Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:01 For today, we live in a world where every company has to become a software company or a technology company to survive and thrive. Um, the, and the fundamental scaling constraint, uh, to become a technology company is having great engineers, um, and curings ability to unlock the world's untapped human potential. There's great people all over the world and who are just, who could be the perfect engineer in your team to contribute to helping you go where you need to go. I think that's the message that's resonating really powerfully with every tech company.
Speaker 2 00:00:43 Jonathan, really pleased to be chatting with you today. First off, thank you for joining us on the podcast. Great to have you with us, um, for our listeners. Can you tell a bit about yourself to kick things?
Speaker 1 00:00:55 Thank you for having me, Dan excited to be a part of the podcast, uh, for the listeners, uh, um, out there, uh, I'm Jonathan Sudar, uh, CEO and co-founder of tiering. Uh, tiering is a, uh, a platform that lets you push a button to hire prevetted remote engineers from all over the world. Um, and, um, it uses artificial intelligence to automatically source software developers from all over the world, automatically vet them automatically match them and help manage the collaboration after they're matched. Uh, we recently became a unicorn a little over three years after we launched and we are in this process of, uh, rapidly scaling. Uh, we call it blitzscaling. Uh, excellent. Where you, you, you grow at this, uh, accelerated pace. Uh, so excited to share some of our lessons, uh, lessons learned challenges so far so far, uh, in a conversation with you
Speaker 2 00:01:52 I'm looking forward to, I love the way, love you phrase it's something similar I've used in organization. Bit more about that. So can you tell a bit more about cheerings mission and vision?
Speaker 1 00:02:06 Uh, absolutely. So we now live in a remote first world and every company today is in a race to reap the benefits of remote engineering talent. Twitter is going remote squares, going remote, um, coin bases going remote, even traditional companies like Siemens Ford, et cetera, are seeing the benefits of, um, of, of going remote. And the reasons are obvious. Um, number one, you get to tap into a planetary pool of engineers versus just looking in your own backyard. You get to tap, tap into geographies where that nobody else is looking at today, like Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia, central Europe, et cetera, cetera, and third distributed teams work now, as we've discovered in the last, uh, couple of years, really. Um, but remote is hard and it's hard for three big reasons. First, if you are ahead of engineering at a company like Coinbase, which is one of our customers, uh, how do you build a, uh, large enough global pipeline to find truly great people?
Speaker 1 00:03:09 If you wanna hire tens of thousands, how are we gonna build a pipeline of tens of thousands of, uh, say Golan engineers from Brazil or C sharp engineers from Croatia? So that's hard. Second evaluating a global engineering talent pool can be hard if you were looking at, uh, an engineer from, um, uh, Italy say, uh, you may not see Stanford Berkeley in her educational background. You might not see Google, Facebook, Stripe, and her work experience. She could be a great engineer, but there's just no signal from just the resume. So you have to interview that person. And how are you gonna interview these thousands of people from all over the world without sucking up all of your engineering teams, interview bankrupt that be super and third. It can be very hard, uh, to, uh, after you found that perfect engineer to manage them effectively. Uh, because if you communication is hard because time zones are hard, often the right kind of daily communication, we communication performance management doesn't happen.
Speaker 1 00:04:12 Um, you, you often managers don't have enough visibility into the work being done. Is this person really working? Are they working on the right things? Security can also be a concern. Um, so these are the three big problems. Number one, really hard to build a global, large enough global pipeline to find truly great people. Number two, really hard to evaluate all of these engineers at scale. And number three, once you've found that perfect engineer, how do you, uh, manage them, uh, solve for communication security and other issues, right? And the traditional solutions, Dan, like, weren't really built for this. Like if you look at a recruiting firm or a staffing firm, uh, they don't do any vetting of engineers. They don't have global reach. If you look at marketplaces, they usually hit our miss in terms of quality. And these it services companies also don't really have Silicon valley caliber talent.
Speaker 1 00:05:04 So we asked ourselves the simple question, can we solve all of this with software? What if we had software that could source engineers plan it wide? What if we had software that could evaluate engineers for a Silicon valley bar? What if we had software that could automatically match the right engineers to the right jobs with machine learning? And what if we had software that could manage the collaboration after, after the match, this is why we build churn. Touring's creating a new category that we call the talent cloud. It's a distributed team of developers in the cloud. That's sourced by software, vetted by software, matched by software and managed by software. So that for you, an engineering manager or head of engineering, or an early stage founder, you can push a button to spin up your engineering dream team in the cloud, as easily as you spin up servers on Amazon. That's what we do.
Speaker 2 00:05:54 This is great. Sounds excellent. So you co-founded back in what then?
