How I negotiated a software-engineering job offer in Silicon Valley

I had job offers to work as a software engineer at Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, LinkedIn, and Yelp. Here’s how I negotiated them.
Article word count: 4163

HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19057514
Posted by sanj (karma: 5526)
Post stats: Points: 99 - Comments: 102 - 2019-02-01T19:22:52Z

\#HackerNews #how #job #negotiated #offer #silicon #software-engineering #valley

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Article content:




[1]Go to the profile of Bay Area Belletrist
What if I told you… that negotiating isn’t as scary as it sounds?

You’re almost finished with the long grind of interviewing. You’re almost free of the stress associated with interviewing at big tech companies. You’re practically envisioning sending off a final “I’ll sign” email.

But you’re not quite there yet.

There’s one last hurdle to clear: negotiating an offer.

You’ve shown that you can interview, but how well can you close a deal?

[2]Late last year I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days, and stumbled into six job offers. I had one last task to make sure my work wasn’t in vain. Here are the principles I had, the rules I followed, and what I did to negotiate an offer worth $100,000/year more than I planned on.

First, some assumptions on my part:
\* Your mileage may vary. I’m obviously not stating that everything I went through is easily reproduced. I am using it as a backdrop to color some advice that I think anyone totally new to this to keep in mind.
\* You have offers, plural. This can be two or this can be ten, but you need to have more than one offer concurrently. I’ve negotiated on behalf of (many) friends in the past with no leverage, but I’m not going to focus on that scenario.
\* You’re not afraid to negotiate. The night before my Google interview I spoke with another candidate in my hotel. His strategy was to low-ball himself to increase his chances of getting an offer. That’s not the path that I took, it’s not a path I’d advocate, and it’s not one I’m going to even entertain. You should always be willing to see what you can get.
\* You won’t practice the Dark Arts of Negotiation™. I’m pretty sure you can negotiate by lying your way through the process. From a moral perspective, though, c’mon. From a practical perspective, getting caught in a lie is not going to help you.
\* You won’t renege on an offer. Could I have squeezed a bit more out of the eventual offer I signed if I had? Maybe. But I’m not comfortable accepting an offer and later rejecting it. I’m sure other candidates do it and I don’t think it gets you banned from the Valley. It’s just not something I wanted to do.
\* You’re willing to work at any of the companies if the price is right. I definitely had a personal ranking of which companies I’d prefer over each other, but each company had a chance. No one was just there to beef up offers.
\* I’m going to both anonymize the companies I negotiated with and fuzz their numbers. My goal is not to answer “how much does MegaCorp offer if you have competing offers.” My goal is to answer “how do I respectfully ask for a larger comp package?” for people that don’t know where to start. The total compensation for each offer is accurate (within 5%).
\* You’re starting at square one. I give my personal experience in this article and some examples of conversations I’ve had when negotiating. I don’t draw on decades of experience with very in-depth detail. I link some pieces at the end that are more suited towards that type of read.
Congrats! You have multiple interviews. I’m sure you’re nervous. I’m sure you’re telling yourself you don’t deserve it, that you got lucky. You think you’re going to fail miserably. The last thing on your mind is how to talk numbers with recruiters.

Chill out. We all go through that! 🙂

It’s understandable. But you don’t want to shoot your future self in the foot. There’s only a few things you need to keep in mind at this point, anyway.

My first major piece of advice: do not make this process adversarial.

I’ve read a lot of people that view this very cynically.

It’s us against them.

Candidate versus recruiter.

You’re trying to extract the absolute most out of a company and they’re trying to cheat you out of the most they can. Right?

I bet you didn’t know that Google recruiters wore capes, did you?

Wrong. This may be the case sometimes, I guess, but that mindset will not lend itself to a healthy negotiating phase. I had very good relationships with my recruiters and in the end it paid off. Maybe it would have gone better if I were more aggressive or lied to them. I won’t ever know how that alternative universe played out. But I do know that I have no regrets about it all. I’m confident I could ping any of those recruiters to kick off the process again. Also, recruiters are people, too. 😅 Be nice!

Next, make it clear throughout the process that you’re interviewing elsewhere. This is critical to make sure that your offers are overlapping. I had to deal with one exploding offer. I had to pass on because the company refused to move the deadline. It took a piece of leverage away from me. If I didn’t let everyone know about my situation I may have lost even more.

It’s up to you if you want to disclose where you’re interviewing. I would share it you think it’s “impressive”. Keep in mind that you should be proud of interviewing anywhere. You’ll have more leverage, though, if you don’t remove the possibility of a Google. My recruiters were very respectful about asking. Companies understand that who you talk to is your business and only theirs if you decide it is. With that said — the threat of getting (and signing) an offer elsewhere is fantastic leverage for everything from scheduling to getting an offer.

Alright, it’s the moment of truth. You’re going to hear how you did. 😱

My recruiters all opted to deliver the news over the phone. Nearly every call followed the same pattern:
Do you have any updates from other companies? Do you have a range you’re expecting from us? How does something in the neighborhood of $package sound? What do you think?
Pretty much anything you read will say never give a range. I mostly agree with that, but sometimes it makes sense to give something. It takes some experience and familiarity with comp packages to do so comfortably. I only gave the first numbers to one or two companies and it was because I was familiar enough with the companies to know they would come in around $50k/yr lower than other offers I had.

