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  • Part two of Culture and Team, and

  • we have Ben Silverman, the founder of Pinterest, and

  • John and Patrick Collison, the founders of Stripe.

  • Founders that have obviously sort of, some of the best in

  • the world at thinking about culture and

  • how they build teams.

  • So, there's three areas that we're gonna cover today.

  • One will just be sort of general thoughts on

  • culture as a follow up to the last lecture.

  • And then we're really gonna dig into what happens at

  • the founding of these companies.

  • And building out the early team.

  • And then how that changes and evolves as these

  • guys have scaled their companies up to 100 plus.

  • I don't even know how many people you have now,

  • but quite a lot.

  • Very large organizations and

  • how you adapt these principles of culture.

  • But to start off I just wanna ask a very

  • open-ended question which is,

  • what are the core pieces of culture that you found to

  • be most important in building out your companies?

  • >> So what are the most important parts?

  • >> It's on. >> Oh, it's on.

  • Yeah I mean I think for

  • us, like we think about on a few dimensions.

  • One is like who do we hire,

  • and what do those people value?

  • Two is what do we do every day, like why do we do it?

  • Three is what do we choose to communicate?

  • And then I think the fourth is what we

  • choose to celebrate.

  • I guess the converse of

  • that is like what you choose to punish.

  • But in general I think running a company based on

  • what you celebrate,

  • is more exciting than what you punish.

  • But I think those four things kind of make up

  • the bulk of it for us.

  • >> We've placed a large emphasis on, as Stripe has

  • grown and probably more than other companies is,

  • transparency internally.

  • And I think it's been something that's been

  • really valuable for

  • Stripe, and also a little bit misunderstood.

  • All the things people talk about like hiring really

  • great people, or giving them a huge amount of leverage.

  • Transparency for us plays into that.

  • We think that, if you are aligned at a high

  • level about what Stripe is doing, if everyone really

  • believes in the mission, and then if everyone has

  • really good access to information, and kind of

  • has a good picture of the current state of Stripe.

  • Then that gets you a huge amount of the way there in

  • terms of working productively together.

  • And it kind of forgives a lot of the other things that

  • tend to break as you, as you grow a start-up.

  • As we've grown, we started off two people.

  • We're now over 170 people.

  • We've put a lot of thought into the tooling that

  • goes around transparency, because at 170 people,

  • there is so much information being produced,

  • that you can't just consume it all as a fire hose.

  • And so

  • how we use slack, how we use email, things like that.

  • We can go into it more later.

  • But I think that's one of

  • the core things that's helped us work well.

  • >> I think culture to some degree is basically kind of

  • the resolution to a bandwidth problem.

  • In the sense that, maybe when you start out working

  • on something, you're sort of coding all the time, but you

  • can't code all the things that you think the product

  • might need, or the company might need, or whatever, and

  • you so you decide to work with more coders, right?

  • And so the organization gets larger.

  • And maybe, in some idealized world,

  • I don't think this actually true, but kind of ideally

  • you could be involved in every single decision, and

  • every single sort of moment of the company, and

  • everything that happens, but obviously you can't, or

  • maybe you can if two people.

  • But you certainly can't at even like five or

  • ten kind of that point comes very quickly,

  • then by the time you're 50 it's completely hopeless.

  • And so culture is kind of how you kind of,

  • what the strands are that you sort of want to have,

  • the invariance that you want to kind of maintain,

  • as you can get specifically involved in sort of

  • fewer and fewer decisions over time.

  • And I think when you think about it that way it,

  • maybe its kind of importance becomes sort of

  • self evident, right?

  • Because again, like the fraction of things you

  • can be involved in directly is diminishing, I mean,

  • almost exponentially,

  • sort of assuming your head count growth sort of is

  • on a curve that looks like one of the great companies.

  • And yeah that's super important.

  • And again, it manifests itself in a bunch of

  • different ways.

  • Like for example, in hiring, I think a large part of

  • the reason why maybe the first ten people you hire,

  • what kind of goes to ship,

  • decisions are so important is because you're not just

  • hiring those first ten people.

  • You're actually kind of hiring 100 people.

  • Because you should think of kind of

  • each one of those people as bringing along sort of

  • another ten people with them, and

  • sort of figuring out exactly what 90 people, you would

  • like those first ten people to bring along is obviously

  • gonna be quite consequential for your company.

  • But really briefly I think it's largely about sort of

  • abstraction.

  • >> So one thing that a lot of speakers in this

  • class have touched on is how hiring those first ten

  • employees, if you don't get that right,

  • the company basically will never recover but

  • no one has talked about how to do that so.

  • What have the three of you looked for

  • when you've hired these initial employees,

  • to get the culture of the company right?

  • How, how have you found them, and

  • what have you looked for?

  • >> Sure. So,

  • I guess this answer is different for every

  • company and I'll say for us it was very inductive.

  • So I literally looked for people that I wanted to work

  • with and that I thought were talented.

  • I think, I've read all these books about culture,

  • because when I don't know how to do something,

  • I first go read things and

  • everyone has all these frameworks.

  • And I think one bit, big misconception that someone

  • said once is that people think culture is like

  • architecture when it's a lot more like gardening.

  • You know, you plant some seeds and

  • then you pull out weeds that aren't working,

  • and they sort of expand.

  • So, when we first hired people we hired people that

  • were like ourselves.

  • I often looked at like three or

  • four different things that I really valued in people.

  • You know, I looked for people that worked hard and

  • seemed high integrity and low ego.

  • I looked for people that were creative, and

  • I usually meant that they were really curious.

  • They had all these different interests.

  • Some of our first employees are probably some of

  • the quirkiest people I've ever met.

  • They were engineers but

  • they also have all these crazy hobbies.

  • Like one guy made his own board game

  • with this elaborate set of rules.

  • Another guy was really into magic tricks.

  • And he had coded not only like this magic trick on

  • the iPhone, but

  • he had shot the production video with a preview.

  • And I think that, that quirkiness has actually been

  • a little bit of a calling card.

  • And we find that really creative, quirky people that

  • are excited about many disciplines, and are

  • extraordinary at one tend to build really great products.