Speaker 1 00:06:06 Yeah. It's journey. It's, it's one of those things where every year feels very different from the year before one of, uh, the CEO role, like as a company grows, you kinda have to scale with the challenges that you see at that next step. Um it's um, so we've, we've um, like in the last year alone, like our headcount grew by almost AEX. Um, so the, the, the company's just been growing, growing, uh, tremendously, obviously a big, um, sort of inflection point for us was February, um, or, or March 20 when, when the pandemic hit. Um, I think, um, it, it accelerated a lot of, um, this shift to remote work, uh, and this move to distributed teams. It was already kind happening, but it was little more of a fringe movement. Was there, there was automatic, there were a few companies sort of the benefits of remote distributed teams of star wars. There was the rebel Alliance of people who kinda saw the absolutely
Speaker 1 00:07:22 The value of remote work and distributed teams. Now it's, um, it's, it's sort of the, it, it's the new Republic in a sense. It's like, you, you kind of, you, we now live in a remote first world. Every company now sees the benefit of you wanna hire the best people in the world, not the people who happen to live near your office. Um, and it's never been a better time to be an engineer like in, in the, in the old days. Um, your opportunity radius was maybe 20 miles from where you lived. Mm-hmm <affirmative> regardless of how capable you are, how motivated you are, how smart you are, you the, the extent to which you are able to contribute to humanity was governed by jobs. You can drive to in a car within 20 miles. Now that's no longer the case, um, at turning like we really wanna kill the geo lottery.
Speaker 1 00:08:16 So we wanna create a future where wherever you live, uh, where you live, doesn't ha doesn't, um, impact the kind of opportunities you have access to. So these last, uh, three and a half, four years have just been this period of rapid scaling. Um, we've been growing our developer base. We now have about 1.2 million developers signed up on touring, hundreds of companies building on top of tiering, including Coinbase Johnson and Johnson. Rubian mm-hmm, <affirmative> these really well known companies, including some fortune 500 companies like Disney and others. Um, and, uh, it's been fun. It's been fun to sort of experience blitzscaling and it's, uh, in its purest form for all the, the good, the bad and the ugly.
Speaker 2 00:09:13 And let's be honest, it's probably one of these things organizations should have done a long time ago. Um, it's, it's changed a diversity landscape. It's you're right. It's not a location anymore. It's, it's all about talent. And I think, I think you've nailed it with that. Um, you raised, you raised series D in October last year. So what do you laser focused on investing this in and what does the next 12 to 18 months look like? For sure.
Speaker 1 00:09:42 Yeah. Yeah, that's right. We raised a unicorn round of, of, uh, about 87 million, uh, last year. And since then we had opened up a safe at a 4 billion violation cap, uh, 15% discount, which, which started, and the focus has been scaling up our sales and marketing, um, accelerating our, uh, developer growth. There are, there are lots of developers in the world. Uh, we want touring to be the place where the best developers in the world work at. So we're investing in, um, making touring amazing for developers from all over the world to work at and really investing in our product R and D. So we build a lot of product to automate the sourcing of developers, automate the vet of developers, automate the matching of developers and automating the management. And it's a lot of, um, uh, data science, machine learning, coupled with, um, uh, software engineering to like really, um, get the efficiencies of scale mm-hmm <affirmative> we, we are approaching.
Speaker 1 00:10:46 So we are vetting is, uh, zero touch, uh, in that we are able to have, um, for wide variety of jobs, job types, like full stack, front end, backend, mobile AI data sense, DevOps, et cetera, wide variety of tech stacks like react node angular, like more than a hundred tech stacks and a wide variety of seniority levels like individual contributor tech lead tech lead manager. And so on, we wanna build this machine that can evaluate engineers at scale, in an objective data driven way without all the biases that a typical interview process would have. Um, I mean, traditional interviewing is sort of not very scientific, it's kinda broken, uh, all sorts of, um, uh, room for bias. So we wanna create this. We wanna just level the playing field for global talent. Mm-hmm <affirmative> so a big focus of investment for us after the series D is automation. So automation and sales and marketing, I would say are the, are the big levers we're also looking for, um, looking at, um, so we've raised about 140 million so far. Most of the money is still the bank as we continue to. OK. Yeah. Um, we are also going be looking at any interesting, um, MNA opportunities for in, in Europe, Latin. Um, so, so we're always interested in, um, great teams of people, great technology that can, that can give us an edge. Uh, so tho those, that will be sort of one of the ways in which we'll scale posts around.
Speaker 2 00:12:20 Excellent. Definitely in love with so great. That sounds, that sounds phenomenal. So you were named one of America's best S last year, massive on that. What is it that's so unique about's employee experience that, that you think secured that accolade?
