Hiring and team building transcript

Transcript: (00:11) tonight is going to be fun because you’re actually going to have to participate so for once i’m going to get to relax and and watch how you can engage yourselves uh but why we’re gonna do that is because hiring is really not a a sport that you can engage in from the sidelines you have to jump right in and be part of the action and so uh tonight what we’ll start with is a series of things that will set up a follow-on from last week’s discussion about vision mission and culture and as the basis for hiring culture as we (00:39) talked about last week is very critical because it establishes who you are and how you behave and what kind of people you’re going to want to build around you into a team that can continue that culture and can be additive to it rather than dilutive to it so i can’t go over all of that of course again but for those of you who missed it last week just go to startup secrets or mjscock. (00:59) com and you’ll be able to find that material from last week on the culture vision and mission tonight’s focus therefore is on what are the practical elements of hiring and the reason we ended up splitting this workshop uh is because the number one thing i hear from startups is that they’re challenged with hiring the right people and by the way making sure that those hires stick both points are absolutely critical uh you might feel like you’ve hired the right person but if they don’t stick around to be part of (01:25) your business and actually ultimately you know it’s success then obviously it wasn’t the right fit and that could be very costly but to bring this to life i’ve got two great guests uh both of whom spend their lives doing this and in fact to introduce them both i’ll have them stand up in a second russ is actually a 25-year veteran of the hr profession and in fact although he runs hr at irobot today uh his role has been very eminent actually in our local community all the way back from lotus when lotus was one of the giants in our (01:55) industry through one of the companies that we were lucky enough to fund face forward that he took public and then now for example more recently at irobot and there’s a number in between there too so we’re very lucky to have russ here and russ you just like to stand up so people know who you are welcome russ now a robot might be considered a larger company today although it was once a startup so i’m going to encourage all of you to you know hear that story but i also wanted you to hear from somebody (02:24) who’s in the thick of hiring and in fact is the fastest growing startup in uh this region at the moment and also has been sort of noticed as the fastest growing software startup in the country and that’s acquia and so we have eric gaffin if you just like to stand up and show yourself welcome eric so you really would applaud if you i should have told you this first so eric has had to go through sixteen thousand interviews to make 180 hires in the last year so that gives you you know that’s that gives you a sense of uh how quickly uh (02:59) you know our queer is growing and that is not an easy task so we’ve got eric here tonight so he can share with you how do you do that how do you manage that kind of you know process and what is it that it takes to actually hire the right people so thank you both for joining us you’re really the stars for tonight’s show and i encourage all of the audience here to just recognize that this is nothing more than a framework for you to get engaged on the topic you know my style i don’t believe that i have answers here i have (03:24) a basis for discussion i encourage you to ask questions particularly of our two guests tonight and then as i said i want to leave time for you to actually engage in a little interviewing yourselves so tonight’s agenda specifically i’ll give you some background i’m going to give you some tools and then we want to get to the workshop and we we’ve given you out some questions you don’t need to look at them now but i will take you through some of these so you can get a sense of what the tools are (03:47) so first of all you know i always like to ask this question why even bother with this i mean why did you all show up why do we have a full house tonight and there’s obviously a reason that you have in your mind mostly what i hear from startups is you know we just can’t find the quality of talent but i actually don’t think that’s the problem there’s plenty of quality talent around boston the real challenge is finding the fit uh and so as i like to say the most important capital is human capital so (04:09) it’s not this the capital you raise from me it’s what you do to find the talent that enables you to build the company that you really have conviction around and this piece is the most obvious thing i’m going to say and yet it is so fundamental you are what you hire you can try to be 50 things based upon a product but if you don’t have the people to take that product to market to engage your audience and to build for example the relationships with your customers service and support them successfully (04:34) you have nothing and so every hire you make whether you like it or not becomes if you will a lego block in the model that builds your business and so tonight is about establishing a premise that is super important and i’m going to start with one which is an oldie but goldie is i would say which is the first thing you should realize is that a’s higher a’s in other words a players know how to hire a quality candidates but the bad news is if you hire b’s if you find somebody who’s not an a player they hire c’s (05:05) they always hire underneath themselves because the very fact that they’re a b player causes them to say i don’t want to be challenged by somebody so they tend to hire people who are not going to challenge them and guess what they hire c’s and i don’t need to tell you this but c’s cost you your company and it’s a very slippery slope and so even though you’re going to find yourself challenged many times to say but i’ve got to fill this post you know we’re desperately understaffed in (05:30) services or support and there aren’t enough people to pick up the phones if you find yourself in that slippery slope and you say well i’m just going to get a body in the seat and i’m going to hire that because it’ll fill the gap for now trust me that’s a mistake and so tonight is about trying to help you understand how to avoid that mistake and to establish a culture as we talked about last week and in particular hiring practice that gets you over that and gives you the confidence actually to (05:55) look beyond what might sometimes feel like an impossible void to fill of the experience knowledge and skills and instead look for things like aptitude and attitude which can be just as important actually in finding the right hire so a’s does not mean that they’re a students and it doesn’t mean that it’s all about just getting for example the best grad out of mit or you know the sloane school wherever it might be i should have said harvard but the point is wherever you come from um you know there’s this bias around (06:23) certain talents and skills that people have so we’re going to try to quash that tonight now i also want to make it really clear that this is not just me talking about this stuff that the wrong highest cost to your company you will obviously recognize this when you lose great people you lose everything that they know and that’s not just their literal knowledge it’s also who they know their networks their connections to their customers the relationships they have internally you basically lose a piece of the fabric of (06:49) your company and if you’re a startup and you know imagine you’re you know five people you just lost one person that’s 20 of your entire value as a company and trust me even when you get big and this is a stat from the mit sloan review from very big companies this is a very significant impact in fact even for just one percent of employees being lost it’s a 25 billion dollar assessed cost so people can measure this stuff but i think you know it intuitively it’s really painful when you make the wrong (07:17) hires of course it can be fatal if it’s something like hiring the wrong founder so i know a number of you for example here are still building your founding teams this is really essential therefore that you take time to understand this and i’m going to put it in the the simplest of senses tonight it’s about like a lot of things developing both the art and the science of it the reason i want you to engage in the actual practice tonight is because that’s the art and we’re going to try to talk a little bit about some of the (07:43) science of it so let me jump right in um the first thing i’ll say is that hiring sometimes feels like it’s ah you just sit down and have an interview and you kind of get to know somebody but actually it turns out it’s really all in the details the details matter like you know what it is that you’re actually looking for in terms of somebody’s experience matters because if you don’t set them up for success finding a fit for their experience no matter what their attitude is they’re not going to be able to apply (08:08) themselves effectively so i’m going to start out by telling you the three key things that i think we should look for and literally if if i was you know forced to say in my experience over 30 years what do i really want to make sure happens in a higher it’s first of all can they be successful at the job in other words are you setting up their skill set to be in your particular role a successful fit will they have the right set of things to bring so that when they engage with you they can be successful if you don’t (08:40) set them up to be successful you can’t blame them you’ve got to look at yourself and say why did i mismatch what did i learn from that what were the things that i thought i needed but i didn’t find the second thing is probably even more fundamental we’ll talk about that because it’s a softer challenge but will they really love this job do they want to come to work every day fired up about it and in the end the energy has to come from within them because no matter how much you incent them or no matter how much opportunity (09:06) you have if it’s not something that they can internally relate to it’s not going to be sustainable and startups are hard work as we all know and they go through tough times so when they do that will be the thing that will be the determinant of whether they really are successful at the job is that they still believe in it they have their own convictions for their own reasons now the last one really is is playing to the cultural elements that we talked about last time which is you know will they fit and reinforce your culture and (09:32) um as i’ve mentioned last week culture is a funny thing in the sense that you know you may not be able to measure it but as you saw when we talked about it last week it has a massive impact there’s a reason why those companies that are best to work for consistently outperform all others when you look over a decade period as i mentioned today outperformed by 300 percent uh their com their comparables so we know it has an impact and so obviously we want people who can reinforce that impact and it can reinforce our culture (09:59) so now let’s talk about what are the elements that go associated go along with that i’ve put up eks iq and cq and i’m going to explain those for you right now so first of all answering the first question can they be successful at the job eks is just an acronym and you know i use acronyms but it’s kind of a fun one because we could always go around and say okay how was somebody’s ex and it was sort of like okay everybody understood their eeks okay their eeks were what was their experience what was their knowledge and what were (10:29) their skills now why do i split those three out anybody got any idea i mean what’s different about experience versus skills anybody got any ideas so you can learn things and just be intellectually aware but not be efficient or know how to necessarily execute on those things well plus you can any knowledge you take in some people just compartmentalize knowledge rather than integrate the knowledge well said very good somebody else had a um a point up the front here i would say that skills is a method to lead into (11:08) experience but they’re not necessarily the same thing so for example i may not have a lot of experience in a specific type of coding um or different specific facet of the company but if i have the skills to program for example that’s not that’s really valuable so it’s not necessarily excellent i think both of your comments are really helpful to to bring this to light so let’s use the coding example you might have absolutely the best c-sharp programming skills but you may have had no experience (11:37) building a back-end system for for example a huge scalable website using those skills so you’ve got the skills but you’ve applied them in a completely different way you maybe applied them for example in some mobile app as opposed to a huge web scale app so skills might be very different to experience and and the classic thing that we see people doing here is confusing the following they say well this guy was an absolutely brilliant programmer but we don’t actually think about what is that programming experience going to (12:08) line up with in what the task is we’re going to set them and so you’ve got to think about how to separate those things now skills are a very interesting thing most of these things people go down and they you know they bought them their resume well i did you know c-sharp and i did java and i did php and python and ruby and you know on and on there’s this long list okay does that mean you’re a good programmer anybody i mean how many times you read a resume that they’ve got a long list of things (12:35) does that mean they’re a good programmer lots of people shaking their head i’d like a no or a yes no why not not necessarily say more they have a laundry list of uh of pre-requisites in the in languages under their belt um yeah they might have the skills but if they don’t know how to apply that if they as that gentleman over there said compartmentalizes it and they don’t have that malleable uh intellect that they can actually apply it at the at the problem at hand that synthesis um then those skills are (13:04) really dead to you as someone who wants to hire them right like you could you could access those skills through the through the internet or or through a book you want someone who can me can who can mold it around the situation problem at hand very good okay so thank you very much that was well said and i don’t want to add to it so now let’s bring in the third piece this knowledge piece let’s say that the actual problem that they’re solving is a healthcare it problem and it’s very deep in the domain of (13:31) healthcare now let’s imagine that they actually do have experience building this web backend and they have the right skills because they’re good programmers but they’re tackling a completely different domain to one they’ve ever done before all they’ve ever done before has got nothing to do with healthcare how does that sound well it’s different right so your domain expertise um is or your knowledge excuse me in this case just to be specific about it might be very important because healthcare