  • They tend to be great at collaborating.

  • Then the last thing is, we really look for

  • people that wanted to,

  • they just wanted to build something great, and

  • they weren't arrogant about it, but they just felt like,

  • it'd be really cool to take a risk and

  • build something bigger than themselves.

  • And that, in the beginning, is very,

  • very easy to select for if you're in our situation.

  • We had this horrible office, like, nobody got paid.

  • So there was no external reason, other than being

  • excited about building something to join.

  • In fact, there was every reason not to.

  • And that's something, looking back,

  • I really, really value,

  • because we always knew people were joining for

  • the purest reasons, and in fact,

  • were willing to forgo other great job opportunities,

  • market salary, a clean office,

  • good equipment just for the chance to work.

  • So, to this day I think a lot of those traits have

  • been seeded and

  • are embedded in the folks that we look at now.

  • >> Yeah the first ten hires are really

  • hard because you're making these first ten

  • hires at a point where no one's heard of this company,

  • no one really wants to work for it.

  • You're just these,

  • like two weird people working on this weird idea.

  • >> And like their friends are telling them not

  • to join.

  • For our second employee, I think

  • he'd accepted the offer or he was just about to, and

  • his best friends took him out the night before, and it

  • was like a full on assault for, why you should not join

  • this company, why this is ruining your life basically.

  • And so anyway the guy subsequently

  • continued to join.

  • And actually one of

  • those friends also now works at Stripe.

  • But this is what you're up against.

  • >> Yeah.

  • And I mean it's also hard because no batch of

  • ten people will have as great an influence on

  • the company as those first ten people.

  • I think everyone's impression of recruiting is,

  • you open LinkedIn.

  • It's sort of like ordering off the dollar menu.

  • It's, I want that one, that one, and that one.

  • And, and now you have some hires.

  • Whereas at least for us, it was very much over a very

  • long time period, talking people we knew or

  • friends of friends into joining.

  • We didn't have huge networks, Pat and

  • I were both in college at the time.

  • So there were no people that

  • we'd really worked with to draw on, and so

  • a lot of those early Stripes were people we had heard of,

  • friends of friends, and the other interesting thing they

  • all had in common is that they were all

  • early in their career, or undervalued in some way.

  • Cuz when you think about it,

  • if someone is a known spectacular quantity,

  • then they're probably working in a job and

  • very happy with that.

  • And so we have to try and find people who were,

  • in the case of our designer that we hired, he was 18 and

  • in high school and in Sweden at the time.

  • In the case of our,

  • our CTO, he was in college at the time.

  • You know, a lot of these people,

  • they were early on in their careers and

  • the only way we could, you can relax when constrained.

  • You can relax the fact that they're talented or

  • relax that it's apparent that they're talented,

  • and we, not consciously, but we relaxed the latter.

  • >> Yeah, I think finding kind of people who are, or

  • just think like a value investor.

  • You're looking for the human capital that's

  • significantly devalued by the market, you know?

  • You probably shouldn't look to

  • hire your brilliant friends at Facebook and Google or

  • whatever, because they're already discovered.

  • You know, if they're wanting to join that's great,

  • but they're probably harder to convince.

  • John and I spent a little a while yesterday

  • afternoon sort of trying to figure out in retrospect,

  • what kind of traits our first ten or

  • so people had in common that we thought were significant.

  • And you know, in general sort of in speaking about

  • culture, I sort of want to caveat everything we say

  • with, I that sort of advice is very limited experience,

  • widely over extrapolated.

  • And I think there's a lot of truth to that.

  • But for our particular first ten people, the things we

  • sort of figured out that seemed to be important were

  • they were also very genuine and straight.

  • I think that actually matters quite a lot in that

  • sort of they're people that sort of that others want to

  • work with, that they're people that others trust.

  • They sort of have an intellectual honesty in

  • how they approach problems and, and so forth.

  • They were people who

  • really liked getting things finished.

  • There's a lot of people who

  • are really excited about tons of things.

  • Only a subset of those are actually excited about like

  • completing things.

  • You know, there's a lot of talk about, for

  • example hiring people off their GitHub resumes,

  • whatever, actually think that doesn't quite ring,

  • kind of correct to me.

  • In the sense that place is a large premium on sort of

  • lots of different things.

  • I think it's actually a priori,

  • sort of much more interesting to work with

  • someone who has spent two years really investing in

  • going deep in a particular area.

  • And then the third trait they all seem to have in

  • common is they just sort of cared a great deal.

  • Like, it was offensive to them when something was

  • just a little bit off.

  • And kind of again,

  • in hindsight, there are all these like crazy things we

  • used to do that I mean, do in fact seem crazy like we

  • probably shouldn't have done them,

  • but everyone was always like well, was borderline insane

  • in sort of how much they cared about tiny details.

  • Like we used to, like every single API request that

  • ever generated an error went to all of our inboxes and

  • phoned all of us.

  • Because it seems terrible to ever have an error that

  • didn't go and

  • get a resolution from the user standpoint.

  • Or we used to like copy everyone else on

  • every outgoing email.

  • And we'd like point out slight grammar or

  • spelling mistakes to each other, because it's terrible

  • to ever send an email with a spelling mistake.

  • So anyway those were the three traits come

  • from that area.

  • A genuine, caring a great deal.

  • And, so what was my second one?

  • >> The other one.

  • >> Yeah so.

  • Sorry yes completing things like list of three items.

  • >> Yeah, I'm only gonna say I just don't think

  • there's any wrong place to find people, so when I

  • look back at our first few folks that we hired.

  • They came from all over the place.

  • Like I put up ads on Craigslist.

  • I went to random tech talks.

  • You know, we met people at,

  • we used to throw weekly barbeques at the office.

  • It was like bring your own food and drinks.

  • And then we would just talk to folks.

  • I think every time I ever went and

  • got coffee in Palo Alto.

  • Like one of you guys was recruiting at

  • Coopa because their office was like

  • strategically situated next to the best coffee shop.