Speaker 1 00:12:40 So, um, there are few things that are unique's culture. Um, the, I would, the main pillars for us are, um, speed, continuous improvement, and a long term focus on customer success. Mm-hmm <affirmative> um, and when I say speed, it, I, I do think like one of the biggest weapons a startup has is its ability to execute fast without a lot of bureaucracy, without a lot of red tape. So we spend a lot of time to think about how we can go faster. And, uh, this means being very, very focused in what we do. It means only focusing on big needle, moving initiatives that can move the, our metrics in a substantial way. It means saying no to a lot of things saying no to a bunch of product initiatives that could be nice things to do, but may not, may not really move the company forward in a, in a meaningful way.
Speaker 1 00:13:51 Uh, and I think people like that culture, like when people come to us from some of these larger companies, the first thing they notice is the speed. This company moves fast, and we have those cult, like one of the other attributes that fits in with the speed is we are very comfortable fail. We would rather take a big, bold bet in an area where we see an opportunity to do something 10 X better, or five X better. And we'll be happy if 80% of the time we fail in doing so maybe the experiment didn't succeed. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, um, rather than sort of tons in terms of iterative, incremental improvements that we do. And I think people like that. So that was speed. Uh, a sec. And second important part of our culture is a culture on continuous improvement. So we think a lot, like when we hire people, we, we look for people who care deeply about making themselves better, making their teams better, making the company better. Uh, it's this mind mindset of getting better every day. Um, I personally have an app on my phone where I track did I work on some aspect of my self improvement today. Um, and I kind of like to try to have a streak of, uh, whether I've been working on this continuously, um, and these things add up.
Speaker 2 00:15:12 Yeah, that's great. Actually love the idea of the app as well. Maybe ask, ask that, but no, that sounds great. It's, it's good. Actually, that's coming you and its way, the organization that's, that's great will focusing in the year ahead from a talent and people perspective specifically.
Speaker 1 00:15:36 So it's going be, um, hiring amazing leaders in the company, um, and making sure that our team is, um, uh, coordinated and aligned and moving in the right direction. Like we are now about 700 people. It's, it's, it's a lot harder to keep an organization of 700 people focused on the most needle, moving things than its when 70 mm-hmm. So it's gonna be recruiting amazing leaders, um, to the company. Um, so I would say recruiting and making sure that the, the entire team is sort of, uh, is focused on the right things. Everybody has a clear sense of company priorities, their team's priorities and how they are contributing to, to moving the company's key metrics forward. A big one thing that sometimes gets missed is, um, something that's in between sort of recruiting and making sure the organization is aligned and moving in the right direction, which is onboarding.
Speaker 1 00:16:41 Um, absolutely making sure that, uh, we are making the people we hire successful. Um, we have the right sort of checkpoints with them, uh, and that's a whole different, uh, topic with, with its own set of, uh, challenges like, like you, you, you kind of need an organization to have the right balance of, um, uh, I would say leaders and ICS, uh, leaders and individual contributors. I prefer the term leaders rather than managers at curing. Like we want leaders, not managers. We want people who raised the level of performance of their team, not, um, sort of somebody rubber stamping the work of, uh, awesome team. So making sure we have the right of leaders to, to, um, individual contributors, that's, that's be a focus. So recruiting, excellent onboarding and having a great culture where the entire organization is moving in the, in, in one direction to hit our company goals.
Speaker 2 00:17:46 And you've also been named one of the companies, most innovative companies demand
Speaker 1 00:18:07 For today. We live in a world where every company has to become a software company or a technology company to survive and thrive. Right. Um, the, and the fundamental scaling constraint, uh, to a technology company is having great engineers, um, and ability to unlock the world's untapped human potential. There's great people all over the world and who are just, who could be the perfect engineer in your team to contribute to helping you go where you need to go. I think that's the message that's resonating really powerfully with every tech company. Like when you, when you think about it, like, do you wanna hire the best people in the world or people who happen to live near your office? Yeah. It just feels very stark in terms of what the best, uh, best path is. Uh, so we've benefited from those tailwinds. Uh, and when you are an engineer, traditionally, the, the path used to be, if you wanted to say work in the heart of the, uh, technology industry, you might have, regardless of where you were born, you might have had to relocate to a few centers, uh, maybe in Western Europe, maybe in the west coast of the United States, maybe in, uh, certain parts of India.
