A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:37:08 · Steve Tuck
[00:37:08] S0: I would say what worked for us is involving the team. Like, bring your team forward. You're going to have plenty of people that do not want to be front and center describing what they're working on and why. But you will find that, you know, folks are proud of their work and what they're doing is a super important part of the overall thing that you are building. And giving them a platform to highlight that a little bit. A, it gives you an excuse for the cadence. It kind of like forces the action. You know, you're sort of thinking about what team members to slot in as co-hosts or participating. Gives you kind of an idea of what the theme or the reason that you're having that episode could be. And then what's happening is, you know, your potential future customers are getting to know the people behind the product. And again, it builds that trust. It builds that sense of relationship. And I think, you know, it also lowers the burden of one person being responsible for the content every single week or every two weeks. But I think I would love to take credit for it. But, you know, Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal have borne the brunt of that religious kind of weekly show. And it does take, takes grit and there's never enough time in the day. But you're right on. Like, you have to get into that cadence and that consistency for it to show up. The only thing I would caution is there's a lot of podcasts out there that are created to try to get to people. Like, are created for the sake of having a podcast. And there's not a lot of great signal, like a lot of great interesting information out there. And that is where allowing the experts to come to the front and talk about what they're doing and why and where they came from and why they're passionate about, you know, signal integrity. You're going to be surprised by the folks that also similarly care about that stuff that become champions of the product.
00:39:03 · Pablo Srugo
[00:39:03] S1: The second thing I want to talk to you about because it's so, like, different is you have about 150 people. My understanding is you're paying everyone the same salary. Tell me as much as you can about why you would do that, how that works, you know, the benefits, et cetera, because I, I mean, I have so many questions about it.
00:39:22 · Steve Tuck
[00:39:22] S0: Yeah, most people do. Let me talk about where it started. So we founded the company. Brian and I both had three kids and we were going to make sure that we did not start the company off where we were, like, already in financial distress. We couldn't pay our bills. So we wanted to make sure that at least we had a, like, a way to be financially stable, pay ourselves, like, a decent salary so that we could pay the bills. And then when we started hiring the first couple of engineers, like, we certainly are not going to pay them less. And they were coming in and they were going to have an opportunity to participate in our early equity in the company. And so we want to make sure that, like, we had a good competitive compensation structure early on and it made sense to kind of, to kind of keep things even as we went. Then it kind of became an interesting experiment because once you've hired a handful of folks and you kind of are incrementing in that wage to make sure it's competitive, as you hire more people, quickly things flipped to where we wanted to hold that as a constraint. What that resulted in is that when we were going to go hire, you know, roles that people typically think like, oh, you can go find someone in that role at a much lower cost, be it support or, like, finance support or other, we had to flip it around. And we're like, if we were going to pay this amount for a support person, like, what does that support person need to look like? That might be like an L3 senior support person that, you know, may have been the most valuable person in the company they're coming from. And that is going to be the only support people we hire. And it then kind of turned out that we would have these meetings with Fortune 50 entertainment companies that would have the same person that was at the whiteboard kind of architecting stuff pre-sales responding to their ticket six months later. And they're like, I've never experienced this before. Like, how did I get to this person already? And it's like, sorry, that's like the only people we have. And so across every role, you end up with this just like highest caliber of talent, but there's a much, much, much more powerful thing that came out of that. And, you know, what you're doing is you're saying every role in the company is equally important. And that just like breaks people's brains.
00:41:43 · Steve Tuck, Pablo Srugo
It's like, ah, it can't possibly be the case. [00:41:46] S1: It goes against everything. Yeah, I mean, it's very, it's almost non-market. You know what I mean? Like, it's like, really?
00:41:51 · Steve Tuck
[00:41:51] S0: It breaks people's brains. And, you know, we've been conditioned as a society that like the way that people are valued and then judged is we put these labels on them, which is their salary, their compensation. Like, you're worth more. That's why you have this higher salary and you're not worth as much and that's why you have a lower salary or title. You're a VP. That is a way of describing your value. And what's reality? Reality is everyone's worked in companies where you have so much resentment because this idiot over here definitely must know someone because they are definitely not deserving of the salary or the title they have. And in many cases, you have these fear-based cultures where folks are incentivized to take credit, certainly to make sure they get full credit for their work, but also like, you know, maybe take credit for that work that's sitting in between a few folks because I want to get ahead. I want to get paid more. I want to get that title. And then the flip side of that is that you have folks that are afraid to divulge mistakes. They want to bury their mistakes. And that is destructive for the company. Now, the company's not learning from things that need to be improved. And so, you know, we've kind of lucked our way into a condition where we have this really high trust team. Everybody is equal. You don't have people competing with each other, feeling like they are in competition for each other for praise or a raise. And it, you know, an engineer that came over from Google had talked about it being the first time in his career that he was able to put all his mental energy towards the thing that he loves, his passion, his work. Not have to worry about, you know, the upcoming performance review and how to position themselves with the manager to make sure this person gets knocked down so they can get moved up.
00:43:32 · Pablo Srugo, Steve Tuck
[00:43:32] S1: It does take politics completely out of the table and it refocuses. I could see how from a mindset perspective and culture building perspective, it can be exceptionally powerful if you get it right. [00:43:43] S0: Yeah, if you're not competing with your peers, now all of a sudden you're interested in doing things for them. So we see team members that are doing work for their peers without being asked and you get this virtuous cycle that ends up becoming a flywheel of sorts where, you know, folks are building for each other. It's easy for those, for everyone to come together in support of building for the customer and it is hard to describe the power of a high trust environment. It's why we can do so much with a team that is, relatively speaking, not that big. And so it's paid a lot of dividends for sure. [00:44:17] S1: Let me ask two kind of tactical questions on this, practical questions I should say. The first one is when you talked about the sort of people that take that support example and you hire someone really high up because you can at that salary level, how do you get them to still do the minutia? Maybe that's changed with AI, but part of the whole thing was certainly before AI, like there's all these little things that are so easy to do. I don't want to do them and I shouldn't have to do them. So put this person who makes like way less than me and get them to do that stuff. How did you kind of manage that when you're hiring so high because your salary kind of allows you to?