has (14:01) a whole sense of a bunch of regulations for example one of the companies that uh russ was involved with phase forward he might talk about tonight there were some very specific domain requirements in fact let me ask you if i may jump in on that when you were recruiting for phase four how important was the domain expertise of healthcare and maybe you could mention a little bit what they did so face forward was one of the first companies that took the fda process of drug approval the the clinical trial process and moved it from (14:30) paper to cloud-based uh process so that you were enrolling thousands of patients in the program and the doctors used to keep track on paper then they would forward it on to the drug company and the drug company would correlate the data and do the analysis and see if it had any efficacy at all and we changed the paradigm for that with our company so when we started recruiting for software developers we we could find the we could find the skills we could find experience with the skills but we didn’t have the (15:01) domain expertise because there were there are re their regs uh in the fda requirement that have to be coded into the software had to be coded into the software there are uh privacy requirements that are how the data can be moved not just within the application but within the application across geographic borders so we were had to look for people that had that level of knowledge and or either a similar application base or or had worked in a healthcare setting with some with the kind of fda requirements that we needed to code perfect (15:37) thank you russ so so what you’re hearing is and facebook by the way a very successful company went public etc but i can tell you it wasn’t easy always hiring at exactly as you’re going to find to get all three of these things you know to find somebody who was really skilled as a programmer had the experience of for example the kind of web scale that we’re dealing with and also the domain knowledge to be able to apply and deal with things like these regs so this is the bad news you very rarely get (16:04) the perfect candidate that has all three and so we’re going to try to help tonight figure out what do you do in those circumstances now you notice that i put where applicable the iq because it sort of goes without saying that you’re going to try to find smart people i mean nobody wants to hire dumb people so that’s kind of easy we all agree on that the problem is what does smarts mean and uh there are lots of different ways of breaking that down the typical one and the one that i find that is the most (16:31) uh daunting is you know to try to and challenge people on intellect but it’s very rarely the one that is actually the driver of success in fact i’ll now relate my one of my own challenges which is that if you hire only really really smart people with the highest iq and that’s all you bring into a team you very rarely end up building a great team in fact i’ve had to fire unfortunately some of the smartest people because they precisely believe that the smartest people in the room and they have no (17:00) interest in teaming with other people who they think might challenge them and it just makes them very difficult to work welcome gary he’s nodding in the back another hr professional so one of the things that’s interesting about this is what do we determine to be there for the right kinds of attributes for for hire so bear that in mind and we’ll hopefully hopefully bring it out in some of the questions so this is the first setup can they be successful at the job do they have the right experience knowledge and skills for the (17:29) job you’re looking to to bring them into now will they really love the job this one should be easy and yet it’s one that i find people don’t spend enough time on so i’m going to try to make sure by the end of tonight that if you go home with nothing else you understand how to interview for this question because in my experience this can be even more important than any other piece of this equation so first of all can you find out what people are really passionate about i think you can probably tell from the (17:53) way i deliver this class i’m pretty passionate about entrepreneurship but nobody told me about entrepreneurship i just learned it because i was determined from the early age of whatever it was uh embarrassingly teen age to figure out what it was that actually made it possible to build companies and so you know here i am with absolutely zero qualifications and guess what i figured my way through it somebody has a question at the front here thank you um did your love of entrepreneurship precede your knowledge (18:20) of coding and your work in web development like so for example did you learn coding so that you could be an entrepreneur or did you just kind of fall into it so my story isn’t as interesting as that because i’m too old to even admit this most of the time but we’re going to get to it the web didn’t exist there was no such thing as a pc and when i learned coding i was programming the world’s first programmable calculator the hp 65 and that was the only thing i could program because you know there’s (18:47) anything i can get my hands on but my passion for solving problems as it turned out translated into hey what could i do if i could automate that on things like programmable calculators or what became pcs later and and my point is that nobody told me that i couldn’t do something and i was passionate enough to just keep at it until i figured it out and so if i was just trying to draw out some lesson for this because everybody has their own experience it’s this that ultimately passion very often and persistence often overcome almost every (19:16) other attribute that we were looking for if somebody can be set up to obviously apply whatever they have in their limited experience knowledge or skills to a problem so it’s really that and and i don’t need to say this except to say um when you’re interviewing what you’re really trying to do is what i was starting to describe that is find a fit for what they love to do because it’s like putting fuel in the gas tank at that point you know if you’ve got that energy that they’re bringing to the the (19:46) table their passion their real persistence their real desire their strong you know conviction that they can make a difference then what you really need to do is put the fuel in the right gas tank and just you know set them on the right road and guess what you know they’re going to make it at that point what i worry about is that i see a lot of hires are made the exact opposite way you hire the best brightest guy but they’re not interested in the problem you’re solving and they’re not interested in the domain that you’re (20:09) working and guess what at some point they’d kind of like peter out because it’s just they can’t relate to it they can’t engage with it so this question is actually sometimes the first and the only question i ask in an interview now if you think i’m kidding talk to some of the people i’ve interviewed because i won’t let people out of an interview russ is putting sound up i did interview i won’t let somebody out of an interview until i’ve understood what makes them tick and that means what are they passionate (20:38) about so here’s an example of how this question might start it’s okay i’ve met you for the first time you know tell me what gets you out of bed in the morning what do you love doing uh what is it you’re excited about what’s your perfect day look like i go on and on and on and on now these should be easy questions to answer right i mean tell me what you’re passionate about well isn’t that an invitation to speak forever should be right here’s what i find unfortunately very few people actually stop and ask (21:06) themselves that you know we kind of get thrown into whatever field of work we’re in or guess what worse than that like a lot of us we have to take a job because we need to pay the mortgage or we just got out of school we got to pay off our debt and you know what the job we wanted wasn’t available and now we’re doing something and we’re kind of in that rut and next thing we know we’re doing something that actually we’re paying the bills by as opposed to really living life by when it really works you don’t even ask (21:34) that question you’re having so much fun at work that it is life and you’re so excited about your job that your life is something that you’re passionate about not your job or your life your life and your work are one and the same they feel great and there are many times i walk around companies and i can see it i can literally palpably see that people are coming to work because they’re so excited about it that they feel this is their life they build their communities there they love working together so they (22:00) show up every day you know excited about what’s the next great thing they can do together and that’s palpable by contrast i can tell you when i go on site visits to see some startups their stats might be up and to the right on their charts they might be doing great things but i walk around and i go i’m not going to back this group because i can tell that basically there’s a bunch of employees there who are doing a job and at some point you know what somebody else who’s got the passionate team with (22:24) all the gas in their tank is going to run right past them it’s just the way things work so here’s how this if you like becomes a virtuous circle people who love what they do tend to take pride in their work they tend to do it well the results and the rewards all follow from it but i will tell you the reverse is not true so i have never hired somebody who told me i want to get rich i’ve never had somebody who said that because i don’t believe that’s the way it works the way i believe it works and again one (22:57) person’s viewpoint is that when you really love what you do you can’t help but do it well you want to take pride in you want to produce great results and guess what when you do that you feel like you can really make a difference and if you’re plugged into the right situation where what you do can align with what the company needs done you’re going to make a difference and that’s what good company cultures do they set you up for success they enable your passion to connect with the mission and vision of the company so that you’re (23:24) contributing in every sense in every way that you can do that and when that happens guess what you’re going to make a difference in the business and it’s going to be noticed and you’re going to get rewarded from it and you’re going to feel great about it you’re going to do more of it it’s pretty obvious that when that circle continues to be fed and it’s virtuous in that way everybody’s going to win there is no accident associated with with aqua’s success there is a specific guy who started a (23:49) project that is now the large largest open source project on the planet drupal that has over 900 000 people following him why because he’s really passionate about connecting and enabling people to communicate jump in it’s one million one million can you say a little bit more tell us a little bit about what what drupal is about as a background here um yeah it’s it’s pretty amazing and you know hearing michael talk about passion i i saw it i i got a chance to interview with dries who is the founder of drupal (24:19) who’s the founder of drupal and this is a guy who just believes so passionately in what he does and believes that the the open source methodology is the way to go about business and the way that the world is going to change it is passion we want people who come into the organization and say i love what you’re doing i want to be a part of that i understand where you’re going and i want to experience that on a day-to-day basis one of the best examples our vp of engineering the question that he asks isn’t about (24:57) school projects it isn’t about experience it isn’t it isn’t about tell me what you’ve been doing in your job it’s when all is said and done for your day and it’s ten o’clock at night nine o’clock at night and you sit down in front of your computer what are you going to do what are you doing that and he wants to hear people say i’m messing around with python i’m learning php i’m doing this i work on this really cool project on the side that’s what we want we want people who (25:27) have the passion that are going to that are going to elevate them to levels that they weren’t before so fantastic so if this is a subject that feels like it’s soft then let me make a very hard claim the hard claim is this if you can’t find what people are passionate about and connected to what you are trying to do as a business you will not make great hires it’s as simple as that because the connection between people’s own motivation and what you are trying to do needs to be as closely aligned as (26:03) possible the minute it’s off one degree it becomes a mile very quickly in a startup because you grow so quickly uh i did an interview actually and i won’t embarrass the guy because he’s in the room right now um earlier today and um it was a very short interview but the thing i was very quickly aware of was that this gentleman had a real interest to go do a startup and so when we were talking about well what do you want to do and we talked about the potential of this particular role that was coming up (26:30) the first question i asked you know when we got into it was well will this be a deflection will this take you off your path because if it’s going to take him off his path i’d rather determine that right up front because that path is going to be something that ultimately he’ll pursue at some point that’s what he’s interested in so don’t ever try to sell somebody onto your path that isn’t going to work that’s not sustainable what does work is if you can help them uncover that what you’re doing is actually (26:54) really aligned with your their passion that becomes a great potential fit so what’s good about this is when you find people who are actually doing what they’re passionate about you get statements like this you know it just doesn’t feel like work i never did a day’s work in my life that’s thomas edison that should be you this is a the corollary of this is that when you’re being hired don’t get sold make sure that you’re authentic about your answers make sure you’re explicit about what you really want to do and if (27:24) you don’t know guess what that’s okay tell them why you don’t know let your interviewer get to understand what it is that you’re trying to work through for example if you’re somebody who really really likes problem solving but you’re not sure that you want to get involved in a technical problem-solving role then explore with somebody you know what are other examples of problem solving might be in customer service or if it turns out you really love conversation and you’ll really like (27:50) engaging customers but you’re not good at selling you know maybe there’s an opportunity for you for example to work in pr there are lots of ways that your vocational talents can be applied but the most important thing is that you authentically both expose them and that the interviewer listen for them and try to match them to what the job at hand is and that’s the great skill in interviewing so you heard chris is the name of our vp of engineering acquire who asked that question one of his questions (28:19) one of mine is uh this one which is if this was your last day at work what would you want to do you know it’s all over after today what would you want to do you know your 24 hours to go just do the craziest thing you wanted to do but it’s today go seize it what is it and you know what that probably is at the heart of what you’re excited about and every day should feel like your last day because you don’t know whether it is or not so you might as well go after it like it’s your last day and you might as (28:53) well find that thing that you’re so excited to do that if today was the last day you’d go out feeling proud yeah i did it thank god and you know you got run over by a bus tomorrow sorry to hear it but hey at least it was great news you know you can say you lived your passion but that’s exactly what this is about now i unfortunately again find that this is hard because you know a lot of what what i’m talking about is more than a science so let’s talk about this in a more practical sense in in a startup (29:23) so let’s get a little bit beyond eks and iq i said to you what can set somebody up for success and and you have to stop and think about what is your situation for example if you’re three people it’s very different than if you’re 300 people you know three people and trying to do all the things that a startup does you’re going to have very generalist roles so you need people who are good swiss army knives or as one of my uh founders once put it they have to be a cross between everything in the kitchen (29:51) sink and the swiss army knife also the swiss army kitchen was the way we described it which was just a joke to say you know reality is startups have incredibly broad needs people end up doing multiple jobs when you get to be 300 i can tell you people have much more specialist needs you have to end up specializing in for example specific disciplines or areas so one of the things to figure out is do you have people for example who really understand how to be flexible i don’t even have this question on here or (30:18) adaptable for an early stage that might be a question that you put in if you’re only three people and you’ve got to do a lot together but you need to draw that out right but if you’re at 300 you might want to get into much more specific things and say you know what in this particular role we need somebody who’s got great judgment dealing with for example particular major accounts problems or challenges that we have and that’s that judgment is actually more important than their intellect so you know that might be a question (30:45) that you ask one of the things that i’m trying to point out here is that it’s situational it’s not specific to um you know the the task of saying okay i’m hiring a programmer or i’m hiring a salesperson it’s often situational to your particular company what do you sell how do you sell it what are the expectations that you have for the way that’s done and what is it that this particular role needs is it for example that you need somebody who just absolutely is going to go above and (31:12) beyond an effort and that’s going to be more important because we’re looking for a particular kind of customer support agent in this case who just will go above and beyond for customers because we don’t know all the answers to the questions they’re going to come up with we’re too early in our in our customers you know in our software development we haven’t got all that the knowledge base build up so we’re going to need somebody who’s really going to go the extra effort to figure out these (31:34) problems that we’ve never solved before those are the kinds of things you’ve got to think about that’s the situational piece and as i said again probably the single word that’s going to be most important tonight is try to find the fit try to think about what you’re seeing in this person whether it really fits the need you have in this particular part of the organization so ecas iq we’ve kind of covered a couple this one is the one that’s probably most determinate of whether you get a (32:04) successful connection into your organization and that’s eq so i’m sure most people have heard of emotional quotient but i’m going to get very specific tonight about why emotional quotient is so important in startups so the i’m going to pick out three examples but i’ll also be very curious if uh russ and eric could bring up a couple of examples afterward too so you know we’ll listen to their experience first of all they’re up here but why do people think eq is important in a startup specifically and without reading (32:33) my slide i’ll bring these up anybody got any ideas why is an important startup yep go ahead and so expanding really means connecting with people yeah and i think that a huge part of connecting with people is how much you understand them and how much you relate to them right right it’s it’s so fundamental i mean it’s it’s hard to team with anybody if you can’t get along with them i’m just like you know how do you do that well now let’s talk about what this means in a startup i have this term i (32:58) call speed teaming and in a startup the really great startups are constantly forming and reforming teams around specific issues that are constantly changing in a startup and i’ve watched it when you see great startups people quickly group cross-functionally across whatever particular you know rank or whatever that they’re in it’s independent of that they figure out how to dig into a problem now eric we actually have a piece of our dna as we call it at aqua that we call uh specifically i think it’s how you dig (33:29) in do you want to jump in and explain what we do at aquarium and why this is so important at aquarium yeah yeah that’s great so uh and i’ll i’ll get into some detail uh just share a little detail about the aqua dna and how we define ourselves later but jump jump in and own it is a core component of the dna of aquia it i mean it very simple we and we tried to do these core dna elements as simply as possible it means you see a problem go fix it come up with a solution jump in join a team i mean this this speed teaming is (34:06) you know i’ve been with the company for eight nine months and i think i’ve been part of 20 different teams and we have solved problems and then we’ve dispersed and gone on to other things uh and it’s cross-functional it’s it’s working with finance and with engineering and it’s working with product and hr it’s exciting it is very empowering if you tell your people that if you see a problem you jump in you get on it and you reward them for that and more to the point you don’t re you don’t punish them for (34:38) failure then you’re going to be successful and that’s a huge component to it if they jump in and they try something and it doesn’t work we don’t punish them at aqua at aquia it’s a it’s an idea if you’re going to fail do it quickly learn and do it right and do it correct the second time so this is a great example so let’s bring up a specific what would be an example of a a speed teaming that occurred on a problem if you can give a real example of a problem that required cross-functional teaming sure i’ll tell (35:06) you i’ll tell you one that we’re actually right in the middle of so uh one of the big problems despite the fact that we have one million folks across the entire world that are in the drupal community and are part of uh drupal uh the drupal organization and contribute to the code and are committed to it um there’s a lack of talent shocker right there’s a lack of talent that we are trying to find here in the boston area or in portland oregon or in brisbane australia wherever we’re located so (35:36) we’re trying to think of a way to a way to create talent out of almost nothing and what we’re doing is we just immediately in the last like month coming off of an off-site meeting we’re putting together uh something we call acquia u and it is a cross-functional team of hr of product of customer solutions of engineering to come together and figure out to put together core curriculum that we can use to teach people who aren’t in drupal now to become drupalists to teach people who maybe are lamp stack (36:11) developers and convert them into somebody who we can use for uh for acquia and this came up very quickly we’re moving on it uh we’re putting together curriculum we’re putting together hiring plans and it’s it’s incredibly fast and hopefully it will work very well but if it doesn’t we’re not it’s not going to be the only time we do it great so here’s a real world example of speed teaming that happened in the last 30 days and now imagine that you’d made a bunch of hires who had low eq low (36:44) self-awareness didn’t know how to connect didn’t know how to communicate were difficult to get along with how do you think that team would go i don’t need to say it pretty poorly right it’d be pretty difficult to get aqueous u to happen so eq is incredibly important in startups it turns out specifically because of the need to very flexibly move quickly which is the great advantage you have as a startup eq is a critical element now let me give you an example another example and i’ve lived this one many times (37:12) as a startup you very rarely have the right product until version three yep i said version three and i can show you many many examples of that what do you need between version one and version three anybody and it’s pretty obvious here feedback say more please what kind of feedback is it feedback from inside the feedback from the customers or from the market okay so about your product so if you’re really difficult to get along with is that going to be easy no it’s not going to be easy definitely you need (37:40) i mean you need to be you need to be to have this emotional intelligence in order to connect with the with the customers exactly it’s actually critical that thank you very much that you can get a connection with the customer that you’re trying to engage with and that somehow you can build a relationship with them when you don’t have a solution for them in fact most of the time you’re going to be probably inflicting pain on them while you figure out how to get something that actually is useful to (38:07) them and so you’re going to have to figure out how to keep that relationship through this sort of up and down and sideways movement to actually figure out what the problem is that you’re really solving for them through version 1 version 2 and version three and that could be a long time so this customer intimacy is another perfect example of why you’ve got to have eq in your startup hires anybody who’s engaged in that is going to need that now here’s the other thing it turns out that in the sort of bigger (38:32) picture of things every one of your stakeholders is in critical piece of a startup you know it might be your shareholders the first investors you get in if they’re angel friends and family or that it’s you know seed investors are going to be super personal um but even if it’s vcs you know you need to get these people to work with you as you work through these problems and all the expectations etc aren’t all met because they never are trust me you need that kind of relationship what about your suppliers (38:58) what about if you really treat your suppliers bad you have no relationship with them and suddenly production takes off and you can’t fulfill and you ring them up and say i need a favor you’ve got no eq connection with them that’s going to be tough so there’s just so many reasons i could go on but i think you get the point in the end every one of the things that you’re doing to build your company is going to be pretty much dependent on you having eq in your team so it’s not optional now you might decide how important it is (39:26) certain companies put it in their culture high and others don’t some of them decide that their culture is such that they are clear-cut ruthless and very very successfully going to deliver on everything that they promise and so they don’t need eq and i’m not going to mention companies that i can think of that are like that but there are some and that that works for certain people that’s why we talked about culture first but if you’re that kind of company then you don’t go hiring people who are (39:49) you know high eq that that want the kind of touchy-feely relationship and by contrast you know if you are a very very very well organized you know team oriented group of people that is determined to have great customer infancy then you don’t hire you know ruthless people who are only results driven jump in please sure uh i just want to add a couple additional a couple additional points on this uh which i think is uh a critical dimension in the hiring is one that often gets diminished ignored uh and i don’t i want to highlight that important (40:20) eric just used a great example about how it plays out at aqua if you if you want a more uh theoretical evaluation of it there’s a new book out by patrick loncione who wrote the book called five dysfunctions called the advantage the book is relatively cheap and get an ebook version read the first chapter to discard the rest and the in the first chapter he talks about the difference between a smart organization and a healthy organization and that the healthy organization includes what he defines us along the same kind of definition (40:50) different words as eq and the smart organization is one that has great intellect a great iq eks and that the difference is that the ones that have both succeed and the ones that only have smarts fail it’s it’s that it’s that clear in this organization the other thing i just say i’ve worked in uh two or three startups as a participant and advised a number of other ones uh i worked in a services-based organization startup organization called nervewire in the early 2000s and they were so serious about (41:22) this they because of the speed teaming their interviews were organized around and they asked you questions in which you were success what you participated in a successful organization and they listened for the pronouns that you used i wasn’t so important as we right it was a great determinant of how you organized yourself around eq and as a related team and the last thing i’ll say about eq is and i think uh michael was was pointing at a great around customer emergency and leveraging relationships every person you hire in (41:54) startup from employee number two three four five is an extension of you and what you’re trying to accomplish it’s another asset that you bring to the equation and if you have someone who’s not aligned or who doesn’t contribute to the eq quotient in your organization you’re actually detracting value from from your organization your ability to be successful so excellent of course sir sure so i mean what’s the weight what’s for the successful company what should be the weight of the eq compared to the other (42:24) two factors what should be the weighting yeah so i think you i think uh you can you can interview a lot of folks and find the same eks and iq and i would only hire the people with the eq so for me it’s to determine whether they are or not you know michael said a’s higher a’s so in my book if you don’t have the eq if you can’t participate in a team and i love the example you said an inch becomes a mile because of the trajectory of your growth if you don’t have that at the core of your organization and your (42:53) organization requires you to have customers or your organization requires you to build a product as part of a team i i think going to once the owners book you can’t be successful unless you have it so it’s it’s it’s almost it’s rather thinking about it as a waiting i don’t know you feel the same way but it is cultural but for most companies it’s a bar you’ve got to get over yeah never mind waiting you know you just if you don’t have it you’re not going to get in the club (43:19) but but that’s cultural so let me what was the book you referenced it’s called the advantage by uh patrick lencioni l-e-n-c-i-l-n-e you also wrote the five dysfunctions of a team which is probably more recent so you know let me let me summarize on this piece because again i want to move us through to a place where we can actually get you engaged in this process we’ve basically said look eks and iq yeah of course you’ve got to be able to assess that but what’s really important here is your eq and cq fit can (43:50) you actually figure out whether you’ve got somebody here who’s going to be effective within your team within your organization and then without going over all of last week’s material again do they fit your culture do they believe in the same things you do do they have the same ethics and values and principles do they align with the way you’re trying to run your company do they believe that how you do business not just what you do is important and if they do then i in my opinion you’re on to the right basis to