Speaker 1 00:19:23 So there, uh, there's like a few centers, like, uh, there are parts of China, parts of Israel. There are also like very strong tech hubs. You have to sort of appro your life and sort of move to those places to work. And today the jobs come to you. And I think this will be one of the, this, we look back on this era as being transformative much like the internet was in the, in the, in the nineties in terms of how it connected the world. Um, and, and just made civilization progress at a faster rate. So we are fortunate to be at the center of that shift. Um, that's been a big reason why we were named in a lot of these, uh, lists, like in the list that you mentioned, like, um, top 10, most innovative companies in, in, in fast company, uh, we were named alongside, uh, interestingly slack, zoom, uh, Gid lab, and a few others, which are all companies that are powering this future, where you can work from anywhere.
Speaker 1 00:20:25 Yeah. Um, and that's the movement, it's the work from anywhere movement. And I think it's, it's gonna be a hugely positive, uh, movement for the world. Um, even outside of the tech industry, if you look at it from a, uh, environmental standpoint, like how much, how much pollution are we, are we avoiding by not requiring people to commute one to two hours every day? How much lost productivity do we have, where everyone sort of commutes on average one to two hours a day. And then they're a little, when they, when they've lost hours of your day waking hours, like know 10, 20% is it's a pretty significant amount of life that you now got back to do whatever you would like to do
Speaker 2 00:21:11 Absolut. Absolutely. Right. So I it's bit win-win for everybody. Isn't it. So that's great. Um, you held your boundary recently. Um, what some of the key S from that event
Speaker 1 00:21:24 In boundaryless event, uh, key one of the, we used that event to announce big, um, product launches for us. One big product that we launched in our boundary was a completed self system that made the process of working with engineers, like picking the right engineer that you would wanna work with as easy as, uh, going on amazon.com. So, right. We, we have this, this, uh, this system now that you could come to and log on, and you, Dan, like, let's say you are starting a company and you wanted a backend Python engineer. You could just put in, uh, what type of developer you're looking for. Uh, maybe it's a backend developer, what are important, uh, tech stacks that you want this developer to be, to be strong at? Maybe it's Python, maybe it's, uh, maybe you also want to add, um, you also want to add node, uh, and then you'll see a ranked list of prevetted engineers from tiering, and you can push a button to choose which engineer you'd like to interview get started with.
Speaker 1 00:22:32 And it's just very, very efficient. We've taken a process that would typically take months and reduced it to, uh, a matter of days and in some cases, same day. Um, and that was a big, um, it, it took a lot of work behind the scenes to automatically evaluate engineers that scale used machine learning to recommend the right developers to the right jobs when you're choosing from a pool of this, this 1.2 million. Um, and, uh, we preview that and we, today more than half our customers are startup customers use that product. Um, and a lot of engineering managers value efficiency. Like they don't like course talking to a salesperson talking, getting on zoom. So they kinda like this sort of search engine that they have to just find the developers that they want, push a button and get going.
Speaker 2 00:23:21 Sounds greats the question, tech candidate assessment, or is most effective for fast growing companies.
Speaker 1 00:23:33 Ah, yes. So for fast growing companies. Um, so, uh, so when we evaluate, uh, software engineers, um, we evaluate them along, uh, three primary dimensions. Um, we evaluate, uh, their technical skills. Uh, we evaluate their soft skills, uh, and we evaluate their, uh, seniority level. Um, and, um, uh, when we evaluate an engineer for their technical skills, like let's say we are evaluating, uh, a machine learning engineer. Uh, we build what we call a deep developer profile, which is a detailed, comprehensive, continuously updating vector representation of a developer's strengths and areas for improvement. So with a machine learning engineer, we would evaluate them for, um, how good is their machine learning theory foundation. Like whether it's probability statistics, uh, linear algebra, things like that. Mm-hmm <affirmative> we evaluate them for how hands on they are, how good are they at, uh, building a text classifier, uh, working with the latest frameworks like PIAR, uh, TensorFlow, uh, et cetera.
Speaker 1 00:24:43 <affirmative>, uh, we would also evaluate them on their software engineering fundamentals. How good are they at writing production level code? Um, mm-hmm <affirmative> we would evaluate them on their ability to build machine learning models versus maintain the models in production. So we have all of these attributes that are betting, evaluates the engineers for, um, we also evaluate them on, in some cases where relevant for their systems design, uh, capability for their ability to architect systems, uh, and things like that. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and in the second bucket, which is soft skills, particularly for a startup, uh, it's important to have engineers who are very proactive, have an ownership mentality, uh, don't need a lot of direction. Uh, can, I mean, typically in a startup, the engineer might be reporting to somebody fairly senior, maybe one of the founders or a CTO or VP of engineering. So they need to be the kind person who can, uh, sort of don't need a ton of hand holding where they can understand the, the vision or for a feature or a product that you're trying to build and take that to its end state, without requiring a ton of iteration and back and forth with the person they're working with work with minimal supervision, uh, and really be committed to working hard.
