Quick Link: Jason Fried of Basecamp interview by Tim Ferriss

Another great episode of the Tim Ferriss show.

I really loved the part [1:18:16] where Jason describe why and how Basecamp filters new hires by their clarity in written communication  - especially since so much of today's both intra-company and also customer communications is text based. Tim adds that Wordpress.com actually interviews candidates over chat!

Other hiring related highlights:

• Jason digs a little deeper into his unique process for hiring designers that ignores portfolios of past accomplishments. [1:22:37]
• What questions does Jason ask potential hirees about their creative process that lets him know whether or not they’re someone with whom he can work? [1:28:52]
• What having everyone in a company work customer service on a rotating basis accomplishes. [1:32:07]

Other Highlights:

• "Joy of Missing Out (JOMO)" and Jason’s case for reading newspapers over online journalism. [28:24]
• How negative visualization can be used to make plans and alleviate what might otherwise be constant anxiety. [36:56]

Quick Link: Talk by Amy Chang of Accompany

Interesting Stanford E-Comer talk by Ex-Googler Amy Chang who has cofounded Accompany which is leveraging AI to take on LinkedIn.

Highlights: Making Time to Network (while in college) and at work (including why she prefers in  person meeting over coffee and walks over conferences, etc - which is part of the Q&A at the end of the talk), Pushing One's Comfort Zone and thoughts on Hiring and Women Executives.

The 10 Commandments of Startup Success

Tim Ferriss has a great compilation from the "Masters of Scale" podcast titled "The 10 Commandments of Startup Success with Reid Hoffman". Here are the commandments themselves (along with the audio time stamps) including some quotes and extracts from the audio that I found especially interesting (in italics).

1: Expect rejection. [09:14]

2: Hire like your life depends on it. It does. [19:26]

“A combination of Persistence and Curiosity (what you care about) is a great indicator of future success of a knowledge worker” - Eric Schmidt

“For sales, we hire Olympian and football players, because it indicates the level of discipline they have developed at an early age.” - Eric Schmidt

“Are your people self confident enough to have people stronger than them around them. You should never hire someone to work for you who you would not like to work for (in an alternate universe”)” -  Mark Zuckerberg 

3: In order to scale, you have to do things that don’t scale. [25:37]

4: Raise more money than you think you need — potentially a lot more. [36:18]

"Take the money whenever and wherever it becomes available. You never know when funding might become unavailable." -Reid Hoffman

5: Release your products early enough that they can still embarrass you. Imperfect is perfect. [44:45]

6: Decide. Decide. Decide. [1:00:16]

“The fighter pilot who has the faster OODA loop wins. The other one dies.” - Silicon Valley saying (OODA = Military origin decision cycle of Observe, Orient, Decide and Act.).

Commandment 7: Be prepared to both make and break plans. [1:03:13]

“Figure out what your systems are going to be later (when you become a larger company) and do it now” - Sheryl Sandberg. (She provides the “not so silly” example of how there was resentment among employees when Facebook - since it had become large so quickly - had to take back its practice of celebrating everyone’s birthday.)

8: Don’t tell your employees how to innovate. [1:07:21]

9: To create a winning company culture, make sure every employee owns it. [01:12:32]

Netflix compares themselves to sport teams (which is about performance) and not family (since the latter implies unconditional love).

10: Have grit and stick with your hero’s journey. [1:23:22]

11: Pay it forward. Use the momentum of your own success to move the success of others. [1:26:03]

Quick Links: Matt Mullenweg (Founder of Word Press) with Tim Ferris

A 2-hour conversation that is so easy to consume!

I especially liked Matt's description of

1) How the process of learning music at a young age helped in his programming career that came much later.

He talks about how the person who is practicing new notes which sound awful to someone who might be listening casual  is pushing himself/herself more than someone who sings/plays what might sound good to them (and hence limit expanding their horizons)

2) Hiring based on actual assignments - rather than based on interviews. He in fact insists on text chatting with the interviewee - which is how most work related communications happen (at least in the tech world) -  so as to not let the person's in person / video interviewing "skills" do not prejudice him.

Related link: Matt's HBR article

How many times should you follow up on a sales lead before giving up?

According to Steli Efti, CEO of sales software firm, Close.io, this Mixergy interview, it's forever - or, at least, until the prospect tells you to stop following up!

My follow up strategy is binary so I follow up until I get a reply. And it doesn’t matter how many times I have to follow up...So when someone doesn’t reply to me I just assume people are busy. Assume people have their own lives, their own struggles their own challenges, it’s not all about me...I just wait for them to reply. Anybody can tell me, “Stop sending me frigging emails” and I’ll stop but as long as I don’t hear back, I’ll follow up. 

...you cannot be whiny, needy or apologetic about it., I stay very clean cut, professional in those emails. I don’t go back and say, “Well I know I already sent you 48 emails and you might not have seen them. No I just go, “Hey, I hope this is a great start off to your week, when is a good time for you to talk with me this week, either Tuesday or Wednesday.” And back a week or two later, I’ll follow up I’ll say, “Hey did you see this great new [??] we wrote or this new development in our software, what would be a great time next week to chat? What about this or that date?” I’ll just continue following up and I’m not going to reference back to why I’ve not heard back from you.

Other Highlights:

• Hiring sales people 

...we’re looking for young people that are very entrepreneurial, very smart, have very (good) values and have kind of the personality of a sales person. Somebody that likes people, somebody that likes to communicate, somebody that can deal emotionally with rejection, someone that has high emotional stability.