  • But I think that the really good people generally,

  • they're generally doing something else, and

  • so you have to go seek them out,

  • rather than expecting that they're gonna seek you out.

  • Triple so, when no one's ever heard of or

  • is using the product that you're working on.

  • >> Yeah it's probably really important to

  • have a great elevator pitch.

  • Not even for investors, but

  • just because everyone you run into right now is maybe

  • six months, a year down the road, a potential recruit.

  • And so, the right time to have gotten them

  • excited about your company, the right time for

  • them to have started following us,

  • and be thinking about it if they think about what

  • they're going to do next, is as soon as you can start.

  • It's gonna take a very long time to recruit people so to

  • being able to consistently get people excited about

  • what you're doing will pay back dividends later.

  • >> Maybe this is a little tangential but John and

  • I were also chatting yesterday afternoon sort of

  • like a bunch of our friends have sort of

  • started companies right out of school.

  • We were sort of thinking about,

  • what seems to go wrong in those companies.

  • And I think something,

  • that may be the most common failure mode.

  • Since we said of doing something kind of

  • overly niche, or overly sort of specific and banded.

  • I think maybe it comes from sort of like there's a major

  • shift in time horizon.

  • As you go from classes to building a start-up.

  • Right? A class kind of plays out in

  • a quarter or a semester or whatever.

  • Whereas a start-up is like a five or ten year thing.

  • And I think this is really problematic because it's

  • actually quite hard to hire people for

  • niche things, in that if you tell somebody,

  • look we're going to build a rocket that goes to Mars.

  • Like I mean that sounds almost impossible, but

  • also sounds fucking awesome.

  • Right? And so it's actually pretty

  • easy to convince people to work on it.

  • Of course, if it's well, you know,

  • we're going to build this, I don't wanna single out any

  • particular idea, because probably sound like I'm

  • picking some actual start up that's doing it.

  • But you know, if you pick something pretty narrow,

  • something that maybe kind of inductively comes out of

  • the kinds of problems you solve as part of a class

  • project, that's actually a much harder effort.

  • >> One specific question that has come up a lot is,

  • how as a relatively inexperienced founder do

  • you identify who the really great people are?

  • So, you know, you meet people at these barbecues or

  • for your friends or whatever, and

  • maybe you've worked with them a little bit.

  • But what specifically did,

  • did you guys do in your processes to identify like,

  • you know, what this person's going to be really great?

  • Or when did you really get it wrong?

  • But what have you learned about how to

  • identify raw talent if you can't just say, well they

  • worked at Google or Facebook, they must be good?

  • >> Well, I mean, you'll never

  • like 100% know obviously until you work with folks.

  • Which is why the flip side of it is, you know,

  • if someone you hired just wasn't a good fit,

  • you owe it to the company and

  • to them, to tell them how they can improve, and

  • if they're not working out to fire them.

  • But I think that the generally,

  • the question of talent falls into two big buckets.

  • Like, one is you have some sense of

  • what makes them good at their job, and

  • there are some areas where you have taste in that area,

  • and there's some where you don't.

  • And the ones where you

  • don't are actually much more difficult.

  • So what we would do is, is we would do a few things.

  • Like first,

  • before talking to anyone we try to get a sense for like

  • what is really world class in that discipline mean.

  • And this becomes very important later,

  • when you're hiring things like Head of Finance and

  • you don't anything about finance.

  • Except what was contained in like a library book you

  • got about like an introduction to finance,

  • or head of marketing.

  • So, I always made it a habit of, like, talking to

  • people that I knew de facto were world class and

  • then asking them,

  • specifically, what are the key traits or

  • characteristics that you look for?

  • What are the questions that you ask, and

  • how do you find them?

  • And if you're looking for

  • the next person that's as good as you, like,

  • where are, where is that person working right now,

  • and, like, what's, what's her phone number?

  • I think that, like, learning what good and bad is during

  • the interview process, is extremely expensive.

  • It's an expensive use of your time, and

  • it's an expensive use of everyone else's time,

  • so precalibration of that really matters.

  • And then, once you have someone in, sort of,

  • the interview process,

  • you'll build the process over time,

  • to both screen quality.

  • And so at Pinterest, you know, we have

  • an evolving set of standard questions that we're

  • always rotating through, and we're always measuring,

  • are these good indicators or bad indicators of quality?

  • But the other thing that the questions are meant to do,

  • is they're supposed to give a sense for,

  • is this the right place for

  • that person to come and work?

  • And this to the point you guys made about being very

  • transparent about what's gonna be easy or hard.

  • Really great people wanna do things that are hard,

  • they wanna solve tough problems.

  • And so, there was a certain brilliance in

  • Google setting out these interview questions that

  • were thought to be really difficult.

  • Because then people who like solving really

  • difficult problems, they come out and seek those.

  • I think it's really important,

  • even as companies get bigger,

  • that you don't whitewash the risks.

  • I heard that PayPal, you'd go in and

  • after interviewing with like Peter Thiel and

  • Max Levchin, then they would say by the way like Visa and

  • MasterCard wanna kill us, and

  • we might be doing something that's illegal.

  • But if you succeed, you'll redefine payments.

  • Or when they were recruiting for iPhone,

  • they didn't even tell people what they were doing.

  • They were like you won't see your families for

  • three years, but when you're done,

  • your kid's kids will remember what you built.

  • And I think that's a really good thing in recruiting as

  • well that you're very transparent about why you

  • think it's an amazing opportunity, but

  • you lay out in gory detail why it's gonna be hard.

  • And then the right people select in, or

  • they select out of that opportunity.

  • >> Evidence suggest it's worth a lot of

  • people to see their kids, though.

  • I feel like one thing you have to do as you try to

  • identify talent is have the confidence to interview for,

  • in a way that works for you.

  • I think you know, if you're, say you're not,

  • the world's best engineer and

  • you're trying to interview engineering candidates.

  • I think it's tempting to try to

  • color code what everyone else does.

  • And you know, get them to call it on white board.

  • And do other engineering, interviewee things.

  • You know in the case of Stripe,

  • hiring our first engineer.