Speaker 1 00:26:01 I mean, startups are hard work, right? Like it's not for, not for everyone at all stages of their life. So you kind of want somebody who's committed to, to the mission of the company who can work put in those long RS. Very good at, um, uh, somebody who's good at direct communication escalating when things are not going right in a startup speed is paramount. You kind of don't, you don't want somebody who sort of says yes to you. And then, uh, two, three weeks later, they tell you, Hey, I didn't really think we could hit this deadline. You want somebody who negotiate more directly with you? Hey, um, uh, VP of engineering, like I know, I know you would like to have this shipped in the next two weeks. I don't think that's gonna happen because there is this blocker and this other dependency let's figure out how we can solve those blockers together.
Speaker 1 00:26:52 So the soft skills front, for particularly for somebody working at a startup, I think some of these requirements are important in a startup, as you might also need to wear a couple of different hats. Sometimes the engineer might need to wear a more product centric hat too. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, you might have to make some product centric decisions. You might have to work with a designer. You might have to talk to customers. So you, you kind of need all of that too. And on the third dimension, which is the seniority level, we again pay a lot of attention to what level of seniority the person's looking for. Mm-hmm <affirmative> we have engineers who can work at the level of a task or at the level of a feature or at the level of an entire product. Uh, and we typically have a conversation with our startup customers or enterprise customers to understand what seniority level they need.
Speaker 1 00:27:40 So it's technical skills, soft skills, and sort of calibrating on seniority levels so that we can, yeah, help companies find the right talent they need. And often Dan, like it's a conversation it's like sometimes when customers come to us, they have a vague sense of what they need. And in a conversation with us and through iterating with our product, we help them sharpen sort of their, their job wreck. Mm-hmm <affirmative> for the task that they need need done. Sometimes what you need, what you need for a project might not be a machine learning engineer. It's more of a data scientist, or maybe it's more engineer understand data sciences, iterative process to figure out, um, what exactly, um, our customers need.
Speaker 2 00:28:30 That's really good. Cause that sort helps evolve that thinking. Cause let's be honest, nine outta 10, what they think need at the evolves you through that process and aside technical challenges, you've about skills. How do you assess qualities such as culture fit, um, or hiring for potential even.
Speaker 1 00:28:51 Yeah. How do we assess for culture fit and hiring for potential? So it's um, so culture fit is, is something tricky. Let me answer that first from a perspective, and then we can talk from a customer perspective. I, I think it starts first with the, uh, the founder CEO writing the culture down. So I spent some time in the last, um, month actually writing down, uh, all the best practices from culture, uh, that we want, uh, treasure and value. Uh, we call the tiering way and we we've written it down in this, in this Google doc in conversation with our exec team in of what are the kinds of traits that have made us successful so far that we wanna preserve mm-hmm <affirmative> so it starts first by writing it down because different companies have different cultures and there's no one size fits all, but you kinda have to write it down to put a stake in the ground for, uh, what you stand for.
Speaker 1 00:29:59 And you've written it down. The, the, you need to have, um, a way to hire a fire and promote based on those values. Mm-hmm <affirmative> so one of the things we are doing now is we've written it down and we write specific examples of what each sort of cultural value, uh, means. Um, and it, uh, and some of it can be kind of, uh, polarizing, like, for example, in our, uh, in our, um, uh, culture, uh, document, we write that we worked crazy hard. We think that, uh, cheerings going to be one of the most important companies of our generation to unleash the world's untapped human potential. And it's gonna take a ton of work and we want you to know what you're getting into, right? Like this is not, yeah, absolutely. This is not the company where it, it, things will go slow and, um, it'll be a lot of work, but we can promise you'll be rewarding and a lot of fun.
Speaker 1 00:31:00 Um, so the first step is to write it down. Um, yeah. And you wanna write it down also in a collaborative way, like take input from the amazing leaders that you have in the company, uh, your exec team, um, and then it, um, it, you, you also wanna be mindful of, uh, not being too ossified in the culture itself. Like the kinda, so, uh, someone, someone told me this, that they hire, not for culture fit, but for culture, uh, addition, uh, in the, uh, so you wanna hire people who will contribute positively to the culture and also improve the culture of the company who can add their own, um, uh, addition to the tiering way mm-hmm <affirmative>. So we kinda watch for that in our interview process, we have people who interview for culture. We kind of, you, you wanna have like a very standard way in which you assess culture.