• Go out on a "founders' date" each week

Once you actually hire more and more people, you grow the team, eventually founders are on different departments and you don’t get as much time quality time together. So once a week we go on a dinner and in that dinner we don’t talk about technical things but the question really is like how do you feel? How is everyone feeling? Is there anything I did that pissed you off? Anything tiny that happened in the last few days?

• Great parting question for the initial sales call - "what is it going to take for you to become a customer?" (from the follow up Mixergy Master Class on Enterprise Sales by Elli)

During your first meeting, ask about their sales process. Who needs to get the buy-in and how does it work? “Even if you are progressing well, your deal might get lost in the middle of a reorganization or somebody leaving,” says Steli. But if you understand their sales process and the timeline, you can make an informed decision about whether you’re willing and able to devote your resources to closing the deal. “Ask, ‘What will it take for you guys to actually become a customer?’” Steli says. “Then have them guide you through the entire process. Keep asking until they say, ‘Yes, and then we will pay you money for your product.’ Then you actually have the roadmap.” 

Hire Slowly. Hire them Early. Hire from Non-Hotspots. And Hire Only Future Entrepreneurs.

Amazingly detailed interview with David Barrett of Expensify on Mixergy where he talks about:

• How he narrowed down the target market (of expense reporting) for his firm - "expense reporting is the most humiliating of tasks (for corporate travellers); they hate all it"
• How Expensify strategically leverages its free service to end users as a "trojan horse" to sell to their companies
• Why Expensify hires people slowly; mainly directly from campuses; typically from Tier II cities (who aspire to move to Silicon Valley - rather than to hire locally in San Francisco). And people who hope to some day create their own startup. (He likes to decscribe Expensivfy as a "University without Teachers")
• How PR (getting on TV; Press, etc) is great for hiring. And not of much use for sales.
• How Expensify decided not to react when a well-funded competititor started to give away for free a service that it charged for 
• Why he won't give advice to other entrepreneurs and why entrepreneurs should not bother to seek advice
• Why he does not believe in setting numerical goals. (Too high makes you demoralized; too low makes you take  it easy. Instead, just keep moving forward and improving.)

Extracts (emphasis mine):

On Hiring:

"We don’t poach. Because the people that you poach generally aren’t the people that you would want anyway...It’s really hard finding good people. And so as a result we hire really slowly. ...the best people (in San Francisco) aren’t looking for jobs here...The sort of person we’re looking for is just a really awesome generalist...So people who generally come from kind of humble back grounds, they want to work hard. They’ve heard the story of Silicon Valley....They come with this level of optimism and..enthusiasm.. And so we typically hire...right out of college...Expensify (is) not just a job, not just a startup job, but the next step in the big thing they want to do in the rest of their life.

So when someone comes to Expensify, it’s not just because for a great salary or great compensation and all that stuff which we do, but it’s because I see what you have here. I see the sort of people that you’ve hired and no other company has this. I’ve interviewed all over the place. I can get a job anywhere, but I really want it to be with you. Why? Because I want to be surrounded by the sort of people that you’re hiring. And I want to learn how the techniques and the strategies that you’re using because I want to go out and do that again after you.

...I think that’s why people come to Expensify is because not for just good pay, not just for our perks and things like this and the products and all this. But it’s because this is a stepping stone...it’s a university without teachers. It’s people who come here who want to learn, who want to teach people around them. But who want an opportunity to kind of go and do some amazing things in their lives. This is a very hard opportunity to find.

On PR:

Well, actually, I would say press is not effective for acquiring customers. Press (is) very effective for hiring. In fact, I would say if there was any pattern as to where the best candidates came from, it was because they’ve read our blog. It’s because they saw something on the road or some podcast. Maybe they even saw some TV, though that hasn’t happened yet. Because again, the best people out there, they’re not looking at job boards...They just approach the companies that they love and they say, “I know you’re hiring because every great company is hiring. And I know you want to hire me because I’m really great. And so let’s talk.”

On Advice:

"I wouldn’t give advice. I’d say just stop asking. Just start doing what makes sense to you. If you’re an entrepreneur, you’re an entrepreneur because you think you’re smarter than the next guy. So why turn and ask the next guy for advice? It doesn’t make any sense. So just do whatever you think makes sense. You’re probably going to be wrong a lot. But every once in while you’re going to be right. And maybe you’re going to be right about a couple of things that no one else noticed and that’s going to make all the difference."

On Competition:

"One of our competitors...launched with free unlimited scanning. We were pretty concerned... First iteration was this gorgeous design. Beautiful, beautiful app. And unlimited receipts, and furthermore they just paid through nose on customer acquisition....And they raised a bunch of money and they came out with like a good management team....We were really wondering should we just eat this cost in order to compete more effectively...? We decided not to. We were like, “You know what? We just think that’s a bad business model. So we’re just going to stick to our guns and do what makes sense for us.” And I don’t know, maybe they can make it work, maybe they can’t. I have no idea."

The "How Many More Days to the Weekend" Employee

In his Mixergy interview, Andy Wilkerson founder of Parallelus, describes why he quit his last job:

I loved work. I didn’t know what having a job was, because I was just doing the things that used to be my hobby and getting paid for them. And as things changed, I started to dread going to work. I was… you know, (getting) stomach pains on Sunday nights, thinking about Monday. I looked forward to Fridays. That had never happened to me before. And it just wasn’t for me anymore.

And so, this is what he has decided for his co-workers at Parallelus:

I used to tell people when I interviewed them that we’re not just looking for the right employee to come work for us, but we want our company to be the right place for them. And if that relationship doesn’t exist, then one of us is in the wrong place, and we need to find the right one.