  • We flew the guy out, and we spent a weekend coding with

  • him, and you know looked over his shoulder and

  • kind of, it was the only way we could really tell and

  • get ourselves confident that, that person was good.

  • And I think you can actually extend that to other roles,

  • where again you're not an expert, and

  • that you know I'm no business development guru.

  • But when we interview people for

  • business development roles,

  • we'll ask them to do a project, you know?

  • Where they talk about how they would

  • improve an existing partnership that Stripe has.

  • Or which new partnerships they would go out and do.

  • And again, you know,

  • even though it's not my domain area, I am actually

  • confident enough that I can judge those pretty well.

  • And I think people often have this imposter syndrome

  • when it comes to interviewing for roles.

  • Yeah. I think a pretty specific,

  • just kind of just tactical thing, and to do for

  • again the first 10 people, is to work with them as much

  • as you can before committing to hiring them.

  • I mean, once you

  • reach a certain scale it's kind of impractical,

  • because it's a huge time commitment on their side.

  • And ultimately I mean it just would be unskilled,

  • would be expensive from your side.

  • But it's really worth it

  • to get the first ten people right.

  • And so, for

  • a majority, maybe in all of the first ten people,

  • we worked with them in some capacity.

  • Usually for a week in advance, and

  • it's pretty hard to fake it for a week.

  • It tends to be pretty clear, quite quickly.

  • And another thing I thought of you know, to the question

  • of sort of how do you know like who is great or

  • who is good enough or whatever.

  • And people always talk about this notion of

  • the ten x person, that whatever that skill set is.

  • I don't really know what ten x means,

  • I think maybe the slightly more kind of helpful or like

  • intuitive version of that is, is this person probably,

  • the best out of all of their friends at what they do.

  • And so you know, it's a little bit sensitive to you

  • know, how well they chose friends, how many they have.

  • But for me at least, I find that kind of

  • a more helpful way to think about it, like

  • is this the best engineer this engineer knows.

  • And the other thing I

  • think that's actually probably just worth

  • mentioning in all of those kind of first ten people, or

  • even more generally on the culture and hiring topic.

  • I think everyone sort of doesn't realize until they

  • go through it themselves how it important it is,

  • in large part because the, like in life and the media

  • and everything, people focus way too much on founders.

  • And they're like, here we are.

  • And so kind of,

  • we're re-enforcing the sort of structural narrative that

  • like, stripe is about John and Patrick.

  • And Pinterest is about Ben and so forth.

  • Whereas, I mean, obviously,

  • sort of the vast majority of what our companies do

  • like 99.9% is being down by people who are not us.

  • Right?

  • And I think, I mean, that's kind of,

  • it's obvious when you say it, but it's at a very much,

  • not just the macro narrative and

  • you know, companies are abstract.

  • So you kind of need to associate them with people.

  • But I think it's worth bearing in mind that like

  • for, you know, Apple, you know everything was

  • you know, Steve Jobs was a like tiny, tiny detail at

  • the end, right, or Google was that way, and so forth.

  • >> So don't screw it up, is that what you're saying?

  • >> Something like that.

  • >> I think, you know, one other thing I'll mention is

  • that I think referencing people is really important,

  • and referencing people is just what it sounds like.

  • You're basically asking people who have real,

  • material working experience, for their honest opinion.

  • And we do that really aggressively, and

  • what we're trying to

  • figure out is what's this person like to work with?

  • We're not trying to validate like whether they

  • told the truth on their resume,

  • cuz we assume that they're telling the truth.

  • So, very standard questions that I'll ask somebody who's

  • in an interview, I might say, hey,

  • we both know Jonathan in common.

  • I'm gonna talk to him, you know,

  • in a couple weeks, cause we're both social friends.

  • Like if I asked him, what you're the best at, or

  • what you would be most proud of, or

  • what you were kind of working to improve.

  • What would he or she say?

  • Because it sort of tests the level of self awareness, and

  • creates a bit of social accountability.

  • And then I'll try to ask something that makes the

  • question which is typically very soft feel a little bit

  • more quantitative, and then calibrate that over time.

  • So you know,

  • in evaluating this person or this dimension, do you think

  • this is the top 1% of people you've ever worked with?

  • The top 5% and the top 10%?

  • And it forces a scarcity that gives a materially

  • different reference, then if you just say hey,

  • like what's the best thing about John?

  • He told me you know, he's good at these things.

  • Can you validate?

  • And you're like yeah,

  • sure, Cuz they don't gain anything.

  • So I think that's just a tool that people should

  • take seriously.

  • >> Yeah.

  • >> Yeah, and

  • referencing isn't obviously easy to begin with, but

  • it does actually prove really useful over time.

  • And you just have to, people I think especially for

  • named references, people really want to be nice.

  • So you have to do things like create an artificial

  • scarcity by saying you know, where would you rank this

  • person amongst the people you worked within this role?

  • Or, you know,

  • you just splitz out on the enchant of how to reference,

  • but usually I aim to spend, you know,

  • 15 minutes on the phone with that person.

  • Not just let them say, yeah this person is awesome, and

  • then hang up.

  • >> That's also a tremendous source of new recruits.

  • >> Yeah.

  • >> Those references are also a tremendous source of

  • new recruits.

  • What have each of you learned about,

  • once you hire these first people and they joined?

  • What have you done to make them effective quickly?

  • To get them sort of, you know,

  • to the right cultural place, you know?

  • Cuz sort of hiring is usually very difficult, but

  • then not as difficult as making them

  • happy and effective.

  • So what do you do

  • with these early employees to accomplish that?

  • >> Well, ways that it's changed when we've gone from

  • really small to bigger.

  • When we first started,

  • we were generally hiring because we needed

  • that person, like, a long time ago.

  • And so their whole on-boarding was like,

  • here's your computer,

  • we already set up your environment,

  • don't worry about it,

  • this is the problem that we have to solve together.

  • And then because of the nature of the start ups,

  • we were all in this, like, tiny, two bedroom apartment.

  • All of the other things,

  • like building personal relationships,

  • spending time together, getting to know one another,

  • it just all happened.

  • Kind of automatically like,

  • you didn't have to do anything.

