A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:46:07 · Colin Zima
[00:46:07] S0: Yeah, I mean part of this is because Looker sold to Google and people were there post acquisition. And either love the big company atmosphere or didn't. But when we set out to go build a competitor to our last company we worked with a lot of great people and people would ping us and say like, hey you're doing interesting stuff. Can I come work there, and we like, yeah I know you do great work. Come over and do it here. And everyone has jobs, and you know who the good people are that you worked with. If you're starting a company those are the people that you should go hire. You don't have to think about it that hard. If you're doing something interesting it's like the Product Market Fit problem, like can you pitch them something interesting about your business. And again, we were very fortunate to have fundraised really nicely. So to give people a safe place to go work as well, but we could sort of give a convincing argument that it's a good place to work and then the talent like accrues over itself. Every good person that you hire that you used to work with makes the place more attractive to the people that you used to work with. So if you worked at a big company with a thousand people and you hire the ten best people you're going to hire the next ten best people also.
00:47:14 · Pablo Srugo, Colin Zima
[00:47:14] S2: This is obviously in your case, you came from there, you had some outbound, inbound. I'm assuming maybe you did outbound, we'll talk about that. But would you also recommend this to someone who's building, let's say these days. an AI native product in whatever category, where there are some SaaS incumbents, ten, fifteen year old companies. Two thousand employees, five thousand employees, would you go poach? You probably don't want to poach the Series A or B startup in your space, because then that's going to come back at you. If there are two thousand, five thousand employee company like they probably don't even notice, they don't really care, would you do that outbound on purpose sort of thing? [00:47:46] S0: I think the thing that you have to be careful about is different scale companies work differently. An effective engineer at Google is not going to be an effective engineer at a startup necessarily. An effective engineer at Looker when we were private is going to be an effective engineer here. [00:48:03] S2: How big was Looker, when, just before the acquisition? [00:48:06] S0: We were a thousand when we got acquired, a thousand employees. But I think the average tenure of our first ten employees was eight years. So it was a lot of people that were there on the first, you know, thirty people. [00:48:16] S2: Got you.
00:48:16 · Pablo Srugo, Colin Zima
[00:48:16] S2: Got you. [00:48:17] S0: I think you do need to be a little bit careful if you're going for incumbent. Because you want to know that the person is not like, has a meaningful understanding of the work that they're doing. That they're not over specialized. But context on your space matters a lot. So I'd say expertise is good, but you need to be able to vet the quality of the person really, really clearly. Like do they align with the type of work that you do? Is the culture fit good? I would probably recommend way harder back channel on that. Because they'll appear more credible in your space. So that on paper they will look much better. But you go to make sure that the work product that they want to produce and the way that they work is aligned. We were really comfortable being like, there's no framework for anything here. No performance management. You will not get mentored. You'll come here and do stuff, and we want to ship code every day. If you like that then you've now self-selected into a good setup. [00:49:09] S2: Did you run an outbound process for hiring as well or was it mainly inbound people that just said, hey you're building, can I come work? [00:49:15] S0: It was mostly inbound, loose social network stuff, and mostly just because we had to be careful about solicitation, and stuff like that.
00:49:15 · Colin Zima, Pablo Srugo
[00:49:15] S0: It was mostly inbound, loose social network stuff, and mostly just because we had to be careful about solicitation, and stuff like that. [00:49:21] S2: And what about on the go to market side? Obviously on the product side, I can see that being helpful. Was it also helpful on the selling side? Where it's like, yeah, I've sold Looker into all these vendors. I'm going to call, you know, the people I used to sell to. [00:49:32] S0: A hundred percent. Our first handful of sellers were all Lookers. Our third hire, who now runs our Europe, was in Dublin and he was just a great seller at Looker. And so we were like, hey, we got no one over here. I don't know how this is gonna go, but we're gonna put a team in Dublin and I trust you. And I know if you can do it, then it works. And if you can't do it, then we need to go work harder as a product. But like, good luck. [00:49:53] S2: This is where to me, this playbook, like you mentioned the risk. Which I think is a genuine risk, but I'm like, if you're selling large mid market or enterprise. Why wouldn't you go and try to hire? I mean, there were times where it was just not doable because they're making so much money. You can't take them. But you've got the SaaS apocalypse playing for you still now, like you've got these stocks are flatlining or going down. They're certainly not going up fast. You can go to these people and be like, hey, you've sold your old product to, you know, X number of people. Come sell my new hot product to those same people. It's a no brainer.
00:49:53 · Pablo Srugo, Colin Zima
[00:49:53] S2: This is where to me, this playbook, like you mentioned the risk. Which I think is a genuine risk, but I'm like, if you're selling large mid market or enterprise. Why wouldn't you go and try to hire? I mean, there were times where it was just not doable because they're making so much money. You can't take them. But you've got the SaaS apocalypse playing for you still now, like you've got these stocks are flatlining or going down. They're certainly not going up fast. You can go to these people and be like, hey, you've sold your old product to, you know, X number of people. Come sell my new hot product to those same people. It's a no brainer. [00:50:25] S0: A hundred percent and again, if they're a great seller. They have a Rolodex of people that they just sold to in your space. [00:50:31] S2: Exactly. [00:50:32] S0: And that product is going to turn over, over time. So a great enterprise seller is almost like a corporate advisor to their accounts. [00:50:39] S2: Yes. [00:50:40] S0: Like you want them to come with a bag of business that you can go address. You have to make sure that you're ready to go address their business and it's taken us time to, you know, scale up to enterprise. But that has so much value for them to actually bring a person that trusts them to have good software and so, that was a huge vehicle for us and go to market.
00:50:40 · Colin Zima, Pablo Srugo
[00:50:40] S0: Like you want them to come with a bag of business that you can go address. You have to make sure that you're ready to go address their business and it's taken us time to, you know, scale up to enterprise. But that has so much value for them to actually bring a person that trusts them to have good software and so, that was a huge vehicle for us and go to market. [00:51:00] S2: Plus one of the, I find, positions that has the most turnover is around go to markets. Maybe Head of Marketing, Head of Growth, or Head of Sales, you know? And if you hire somebody from your industry who's sold, whatever, and let's say you can back channel and know that they actually sold that. And they can't sell your product, now you've got a real something to look into and start thinking about why. [00:51:19] S0: It's true. [00:51:20] S2: Perfect, well, let's stop it there. I'll ask the one question that we always end on. If you had maybe one top piece of advice. Something you find yourself saying to early stage founders pretty often, what might that be?