a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: Finding and Hiring for (Expectations) Fit on Both Sides

Episode Date: May 22, 2015

"Fit" is this squishy idea that a person, role, and company are a perfect match. But how do you tease out expectations and motivations from both sides of the hiring equation -- candidates and founding CEOs alike? In this segment of the a16z Podcast,a16z Executive Talent head Jeff Stump and resident talent expert Gia Scinto tackle ways to identify and analyze this, and methodically. And they share their secret weapon for putting the right person in the right job: "the 100-Day Plan".

Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland, and I'm here today with Jeff Stump and Gia Sinto, who are from our executive talent team, which means, and I'll let you guys explain what it means, but my understanding is you guys know everything about building teams at the executive level. And so we're here to talk about that today. Welcome, guys. Thank you for having us. I hear you guys talk about this a lot and others, and one of the things that startups always grapple with is this kind of notion of fit. We're going to hire somebody. We're going to bring them into our little family.

We want to make sure that they're going to be a good member of the family. But how important is fit? And then I want to get into how, like, is there a method and a process for something that's so squishy? Yeah. No, there's definitely a method to the madness. And, you know, fit means many things. There's fit around the role, right? And can this person be effective and, um, uh,

have success in the role, and then there's fit when people talk about fit around culture. Right. And so two totally different things to evaluate for two very different dimensions and a candidate. And so if you're a young company, how should you go about, I guess, analyzing for it? Before I mentioned, there's kind of like, at the highest level, there's two dimensions, there's the cultural fit, and then there's the position and role fit. I generally believe there's like, there's, in the role category, there's, there's expectations, right, that have to be aligned.

There's a certain alignment of motivations. And then the byproduct of those two things is really fit, right? So to go a little bit further, for example, you hire a VPS sales. An alignment of expectations is that VPS sales thought, you know, in, they could hire 20 reps. The CEO, in his mind, had 10 reps. Right. Bad fit, right? It was a misalignment of expectations, and we, all of a sudden, now you have an issue that they're trying to figure out, like, you know, there's a misalignment of what you need me to do with the resources that I have. And that could be a misalignment that could say, that founder could walk away from

that conversation. It's like, oh, this guy doesn't get it. He doesn't understand that we're hands-on culture, we're a startup, we don't have the resources. So, boom, all of a sudden we have a misalignment of expectations. Motivations is a whole different category. It's like, you know, what are the motivations of an executive coming into a company? Like, what do they want to go build? Do they want to really build a 100-year company? Are they more interested in making money?

You know, very coin-operated executives out there. And depending on the CEO, like, you know, maybe that founder, CEO is interested in flipping their company in two years. Well, you might want to have someone that's not interested in building something for the long term. You could have a misalignment of motivations of coming on board. And so, again, it's the byproduct of those two that usually end up saying, well, they just weren't a good fit for these reasons. Something that's important is back to the culture piece in fit around hiring your leadership team, probably in an early stage company. There's a lot of engineers, and R&D is king.

And if you are going to hire a leader in another discipline, that being sales or marketing or finance, for that matter, the company, the CEO has to be prepared that the culture might change a little bit. And they want to control the culture to some degree, but they also have to embrace that a sales guy might come in, hire a bunch of sales reps, and therefore they're building a bit of a go-to-market culture. So it's just important that expectations around that the culture might change is just as important as expectations around the job. not that it might change but that it will right yeah we've got bean counters and people with big watches in there all the sudden right or maybe not these days but you know glen gren ross jeff what about the culture side of things yeah you know i recently met uh an executive at a well-known e-commerce company and the company's been public for a long time and he was talking about he was talking about culture and i'm like well what does culture mean to you and we we went

down this rat hole and the conclusion was this gentleman thought the company got further away from its core values because they over many years hired people that really weren't passionate about what the company did right and I found this really fascinating and there's definitely companies in our portfolio like Brian Chesky at Airbnb that that cared deeply about the interest of people that are joining here and be, did they believe in the movement? Do they believe in the cause? And as I think back, some of the hires that haven't worked out, it's like, were these executives all in? Were they all in on what this company was actually trying to do? And you could mostly, you can associate that with consumer brands, but you meet great enterprise

executives and like networking, storage, wireless, security. One of the ones, one of the executive I've met recently, he's like, I'm a plumber, right? And, like, I love building infrastructure. And, like, he believed in his bones when he said this statement. And, like, you could give you chills. Like, he just loves building storage and it was a virtualization. I'm guessing he's met our general partner, Peter Levine, here. Yeah. So, um, so anyway, like, I, you know, I would encourage, um, any hiring manager to, to test for that. And, like, do they, they really believe in the company. Otherwise, it's just a job.

