Lessons

Lesson Info

Backstage Interview With David Goldberg

That was really Ah, fantastic presentation about how toe use surveymonkey and surveys in general to learn more about your customers. Tactical really useful information we like to do in the backstage is maybe talk a little bit about, you know, kind of culture things, the leadership lessons. And I always like to make things as personal as possible for for the audience. But in this case, I'm actually going to try and make this personal for myself, if that's okay. Yeah. So you've had, ah, variety of leadership roles in a number of organizations. This I'm head of marketing here. Creative life. So this is my first rial executive experience. I'm sort of making the step up from running some teams at Google. And, um, you know, what are some of the kind of mistakes that maybe you've made it you've seen people make as their sort of making the leap to that next stage in their career is, you know, yeah, um, I made lots mystics. I'll just start with that mine. Um, I think, actually, it's kind of a g...

ood question. I think, um, if someone tells you they're not making mistakes, then something's wrong, So I really firmly believe that everybody should be allowed to make mistakes Now you don't want people making the same mistake over and over again. That is bad. But you want to create a place where people feel comfortable that they can take risks, that they can fail, that they can learn from those and and and that's how people really improve themselves. So I've made tons of mistakes. I think you know, I think the classic mistake is a manager, particularly is you. You're kind of learning this, um, really excited to hire people. Um, it's very easy when you're hiring people to get what I call false positive. You meet them in an interview. It's like a It's like a great DEET or, you know, great connection with somebody you're like. I love this person. That is an awesome can't wait and then you hire them and like, it was like this person. They're just they can't seem to get with the program. And you think what happened between that great interview and and you know, the actual performance which just wasn't there. And, um, I think when you go back and look a lot of those things, we get fooled by people who are like us. You know, if you find someone like yourself, you want to hire your people like you. That's just it's normal human behavior, and so you kind of have to go out of your way to avoid that problem. So the biggest thing for me is I can figure out pretty quickly and interview. I don't want to hire someone. That's actually what for media interviews for. The interview is not to figure out if I like. I'm That's not useful information, But clearly I, you know hiring people is really important is probably one of the most important thing. We've grown from 14 to about 230 people in the last four years, and so we're hired a lot of people, and you're gonna get it wrong. There's no question, but you want to minimize. It is very painful for the organization, for that individual, for everybody. So getting the hiring right, What I've found is, um, you just need to do other work on that person. So for our engineers, we give him tests. I think you were Google. That's part of the process. That's objective. It's not about do I like the person or not? It's like, Can they actually do the work? So tests were good. Some jobs, marketing, being one of them. I A can't really test. So I look at people's motivation. I look at Why do they want this job? That's really important. That's not about who they are, but it's why they want the job. What's important? Why do they want to leave their current job? Maybe they don't want to leave their current job. I have to convince them That's actually where you get the most false positive because you're in the cell mode trying to convince somebody you don't spend that much time evaluating them on the other really important thing is rial references, so not the references that person gave you. But where I had the most success with hiring is when I get somebody who's somebody I know and trust says this person is great for what you're looking for your every time you check references for whatever that can gave you, of course, yeah, and so we do a lot of work on those things and and where we have a trouble getting that stuff, those are the hardest calls on hiring. It is not that we just don't have that relationship. But most of the senior people that I hired I had to hire an entire senior team first, very monkey. Almost everybody I hired was somebody either I knew before or somebody that was one degree removed for me. And then as we hired kind of the next layers of people, it was somebody, one at least no more than one degree removed from somebody on our team. Let me ask you then, uh, once you've on boarded those people. And one of the things that I struggle with personally on a day to day basis is how much emotion do I show my teammates and I'll give you a specific example. So getting ready for this event, there are a variety of moving pieces, and I have kind of my spider sense going off here and there about this aspect of the event or the marketing Cain campaign leading up to it. And I, you know, will get hit by nervousness or fear, and so that to me says OK, this is something we need to take care of. How, what's the right way to recognize problems and, um, and transmit that sort of spider sense that you're feeling. I mean, that's stuff that makes me scared means that we need to pay attention to this. How do you transmit that to your team? And I guess a positive way. Something I'm personally struggling with right now. Yeah. No, I think it's a great point because you want people to pay attention to those things. You want things to go? Well, you Ah, you want there to be a good experience and have everything go well. But you also don't want to, like stress everybody out, drive everyone crazy. So it's kind of and you've got to be honest about There's a problem here. Yeah, I I'm just I'm all about transparency. I don't think there's any point hiding that stuff, including your own feelings. And so if I'm feeling like that about something, I'm just gonna communicate