(44:17) assess everything else but it is to me at least a bar and for most startups that’s true because you’re so dependent on your core team in the early stages now we’re happy to we’re lucky enough at harvard to have some some great material on this and uh for those of you who haven’t read it i highly recommend noam wasserman’s book around the founders dilemmas which talks about how critical this is in the early stages of finding your company and the quote that i pulled out from that is uh (44:44) highly relevant since twitter went public today from their ceo and that’s just him stating this in his words that the fit between personalities was so much more important than just finding people who were good so you know it’s it’s that that’s propelled twitter to the multi-billion dollar evaluation as they figure that out they’ve got a ceo who gets that that knows how to build around that i mean after all twitter didn’t start out with you know multi-billion dollar market cap they started out with 143 characters (45:11) so you know it’s actually about what you do with the acquisition of talent that enables you to go build big companies and it’s so easy to say it but it’s so hard to do so a bit of practical we’re going to give you a bunch of questions but just to sort of put this in context for iq my favorite question is one that connects with the job that you’re actually hiring for so i always ask what is the most relevant experience knowledge and skills you bring to this job because that causes the following it (45:42) causes them to immediately have to figure out well what is this job and if they haven’t been listening to what the job is right there they’re stumped and if they’ve got a high iq or and they understand you know what this job is they’ll be very quick to then pick out what have they done in their past that is relevant to this particular job and how well they answer that question is really about how well they’ve understood and how well they can connect so there are a lot of things that come out of (46:07) that so that’s one of my my favorite questions the other thing is people have a hard time sometimes bringing this out without talking about examples now if you can get them to share with you something like their favorite example of a problem they’ve solved and how they solved it then you’ll get a lot of insight into the way they go about approaching difficult situations or problems or whatever the fun part about this is the real question i’m asking is what do you consider as a problem so some people consider a problem as (46:34) well you know i had a i had a bug and i had to solve it other people will say oh the problem i had was that our team was dysfunctional and i had to figure out how to get them back together again to really you know get our product back on track which guy you’re going to hire i know the one i’d hire it’s not the guy who’s focused on the bug he’s focused on the team so you know you have to think about what you’re really looking for in the answer but at some point questions like this can draw out (47:03) all of these things if you if you you know get the the right question for the particular situation the important point i’m making here is not that these questions are the questions that they are the kinds of questions that can help you draw out things like iq and eq now this is a fun one what are you most proud of in your work interactions that brings out all sorts of things you know i hear stories sometimes about well actually that i formed a team that actually plays football outside of work and were incredibly successful that was (47:30) a real answer from a real guy i had he was very successful guy actually one of my best engineers and and that’s exactly what he said and but then he then brought the whole analogy back and said by the way the way i built that football team was blah blah blah blah and this is how i do my programming and this is how i brought it into our teams and this is how we’re successful and i mean the guy is off the charts he’s just a great engineer but not by the way as a team lead interestingly enough he’s an individual (47:55) contributor and it’s because he doesn’t actually like managing but he likes being part of the team and so what makes him really special is that he makes everybody else around him successful without being a manager which i think is an incredible quality that’s a guy i’ll hire over and over and over again and by the way here’s the other thing he is not the best programmer i. (48:19) e he will not produce the best code his code is perfectly good there’s nothing wrong with it but his products are always going to ship on time the quality of them is always going to be really high and his interactions the rest of the team cause everybody else has said to do such great work that the end result is terrific so he didn’t have the eks or uh actually he didn’t have the iq that would have beaten everybody on the team but he certainly had the eq to make his team successful that’s the guy i want to hire now by contrast one of the guys that (48:46) joined at exactly the same time as him had a real cultural misfit with us believed he was the smartest guy in the room and many times was a problem as part of the challenge to you know rise to moving from v1 to v2 to v3 and eventually the team ejected him because he really didn’t believe in something we valued very highly which is that not the customer is always right but the market’s always right in other words it doesn’t matter what we think is the best way to solve the problem unless the market can absorb it he was constantly (49:15) saying it but there’s a better way to do it there’s a better way to do it yeah but who cares if people can’t actually take that that uh you know application and use it so it was a constant fight with what we had as a cultural value in the company which was it’s all about what the customer acceptance of the thing is and how they can adopt it and how they can use it it’s not about having the best solution because the best sometimes doesn’t work the best might be you know brilliant but just too hard to adopt too difficult to (49:40) integrate for example so you’re probably getting a sense of this and my point is you in your own particular way have to figure out what it is that you use as your questions to draw out the iq eq and cq but at the end of the day i want you to have one more little acronym which is qc i want you to have quality control and your quality control after you’ve been through all the analysis should always ask one basic question and we always did this as a group when we had group interviews we came back and we said do we all feel (50:10) like this is net additive to the team because if it’s not just excuse me if it’s dilutive forget it just dilute it to the culture if it’s not additive to the you know spirit of the team it’s not going to work if it’s you know dividing people if it’s as opposed to multiplying their skills not going to work now some people don’t believe in those group interviews but um i heard a really great example i happen to be out to dinner with actually tim last night tim bertrand who runs sales for aqua regular check-in and (50:40) we’re just having dinner and catching up and he told me that the three key people who are running sales now they don’t even bother going to the second interview if any one of them even has a sneaking suspicion that they’re not happy that there’s something amiss they don’t even bother they just if any one of the three of them the head of sales op the head of channels and tim himself they just immediately drop it and why so i said look i’m giving this customer you’ve got to give me some evidence of (51:02) this he said because we’ve occasionally you know said ah we’ll get around that it’s just you you know hey mike you know you’re particular about that kind of thing we’ll get around it none of those have worked out so here’s another little obvious thing trust your gut because if you have some instinct there’s probably a reason for it and if you really just don’t feel like it’s a fit it probably isn’t and you’re better off figuring it out up front all right enough said on the cues and (51:31) i think you’ve probably got enough cues for this evening but please just remember one thing i said at the beginning these are frameworks they are not exact things i’m not trying to say these are the answers and i’m not trying to say these are the questions they’re just the experiences that hopefully can inform you to think about what you should put forward all right how many people in the room would like to hire a players okay we’re in the right room the bad news is that google introduced plus and it seems like everybody wants (52:01) to to hire a pluses now and in fact that’s what i was here no i want the a plus players so we’re going to talk a little bit about what do i think makes for a plus players well remember i said to you we’re very unlikely uh to be able to get all of the particular attributes that make up you know somebody’s perfect eks and iq etc so let’s talk about this in a context that hopefully is practical and let’s talk about what does it really mean to find a plus players and how can you actually apply it in practice (52:31) well my first three a’s are aptitude ability and attitude and ability is in the broadest sense it’s really in the in the sense of suitability for the job so let’s talk about these three first of all it might be uh obvious what i mean by these things but let’s let’s engage um you know you guys in it for a second why is attitude important in a startup you should always hire for will and train for skill you just can’t give you cannot give will to people sounds good so i like that that uh higher for will not for skill well (53:09) um let’s dig in a little bit does anybody have an example of where somebody with great attitude has made an impact in their startup maybe russ i could draw on you if we don’t get an answer from the crowd anybody got an example of of uh where a great attitude has made a difference in their life maybe you’ve had as a customer example so i’m the fleet manager for zipcar boston and uh we have a particularly tough task ahead of us at the moment which is merging our two fleets together between avis and zipcar (53:40) and kind of like the toughest part of it is this fleet sharing operation where we have to get cars from avis side into zipcar’s fleet for the weekend because we need to balance out utilization and basically it’s a really quick turnaround with you know getting 85 avis cars in and then out on the same day there’s a lot of things that need to go in and out in terms of gas cards and easy passes and it’s not fun especially if it’s cold or you know if you have issues and we were using avis as labor (54:12) and you know it they weren’t getting getting along very well and we hired our own employee just to kind of make this problem go away and it was a really important hire for us because this person is honestly i was doing it all summer and it needs to happen it’s the number one priority for the company and so the person we actually hired was one of the avis shuttlers and she’s been fantastic in terms of man she kind of speaks the avis language she understands the admin side at zipcar which is pretty complicated (54:44) to make all the cars move around she came in with a positive attitude and just crushed everything she did and so in terms of the unique set of skills you know she was young tech savvy understood the avis system she was pretty much the perfect fit um and i thank the lord every day for giving me so he asked how i found her um and basically i just asked davis who is your best that you could afford to lose and they basically said oh well here’s a list and i just interviewed them and she just jumped out right away you know (55:23) and again for attitude or for our skills or what jumped out at you uh well she jumped out for attitude she seemed really eager she jumped out for you know just understanding the technical skills part of it it was actually fairly risky because she’d only been with avis for two months um she was fairly new but and just on her own side there were some hurdles i really had to like push her through our hr process but you know i he pretty much fought for her it went all the way up to our coo because there were some question (55:56) marks in hr because they don’t like to bring people that were just hired within two months and like promote them cross company and stuff like that but i was just confident that like this was the person that could do this speak both languages make all the problems go away and so yeah i mean in that situation it was perfect so it’s a good it’s a great story it’s great as much for your willingness to push it up the chain and take it on as anything else and to pay dividends for you right so the attitude is one of (56:24) those things that you know michael said earlier about feeling it in your gut that’s one of the things that sometimes shows up you know it doesn’t it’s not going to show up in eks or iq it’s going to show it’s going to show up another way i’ve got one quick story uh we acquired a company of some of the most brilliant vision scientists robot navigation vision scientists in the planet we fought we found them uh on a piece of a white paper piece of research that one of them had published it was that it (56:51) changed the paradigm for the way people thought about machine vision anyways we go out there we do the digitals in the company and uh you know what what businesses do is they look at what the profile the uh the spend line is they say okay so we can probably do without these jobs so we’re having a conversation with the ceo the founder is an ideal lab company um and um so this is what we think the integration’s gonna look like he says you can’t touch her i said what do you mean i can’t why are we gonna you can’t touch her she’s she’s (57:20) playing like an office manager role that’s that’s something we think we