Speaker 1 00:32:01 Um, mm-hmm, <affirmative> your ability to contribute to tutoring's culture, um, ask the same type of questions. So you're kind of calibrated across a white group of people and, and share this, uh, this culture document that you create with prospective candidates with managers, uh, not have this be something that's sitting in a slack, uh, or Google drive somewhere, but really actively use it. I think the more often you can point to that and say, Hey, this is not part of our culture. Like, you can point to this document, the more mm-hmm <affirmative> that it's actually being used. Uh, so step one is write it down, step two, be comfortable, sort of, uh, uh, editing it. And step three, have a system of hiring, firing, promoting based on what you've written down. Yeah. A culture document without enforcement is kind of toothless, right? So we, uh, so it's important.
Speaker 2 00:32:52 Yeah, no, I agree with that. And I like the honesty and openness about this working hard, and you had people quite scared about saying they want high standards and all that sort of stuff, but you've gotta be really clear on what its that's gonna help drive your organization forward and attract the right people, the talent through the, you have thousand developers across 10 that's incredible of talent that typically is in demand and tough to hire. How do you attract and engage that talent to the extent that they opt into,
Speaker 1 00:33:27 Uh, great question. So firstly, uh, we, we live in a remote first world and every company's in the race to hire the world's best remote talent mm-hmm but it can be hard to stand out in a planetary pool. Yeah. Um, if you are an awesome engineer from a, a small town near Sao Paulo, Brazil, nobody looking at your resume might recognize the schools that you went to or the prior work experience that you had. And that's a shame like this could be a perfectly amazing engineer, but it's, there's just not too many signals that exist. And if you're an engineer historically before touring, you had, I would say, uh, three options that you could have, you could have done. One is you could have applied directly to the best companies that are hiring. And uh, most of the time like people, when they do that, they don't hear back.
Speaker 1 00:34:20 Like you're kind of, you're lost to the shuffle. I'm sure among our listeners, there's a ton of, if we had a show of hands for who's applied to these, these top, uh, like the Google apple, Facebook, Amazon company only to never hear back, like 80% of the hands would go up. Um, another and these, these jobs are good jobs. Like you cannot get career growth, you kinda get mentorship. These are long term engagements. Um, uh, and you're working on exciting products. So that was good about them. Mm-hmm <affirmative> the hard part was you never hear back. It's hard to, hard to really get notice. On the flip side, there used to be these marketplace companies, which are easy to get that the jobs are easy to get. You can post a job on some of these marketplaces you'll you'll mm-hmm <affirmative> you might get a gig, uh, here or there, but these are gigs, not real jobs, like not jobs that contribute to your career growth. You don't get good mentorship often you're not working on the most important part of the product you're working on something on the site that people don't care that much about.
Speaker 1 00:35:23 The third used to be. You could go work for like an it services giant, um, like an accent TCS with pro emphasis. One of those companies and challenge, good jobs are limit where you're not directly working with those companies. You're working a middle. So quality category work where give all over the world, the benefits of each of these without none of the comms. What if you had access? What if you could work for Coinbase, you could work for Rivian. You could work for Johnson and Johnson directly on their core products, um, and have long term engagements have career growth, community, things like that. Um, it's a, it's a, it it's a model that combines all of the benefits with none of the cons. What have you had the flexibility to time off between engagements? Um, why we build, we build to satisfy that goal. Um, and people really value the work that we do on our community side to help our engineers up level, their career growth. We have programs where we help them learn how to interview better, how to work on your soft skills, how to work on your, uh, leadership skills, uh, recommending what skills are in demand that they could learn, uh, to grow their value in the industry to access, to, to get promoted faster. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. So we wanna like give people like this guidance to be the sort of jet pack on their back to help them reach Heights that they're truly capable of.
Speaker 2 00:37:13 What have some of your biggest learnings been when it comes to building teams?
Speaker 1 00:37:19 I would distill it into sort of, um, um, into three big learnings. Um, question was, what are my biggest learnings with building teams is being really intentional about, um, job description. You are starting to hire for a role. Um, it may sound obvious, but often the biggest times when we've had challenges is when that initial job spec wasn't, um, super clear in terms of what we were looking for, uh, in this role, uh, in, in this person. So spending time to really, um, be clear on who we are looking for to do what role and how we are gonna measure success, making sure like that's kinda defined very well defined upfront. So that's number one. The second learning is I would go back to, um, our earlier chat then on hiring for culture. Um, and it only starts when you write it down. Um, mm-hmm, <affirmative>, it's not OK to just look for can person do the job.