And in our young companies, you've got to believe in the mission. And so I get that intellectually, but it sounds to me like it's one thing kind of wanting for that, wanting to have that, but then actually testing for it and checking it to make sure it's there.

How do you possibly do that? Yeah, those things are, I think those things are pretty interesting. Like, for example, you know, I wouldn't show, personally, I wouldn't show up to Pinterest without having used Pinterest, right? I wouldn't show up to eBay without having used eBay. Like if they ask me if I use the platform, I'm sitting there, not yet.

Right. I would more or less look like an idiot. So I think just one, you know, what's their usage of a consumer platform? And then how you test for it is just like are they deep thinkers, right? Are they deep thinkers around using the technology, whether it be an infrastructure or enterprise or consumer and are they futuristic thinkers around it like do they have they are they thinking long term where this industry is going and that's fairly obvious when you get into an interview like can they can they articulate what they see in the future around this particular

technology uh in our world yeah yeah how do you check for that sort of um all-in mess for executives I mean, yeah, some of it is just the exterior and how excited they present themselves. However, with all the disruption that's happening in technology and healthcare and education and financial services, like I'm seeing people out of eBay want to go to some health tech startup because maybe their father has diabetes or something, which is something Omata is tackling. But, you know, when someone has maybe a personal story around why. particular technology is of interest to them.

I test for the personal side, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. That's a really good point because we had, we'll leave the portfolio company out of it, but we have an executive joining one of our companies, and she's leaving a $6 to $7 million annual package on the table to go do this thing. and like what better what better example do you need like and it wasn't a difficult decision for her like she just believes like she wants to do something that's going to make this place a better place to live right and the fact that she's walking away from it is is is pretty amazing well okay so that's one thing and it sounds to me like you want that commitment and that

passion in an executive coming into a role but then there's all these other parts of that that comprise culture and fit. And how do you then, what's the process that, especially if I haven't done this before, how do you help people make sure that they stand the best chance of, you know, beyond the passion, beyond the, like, yes, I believe in this, that it's going to work with my team and with my people already there.

And actually, not just my team today, but sort of the way we want to go in the future. You talk it as someone joining the company or as a CEO hiring? As a CEO hiring. Yeah. The 100-day plan. Do you want to comment on the 100-day? Well, I mean, we are very passionate about this thing called 100-day plan.

Some call it a 90-day plan, some call it a six-month plan, but speaking directly to process and for any CEO hiring manager that's gearing up to make a very important hire is asking their final candidate before you extend an offer to create a 100-day plan, invite the finalist to your Monday morning staff meeting, If you have a management team that, you know, in some cases, some of our portfolios don't have a management team. So it could just be a discussion between the CEO and the final candidate. But more importantly, if you do invite your staff, I think the dynamics are really different when someone's presenting what they're going to do the first hundred days on the job.

How magical is it to, in some ways, simulate what it's going to be like to have this person around your executive roundtable as a CEO? where, to my earlier points, having this person come in and present their budget, their hiring plan, their go-to-market strategy, how they're going to tackle company issues. And more importantly, to hear that, and does that align with what we thought was actually in the world? Does this align to what we call the outcomes of what we needed in this hire? To have some congruency on what they think and what we think needs to be done, alignment

of expectations, check the box. Check the box. Now, motivations, like, did we hear this passion? Did we hear this desire to actually build something really sustaining? I'm interested in building a hundred year

company. And, you know, a BPS sales talks about developing a training program for all salespeople, building a university for training people, they think the way we think. And then as CEO to step back and see the interaction with this potential hire among all my executive team and to see the body language, to see the interaction between these folks, it's hard to do this any other way.