can manage without he said you take that job out you lose the entire company he said we hired this person out of a out of a uh a rehab program to come back to work we hired her because of her attitude we hired her because she there was nothing that she couldn’t accomplish she told us she convinced us an interview there’s nothing she couldn’t accomplish there’s nothing that she wouldn’t do and we were a bunch of phd scientists who couldn’t (57:49) get out of her own way who made plotting progress arguing with each other all the time she was the one who showed up and she when we put up set up test rig she was running ran the test overnight and told us the next morning the results she was the one that that had pizza and food for us when we needed at the end of the day she’s the one that enabled the rest of the team to be successful and she had nothing in terms of qualifications in order to do the job but she had something that we needed which is this idea is when you were (58:15) talking about just jump in and do it this is a jump in and do it attitude higher for will not skill that’s exactly what she had so the these people can this this attribute is immensely valuable hard to measure as but it can be the difference between something working okay and something working wildly well so i’m sure we could have a lot of stories to bring out tonight but it’s one of my three a’s that i always recommend you put top of the list now the second one is a really easy one to talk about in the startup world which (58:44) is aptitude so for those of you don’t really sort of think about aptitude every day aptitude is your ability to learn something quickly and why is this important in a startup in a startup specifically think about this if you’re really going to do something innovative you’re going to probably move into an area that is unknown it’s a breakthrough it’s never been done before so you can’t teach people it in advance because it’s never been done before so what do you need when you get there (59:12) and you’re on the other side of somewhere that you’ve never been before and there are no rules and there’s no basis for you to be doing whatever your breakthrough is whether it’s machine vision or it’s you know a new way of interacting with customers for payments whatever it is you need aptitude you need the ability to quickly switch into a new gear learn a new subject find a new way of working figure out what it is that’s the new set of boundaries and get into a place that obviously you can make an impact that’s (59:37) aptitude and for startups in particular it’s really critical now the second the third one here is is ability and i meant it in the true sense of suitability so we’ve sort of covered a lot of that but what you want to make sure here is that there’s that fit that we were talking about earlier that all of these different components now start to feel like this person’s really got the package of whatever it is that you need in the way of experience knowledge and skills to be able to do this job but (1:00:02) without these other two i’d say this one isn’t going to do anything because i can tell you many many times in a startup you run into these situations where because of the way things have speed teamed or formed or you’re facing some new problem you thought of or you got into a difficulty you didn’t encounter somebody with a wrong attitude who just doesn’t want to learn even if they’ve got all the abilities in the world it’s just going to drag you down but by contrast when you’ve got somebody like (1:00:27) they’ve come out of rehab and they don’t know any better than to just fight their way for through something and they have the attitude of can do and by the way they really want to learn they’re they’re who are most likely to go to plant that flag on top of the hill and get everybody else to follow them and that’s what it takes and in many instances the great startups show that dna over and over again and that’s why they succeed so quick examples of attitude what i look for problem solving you know we’ve already (1:00:54) heard this from eric fail fast and learn faster you want to be the kind of person that digs in and is not afraid of failure you’ve got to have the attitude that you know what can i do to make a difference as opposed to how can i marginally move the thing forward marginal improvements don’t make great startups big breakthroughs do and that takes boldness and it takes a an attitude that says i’m okay to fail i’m willing to do that and i’m willing to learn faster i’ve already talked a little bit about (1:01:20) this which is persistence you know there’s the ultimate test of a startup which is how well do they do when they really screw up and when you really screw up you have to have some persistence to say you know what i still believe in this i have the passion the conviction the belief and i have the posit the persistence to go to the next step and to figure it all out again if necessary as you know that can involve literally throwing away your assumptions and going back and in particular getting to the root of the problem issue or opportunity (1:01:52) i have a post that’s it’s due to go up i’m not quite sure when it’s all about problem solving it’s about the what i talk about is the eight levels of problem solving so it’ll go up some stage on my site but what that really is all about is one thing which is trying to find people who have the attitude that says look i’m not just going to fix the bug i’m going to fix the cause of the continuous bugs like i said earlier which is that we’re not working as a team to really understand how to build effectively (1:02:18) that’s the root problem root cause of the problem and then if you go back and and you start to look at the really great companies they go one step beyond that they say well why is it that we didn’t build the right team in the first place well guess what it’s probably a hiring problem you go all the way back and say we’re probably hiring the wrong kind of people in the first place we didn’t have people the right kind of eq then you go back and you figure out okay well so do we have the culture right to (1:02:40) do that or do we have the incentives right to do that well wait a second is the management looking at this thing the right way people who are really good and have the right attitude consistently figure out how to go all the way to the root cause persist to figure out what they can do to make a difference and they participate in a way that makes everybody successful not thinking about their individual you know merit or particular award or whatever they figure out what are they going to do to make everyone successful they know that (1:03:06) they’ll rise as one of the boats on the tide at that point and and that’s just a great attitude to having a startup all right the pluses so these are just purely things that i’ve you know experienced myself and again i don’t mean to say that these are what you’re going to pick out but here’s what i’ve learned this is the one if i can find it early i almost guarantee you i can build it around it and that is is somebody self-aware why is this important what happens if somebody’s not (1:03:36) self-aware how easy are they to work with well if you’re not self-aware you can’t have emotional intelligence because a lot of people when they treat people and you know i was a former kindergarten teacher before i worked at behavioral child i’m learning that but no so usually they follow the proverbial rule treat people how you want to be treated but emotionally intelligent people flex to where people are at and they treat people how they want to be treated so in order to have awareness without you (1:04:11) have to have awareness within so that’s another wonderful quote you i need to get you up here writing my sort of little anecdotes so uh but i really love that and i actually want to take that back to the eq place too because i really believe that’s true too if you if you don’t have awareness from within it’s difficult to have awareness around you now when it actually comes to startups i’ll tell you why it becomes super important because you’re really trying to make sure that you build a team that can be successful (1:04:39) around people’s strengths but how can you do that if you don’t know what their strengths are and nobody has only strengths much as we’d all like to claim that and the first thing i’ll tell you is all my weaknesses and there’s a long list of them but the good news is because i know what all my weaknesses are i know who to hire to work with like the first person i’ve always hired in one of my companies is the cfo or somebody who’s going to run ops because that is not my strength it’s absolutely my weakness but guess (1:05:06) what i know that i’m self-aware about it i’ve actually been told by enough people how crap i am at it that it’s very easy to figure it out but the good news is once you know that guess what go hire the best person to counteract for that and actually hopefully find somebody who’s self-aware enough to say no that is my strength but i’m not the guy who’s going to go out and be the visionary and champion you know the cause hey michael you seem to like to do that go for it now we have a team because (1:05:34) we’re self-aware about our strengths and weaknesses we know how to work together so this is so important in a startup because the more self-aware people are the more easy it is for you to figure out how to fit them together now if people aren’t self-aware some reason sometimes it can be because they’re not comfortable to actually get to a place where they can admit their weaknesses and that can be cultural so again going back to last week try to build a safe culture build a culture where it’s actually okay to say i’m crap (1:06:00) at x i need help with why and guess what if you could just you know see me through z that would be great because you know what that’s a basis on which to have a dialogue but if you have to keep banging on the door to find out what somebody’s good at and where they’re screwing up and they won’t admit it it’s going to be very hard to work with so that’s one of my pluses the second one’s an easy one which is authentic but it goes along with this a lot of people feel like they’ve got to (1:06:26) be something you know they’ve got to be like this or they’ve got to be like that really i mean why you are who you are accept that figure out how to get comfortable with it establish where it is that that fits and where it can work and lots of things can build on that and then the last one which is is a sort of a fun one for the startup is sort of the athlete in the end i don’t know how many times we’ve been part of this and in fact i’m sure one or two one of you two could jump in on this (1:06:52) you know you haven’t got a talent pool that’s gonna fill the position for the particular experience skills and knowledge and what do we do at that point maybe i could have you jump in russ you’re nodding on this you you go to the athlete piece as i call it maybe you have a different word for it but i think the zipcar story is a great example of that as well i think the zipcar store is about someone who had a set of capabilities had the right attitude and could and uh you know could operate as an athlete i think the (1:07:22) other way to think about an athlete is someone who’s who’s proven that they’ve been successful at everything else that they’ve done and they were and they may be they may not be the direct customer support person but they’ve they’ve moved up the sales channels they’ve uh they’ve done another uh set of work in another part of the organization has been successful and they’ve shown the sign i would think it was a combination between attitude and ability and you they they’re going to be good at whatever (1:07:47) they do they’re going to be able to move one degree left or right to be successful exactly so so a lot of times when you can’t find that perfect skill set or they haven’t got the experience i’ll hire the athlete i’ll hire the person who’s shown themselves in the past you know to have been good at adapting and adopting whatever the particular job is that’s that’s um you know come up in the past and when they show those kinds of skills generally speaking athletes end up adapting to whatever new job you’ve got (1:08:11) and showing themselves to be successful at that so that’s my three a’s that’s my three pluses and putting it all back together again what i call the golden triangle emerges if you get people who’ve got the right aptitude the right ability the right attitude you’ve checked out they’ve got the right experience knowledge and skills and iq and cq and they’ve got all those pluses you just hit a home run you’ve got the golden triangles i call it it’s the combination of all those things and (1:08:36) funnily enough you will find that they can be successful at the job they’ll really love it and they’ll fit and reinforce your culture because you’ve basically checked off those things now it doesn’t mean to say by the way that all these things are going to be there from every hire but obviously what you want to do is establish some tools for uncovering these things and that’s what we’re going to spend a little bit of time on now uh and we’re going to we’re going to set you up for these uh at least one of (1:09:01) these tonight which is with some of the questions so for eks largely speaking it’s not rocket science you know it should be on their resume or their linkedin profile or you can get it through interviews you should be able to extract that kind of information about what is their experience you can read their you can read that on their resume but don’t get trapped and i encourage you to think about this in your interview getting them to recite their into their resume to you that’s your job you can read the (1:09:25) resume what you’re trying to do is get behind the resume and in the interview ask the questions that bring forward what it is that’s actually enabled that experience to come out as the person that’s in front of you and what will it do to help them set to set them up for success going forward on the iq side this is something that’s specific to startups so i’m not going to say this is applicable for for large companies but it can be just as applicable look for proof and you are almost invariably small (1:09:53) enough certainly in your early stages that you can afford to say hey guess what if you’re looking for an engineer let’s get them to do some coding let’s take a real world example eric i think we do this at acquired you want to talk a little bit about that we’ll do a few things and it again another wonderful thing about aqui is how flexible we are and our the different departments will do different things so we do code tests uh we will we will give people very creative kind of odd problems to solve and see how (1:10:24) and see the type of code that they get you know there are some really interesting uh we’re in a unique space we’re in the open source space and there’s actually a a website uh a that helps analyze open source code right now it’s called guild so if you have a project out there and you what guild does is it scrapes all the websites out there and figures out what type of open source coding coding problems you’ve solved and what you’ve done and it analyzes it until it will tell me how you scored in python and what you (1:11:02) could you could you have done better