its people, try and do it in his neutral away as possible. So I think where it causes problems is like you let the emotion get into it, right? So you're stressed about the event you've got to communicate to people, you're stressed about it, and here's how we need to sort of work through it, but try to take the emotion out of it. Try to make it not a risky thing for them to help solve the problem. Try not to make this. Oh my God, he's really stressed. But the city discos badly. I'm in trouble. He wanted to make it like we're all in this together. This is stressful. We got to make this work. But nobody's that blame. Nobody's at fault. I'm part of a team. I'm in their solving the problem with you, right? I mean, I look at a big part of my job, is I gotta hire the right people. I gotta have the overall strategy. And then most of my job is helping my team do their job better because I can't do their job for them. And I got to help them do their job better. And I want them to be able to feel like they can come to me and asked me for help when they're feeling stress. Yeah, um and it's so it. But it's it's about Are we in this together or No, you're You work for me. You better make sure this goes well or you're you're in trouble like that. That doesn't work for people long term. I try to get up every day, and I don't know whether I'm able to do this well or not. But I and I tell my my team is like, I actually work for you guys. Yeah, my job is to be of service to the people who actually get the work done a day today basis provide really clear prioritization. Um, re sourcing to make sure they were able to do the priorities that we jointly agree on an exit. The research priorities are wrong, and the resource is not there. They can't be successful. So my job is to enable them to achieve and then get out of the way. Because hopefully, if I've hired well, they know more about that than I do. Exactly. Yeah, And I take it I completely agree. And that's exactly the way I think about it. And I take it to the next step, which is actually over time I've learned what I'm good at and what I'm not good at. What are you gonna, uh what do you Not gonna you know, I'm not like um, the detail person. I just know that about myself. But I know that details are important. So I make sure that I have people around me working with me who are really good at details because details are critical. It's just not what I'm good at. And so and I know I'm not going to do a good job if I have to do that real detail stuff. But there's other things I'm better at. And so you know, I might be better at sales or BD sort of partnership conversations than somebody else. And so I think, what's really important an organization. It's like it's having a great team and people say that, but they don't really mean it, but it's like we need to have. You know, it's it's like in part in the sports analogy, but it's it's like having, um, a good, um, football team or rugby team where you have different players of different shapes and sizes and skills, but altogether it works. I think that's kind of what you want to think about is like getting people who can use their strengths. I'll often think the worst thing you can do is try to fix somebody's weaknesses, right? Like that's just it's not that good. No matter what someone tries to do to me, they're not going to make me really great at details. Just not gonna happen. And I know that about myself at this point so I wouldn't let someone try. But early on in my career, I actually did. I had had an experience. I worked at Bain as a consultant right out of college. And I had one of the partners say to me, You know, hey meant this in a very critical way. I took it as a compliment but he said You make a much better partner than an analyst. I like Awesome. I'm on track. Yes, What he really meant was stopped doing my job and do your job, you know? So, uh, but I think that that's really critical is to get people doing their strength and then making sure you have the right group of skills with those strength on the team. And sometimes you might have too much duplication that everybody wants to. And this is the, you know, again, sorry sports analogy, but the soccer analogy. Everyone wants to score the goal right. And so that doesn't work either, if everybody's strengths with same, even if they're all really good at what they do. If everybody's trying toe, sell the deal or everyone's trying to design the product and no one's doing the other pieces, you've got a problem there. You need to go leads. People play defense and you got to pass the ball. And then someone gets to sign the ANC. And that's how it works. Yeah, um, let's let's transition a little bit Teoh, maybe some so sorry. Monkey is a very obvious tool and almost is simplistic. And for for a long time, myself included. People just kind of assumed, Oh, surveymonkey, you know, it's it's there and it was kind of throw away. You've been able to build that into a business that has over $ million a year in annual revenue of $1,000,000, plus valuation. Um, how what are some of the lessons that you've learned in that scaling process? And and frankly, I think it's one of the more impressive stories in the Valley because it was no one thought it was gonna be as huge as it is, and you know, largely to your credit, what can you you know, I'll start by saying the most important thing to do is start with a great business, which is what I was able to do. I didn't start the business founded by Ryan Finley 13 years ago, and he built an incredible tool, an incredible business brand that people love a product experience people have. And so my real things I did was I took it to the next level. But I started with something that was already great. Um, and that that would have been impossible to sort of recreate. I think, um, I think was Surveymonkey. Our main thing was, don't break things that aren't broken, but the team had been really small. So before I started that we had 14 people in Portland, Oregon, nine of whom were on our customer operations. Yeah, there was two engineers on the company was super profitable and growing nicely. But there's just so many things that they hadn't done, Sure, but