A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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?
00:44:17 · Pablo Srugo, Steve Tuck
[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? [00:44:49] S0: Yeah, I think, you know, man, such important stuff happens in the minutia. So like it turns out if you, through your hiring process, make sure that you're finding folks that love the grit, that love the detail, oftentimes that like quote unquote menial work is the difference between a high quality customer experience and a low quality customer experience. Because by the way, like someone has to do that dirty work and if you don't do it, you put the burden on the customer. And so I think, you know, we've got folks that lurch at the opportunity to get into the weeds, to get into the data, to get into the detail and yes, are also like, hey, let's figure out how we can automate something that should be just sort of an automatable, repeatable kind of a thing.
00:44:49 · Steve Tuck, Pablo Srugo
[00:44:49] S0: Yeah, I think, you know, man, such important stuff happens in the minutia. So like it turns out if you, through your hiring process, make sure that you're finding folks that love the grit, that love the detail, oftentimes that like quote unquote menial work is the difference between a high quality customer experience and a low quality customer experience. Because by the way, like someone has to do that dirty work and if you don't do it, you put the burden on the customer. And so I think, you know, we've got folks that lurch at the opportunity to get into the weeds, to get into the data, to get into the detail and yes, are also like, hey, let's figure out how we can automate something that should be just sort of an automatable, repeatable kind of a thing. [00:45:34] S1: I think that's the other thing that you got kind of for free through this, which is the 10x type people are more than happy to automate what they should automate to kind of lift them up and especially if they're not going to lose their job, like they're not worried about, oh, AI is going to replace me so I've got to shield it, so I've got to, it's just like, I'm going to be here, I'm going to make what I'm going to make because we all make the same thing. So I might as well just 10x myself and 100x myself and you're hiring those sort of people. It's kind of this, this extra, you know, tailwind that you get, it feels like at least from the system.