in php and fill in the blank um and we’ll take those as a as a benchmark but then we’ll give you a code test we will actually we will say here’s a here’s a problem we need to solve and we’ll make it realistic to what we’re trying to do we’re not shy um you know drupal again open source it’s open for everybody anybody can go in and look at the code they can fix a module they can do bug fixes it’s great it’s interactive so we give them and we say here fix this (1:11:33) problem please and oftentimes it’s not even necessarily like the the one one point that i think is important to make it’s not just about did they get it right but i do want to know how they came up with their solution and what was their process what was their strategy why did they come up with that solution it might not have been the exact most perfect code but if they had a sound fundamental reasons as to why they did it in a certain way that can go a long way that gives us an indication that they have the right mindset they (1:12:06) have the right analytical tools that we need to move forward super and so you’ve got plenty of ways you can do this and and i really encourage you to make them practical so that you’re not guessing about whether somebody’s got these uh particular skills and whether they’re actually going to be able to do the job get them engaged in it you’re small enough i would say actually until you get to be you know over a thousand people or more and even then you can break it down departmentally and think (1:12:29) about how to do this now the cq piece is one that’s less easy and so you know how do you ensure that somebody’s a good cultural fit obviously there’s that gut check that i talked about but the one i’m going to encourage you to think about is the process itself so here’s a simple example you know we all know to show up for an interview on time right pretty basic however how many people thank you for an interview how many people actually then follow up and say you know hey i’ve got some questions for you (1:13:00) or engage you in a way in the interview that you feel like hey i’d really like to have a conversation with this person well i’ll tell you a funny story the best hire i ever made i threw all my questions away i actually forgot i was having an interview because this person ended up engaging me so well that they completely took the process over for me and i realized oh my god this is just somebody i want to work with well that’s sort of the observation i’m trying to get you to think about here is (1:13:26) what are the interactions you’re having with this person is it really hard to get the answers out of them is this feeling natural is this a conversation or is it really a tortuous interview process these things help you observe whether you think you’ve got a cultural fit and so i’ll always ask my team at the end you know did this feel like it was an easy process that we really enjoyed and this person naturally would just you know flow right along with us and if the answer is yes you’re probably observing (1:13:52) a cultural fit but i still encourage you to ask all the questions i mentioned earlier about from a cultural standpoint but this is sort of the the softest piece of it so i have some things that i’ll bring to the four in a minute on this okay so the tools around this have to be supplemented by one very practical thing and i really believe you should not ever skip this step and that is going to get what i call real references what’s the difference between a real reference and the reference they give you (1:14:17) the answer is the real reference is not the one that was rehearsed and anytime anybody gives you a reference i’m not going to pay any attention to it the references i care about the ones i go find out about that are not on their resume they’re not the ones they gave me so i will go and try to find the references of peers of people who worked for them and people who they worked for and all three of those are important but pay attention to the details because for example when somebody says yeah no this (1:14:45) person was great that usually means if they stop right there they’re trying to get you off their back because there’s something else they were great and would you hire them again yeah i’d hire them again but in the intonation was it yeah i’d hire them again or was it yeah i’d hire them absolutely in a heartbeat and here’s why and references are tough because most people don’t want to tell you what they think about people so you’re going to just have to develop a skill to actually (1:15:11) be a colombo because really that’s what it takes you’ve got to play dumb and say well what did you mean by that or can you tell me an example or what was the experience you had can you be specific come up with 20 ways to get behind what somebody’s saying because it’s not easy and when people approach you for a reference if it’s somebody you like you probably want to say the right thing but they might not be right for the job so try to be specific about why you like them or what you think they’re good at (1:15:36) and here’s the thing i’m going to encourage you if you’re either giving or getting a reference remember in the end you don’t serve anybody well if you don’t actually tell the truth because they’ve got to find the right fit and so if you get them a job that they’re not a fit for you actually didn’t do anybody a favor you didn’t do the person of failure you didn’t do the company favor real references to me are authentic very specific and they get to the heart of what this person really is (1:16:00) so there’s no shortcut to that that’s just plain hard work and it’s really worth doing the work on it eric yeah just another thing always have the hiring manager do the references it’s okay it’s okay for uh for hr to assist or recruiters to assist but always have the hiring manager do the references you’re gonna get more information um one great question ask the reference what skill are you missing now that this person is gone what’s lacking what’s lacking on your team now that that person is gone (1:16:31) if they don’t have an answer how valuable were they to that organization that they left so i’m gonna have you stay right up here so we can skip right to the aqua piece okay um so we’ve covered a lot of this but to give us two minutes background on on aquia and how you’re hiring at the moment this is your slide so you hop through great thank you um so i’ll tell you just a little bit about aquay and i’ll just tell you a couple quick stories i know we’re uh we’re running up against the (1:16:56) time so uh what one of the key components to uh to what we do in delivering great digital web experiences to customers uh warner music group is a perfect example um we’re able to put together websites like two these 250 artist websites on only three templates but if you look at each of those 250 websites you probably can’t tell that they came from three three templates they are customizable they can be changed around in any way that you want they’re incredibly agile they can they can they can look and feel however the individual (1:17:36) wants them to feel you see david bowie up there one of the things is when you need to move fast you need to move fast david bowie no songs for 10 years calls up time warner and said it’s warner music group and says i have a new song guess what it’s coming out in four days be ready what does warner do they say no problem boom they go in they change they change their entire website they’re ready for the commerce so that they can sell the music and they can launch the two most anybody anybody there’s always a fun one (1:18:10) anybody know the two most important days for an artist page for a musical artist page i already gave you one when they die and when they die absolutely that is the most important when somebody dies their web pages get hit again and again and again um another one a little bit more not not a little more serious uh during hurricane sandy the mta had over 30 000 concurrent users on a regular basis this is per second people trying to access information think about that 30 000 p 30 000 requests every second boom boom boom (1:18:54) critical information that people need during a massive emergency what previously happened with the mta is that anytime they had a they had a hurricane or they had a shutdown or anything they couldn’t do this and their website turned into basically just a text page it just kind of said please check back later now they’re able to deliver important information it actually turned into a place where people went for information about where to go for housing for where to go for food for shelter and it became just one of the a (1:19:31) huge success story for how you can be resilient how you can make sure that your website is is doing everything properly i’m actually going to skip whole foods uh and i’m going to go straight into our aqua dna and i’ll i’ll do this kind of quickly as well because we’ve talked about a little bit of it committed to awesome do the right thing jump in and own it give back more and inspire a little crazy um i’ll talk about inspire a little crazy because it’s a fun one we just did this yesterday uh we we went uh michael scott (1:20:04) was there uh we spotted crazy in and of itself yes it was crazy in himself we anybody here of lunchbeat basically yesterday acquia sponsored lunchbeat which about 150 people showed up at district hall in the innovation district we danced from 12 to 1. dj was on actually our co-founder uh founding member of acquia jay batson was spinning the tunes everybody just danced no alcohol no alcohol imagine that that was the hard part but you know the these these are the things that we fundamentally believe make aquia a fantastic place to work (1:20:43) these are the things we look for when we are hiring and then the other pieces we we talk about p triple i which is passion integrity intelligence and initiative and i’ll just talk one a little more briefly about passion i’ll leave the other three out there for you guys to noodle on passion doesn’t just come from what you’re looking for it’s not just about i want to see passion in the person who i’m interviewing it’s about you exuding that passion to that person because you need to match their passion (1:21:17) they need to match yours if you’re passionate about what you do and you’re passionate about your startup idea and your company that’s going to come through to the candidate that’s going to come through to that prospective person who’s going to help you get to where you want your company to be and if you’re not passionate about what you’re doing then they’re going to see right through that they might not want to join your company it’s not it’s not just about you selecting them it is about you is about (1:21:42) them selecting you so we always put passion first that’s the most important thing that we believe in um integrity intelligence and initiative a lot of those things are you know we have the three eyes and michael has the three a’s and combined we have uh ai i like it on the fly thank you very much eric okay so uh the next section is up on my site and i’ve written it up specifically so we don’t have to go through it tonight but it’s because there are questions i always get asked by startups about (1:22:14) hiring so they are you know should i hire known quantities should i for example figure out how to you know hire youth or should i always hire experience should i be going for one or the other uh you know how do i actually make sure i sell my company but listen to my interview interview these are really tough things so i i’m going to just turn it over to russ for a second to give us a few words of wisdom before we kick off the actual um session we’ve got a few more minutes before we will have you actually doing (1:22:41) the interview russ what would you share from all your years of experiences some of the important things for people to think about before we get off kick them off to do their interviewing um i think i i i’ve known michael for a few years and i’ve uh i love i’ve seen parts of this presentation before part of the reason i love it is because the parts he talks about are the parts that often get ignored when you’re starting a company and you work and you’re working to try to create something out of nothing you tend to (1:23:07) focus on the content expertise that you need you tend to focus on the on the things that have to get done but not the company that you’re building last week it sounds like you talked about mission vision and values this week is the expression of those mission vision and values to people my i’ve been lucky to work for some interesting companies i’ve had a couple of startup experiences in there i’ve seen three industries start grow and begin to mature uh i’m you know delighted that i’ve you (1:23:32) know at a robot i’m you know people think i have a robot as ground zero for the robotics industry 20 years ago when the company started there was one robotics company in massachusetts called irobot now there are 127. and our challenge right now is to find a great find the greatest town that wants to contribute to our mission which is build cool stuff deliver great products make money have fun and change the world uh it’s a though each of those attributes we talk about in interviews and we find out the passion that each (1:24:04) person has around each of those topics uh we also get we also do a lot about giving back we look at their look at their interest in contributing back we’re trying not just to to be be creative and successful now we’re trying to grow the next generation of engineers we uh we have a we give employees two days a year to go teach stem education in schools or to do robot demonstrations in high schools or to get in front of the girl scouts and talk about why girls that needed engineering so it’s part of what it’s (1:24:36) part of our dimension of change in the world the one thing i’ll say and i’ll step down because the real work is next is that you can’t underestimate the importance of the people that you hire from the beginning there i i have corporate marketing now which is uh which will shock michael but i have uh i i have corporate communications pr web i own irobot. (1:24:59) com and i have the creative services team and part of the reason i think that is is because when we started hiring i joined three years ago i said i wasn’t going to let anybody in who couldn’t represent irobot’s brand in their world because everybody is a network connection uh we we sell a consumer product right if we we we architected the the the process of interviewing so that even if people get rejected they get they came away with a great experience because when they went into the store to buy something and they saw (1:25:30) a robot next to it if they had a lousy experience with irobot during the interview process they were less likely to buy our product we knew it we’ve michael and i had a conversation about a couple months ago that inspired me and now people who come to our website who are interested in our products we also try to find out if they’re interested in working there as well and we’re trying to we’re trying to extend that as well but everybody is an extension of the brand that you’re trying to build you have a brand (1:25:56) yourself you have a set of values instead of passions those have to be expressed through everybody you’re building the most the see the single