00:44:54 · Guillaume Moubeche, Steven Schwartz
[00:44:54] S1: You cannot lose if you do not quit. [00:44:57] S0: It's a fact. It's true. [00:44:58] S1: And you mentioned a bit, like, the the change in role and you being, like, focused a lot more on hiring and building the team. I can feel like you're a builder, like, at heart. So how did you, like, feel and how do you feel transitioning, you know, from a role of building things, creating things to building a team. I mean, of course, it's still building, but it's a bit different. Is that something, like, you enjoy, or at least you're learning to enjoy? Or how do you feel about it?
00:45:30 · Steven Schwartz, Guillaume Moubeche
[00:45:30] S0: I am definitely learning to enjoy it. It's actually really addicting sometimes. I mean, I think that the only difference is that the feedback loop is a little bit slower, and that's the most difficult part of it. So if you're building something yourself and you're just typing your code or blah blah blah, you can see the thing rendering on the right side of your screen. And it's... That is like the most addicting feeling ever. You just change something and say, oh, wow. Feels great. But if you're trying to bring somebody on the team, might take like three weeks, and you're like, oh my gosh. I just talked to this person. I really like them. I'm like, but the next step isn't until a week from now. And you have like 30 of those threads running at every given time, and that is the challenge. That being said, I think there's a lot of other work that needs to be done in the meantime that I'm learning quickly and finding a lot of joy in. So I think it... Of it very much still is building and just not building a a literal product for customers, building our organization that builds products for customers. And I think if you do look at it with a builder's mindset, then I think it's still pretty addicting. And it does feel like I'm building. It doesn't feel like I'm whatever the opposite of building is. So I I believe it's still very much building. [00:46:36] S1: And what are, like, some practical tips you could give to someone, like, young, building an ambitious company to to hire, like, the the most talented people?
00:46:46 · Steven Schwartz
[00:46:46] S0: To... For specifically building a company to hire the most talented people, you know, honestly, like I think it's less about hiring and more about culture. As somebody told me the other day, says culture is existential, and talent is excellent. And that means you're gonna attract the right talent if you're focusing on yourself and the product that you're building, and all of the the other stuff will come naturally. And the second you're like, if you if you wanted to start a company tomorrow, your first thought is to try to hire somebody, you've you're in another... You've completely missed the point of of starting a company. So my advice would be to almost not focus on that at all. And and and if it doesn't come super naturally, then there's another bug that is in your system. You should figure that out. Okay. And You you reach out to a bunch of people on LinkedIn, but, like, why would somebody wanna talk to you? It's it's not... It's it's a very... I think that the idea... This... Everyone's saying you should be spending 30% of your time recruiting. It's like, k. What does that mean? It's actually that you should be spending a 100% of your time recruiting, but you're not doing it in a way that's like, I'm recruiting right now. It's just it's just another part of your of your mind always thinking about it. You're walking down the street and you see somebody that has a shirt on that says, I like JavaScript, and you go up to them and say, yo, I like your shirt. And you start talking for thirty minutes, and then the next week, they're on your team. Like, that's that's recruiting. And I think we try to do that. And I think it's... It can be applied. You see some cool thing online that somebody built. It's like, oh, wow. That's really interesting. Let's go talk to that person. It's not like, okay. We need to recruit. Let's run this process, and I I can't stand that. So that's my advice to people that wanna
00:48:35 · Guillaume Moubeche, Steven Schwartz
[00:48:35] S1: Yeah. I agree. I think it's counterproductive, you know, in the end. Like... Because, obviously, like, the better your company becomes, the more well known your company becomes, the easier it is to attract the best talents. So make your company as successful as possible, and you will attract like the right person. [00:48:52] S0: Yep. I I agree. It's a it's a chicken in the egg. You know, you have to you have to focus on making sure that it's clear why awesome people would wanna work with you. And and if you figure that out, you're you're not even gonna have a problem with the rest. [00:49:09] S1: Talking about problems, what do you think is the hardest problem you've solved building a Whop so far?
00:49:16 · Steven Schwartz
[00:49:16] S0: So many ways it could go. Oh, man, that's a good question. I mean, you could cut it in so many ways. Know, like, we have we have, at any given time, we have tens of thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people on our website, that's a pain in the ass to solve. You have to get the right engineering infrastructure, you have to have a lot of scar tissue from how many times your site has crashed, and eventually, you kinda figure that out. I think that we have a lot of reps on that, and we're getting much better at that, and just the the reliability of platforms at a certain scale, you kinda get into this mode where if you can scale to a million people, great. And then you wanna scale a million to 10,000,000 people, it's like, okay, that's another another world. And then if you wanna prepare for 50 or a 100,000,000 people on your platform, it's like, alright, brand new world, and then you're kind of good until a billion people, and then you're like, okay, well, you're screwed again. And in some ways, we think we've solved a lot of those problems that at least at our scale now. I think on the internal cadence and rhythm, I think that we're getting a lot better at. I don't think it's solved, but I think we have a good rhythm. We have board meetings each quarter. We have all hands every Friday. We have team meetings about product on Tuesdays, we have weekly business review on Thursdays, and we have a very good rhythm on all that. I think we're getting a little bit more structure in our day to day, and we remain a little bit unsolved on on the level of focus and structure that I would like, but it's getting closer towards that. I I think in... I I'm hesitant to say that we've solved all these problems, because my mind doesn't think like that. It's only thinking about the problems we haven't solved, and that's all that my answers can give you. I think we solved, like we know how to build an environment that people want to spend a lot of time in. I think that's a a problem that is worth solving. It's very difficult to build a a successful business if people don't wanna be working on the business, and if people aren't aren't having fun with each other, and they're not in an environment that they wanna spend time in, good luck trying to get anything accomplished, I think we've saw... We've solved that. And
00:51:44 · Guillaume Moubeche, Steven Schwartz
[00:51:44] S1: if you had, like, a a magic wand right now, what would be the the first problem that you would solve? You can only choose one. [00:51:54] S0: I would I have more... I would be able to freeze freeze time in the day, and that that's what I would do with my magic wand. I think that how how everyone's using their time is increasingly important as you scale, because if you wanna double the business today, we need to basically bring on $4,000,000,000 a year in in earnings, which is like... That's a lot. And if we were starting out, we only needed to do $4,000,000, and that's doubling the whole business. So what we do with our time is is is everything. I think magic wand, I mean, we're we're hiring for so many awesome roles. If you can show snap fingers and have the most talented designers, engineers, and partnerships people, [00:52:35] S1: and so on, that would [00:52:36] S0: be fantastic as well. But I think it's magic... If it's real magic, then it's time that would be stopping. [00:52:41] S1: Okay. I know we are, like, almost out of time. So my final question to you is what would be like the advice you would give to anyone like launching a business? [00:52:55] S0: Do not give up under any circumstance, and empower through, and don't get mad and tilted about all the things that are gonna come up. It's only your fault. And I think if you have that mentality, then I think you'll do very well. But people like to blame things on whatever the world, and [00:53:13] S1: it's like, that's not a good