A typical interview process is going to have you having Mr. Candidate meet with Executive 1, 2, 3, and 4. All those guys are going to be in siloed meetings, and you're going to get different feedback from all of them. But the CEO to step back and have this get-together where you talk about what this person wants to do can be what I call it is extremely magical. And when you have like candidate 1A and 1B, you come out of that. very rarely do we have our portfolios company CEOs come out of that and saying this is still a close race. So you're trying to pull them out of that sort of more formal and in some ways artificial interview process and get them into the actual flow of like, here's what it's like to be at this company. Has anyone ever balked at that? I mean, it sounds like it's a lot of work.

If you're the candidate, you know, like, wait, I got a job here. Or maybe I don't have a job like, I don't work for you guys yet. Is that okay? It doesn't sound like a very motivated candidate. And, you know, that's a great question because so many candidates say, you know, gee, they asked me to do this 100-day thing, and I'm like, right, and you should, and they're like, but what do I do? I mean, I think to some degree, some of them are afraid that whatever content they put down may be incorrect, and I assure them, listen, think of this as if you're on the job, number one, obviously. Number two, you went through an interview process and you heard what everyone's expectation was about what they needed this role to do. So incorporate that into it, incorporate your budget, incorporate your hiring plan. You know, just the basics.

Don't like overdo it because there should be room for like a white boarding session is part of that 100 day plan, which, okay, here's a bullet point, but then let's elaborate on it. So I kind of give them that advice and it sort of changes their thinking, like not to be scared. if the content is wrong, then chances are expectations are misaligned at that company. If you are translating what you heard in the interview process into this plan, then it's wrong.

But what, I mean, again, if I've never worked in this industry or at this company, and maybe I might get some things wrong, but what if there's like another, but we worked together so well, it turns out like everything I suggested was completely in the wrong direction,

but boy, we have... It's a phenomenal point. don't you want to frickin' know that before taking the job? What if you're thinking something completely different? Right. So the one example that's great. It was one of the first times we did this almost five years ago now. And I'll leave out the names, but the CEO had called me back and said he was 100% wrong in terms of what he was thinking around messaging and strategy.

but I want to hire them. I loved them, right? And the whole team thought that way. We got in this big heated debate. Why are you thinking this way? The way he handled himself, his thought process to leading up to the plan that he presented was amazing. So even though he was up 180 degrees off in terms of where we should be going, he did a phenomenal job. And to this day, like it was the guy's been in the job for about five years and doing a great job. So the important part of that wasn't so much that he had the right I guess 100 day plan like okay next month we're going to do this

and we're going to hire these people but that he was what just more integrated in the team he had the right thought process he had and do those trump being right? The methodology was right on and in fact who's to say that he would have

if he wouldn't have done this he would have gotten in the job and would have been completely in disarray it's like oh shit my first meeting and it went terribly wrong and And what if the team didn't have the confidence in him at that point? So the fact that this was this played out before the guy was actually hired was why it actually made it work. And to piggyback on that, if you think about it, it is also an opportunity, again, assuming everything goes well and the person gets hired, that this person has a win the first 100 days.

We cannot tell you how important it is that an executive both professionally and personally has, a win in those first 30, 60, 90 days, and part of the plan helps gain the win. And the win helps you assimilate in, gives you a little self-esteem. And it just, we find I think the stick rate is a little higher of success in people staying in the job longer when they have a win those first 100 days. And how often do people then just deploy the 100-day plan? Like, okay, I got the job and like, it happens all the time. Here's the next 100 days. Right here. It was about six months ago, a VP of HR that was hired under one of these, who had not done these before, walked into my office, and she's like,