most important person in the development of the culture you learned this work last week i’m sure is the leader right and that and at the startup the value yeah i said about it earlier the value you’re generating includes the relational like the equity value the emotional intelligence of the people that you have on your team and the relationships that they build and the (1:26:24) relationships that they have so i’ll leave it at that thank you very much russ for those of you who weren’t here for one of the sessions where actually we did this in go to market we talked about in startups the brand is you and last week we talked about leadership and culture and that leadership and from the top comes the culture so uh you just heard russ reinforce that and it’s actually great to hear that you’re doing that that you’re you know taking over that literally by leading from the front (1:26:57) that’s fantastic it really is all right um sorry we have one more question but i really want to get to the workshop right after so jump in uh when you are hiring when you are interviewing you you say i but you imply there’s also a team of people in the room interviewing these people is that is that true is it a group interview is like one potential hire and three or four people from the company or is it just you one on one so i’ll i’ll let both russ and eric uh answer that because everybody’s different (1:27:24) i was answering in the very simplest of senses saying that many instances i’m doing one-on-one interviews i do know that some people do it differently jump in it depends it depends on the role so uh there’s sometimes we’ll do it uh serially where we have you know a series of people interview we always coordinate the beginning and the end michael talked references it a couple times when he sits down with the team and he says is this really someone who’s going to be additive to our team uh or dilutive to our team so you do it (1:27:50) that way but you start out as a team and you end as a team sometimes we do this a lot robotics is really the integration of a number of capabilities and technology so it’s hardware it’s it’s mechanical electrical uh software we will some depending on the on the role we’ll have the team interview that as part of the process will the manager will like the systems engineering guys will the leader will take the small pile of candidates and win it down to one or two and then put them in front of the (1:28:17) team so it can be role dependent it can be cultural dependent if your culture is open and team-based you may want to make it a team-based interview at nerve wire you know the first interview was with the competency league the second interview was always with the team and uh so it can really depend excellent so let me kick off the workshop um we’ve got about 15 minutes to do this i know we started about 15 minutes so people are late so people want to stay late we can do it for a little bit longer but i want to try to give you all (1:28:44) a chance so you should all have a copy of one of these sheets which has got a series of questions on the top and if you don’t just stick your hand up because jennifer will get you one so uh in there are a series of questions and each of them are divided by things like the iq and eq and cq that we’ve been talking about so what i’d like you to do is just find one person could be either somebody next to you but just you know pair up so for example if the two of you at the front and the two of you at the front would (1:29:13) like to just get together what i’d like you to do is just go through these questions a lot of them i’ve already hinted at and pick one of them that you think is the most important if you if you had to just start with one question uh to start an interview out with imagine you’re a founder and you’re trying to find a co-founder that’s as written at the top of the instructions what would you look for and just interview each other we’ll give you give give you about five ten minutes to do (1:29:38) that and then i’m just gonna ask for a couple of you to share your experiences and we’ll we’ll have a discussion about it and draw some of that out so uh jump in make sure you’ve got paired up and uh and and give yourself a chance to sort of ask some good questions here all right the good news is uh you’ve got the rest of your lives to figure out how to ask these questions and answer them we just wanted to give you a flavor of some of this tonight uh so we’ve got five groups that have volunteered to (1:30:31) share their experiences and uh russ and eric are going to take a moment to uh give you a chance to share what did you learn what what question do you pick first of all on why and then what did you learn by asking that person so let’s start on the right eric why don’t you jump on it sure um so why don’t why don’t you share with us uh what what question you asked your your partner here well one one of the questions that i asked him where what legacy do you hope to leave and i found it very interesting (1:31:00) he said that you know he wasn’t he wasn’t going to be bill gates i thought that was very humble of him but um that he had he still pushed for higher standards and higher stability so you know that humbleness and also his willingness to still move forward was it a uh was it a complete answer did you feel that at the end of what he described to you that you felt satisfied with that answer i thought it was it was very honest and it also gave me a feel of um you know his personality as the you know conversation progressed i learned a lot (1:31:39) about how important family and community and other values are to him and that translated um very very influentially to team building with me so i felt like you know if he was ever in a management position that he would do what it takes to sustain that team and it sounds like that came out organically like not as a result of a of a specific question about what you what your fundamental values are it just came out as part of that initial question yeah great so that’s that’s good so i’ll ask you now the same (1:32:10) thing what question do you choose and what did you kind of learn from it yeah i asked her you know what’s your passion in life and she she said that she loves to create and and also um from other aspects and i asked her um the balance in the balance in life and she um she treasured the um the contribution to the community and the society and also the uh the fact that kind of you know impressed me that she is willing to sacrifice for the next generation and um i see that very sincere uh you know from you know what she she talks um (1:32:54) and she said she likes to talk so so the i i you know right so uh being eloquent and articu articulated is good um you know in the in a good way so i think in general i’d say that she can be a very good managerial resource or type for the organization great so what i’m hearing here which was great just to sort of pull out a couple of examples is when you ask the question about you know what’s the legacy that uh he wanted to leave behind you know that tells you a lot about somebody because it’s a chance for them to say well you (1:33:34) know when everything’s said and done what do i want people to remember me for and so that probably gets to some core issues and it’s great that you asked that question brought out a couple of cq issues like his values and eq issues like how you wanted to work in a team and then when you flipped it around i thought it was great what’s your passion is of course you know that’s my favorite question that can lead to a long discussion uh the fact that you started talking about community you could have (1:33:53) talked about anything right you could have talked about work but you chose to put that first that talk to your you know cq and eq the fact that you you want to engage in that way and you know your sincerity and the fact that you open it up to say i like to talk it’s awesome so anyway thank you both very much for participating that’s great so on this side you toured a team to pair did you ask more than one question or just one yeah we asked a few questions actually so i didn’t i’m not sure if i judged the time (1:34:20) right i guess i can speak and i only have got a chance to so my name is tim and uh this is elise um and it was mostly me interviewing her because we ran out of time at the end but i think we both learned something from uh from the roles we were playing tell me the question that you learned the most from when you were interviewing her uh sure i mean i started out with the question uh what are you passionate about because it’s michael’s favorite question okay you broke the first rule this is about you you choose the questions (1:34:50) and it seemed like a good intro question to kind of learn some general things about her um i think i’ve picked up right away that she’s a very intuitive person and it seemed like she had a very high emotional iq she started out by saying um you know that she’s passionate about problem solving and meeting new challenges and and making people feel good you know like doing things that affect other people in a positive way um so we talked about that for a little while and and and on the emotional quotient (1:35:18) side i didn’t ask for any of these in particular but just asked her straight up you know do you consider yourself to be a person with with a high emotional quotient and um you know are you perceptive and do you pay attention to other people um and are you in touch with that and she was able to uh genuinely talk about that for a little while um and again so i think she i think she is um there’s one more actually um on the values um this is one that i don’t hear people talk about too much but it’s (1:35:50) uh it’s something that i have feelings about it’s uh the you know what is what does balance mean to you in your life um i was happy to see it on this this list because i think people can kind of they they tend to um automatically err on you know working a lot right that’s right uh and i’m a kind of opinion that um that there can be drawbacks to that and so i asked her about that um and i and i thought you know if this was somebody i was actually interviewing i would be happy to get these sorts of responses (1:36:23) because she uh she’s you know she was saying well work and life are connected and if things are out of balance it can have bad effects on both and i thought well this resonates with me culturally uh and if if i was gonna be in a position of hiring her that would be that would be important so yes three questions you asked about passion you asked about eq and you asked yeah i think other ones too i’m just hitting the high those so those are those are the three you learn the most from yeah right would you hire (1:36:51) yeah i mean i mean i have to ask a couple more questions but basically on that she was charming but would you take the job unless she’s got to hire me but she’s going to enter oh she didn’t get a chance interview that’s right but i mean is there anything you want to share um yeah can i please so um i am elise i would like to share a little bit about uh to be interviewed so my last interview was happened like five years ago i haven’t been interviewed for a long time and five years can happen a lot so (1:37:26) when you ask me about the passion and there are two or three seconds uh my brain has nothing to to say and then i found okay let’s think about what happened in the past and the the moments and there are two moments come come to my mind and i think that’s my passion and so i just want to thank for this chance to you know i feel like maybe i should be interviewed every like month to keep myself calm and you know be self-awareness and ask you ask my partner a question about what you’re not doing day to day so for (1:38:02) me i feel like people when you come to interview a job you are reading a very excited moment and you prepared um prepared a lot but the knife is always peaceful so the day by day every day maybe can make some people’s passion really drop down and some people can really keep a very high level so i want to know what what happened to it’s day by day time so that that will make me see the common and normal and as a human being and not a hero or something so that that’s what i ask you that question and yeah he taught me more information than (1:38:42) i asked and yes i was satisfied with this this interview thank you you’re welcome the i think the essence of the of the learning is that is that when you get beyond in some ways i i really liked what you said about you were prepared for the question about passion you hadn’t thought about it in some ways you’re not when michael asked me that question the first time i met the second time i met him he asked me that question i wasn’t that was one of the questions i wasn’t prepared for but it but the reality is it (1:39:12) what comes out in that moment is really essential to who you are it’s really it’s not practice it’s not an audition i you know one of the things about interviews you’ll learn is that people reveal themselves in moments and if you can ask the question that they’re not prepared for rather than the question that they are prepared for you learn more and so you both learn something about each other that was valuable right yeah fantastic i also wanted to you shared something that that i hadn’t (1:39:36) revealed tonight but it was a an excellent point you made which is being interviewed is actually an experience that you very clearly remember and so if you’ve had a good interview that obviously tells you something about the company if you had a bad interview that tells you something about the company too and i’m amazed how many times that is ignored you know people start selling their company you know what the best way to sell your company is to have a great interview ask great questions figure out how to really listen so thank you for (1:40:03) bringing that out that was great all right want to move one more down the line here you okay here you go so talk about the question that i guess you learned the most from when you interviewed him sure uh hi i’m vidishi this is veron so the question that i asked varun was michael’s favorite yet again what are you passionate about because i actually i think there’s a good reason why it’s his most favorite question like i think it does reveal quite a lot about a person and so varun’s answer was really interesting he (1:40:34) said that he likes to build things and see the impact from those things and the example he gave was really cool which is that when he worked at microsoft he worked on the photo function in windows 7. and the cool thing about that is that everyone uses windows and so he was in rwanda on a project talking to some children and he was able to point out to them all the way in rwanda the specific product that he built and i think that reveals quite a lot about what you know what motivates him and what drives him that’s right (1:41:06) great good um yeah so i’m ruined i asked actually vadushi uh the same question uh yet again what are you passionate about and you know i actually from the kind of the general category of questions i really like that question it i feel like this is a good question about like hey what’s your north star what are you kind of aiming for um and then um amongst these other ones kind of the day-to-day ones or the previous job ones i’m not such a big fan of those just because i