we saw all this opportunity of things we could do. But at the same time, people loved our product. They found it useful on dso trying to kind of scale the business without breaking it. Sure, that was kind of the primary thing. And, you know, sometimes you could be too cautious and then you don't do the things you need to do, and sometimes it could be too aggressive. I think we've got a pretty good balance. You know, we haven't done things quite as quickly as I'd like to be done, but I think we've made really good progress. We've really international, which it was part of the audience here, International been a huge focus for us that we used to only be in English. We used to only have customer support on West Coast time. We only you could only pay us in U. S. Dollars. And today we're in 15 languages are sites and 15 Lindsay even take a survey in any language. But the sites and 15 languages we can pay us. In currencies, we have 24 7 customer support. So we understood that there was this big opportunity internationally, but we just didn't have a resource is before taking Sure. Yeah. I think that there is some interesting correlations between what you've been through and where creativelive is that right now, essentially a year ago, Mika Salmi joined the business in a similar position about he's employee number nine or 10. And, um, you know, we've come a long way, were about, you know, 70 80 employees right now. Ah, and you know, in international, is it We reach people in English, but there's a There's a lot of opportunities there. Um, let me talk a little bit of the cycle about about culture and you surveymonkey is noted for having like, a great culture. And how did you go from 14 to plus employees while making it an awesome place to continue working at? Yeah, I think, um I mean, obviously having the right people in the first place helps. But I think when you're 14 you know everybody and everybody knows each other and, like culture at that point is more. It's like, uh, yeah, we go and have beers together after work, but it's not. You don't need to communicate about culture. It just is, um, but when you get to 200 or even 100 people, all of a sudden you gotta think about a little bit more. I think we thought about it. What um, starting with the hiring was we wanted people who, um, who understood how to scale things that was critical for what we're doing but also really wanted to be in an entrepreneurial startup, small team environment, right? And they wanted the kind of mixture of the two, because that's what I wanted. And so then I felt that that was what we needed, which was to keep kind of being nimble, moving quickly, making decisions, breaking things and fixing them but moving on and moving quickly, but yet being able to do it, it's scale. And so you start with that as the framework and then you say Okay, one of the things we need to do to have that kind of environment and culture. Well, let's not have too many meetings, okay? Because meetings slow people down, right? Let's make decisions quickly. We're not gonna agonize over, you know, we almost never if we need to, like, have make a decision and something, we can't make it over email, and we have a meeting say, Let's come back to this tomorrow that as ridiculous. We've just wasted everybody's time. Make a decision. It's not perfect, you know. But make a decision. Move on. Let's let's go. So I think, you know, um, I think, you know, we have a culture where it's not about face time, right? Get your job done. Do a great job. We don't care. You know we have. Ah, we have a vacation policy, which is take as much vacation as you wanted. You could get away with and get your job done. And, you know, if you take six months off, you probably have a hard time getting a job done. Right? But if you could while you're super productive, you know it and all these things kind of resonate through is like we trust, you know, this is a culture. You know, I've said this before. I leave the office at 5 30 go home, have dinner with my family. I get back online after my kids go to bed. And so I don't, you know, work 9 to 5 30 That's not my workday. My work day is kind of broken up by this period, but I think it's important people to have a life. Um, you know, my first cos a startup. I wasn't married. I worked every single day the 1st 2 years never took a day off. Um, and we didn't really have a whole lot of choice at that point. But that's not sustainable around sustainable for individuals, not sustainable for the company. And so I think having a place where people feel like their time is respected there, they're able to sort of have this ability to control how they use their time to get their job done doesn't mean we don't hold people accountable. Doesn't mean people don't work hard, but they're able don't have really high expectations. Absolutely. It's just that they have a little more control, an ability to make life work for them. Yeah, or make make work. And some people and some people have trouble with this. Some people need a much more structured environment. Yeah, they need to be said be here at this time. Don't leave before this time. You know, Onley take this. Breaks that this I mean, you know, tuck in the shirt where so and so sometimes for some people, this isn't a good fit. Um, but I think the kind of people we want to attract, like he sort of the accountability and responsibility Go do that, and it seems like the Valley in general is becoming. It's less about How many hours did you work this week? How much code did you push? And it's becoming mawr balanced as the Valley has has grown up over the past 20 years, which is kind of, Ah, nice thing I think it's I think it's good, I think you know, um, you know, we've been able to attract a lot of people who wanted to have a great experience, a great job, but also want to have a life. Um, I think that's more important than like, Did we give you massages at work, or did you get to eat breakfast there because we want to keep you there all day, right, you know, So by the way, we have food people, but but But but But the life parts a lot more important than all the perks right from my perspective, but the kind of people we want