Speaker 1 00:38:31 Uh, it's really, are they gonna be a good culture fit for tiering? Um, are they well other people on our team mm-hmm back reference before level roles we look to do at least two back channel reference checks for every exec level role that we hire. Um, okay. I think that that is really important. And the third learning for me is to, particularly for leadership roles and level roles stay very close to the person for the first two to three months. Um, don't, um, not to give them so much more so not to give them a ton of responsibility too quickly. And it it's one of those things that requires a little bit of a lack of a better word, a top down push where the person like, particularly in leadership roles, I feel like the person may feel like they are ready at a certain stage sooner than you probably know that they're ready.
Speaker 1 00:39:42 And there would probably be a phase where the person probably feels like they have sufficient context, but you have more context about what they know to kind stay close to the person for the first two to three, uh, months to make sure that they're successful, I think is key mm-hmm <affirmative>. So it's number one, being very clear on the job description and what are, what you require them to do, how you're gonna measure success. What would a good 30 day check can be? 60 day check can be 90 day check can be, um, the second, uh, being, making sure that a good fit for the culture and stage of the company. And third being, staying close to the person in the first, uh, two to three months. Um, and the culture piece is kind important. Um, mm-hmm, <affirmative> in that, um, when you hire a leader, like the way I think about it is I'm going to be hiring like a hundred less good versions of this person.
Speaker 1 00:40:42 It's gonna be a army of, uh, this person's gonna be kinda the ceiling in, in their function, right? Like it's very hard for people to hire, attract and hire people better than them. Not impossible. I think we should always try to do that. I try to do that, but it's, but it's hard. So the leader often becomes the ceiling for the function. So are you hiring people with a high enough ceiling so that they can attract amazing people? And the leaders, leaders also model what, uh, good performance is to their organization. Mm-hmm <affirmative> so if you have like a hundred people who are gonna be, uh, sort of, um, lesser clones of this person in terms of their ability to, to contribute, like, would you be happy with that? Mm-hmm <affirmative> and I think that's a good check when you, you build teams by building leaders, by hiring leaders. So you wanna make sure that the leaders, the template of the leader is exactly the one that you want a lot of copies made in your, in your company.
Speaker 2 00:41:43 I really like that thinking I don't it's, it's interesting. I'm not sure every organization looks at it that way, and that's a really clever way of looking at it. And I think, um, I look, a lot of people can learn from that. So hopefully our listeners are listening. So, um, next question. So if, if there was one thing you could wave a magic wand when it comes to building and leading tech teams, what would it be?
Speaker 1 00:42:08 Um, I think with tech teams, it's, it's just, I mean, uh, advice to any founder is, um, speed of hiring matters. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and the way you're going to hire the right engineering team fast is by casting a planet wide net. So I find companies like sometimes being overly restrictive in terms of where they hire from, and it always hurts the company. Um, at the end of the day in a company, your goal is to build a product that makes your customers happy and moves the metrics for the business. And you wanna do that as fast as possible, so you can grow as fast as possible. Yeah. And the biggest stumbling block can be speed of hiring. If you are hiring super slow, if you're hiring one engineer a month, when you should have been hiring five engineers a month, it there's a big difference between a company doing a versus B in terms of who, who ends up raising a successful next round, who hits their metrics and so on.
Speaker 1 00:43:10 So my advice would be to B very thoughtful about, um, which, uh, about, um, which countries that, that you, I mean, obviously you shouldn't work with any country that you're legally not allowed to work with. So you have to make sure from a standpoint you are clear, but outside of that, I think, um, a four R time zone overlap is really all that's needed for an engineering team. Anything looking for anything more than that? You, you are losing out on great people for mm-hmm <affirmative> for unnecessarily, because a lot of engineering time is spent in inside of a code editor, insight, insight, GitHub, or slack or JIRA or tools like that. A for our overlap for, for tech teams is fine. I mean, if you look at crypto or the open source, uh, movement, um, it, it, it, it's a Testament that distributed teams work with largely asynchronous collaboration.
Speaker 1 00:44:11 Um, so, so my advice would be look for a, for our overlap, other than that, like cast as wide a, a planet wide net, as you can, so that you find truly great people. Um, and, um, tech teams are no different from, uh, other teams in that mm-hmm, <affirmative> what makes a great team is a great leader who sets the right culture like you as the founder, like cannot, um, make sure that every IC on the team is, uh, is performing at the level. They need to, you need great leaders. Um, so you, you definitely, I would highly recommend having, um, uh, an engineering manager or a director of engineering or head of engineering. Who's hands on. Um, like we, like we believe at, during that our managers need to be hands on meaning the managers code as well. They're like, mm-hmm, we have a culture where the, the leader is usually the best engineer in the team, in addition to also being good at managing the team.