feel like sometimes those are very contest (1:41:36) contextual like your previous job there might have been other million reasons why you know why you enjoyed it that’s hard to bring out and then also on the day-to-day one like you know sometimes it’s like well i it’s hard to say like um you know what you would love doing day to day because each day would be different so i i i wasn’t that big of a fan but anyways vadushi’s answer was i actually really appreciated she was like hey you know i i actually don’t know what i’m passionate about yet um i’m (1:42:04) still in the process of figuring that out and like that was her first sentence and to me i thought that was actually really great because i it revealed a great deal of self-awareness saying that hey i don’t know what i’m passionate about but here and then she went on to figuring out what they are um so she’s like i really like interacting with people i like working with smart genuine you know kind of authentic people um i think you talked a little bit about um impact and and that stuff as well um so (1:42:29) right right it’s interesting again it’s a similar example i think the passion question has a great opportunity to distill out the essence of the person you really find out the court you found out a little bit about his core and he found out about your core in ways that you might not get in any other kind of question right the importance of eq and the importance of how that aligns with what you’re trying to hire for right so great thank you awesome thank you guys so i’m going to ask these uh the last two couples uh (1:42:56) here did you ask other questions besides what are you passionate about you did okay great you have the mic okay uh i guess i’ll skip the passion one because we did that but but that was first um i think uh it went into values but but then we went on to legacy like what kind of legacy would you like to leave and um here um left um told told me that he’s he’s working on a tele health um startup and he wants to um he basically wants to leave um he knows that he’s not going to be in his words oprah win winfrey (1:43:41) going out you know to different places being famous on every poke channel but he wants to improve the lives of the people he meets in person and he was talking about how he wanted to um help people like say in rural areas like rural nebraska um see um basically get um kind of connect with doctors in boston and basically facilitate that and he also um his values he values education um his family values education and especially for her girls um for people who wouldn’t have the opportunities otherwise so he um he talked a bit about (1:44:25) those but and then we talked about management and um he basically said that like a management should facilitate the work of ev of others and make basically not micromanage but make more possible so it seems like he’s someone who really wants to improve and change the world and would be a and i really got a picture of uh what his goals and his uh personality was um so uh i asked marcella um you know as i started off i asked her um what do you value most and one of the things that she asked me was in what context i thought that was really (1:45:06) important because um if i were going into interview for a for a summer camp and you asked me that question i tell you i love to bike and then i’m an avid biker but if i were going into a healthcare interview i would say i value access to care and underserved populations and so forth so i think it was very good of her to ask that question i did ask her about management and she gave me a answer that was kind of parallel to mine in that you know she felt that a manager was there to kind of help support um you know a group and kind of be there for (1:45:39) them when they needed something but not to you know guide them there because it you know kind of stifles them um so i think that she answered the questions very well and there were the answers i wanted to hear um if i had to say anything i could say that maybe those answers could have been a little bit more personal um because they were they were basically like what i wanted to hear and not more like why it was about like why her and why she was saying that’s like what experience she had with it but um but yeah overall i (1:46:07) thought that was very insightful to start off by saying in what context so just to pause for a second you asked something that was important how could she have gotten more personal and how could you have helped her because one of the jobs of the interviewer is to actually make somebody comfortable enough that they will share what their you know real personal sort of like values and stuff how much you’ve done that so you could have asked her to give me to give me an example of a time where she felt that she was managing a group (1:46:33) of people um and see what her response was but we didn’t we didn’t get to that point but um but yeah i think that’s something i could have asked her so yeah so if you ever get to reading the website somebody did ask me where all the materials are again it’s all up at startupsecrets.com or mgiscock. (1:46:48) com the bottom line is um the interviewer’s job is to make sure that you set the stage for somebody to become authentic and sometimes i find that that’s actually hard like people are so tense and they’re so nervous or they’re so unpracticed or whatever in which case change the scene like literally walk them out the building if they need to take them for a walk or take them to the cafeteria buy them a coffee or if you need to just say you know what is today a good day for you and maybe the answer is no (1:47:11) right and actually you know what if it’s an important position let them come back right um it’s it’s actually your job to figure out how to get that you know to the right i don’t know it’s great i just can’t jump in a second just say how critically important that is and difficult right it’s i mean when you’re hiring you’re especially at this stage in an organization’s life like i said earlier every person you hire is an extension of your mission and you’re what you’re trying to accomplish (1:47:36) and so as the interviewer it’s kind of your responsibility to make sure you can authenticate them as who they are people show up often times i don’t know the suggestion happened here people show up in times of interviews like it’s an audition right they study the website they study the market they look at the they look and see who else is in the company who they might know and they try to make a connection but it’s it’s it’s a they show up as an addition it’s your job to strip the strip away that (1:48:05) veneer to try to get to the to the person and that you know uh take a walk right so instead of doing it in your office walk them around the location you’re at and you know observe them you know that’s one of my earlier comments so people sometimes reveal themselves in moments um and that you’ll get you’ll get their authentic self in a splash and if you’re attending to them you can just use that moment to leverage into uh to discover more about who they are great thank you like last but not least (1:48:36) yes um so this is chris i’m elena and i asked him a similar question to what are you passionate about but not quite which is what do you love about your life and i was trying to capture i thought you know a good answer would kind of indicate what you’re passionate about but also reflect his values um which is the reason i asked that one and i thought his answer was really really interesting which was that at the moment he loves the focus he gets from his work his research in a biochemistry lab but he added for now which i thought was (1:49:11) quite interesting because it’s not you know a lifetime love necessarily um so we talked about it more and he talked about how he built they’ve built this team over four years and it really started as a very risky venture and really just him and over the course of four years it’s grown quite large and gone beyond the research that he’s doing to be something that other researchers are able to tap into and so i thought that was really interesting because it reflected that he was interested in work beyond his own (1:49:42) and then i thought the fact that he was saying that this is what he’s interested in for now but is willing to change and also how his research had kind of changed over those four years were both quite interesting aspects of the response um before we lose the thread i loved your question i thought it was great what do you love about your life but you also get an a-plus at my book for the way you were listening because you picked up some nuances like you know he immediately jumped to work which tells you he’s passionate about his work but (1:50:08) the for now nuance was very key let’s give you a lot of kudos to that very good nice the other the other piece that i particularly enjoyed was that she asked the question and she had already thought about why she was asking that question also you know you don’t want to go into an interview and just have your list of ten questions you’re gonna you’re gonna lay out there without some sort of expectation as to why you’re asking those questions there should be a purpose behind those questions and she (1:50:37) specifically said right up front why do you what do you love about your life here are some here’s some things i might get out of this and it might it might give you those those glimpses into the authentic self and she’s looking for that so if you go in with some expectations of why you’re asking those questions it’s it’s much more helpful than if you’re just going in and you’re just asking a question very straight thanks thanks eric yeah i started with what are you passionate about question (1:51:09) as well and it turned out that elena is working at the school of public health and it’s sort of obvious that you can be very passionate about this kind of work because other people benefit from what you’re doing and so that’s how it started and then it went more into problem solving so what type of problems she’s passionate about how she likes to apply her specific skill set to break the problems into smaller pieces and then solve these kind of problems so i learned how she approaches her work and why she is passionate about this and (1:51:46) how she thinks she can make an impact by finding the problems she can address with her skill set and then make a difference based on the results of his work so i think i got to do to the bottom of what drives her in her day day-to-day like environment motivations right fundamental motivations great fantastic well i want to thank all of you for for participating in this was this uh we did this the very first year in the workshop but it was new and near as much fun as you made it tonight that’s right uh so this was great i also (1:52:18) want to thank uh eric and uh russ for joining us and um i’m going to just try to wrap up briefly you don’t need to move by saying there is one thing that really stood out for me if you look at all the answers that we got how many of them were really about iq almost none of them which to me means tonight was a success because the iq is the easy part that’s the piece you can figure out but it looks like frankly uh all of you found your own way to bring out eq and cq and figure out what was this person really (1:52:51) about so i really congratulate i think it’s fantastic it makes me feel proud to uh to being part of this so great great fun i’m going to leave you with my final question which is an open question it’s up on the screen uh which is what else should we know about you and and the reason that i always have this question at the end is that it’s sometimes difficult to actually give somebody a chance to tell themselves about you no matter how many questions you ask and so by asking this last open question you (1:53:19) kind of leave the catch-all it’s like okay i might have missed something about you or what if you leave this room and you go damn i wish i’d told you know vid about this or i wish i’d told the leaner about this or which i told ross about this this question allows you to do that it’s the you know it’s the catch-all so i’ll leave you with that the other thing that you already did so i left this to the end as to point it out is that you can tell you know there was a lot of this in the uh the workshop that came (1:53:45) out we were trying to discern three things you were trying to make sure that you were listening to uh what their responses were and observing how they responded through your questioning and you did all of that very very well now the piece that’s not so obvious is the little subtlety behind this people have needs wants and loves and many other things but separating them is important so the observing i thought you did very well but uh let’s just get to the specifics of the needs wants and loves so sometimes people need to get paid a (1:54:14) certain amount does that mean to say they love you know their job not necessarily they may want for example and and need to be recognized they may want for example to learn that may be a different thing um and they may love to contribute to make a difference for example those are all different things so here’s an example of what gets very difficult in interviewing and it’s it’s what i thought you guys were doing very well which is a nuance which is somebody says i really want this job how many times do you hear that okay but (1:54:43) why do they want the job is it because they’re going to get paid more is it because they really love the work or is it because they absolutely have to get a job at this particular point you know to meet some you know green card for example requirement by the way which has happened to me uh that exact problem and so they’re convincing you and they’re convincing you because you know it’s a genuine need but it doesn’t really get to the heart of what they actually want to do or how they want to (1:55:08) contribute so just try to separate those things um my my pure view on this thing just to having paired you up is that there’s only one secret that i really want to leave you with that’s that’s uh most important it’s all about finding a mutual fit in other words not only are you trying to find a fit for that candidate that will meet your needs but you also ultimately want to make sure that it’s what they are going to have to meet their needs if it’s a true mutual fit it meets their needs it meets what they (1:55:37) want to do and it’s going to ultimately put them in a position where they love it i think you’ve made a great hire and i would never sell if you don’t find that because ultimately it’s going to come undone it just won’t be sustainable and particularly in startups when you have you know small teams and as russ said so well where these teams really are the core and the defining essence of what your company is it makes a huge difference and so one more to to uh you know follow the jobs theme always one more thing (1:56:04) uh that is be patient hire the right person not the right the person right now because it’ll always feel urgent it’ll always feel like you’ve got to just hire that person you’ve always got a hole but if you can hire the right person and make that difference honestly you will see your company soar from that so once again thank you to russ thank you to eric thank you to all of you and look forward to seeing you next week