I literally laid my 100-day game plan on my desk on the first day of the job and just started at it. She's like, it was great. Like, I knew what I was doing. Like, no one had to tell me anything. Like, I already had buy-in from the management team as to what they wanted me to do. We had a company portfolio recently that is a big fan of the 100-day plan. and had two final candidates for VP sales search

and was actually just going to fast track the guy, the number one candidate, because everything was just perfect. And then started doing references and something was eating at the CEO and he was almost going to make him an offer without doing it and sort of checked himself and went ahead and did the 100-day plan

and then did the 100-day plan with the runner-up candidate and which helped him make the hiring decision to go with the first guy that he was going to go with. But I think if he hadn't done the 100-day plan, you know, we wouldn't have, I think he would have been guessing, second-guessing himself a little bit. Right. How do you know, though, then a hundred-day plan goes well, there seems to be fit. When do you know at some point, though, that actually it's working? Like how long afterwards that this is really, this was the right hire or the wrong hire for that matter?

Well, usually we don't get a phone call. don't want if we hire this person yeah that's a good thing so how do you know it's working well yeah just you we check in we're checking in almost weekly after the hire has taken place

and is there goodness happening and you you almost hear a certain level of conviction you hear conviction when the hire was made but then you have this like over the

top conviction. It's like, oh my God, I know I was totally right. And then, you know, there's a honeymoon period, as we call it. And then, you know, rubber usually meets the road, I would say, in month three, month four, where, like, is this person usually, and usually are they doing a good job? And to Gia's point, the great examples are like they had a win, right? And when we're, when we're hearing that conviction in the voice of a founder's CEO, it's like, man, they just hired this guy from this company or they just hired an amazing sales rep and recruited her out of this company and and like you you hear this win that happened that is either a transformational hire or it's a like a transformational impact on the business and you know one of the amazing

examples was really at Lyft with the hire of Brian Roberts and had an immediate impact with Logan and John early on, like within weeks, they called up and said this guy has been transformational to our business. And Brian's heading up what for left? So he was hired for corp dev and business development, and

they also gave him the CFO job. Right. What about the flip side when it's not working? I was thinking about that. Like, when has it not worked? And there are two scenarios that stick out and I have to say, and Jeff, if you have more to comment, one in particular was

you know the guy got under the hood and there was a lot of dysfunction that was happening in the company that there was no way as a candidate that he would have been made aware of unless he got there you know and and so

I mean so that was just sort of a bad situation and the other situation was in marketing in particular where the role was sort of divided I'm not sure the person was set up for success because they came in as the CMO, but the product marketing group was sitting somewhere else. And there wasn't enough synergy between the two groups.

So for what it's worth, sometimes I think if it's an org design issue or some real bad stuff under the hood, none of that happens in our portfolio, of course. You ever see Matthew McConaughey and Failure to launch? so that's usually what I see there's there is we go through this 100 day game plan everything goes brilliant we want to hire and then like like doesn't it doesn't happen for whatever reason there's like this like they become paralyzed or there's what I call it there's literally a failure to launch in the company and you know maybe it's a personal issue maybe it's um you know buyer's remorse getting into the company,

something usually happens. On average, these are real-life people. Like, you know, we talk about candidates and sometimes feels like we're trading baseball cards in executive town, like, hey, I'll trade you this guy for this guy. So, like, these are people. They're not perfect. They're not perfect.

And something happens personally. Right, right. And they don't bring it up. And so, like, I would encourage, and it's usually like a taboo topic. So they get into a job. and something happens to the spouse or something happens to a grandmother and throws everything in a disarray and they're not able to really focus.

And the unique thing about a startup, there is nowhere to hide, right? I mean, there's nowhere to hide. You know, you can't crawl under a desk. You're completely exposed as an executive in a young company because everything's your fault. And something that distracts you like that can lead to a failure to launch. What do you advise candidates when they're walking into a new company or a new opportunity to look for in terms of their own fit? Hopefully most executives have their filters figured out, but not all of them do. So I hear people say, I just want to know I can have dinner with the CEO, he's someone I want to go out and have a drink with.

