of the most important things they can do, and we try to coach them in this regard, is to help the reports select well. So that's the most important thing. The other very important thing that you accomplish when you give people a lot more work than feels comfortable is you're really forcing them to come to terms with the immensity of possible. We find that sometimes people as they grow and the aperture for them professionally expands, they get overwhelmed or there's too much to do. We need more people, for example, on the team. I think that's generally a terrible way of looking at life or the world. Generally speaking, there's always a lot more you could be doing than you can do in terms of your capacity. It's just that some people don't realize it. It's not that if you're a student and you're done studying for an exam, there's nothing else you can do. There's plenty you could do.
00:45:32 · Luca Ferrari
You could launch a startup, you could take a second degree on the side. It's just that you may not be sufficiently proactive and imaginative to figure it out. And so as people jump in a job and if you give them just a relatively short task list so that they'll be done within their eight hours and there's nothing in their mind, that initially feels easy and comfortable, but you're failing to train them at a massively important skill, which is handling that immensity of the possible. And once you become really good at being comfortable with having a 100 times more things you could be doing than you can actually do, that's an insane superpower to have, because it enables you again to handle a vast array of possibilities and surgically select those with insanely high returns. And it's something you can only do if you're not thoroughly overwhelmed. So is it better to have someone become overwhelmed by that immensity once they're ten years in and they're running a 100% organization and a billion dollars in revenue? Or is it better to test them at that and coach them at that? I wouldn't say on day one, but maybe day seven and for the first year so that, first of all, you only promote to that higher level of responsibility, people who have proven that they can do that. And if they actually can do that, they begin benefiting from it much earlier, even if their scope is more limited. But you need to completely eradicate the concept of I'm only good at my job if I exhaust my checklist, my task list. There's no such thing. You're always going to have at least a Bending Spoons. But I think, again, life, if you look through the veil, is like that anyway. You're just unconscious about this sometimes. You really want to be able to handle that enormous amount of possibilities and surgically identify those that have insanely attractive returns and then be laser focused on those and disregard everything else. Is this related to
00:47:33 · David Senra
[00:47:33] S0: what you're saying earlier, you're like, listen, they're not going to be AOLs. If it was a standalone brand, they're not going to get the talent that we are going to get at Bending Spoons. We can have a massive impact because they have a huge customer base, but then we can treat it like a startup. But then you said something about, like, if they can work on this for ten to... Or twelve to eighteen months. So then you rotate teams throughout the different companies. Is that part of saturating their capacity? Was like, okay, this opportunity on this business, this person is really talented, but there's no other ways to utilize that talent to a higher degree here, so let's move them to another team. Am I understanding that correctly?
00:48:02 · Luca Ferrari
[00:48:02] S1: Another company? No. No. That... You you do... There there... There are... Yes. We do rotate people all the time. There are very reasons for that. Part is, I think at some point when you've looked at the same thing for a long time, you stop having good ideas. So it's good to get new people in to maybe take a fresh look. Part of it is we just find that if people keep working with the same people, you risk developing subcultures. And we are highly opinionated on what the optimal culture looks like. We want it to be uniform across the company. And if someone comes up with a better idea, that's awesome, but that has to be spread across the company. We don't want to have subcultures. And so you want to move people, you know, mix and match and so so that they they they don't get used to a different way of working, at least in one important aspects. Another one is that they get to learn more. So that that goes back to what you were discussing. It's slightly different from having, you know, know, an immense set of possible tasks. There's an element of of of diversity. You need new challenges and diverse challenges to keep honing your craft and and finding new ways of growing. That helps too, and it keeps also enthusiasm levels higher because humans tend to get bored, and so we want to try new things to stay motivated. Last but not least, as we keep acquiring new things, as an organization, the universe of the things we could be doing expands with new acquisitions and often working on those new things yields the highest expected returns. So we Regrettably, we have to remove resources from businesses that would still have plenty of opportunity in them. But relatively speaking, it's better to work on a new business. For all these reasons, we do rotate people all the time. And I think it's been quite successful for us to do it that way.