  • The one thing that I would add to that is, though,

  • we would always try to remind people of like,

  • where we wanted to go some day.

  • Cuz it's really easy when you first join to drop

  • somebody into a problem, and then they think the whole

  • world is like this little problem in front of them.

  • We'd always say,

  • you know, hey, some day we wanna do for

  • Discovery what Google did for search.

  • This is our plan for trying to get that done.

  • Now as the company, grows I think that process has to

  • get a little bit more formalized.

  • And so we spend a lot of time thinking, and honestly

  • trying to constantly refine what is that person's

  • experience look like from the day they came in,

  • to their very first interview,

  • through 30 days after they joined.

  • Like do they have somebody whose name they know?

  • Do they know who their manager is?

  • Have they sat down with people on their team?

  • Do they know what the general architecture of

  • the company is, and what the top priorities are?

  • And we have a program and it's a week long, and

  • then there are some function specific programs that

  • go in deeper.

  • And that's something that's always been refined.

  • And the alpha metrics that we look on that,

  • it's when we ask people like what did you think

  • afterwards and then 30 days afterwards.

  • And then we also ask their peers and their manager,

  • like hey, is this person kind of up to speed?

  • Do you feel like we've done

  • a good job making them productive?

  • And if we haven't, that's a key A, that, that team

  • shouldn't be hiring anymore people, because they're not

  • doing a good job bringing in new people.

  • And B, that we need to retool that.

  • And so I think those things are important.

  • I just wouldn't discount just how important it is to

  • get to know the person as a person.

  • Like what are their aspirations?

  • What's their working style?

  • How do they like to be recognized?

  • Do they really prefer being in total silence?

  • Are they a morning person or night person?

  • Like knowing those things I think, it just

  • demonstrates that you care about them individually as

  • well as collectively, like what you goals are.

  • >> I think there are two things that are important at

  • any stage through the implementation of a change.

  • The first is to get them up and

  • running, doing real work quickly.

  • Because that's only when you can find the problems,

  • that's how progress is measured,

  • is how much real work they're doing.

  • And so, you know, when we have engineers start,

  • we'll try to get them committing on the first day.

  • When we have people you know,

  • people in business roles start,

  • we will have them in real meetings on the first day,

  • on what they're meant to be working on.

  • But I think sometimes there's a tendency to

  • be tentative, and help ease people in.

  • We're much more of the push people off the cliff school.

  • And then I think the second, is to try and

  • start quickly giving people feedback, and

  • especially feedback on how to adapt to the culture.

  • Because when you think about it, like, you know,

  • if you have built a strong culture as, you know,

  • all the companies up here are trying to,

  • then it's going to take some adapting for the person.

  • It's not going to be necessarily easy, you know?

  • One thing we have at Stripe,

  • is just the culture was a lot more written.

  • And so, you know?

  • You have people who are right next to

  • each other each with headphones on, and

  • just like IM'ing away to each other.

  • And for you know,

  • a lot of people coming in who hadn't worked in

  • an environment like that, it's, it's sort of hard.

  • >> In normal places.

  • >> Exactly. Yeah.

  • And so, everything from kind of high level how you're

  • doing at your job, to kind of minor cultural pointers.

  • The more feedback you can give them,

  • the better they'll do.

  • And it's unnatural.

  • Right? Because it's

  • unnatural to be constantly telling people that

  • they're doing a good or bad job.

  • You don't do that, hopefully,

  • in your normal life, you're more restrained.

  • But when you have employees,

  • that's kind of what you owe them for them to do well.

  • >> So I think this is sort of a good transition too,

  • as your companies have scaled.

  • What are the biggest changes you've had to make to your

  • hiring processes?

  • And also how you sort of manage and

  • run the team, as you've gone from, you know,

  • two to 10 to 100 to 1000 employees?

  • >> There a lot of changes.

  • I mean, I think one thing that we try to do on

  • the team side is, the goal is to make the teams feel as

  • autonomous and nimble as possible within

  • the constraints of having a large organization.

  • And that means over time, that we're always trying to

  • make it feel like a start-up of of many start-ups,

  • rather than this monolithic organization with a set of

  • foreign processes that cut horizontally through it.

  • And it's easier said than done.

  • I think that, like we're not all the way there.

  • But one of our goals is that each team has, they control

  • the resources that they need to get things done,

  • they know what the most important thing is, and

  • how it's measured.

  • And in that way,

  • then the management problem becomes somewhat tractable,

  • otherwise it feels completely impossible if

  • you can't decompose it into autonomous units.

  • Like you just look at it, and you're like, oh my gosh,

  • communication complexity is increasing geometrically.

  • Management complexity,

  • like it's never gonna work, and so

  • you have to sort of create these abstracted units, or

  • that's at least what we're gonna try to do.

  • And at Pinterest in particular, the real

  • challenge of creating those abstracted units is.

  • We want to actually have

  • units that encompass a super-strong designer,

  • a super-strong leader in engineering, often a writer,

  • often sometimes like a community manager.

  • We want them all to be self-contained.

  • And so that makes the problem really hard,

  • but that's kind of core to our philosophy of how we

  • build products.

  • We try to put people together that have all of

  • these different disciplines.

  • They're curious about lots of things.

  • And then we anchor them on a single project and then we

  • try to remove barriers to let them go fast.

  • When we find new barriers, we sit down and

  • we think, how do we speed that up?

  • I think hiring is a little bit different.

  • And I think the biggest change and

  • the biggest asset that you get as you get more

  • people is referrals become like more and more and

  • more and more the life blood depending on

  • the network of all the people that you bring in.

  • So one of the really lucky,

  • and in hindsight, great decisions that we made, was

  • actually the 14th or 15th person that we hired was

  • a professional recruiter and she had worked at start-ups.

  • She had worked at big companies like Apple.

  • But she knew where that pipeline breaks down,

  • knew the early indicators, and

  • taught everyone not just how to screen for talent, but

  • how scalably to identify the people that are gonna be

  • culturally, really good for the company.

  • And I think looking back on that,

  • it's something that I personally really value.