Well, you know, it's not always fun in games, right? I think they want to be empowered as an executive and they want to know that the CEO is going to empower them to do their job. And in some of the cases with a lot of our founders being first time operators, I think they actually are learning themselves. So some of my advice is also be prepared to be an educator to some founders, not all. But I think knowing that part of your job is not just execution and strategy, it is also being somewhat of a teacher

right um is been i think some good advice it's it's given them a little extra patience uh to some degree what else would you say yeah i mean the the same advice that applies to a CEO or any hiring manager hiring someone alignment of motivations alignment of expectations that knife cuts both ways right so a lot of my advice to uh executives that are embarking on a process what are you motivated by and like are are you guys truly aligned around what they need you to do, right? If you can't, if you can't articulate to me now, what, I've actually have had executives, I'm like, well, what do they need you to do?

And they, honestly, and these are smart MBA executives, they really couldn't articulate to me what that company, what the real charter was. And they were still going after it. It was like, yeah, you know, it's a little fuzzy, but I'm super excited about the company. I'm like, holy shit, run the other way. Right. So, like, again, the same, the same philosophy. lot, the same methodology in, in, uh, that, uh, that, uh, companies are interviewing for

the, for, for, for potential executive coming in, use these same philosophies. Like, are we, are we aligned across what I want to do? Am I passionate about the company? Am I motivated by the role and, and what we're going to be building here? And is there alignment around the expectations coming into the role? I, you know, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but from what I'm hearing from you guys, it sounds like this. fit. And, you know, as it sort of fits in with culture is probably one of the most important things at a company, if not the most important. I don't know how you, I mean, in the calculus for both sides, for a hiring CEO and also for the executive, there's comp, there's location,

there's, you know, do I get a nice chair? But, like, what do you think really that people should be valuing on both sides? And is this it? Yeah, I think the culture word gets thrown out way too much because I mean I think you can ask a lot of companies what their culture is and they're going to get a thousand different responses you have you have an overriding culture then you have department by department by department could be very different your sales group could act very differently and have different cultural values than your marketing or engineering department so that to me is it's really fluffy word and and to me it's like it gets down to almost kind of traditions and like I think there's traditions and companies that

they uphold and they look to people coming in to kind of uphold those same sort of traditions like we pull all-nighters when we need to. If that's not in your toolkit don't apply. So there's that's just one example. I think traditions of companies are kind of more demonstrate what the company's about than what they perceive

their cultural values to be. You know, I ask executives when I meet them if they've had a decade or two decades of experience, what was your favorite job? Just one, pick one, and there's always a favorite job. And whatever that job was, like, those things are the same things that you need to look for in as you're looking on your next opportunity. And it always is the people that they worked with. So it does go back to the fit, and that's the fuzzy part of culture. So it's the people. What's happening a lot these days is someone that's been in a

company and has had great growth experience, great success, and they leave to go do something earlier, and they're looking for that exact same type of opportunity, and it doesn't happen, and why doesn't it happen? I think they went too quickly, they didn't do their due diligence, they didn't, you know, it does move really fast here in the valley, and so they skip some of the steps as a candidate, they skip some of the steps that they normally would have, they didn't do the references on the CEO, and it doesn't matter. they skip certain things and they find themselves not so happy in a year and they sort of wonder why and they expect that they're going to have the same experience that they had prior which is

like very hard to do and repeat over and over again so yeah and i think it's harder for some of the high-flying companies like everyone wants to work at them so whether it's a Pinterest or an air being like the notable consumer companies everyone's interested in working And it's hard for those guys because, like, how do you know this person's really joining, you know, because they like the company or they just want to be part of a high flyer? Right. And something that I've been encouraging, and there's definitely, I won't name the names, but there's companies with, that have been on the precipice of not working out but survived. And it's now part of their culture. Like, they look for these executives that are not only there for the good time,

but they're there, the best executives are the ones that are there for the bad times. And so the fact that they can, they look for that now in people's backgrounds. And that's, you know, call it culture fit or whatever. They want to see where this person's been stretched, beat up, beat down, and come back like Rocky and succeeded. And they interview for that now. It's interesting. I mean, as a company that's got some miles under its belt, you can see how you could recognize those things

but it also sounds to me like as a startup you need to start kind of looking for those as well like from day one you were establishing traditions and you may not even realize it so well I encourage everyone to look for fit sounds like fit equals a fair bit of happiness on

all sides so Jeff and Gia thank you guys so much thank you thank you thank you