Speaker 1 00:45:09 So, so that they can unblock their team, that they can help them, uh, identify, uh, and make the right architecture decisions, the right systems, design decisions, so that the company moves, moves critically in the right direction. Um, so I would say the two pieces of advice would be caster wide net for our overlap, distributed teams work. Um, and, um, um, making sure that, um, the, uh, you have a hands on, uh, engineering manager, um, your, your leader code, I think for a tech team today. Um, and when I, when you say tech team, I would, um, split it into engineering product and data science, and usually design is in product. Um, you also want a tech team that can collaborate really well with their peer organizations. You want, you want an inch team that can be a good partner to product, good partner to data science.
Speaker 1 00:46:04 You want a data science team that can be a good partner to product, good partner to engineering and data science is a somewhat new function that didn't exist in this form maybe five years, even 10 years ago, for sure. Maybe even five years ago. So it's really important to clarify the boundaries for who makes, what types of decisions, like, what is, what is data science responsible for? What is engineering responsible for? What is product responsible for? And we are building a team you might want to think through that more carefully. Uh, now there is this new tech category of data engineering, which is different from data science at tiering. We have data engineering under data science, and that again, uh, leads to sort of, uh, needing to be very thoughtful about, for example, who defines the data layer in a company who defines the database, who defines the, uh, nature of the metrics being tracked, the events, being logged, uh, the schema for a dashboard that you build, who defines where the database sits in, in where the servers are located. So, so you kind, when you're building a tech team, you wanna be thoughtful about not just your team, but your engineering team, your data science, data engineering team, and your product team, how you split responsibilities between
Speaker 2 00:47:28 Really find unapologetic amount of joy course be professional personal, or,
Speaker 1 00:47:36 Uh, thank you, Dan, for that question. Uh, so I'll give one that's and one that's that's thing. One thing that gives me joy is working on my own continuous improvement. Uh, I like this, I like, I want to like wake up every day a little bit better than I was the next day. So I have a long list of sort of areas for that. I want to sort of up level myself areas that I want to improve at that I'm, that I actively work on. And I always feel happy when I worked on something relative, uh, that was related to my improvement. Um, and I like, um, and, and these things compound over time. So there's a lot of value in it. Mm-hmm, <affirmative> joy to work on my own self improvement in areas that I care about. Yeah. Um, on the personal side, besides of course spending time with my, uh, with my, with my family, uh, I, I was, uh, I with my wife and my one month old daughter, um, uh, which, which is, which is a huge, uh, source of joy and fun.
Speaker 1 00:48:49 Um, yeah, besides that, uh, I love, um, being at the cutting edge of machine learning. So I, I love reading up, uh, and playing with sort of some of the most recent machine learning frameworks, uh, AI frameworks, just building things for fun. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, um, like in one of my, um, uh, in one of my Christmas breaks, like I was just building like a, a machine learning, uh, system that could automatically categorize, uh, stand up data from a developer to tell whether, uh, everything was green, yellow, or red based on what the developer is saying. Um, it, uh, so it was just a fun thing that just tinkering away in, in my sort of, uh, lab. So I, I like, I like those, like these, um, like for me, it's mostly, um, I, I, my background is in machine learning. I, my at Stanford, my grad school was in machine learning.
Speaker 1 00:49:47 I, um, at Stanford, I, uh, I received the best master's thesis art in, in computer science for my, for my research. There's an alternative path where I could have, I, if I were not building companies, I think I would've loved do more ML research. So I kinda scratching that itch a little bit by when I, when, when I have time like to it's a hobby of mine, you could say to just stay sort of bleeding edge of machine learning and AI, and it does help as well. So that when I'm speaking with our machine learning team or our data science team, like knowledgeable about what they're ask the right question.
Speaker 2 00:50:31 That's interesting. That's definitely leading links.
Speaker 1 00:50:46 I 5% every day. Okay. I'm, I'm not sure if I would get to 5% like today, but it's an aspiration today might be 5% <laugh>, but hopefully
Speaker 2 00:50:59 You, but it gives you, it gives you a name and it helps you. It helps you increase. That's that's been really good Jonathan today. I've really enjoyed our conversation. It's I've really appreciate time. So thank you very much for being on my podcast. And I hope thank very
Speaker 1 00:51:14 Likewise, Dan, I really enjoyed our conversation as well, and inviting it's for founders from Europe in, in a better time to build a startup from anywhere in the world. Uh, yeah, you, you can fundraise from anywhere. You can hire a team from anywhere. It doesn't really matter where, where you are based anymore. So, uh, wish you the best of luck in, in building your companies. And if you need to hire engineers, uh, do check out, uh, churn.com.