  • >> You know, there's just a huge amount of

  • stuff here, right?

  • In that I guess,

  • this is all under kinda the rubric of managing growth.

  • And either your company fails very quickly or all of

  • your problems become in some way about managing growth.

  • One thing that I think tends to take people by surprise,

  • and certainly took me by surprise,

  • is kind of how quickly just like the time

  • horizon has changed.

  • In that, in your first month you're largely thinking

  • about things maybe one month ahead, right?

  • In that, maybe that's kind of

  • what your development road map is oriented around,

  • even in terms of who you're working with.

  • Maybe it's like,

  • informal relationships where they haven't fully committed

  • to remain full time or whatever, right?

  • And then, the more time goes by,

  • I think that kind of has a reciprocal, or

  • corresponding increase in the time horizons.

  • After one year, you're kind of thinking one year ahead.

  • After four years, you're thinking four years ahead.

  • But that increases very quickly, right?

  • And so after you know,

  • it's after one month, it's again, super short term.

  • And then just 11 months later you should now

  • actually be thinking and planning a year ahead, and

  • thinking about human structures on

  • that time horizon.

  • Thinking about the stuff Ben talked about, like where you

  • want to be going long term and things like that.

  • I think that also plays into your hiring and

  • the kinds of people you hire, right?

  • In that in the really early days you kind of

  • have to hire people who will be productive,

  • essentially immediately.

  • You don't have the luxury of hiring people who are really

  • promising, but they're not quite gonna be up to

  • speed for another year or two.

  • They have to be able to contribute immediately.

  • But after two or three years, now it starts to get

  • much more reasonable to make those investments and

  • in fact, if you're not making those investments,

  • you're probably being much too short term.

  • And so I think that's really important.

  • And a lot of it also just comes from

  • all these problems in some sense are easy,

  • like how do you build good social bonds between people?

  • I mean, we all do it every day, right?

  • It's kind of, how do you make it systematic and

  • effective at scale?

  • It's always a very severely imperfect approximation of

  • what you would ideally do if you were small, and

  • what hacks can you pull to make it work as well as

  • you possibly can at a larger scale.

  • Like a rapidly growing company,

  • say growing headcount here, two or

  • three x a year, it is a very unnatural thing.

  • And so it's, what's the least bad way of sort of

  • managing that period of growth?

  • Human organizations aren't designed for

  • it and I think it's worth being quite systematic about

  • thinking about ways to do that.

  • But realizing that you probably can't do

  • much better than adequation.

  • You know, for Stripe, it's things like we

  • have three meals every day at sort of

  • long tables where everyone can sit together, right?

  • And if you think of net, how much more total human

  • interaction happens as a result of having these kind

  • of randomly mixed meals, it's vast, right?

  • And it's kind of a whole list of things like that.

  • But, I think that's kind of the general framework.

  • >> One thing I'm really curious about you guys value

  • transparency.

  • How have you scaled it over time?

  • I know we think about figuring it out all

  • the time, just curious.

  • >> So you know, start-ups, I can't remember who it was,

  • defined it as a, start-up is an organization that's not

  • yet stuck with all of these principle agent problems.

  • That at most large companies,

  • what is locally optimal for you is very frequently not

  • what is globally optimal for the company.

  • And so there are, as a consequence of that,

  • probably a lot of ways in which a start-up can

  • work differently to a big company.

  • At a big company, a lot of the things that are good for

  • you, well, you couldn't do them in

  • a completely transparent environment, right?

  • Because people would think less of you or

  • you're doing things you're not supposed to.

  • But because everyone is kind of sailing in the, or

  • rowing in the same direction at a start-up, you can

  • actually just make all of the information transparent.

  • And so, I guess I mentioned earlier, Stripe used to BCC

  • every other person at Stripe on basically every single

  • outgoing email unless you opted out of it, because we

  • thought that would be much more efficient.

  • You wouldn't need to have as many meetings,

  • if you just kind of keep abreast of what's happening.

  • And over time we've sort of built an increasingly

  • intricate framework of mailing lists and

  • we now have a program for generating Gmail filters.

  • And for like a pretty rocky patch where 50 people or

  • so, to Ben's point of like, asking people how they're

  • getting on after the first couple of days.

  • They're reported terribly because like they couldn't

  • even find all the emails that people were sending to

  • them and they were missing things and everything.

  • >> Gmail broke at one stage.

  • >> Oh, right, at one point Gmail broke because we

  • were just like sending too much email.

  • It is hard to scale, because I mean,

  • you might contact somebody outside of the company with

  • like some great idea, and maybe the person

  • sitting across the way from you thinks that's like

  • the stupidest idea they've ever heard, right?

  • And you're kind of subject to the scrutiny of

  • the entire organization, to some degree,

  • with all of your communication.

  • Like kind of the challenging side of it.

  • Then the good side is people are much more informed about

  • what's happening.

  • I guess I don't feel that I can give much

  • stronger endorsement of it than it has worked so far.

  • >> That's a pretty good endorsement.

  • >> Yeah, I'm actually really curious how or whether it'll

  • work when we're 5,000 people or something like that.

  • If we're ever at that scale.

  • >> I think the two things that have

  • helped us scale it are one, changing the tools and

  • two, developing the culture around it.

  • And so on the tools front, you know,

  • used to be the case, or the infrastructure, it

  • used to be the case that you could keep abreast by what's

  • happening in the company by reading all the email.

  • Now we have weekly all-hands sometimes on the deck,

  • and we actually have to put all this work into

  • developing a deck to, to communicate to people what's

  • going on in the company, since there's so much more.

  • And the second is on the cultural side, so much

  • information being available internally, you have to

  • develop cultural norms around how it's treated.

  • Obvious things like the fact that a lot of

  • it's confidential to Stripe.

  • But even less obvious things like when emailing someone

  • or talking in Slack or

  • IRESE, when that is viewed by now 170 people,

  • it's pretty easy to get stage fright.

  • And it's, it's pretty easy for what you thought was

  • a reasonable proposal, you get this drive-by criticism.

  • And you're now less likely to share in the future.

  • And so, we've had to create norms around when it's

  • reasonable to jump into discussions and

  • how that interaction works.

  • Because people are on the stage so much more.

  • >> I'm pretty sure it's not good,

  • but, not to put her on the spot but

  • Emily interned at Stripe this summer.

  • I'm curious, like,

  • as an intern, what you thought of it?

  • >> I think, overall, it's great.

  • I think, like, my first week,

  • I spent most of the time reading Hackpad and

  • getting caught up on what the company was doing.

  • It can often be quite distracting,

  • from your own work, as there are oftentimes other parts

  • of the company you're really interested in.

  • >> Hackpad, by the way, is like Google Docs, but

  • with a news feed and

  • that way you can just like see all the documents.

  • >> Yeah, and you're encouraged to make

  • everything public, everything you work on.

  • But overall, it gets you spun up really quickly.

  • And we also have things called spin ups where

  • every single leader of a team at the company,

  • whether it's sys or it's product gives like a 30

  • minute talk on what their team is currently doing and

  • how you can contribute, if you're interested.

  • >> Do you think email transparency was net good?

  • >> Yes I remember having a hard time understanding what

  • I should and should not subscribe too.

  • And the first week having 2,000 emails in my inbox and

  • then by the end there are three of four teams you

  • actually want that information coming in from.

  • >> All right, audience questions.

  • Yes.

  • >> So this question for Patrick and John.

  • Is it your experience that your early hires begin to

  • grow and

  • evolve into leadership roles as the company scales?

  • And a question for

  • Ben, how is the difference, what difference is today?

  • How is a difference in your initial bid run of

  • the product and the audience would be?

  • >> All right, we'll go first on.

  • The people, actually all three of you are welcome to

  • answer this, have the people that you

  • hired early been able to grow into leadership roles?

  • >> In the Stripes case, yes, in that quite a number of

  • the first ten people are in leadership roles now.

  • I think that's one thing that organizations, again

  • it's an unnatural skill that they have to get good at,

  • is realizing that people don't necessarily come out

  • of the womb being good at managing or being good at

  • leadership and being able to develop that in people, and

  • being able to help people progress as

  • they spend a number of years at the company.

  • It's a lot of work at a time when everyone is running

  • around with their hair on fire, but it's also damaging

  • if the company can't develop that skill.

  • >> Yeah, I think for

  • us the answer is some yes and some no.

  • I think one of the big benefits of

  • working at a start-up is that you can be

  • handed a challenge that no one else would be

  • crazy enough to give you the opportunity to take on.

  • And that could managing people.

  • It could be taking on a project.

  • But the implicit contract with that is that if

  • your going to ask somebody to take a really big risk on

  • that, it shouldn't be like one-way through the door and

  • if you don't succeed,

  • otherwise it creates fright to give it a shot.

  • So we have some folks that are managing large teams

  • that started as individual programmers, where they were

  • engineering and they said hey, I would love to try.

  • I'd love to try leading a project and

  • then leading a group and

  • then taking responsibility for

  • management, taking a group.

  • And we've had other folks that tried it and

  • they were like, I'm really glad I tried it because I

  • never wanna do that again.

  • We try to make sure that, for those people, like you

  • can have just as much impact at a company through your

  • individual contributions as an engineer or designer.

  • You don't have to manage.

  • But it's really hard to

  • predict until you give people a shot.

  • And so my strong preference is that you give as many

  • people a shot as possible, in the few areas where you

  • really feel like there's too much learning curve relative

  • to the business objective you're trying to achieve.

  • That's when you look for somebody who might be able

  • to walk in and really execute well in that job.

  • Are you going to answer the other question?

  • >> Oh, so the question was

  • how has the vision changed since we initially started?

  • >> Yes, >> Sure,

  • well I think on the vision, when we first started,

  • I think we started hiring very inductively.

  • We were like, oh, we're

  • gonna build this really cool tool.

  • People are gonna enjoy it.

  • I love collecting things.

  • Maybe other people like collecting things.

  • And what we didn't expect,

  • that kind of revealed itself early on,

  • was that looking at other people's collections turns

  • out to be this really amazing way to discover

  • things that you didn't know you were looking for.

  • It becomes kind of a solution to a problem that

  • a lot of other technologies don't have.

  • And so, over the last couple years especially,

  • we've poured enormous kind of technical and design

  • resources into building out recommendations products,

  • search products, feed products.

  • Leveraging the unique data that we have which

  • are these pins that were all hand-picked by someone and

  • hand-categorized.

  • And then on the audience side, the first big

  • surprise was truthfully when we first started,

  • we didn't really know if anyone would use it.

  • And we were just happy that anybody that wasn't related

  • to us and

  • obligated by familial relationship would use it.

  • And so one of the biggest surprises has been how many

  • people and how diverse those groups of people have been.

  • I think that's been one of

  • the things that's really exciting.

  • And, the funny thing is,

  • that is often like the company goes farther along,

  • your aspirations therefore get bigger.

  • So there's this gap that always exists,

  • I tell my team, between where we are and

  • where I think we should be, and

  • even though objectively, we're much farther along,

  • I feel like the gap has widened even farther.

  • But I think that's a really common trait among

  • people who found companies.

  • >> Yes?

  • >> You said that like,

  • while selling a vision of the company you had to

  • describe and

  • go into detail that how hard it is going to be.

  • And like they won't see their families for

  • three years but then they will also get a thing that

  • their grandchildren can be proud of.

  • But how do you really know?

  • Both of you know that the second part is

  • not guaranteed but the first part,

  • if they're not gonna see their family for

  • the next year, it's gonna be a different show.

  • So like, how can you be authentic by selling that

  • vision of the company or is it about giving high returns

  • for the high risk they are taking when the number of

  • equity that already >> Great question.

  • So the question is,

  • most start-ups are not the iPhone.

  • You can't guarantee that people's grandchildren

  • are gonna remember this because most start-ups fail.

  • How do you convince people to sort of

  • make sacrifices to join a start-up?

  • >> I think, part of the way in which it resonates with

  • people is because it's not guaranteed, right?

  • If it were guaranteed then it'd be boring.

  • And so it's that there is the prospect of affecting

  • this outcome, but nothing more than that potential.

  • To the not seeing their families or

  • kids, start-ups often do involve longer hours in

  • the beginning, but I think, well.

  • I, I think that that particular story is

  • probably somewhat overstated.

  • I guess, it was, I think

  • Scott Forestall was trying to recruit these people.

  • But I mean, even though startups,

  • especially in the earlier days,

  • tend to involve somewhat longer working hours.

  • I think it was kind of this tendency to,

  • to exaggerate it.

  • And sort of,

  • I mean it's like the startup version of fishing.

  • Like, every startup thinks they worked even more insane

  • hours than, you know,

  • the next one back in the early days.

  • Like, we literally never sleep or slept rather,

  • for two years.

  • So I don't know.

  • I think that realistically for most people,

  • it's not that big a sacrifice, right?

  • You're, maybe on average, being really realistic about

  • it, you'll work two hours more on average per day.

  • It's certainly a sacrifice, but

  • it is not forgoing all you know, pleasure and

  • enjoyment for the next half decade.

  • >> Yeah, I mean, I think even the iPhone

  • wasn't the iPhone before it got done, right?

  • I mean, no smart person you're hiring is

  • under the illusion that you have a crystal ball into

  • the future that only you have, and

  • that joining is a guaranteed thing.

  • And in fact, if you're telling him that and

  • they select in, you probably shouldn't hire them.

  • Because they,

  • they didn't pass like a basic intelligence test

  • about uncertainty in the future.

  • But I, but I think it's fair to say, like you know,

  • what's exciting and where you think you can go, and

  • where it's going to be hard and chart your best plan.

  • And then tell them why their role in it can be

  • instrumental, because it is.

  • You know I really liked what you said.

  • You know, if you tell people like hey we're gonna go

  • to Mars, it attracts the best people and

  • then you're incrementally closer to getting to Mars.

  • And they know that going in.

  • What I would discourage doing is

  • just whitewashing all of that.

  • And if people kind of are joining because they want

  • sort of oh, I want all this certainty and guarantee of

  • working at Google, plus like the perk of working in

  • a small start up and more email, and transparency.

  • Like that's, that's a really,

  • really negative sign.

  • And for

  • example, when I interview people they'll often say oh,

  • I'm really passionate at what you're doing, and

  • then I'm like well, what else are you interviewing?

  • And then they'll just list seven companies that have

  • nothing to do with each other except they're sort of

  • at the same stage we're at.

  • They're like, you know,

  • I love the problem of discovery, so

  • I'm interviewing at Stripe, Dropbox, Airbnb, Uber.

  • Now I'm also putting into my resumé into Google X,

  • into that part of the division.

  • And that's a sign that they're probably not

  • being authentic with which they care about.

  • >> Yeah.

  • >> And those folks often, when things get really hard,

  • they won't stick it out and work through it.

  • Because they were really signing up for

  • an experience, not for achieving a goal.

  • >> I think the other thing that motivates people

  • a great deal, in addition to the prospect of sort of

  • them you know, affecting some outcome is just sort of

  • the personal development angle.

  • And that a start up,

  • just because it's much, kind of more lightly staffed.

  • It's much less forgiving, right?

  • In that, like,

  • even if you're the best person in the world,

  • if you're not going to.

  • Well, whether or not you're the best or

  • the worst person in the world, you're probably not

  • going to significantly alter Google's trajectory, right?

  • Whereas if you sort of,

  • really wanted to benchmark yourself, and

  • see how much a contribution and an impact you can make.

  • And I think that prospect is quite compelling to a lot of

  • the best people, then a start up is

  • a much better place to, to go test that.

  • >> All right.

  • >> Last question, who'd you want?

  • Last question.

  • So this question is for

  • Ben, but you guys can all answer it.

  • But how has your user base effected your

  • hiring strategies?

  • So Pinterest is a site that's used like 80% by

  • women, so

  • how did that effect your initial hiring decisions?

  • >> How has your user base effected your

  • hiring strategy?

  • >> Yes, so, You know,

  • conventional wisdom is like you only hire people that

  • religiously use your product every single day.

  • And that probably works really well if

  • you're making an API, probably amazing.

  • For us, we screen for people that are ambitious and

  • excited about the vision of cracking discovery online.

  • And they have to know exactly how

  • our service works and have to have used it.

  • But they may not be a lifelong user.

  • And that, for us it's this great opportunity because we

  • can be like, what is the barrier that's

  • preventing you from using it?

  • Come join, remove that barrier,

  • and help us get closer to that vision.

  • I don't know, there's a lot of,

  • if you read any sort of book, there's all this

  • startup wisdom that sounds like really reasonable.

  • But it's only useful if it works in

  • your particular circumstance.

  • And so for us, we've had to sort of

  • broaden the lens a little bit in looking broadly about

  • people that are ambitious about the mission.

  • That care about the product and

  • our approach to building products,

  • even if from day one, they weren't our earliest users.

  • >> The one thing I'll just tack on to that is that when

  • we talked about the fact that, you know,

  • it's really hard to hire for those early employees.

  • And you know, you have people who have

  • other good options.

  • You're very much at the ugly duckling stage.

  • Finding people who are passionate about your

  • product can be a great way to find people.

  • Because there you kind of have an unnatural advantage

  • over other companies.

  • And so I know, for

  • sure, in Stripe's case, we definitely, we hired I think

  • it was four Stripe users in the very early days.

  • And you know, those were people who,

  • who we probably couldn't have gotten otherwise.

  • I'm sure it was the same in Pinterest's case,

  • where you'll get all this benefit of working at

  • Pinterest and hey, it's Pinterest.

  • And you get to work where you pin.

  • Yeah.

  • >> Thank you guys very much for coming in today.

  • >> Thank you.

Part two of Culture and Team, and

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第11講--招聘與文化,第二部分(Patrick和John Collison,Ben Silbermann)。 (Lecture 11 - Hiring and Culture, Part 2 (Patrick and John Collison, Ben Silbermann))

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