I would never give a range to a company that sends out sky-high offers. With that said, I’m not going to waste a back-and-forth cycle with a recruiter when I know they’re not going to come close to an existing offer. Recruiters won’t want to go back-and-forth and back-and-forth writing up new offers for you. If they won’t be close, let them know where the range is going to start. Wasting time waiting on a non-competitive offer isn’t advantageous to anyone.

That being said, if you are dealing with a company whose budget is infinite, be smart. [3]Levels.fyi is the best resource I’ve seen (far better than Glassdoor) when it comes to learning what’s typically offered. Shoot for the sky and never, ever assume you can’t get a top offer. Watch the situation play out and be willing to adapt to it. I ended up getting far, far more than I ever though a company would offer me, and a lot of that is due to never anchoring myself mentally to a “top value”. 👍

Trust me, recruiters will do their best to limit your offer. You don’t need to help them out!

Never sound “giddy”. Remain measured, even if you’re confident you’d accept an offer. It’s a lot to take in on the phone — especially if it’s an offer that surpasses what you ever expected — and you’re probably not thinking straight. Always think on any package for awhile.

Make it clear you won’t accept an offer until you hear back from everyone. In my experience, recruiters understood. I made it clear I would like to go to any of the companies I was interviewing at. I definitely had a dream company throughout the process, but that wasn’t really anyone’s business but my own. 🙂

I don’t see actual examples of things to actually say in these situations. I’ll provide here what it sounded like for me. That should help those that don’t know where to start. Don’t follow this as a script (because that’s weird and unnatural), but this is the sort of thing I would say to remain respectful and open to negotiate. Let’s assume the offer you’ve heard is something you might sign (that is, it meets your bar to go work there):
Recruiter: So, what do you think?

You: That’s an interesting offer. I think it’s probably in the ballpark, but it’s not something I’m going to sign right now. I’m going to wait until I hear back from the other places I’m speaking to.
In the above, you let your recruiter know that they’re “in the running”, but that it’s not enough to blow you away. You’re respectful but firm. This is the blueprint for how your discussions should go.

Don’t give away more information than you need to, don’t be aggressive, and don’t give numbers if it doesn’t make sense. The above is all honest, too, so you don’t need to worry about getting caught in a lie. Essentially, you’re trying to maintain good standing with your recruiters and avoid getting into the nitty-gritty until you have all of your offers on the table. That’s the fun part!

So, you’ve got numbers from everyone that you’re considering. Now you can start counter-offering based on what information you have. When I counter-offered, I never used solid numbers — I gave ranges. I don’t like the idea of committing to a solid number until the very end.

There’s a few reasons for this:
\* For one, giving a solid number feels weird; why is $120,000 acceptable, but $119,000 is a bit low? I’d much rather present that as “somewhere between $120,000 and $140,000”. It also leaves room for a company to move upward if you keep things a bit in the dark. Note that once you have numbers from a company it makes a lot more sense to be more explicit in what you’re looking for.
\* To me, there’s an implication when giving a solid number that it’s “the one.” If a company can hit “your number”, you’ve lost out on the chance to negotiate much more unless more offers coming in. Companies can still hit your number if they offer the top of your range; keep that in mind. If you give a $5,000 range, don’t be surprised if companies meet your demands and expect to get a signed offer.
Some may object to how I presented the above, as recruiters have a lot of flexibility. You can always give a number, have them match it, and then ask for higher. I’m not denying that. But it was a goal throughout my negotiations to keep on very good standing with my recruiters and it paid off very well in the end.

I definitely looked this cool while negotiating.

My initial counter-offers sounded something like this (I made up the numbers here and provide a few examples):
Bar, Inc.: We were thinking of offering a base salary of around $120,000 with a four-year RSU package of $150,000 and a signing bonus of $10,000. What do you think of that?

Me: How flexible is Bar, Inc. on equity? I’m really looking to stay and grow at a company, and equity is something I really interested in wherever I go. I’m comfortable with something in the neighborhood of $120,000 on base, but I’d definitely like to sign an offer with a larger equity package.

FooCorp: We were thinking of offering a base salary of around $100,000 with a four-year RSU package of $150,000 and a signing bonus of $10,000. What do you think of that?

Me: I think the base is a little bit lower than what I’d like based on my offer from Bar, Inc. for $120,000, and base salary is really important to me. As for the equity package, I was looking for something closer to $200,000. The signing bonus is around what I was looking for.
There’s a lot of actionable information above for a recruiter without you giving any implicit commitment to any number. FooCorp knows they need to get to $120,000 to meet your other offer. Bar knows that equity is important to you, and equity is something that companies tend to move a lot more willingly. You now have two companies moving in tandem to get a better offer to you and neither of them is talking to each other. This is pretty much how you want this entire process to go.

It makes sense to change an established range once another company ups the ante. This is how that discussion went for me:
Me: Hey, I finally heard back from Baz LLC. Their offer came in a lot higher than I was expecting. They offered $150,000 in base, $200,000 in stock, and $40,000 in signing. That being said I think the work FooCorp aligns more closely with my interests, so I’d really like to make something work with you guys. Can we do what we can to get to those numbers? I’d love to figure this out.

FooCorp: Wow, that’s a good offer. Keep in mind FooCorp is {making the world a better place / has amazing potential / is better for your career} and I would hope you wouldn’t be deciding based on a paycheck. I don’t know if we can match that offer exactly, but I’ll see what we can do.
I went through the above sample conversations so many times and they all went pretty similarly.

They always sounded very doubtful about moving their numbers. They always said it was more than they would typically give up.

They always explained why their company’s mission and culture made up for the difference in comp.

But almost always, they upped the package.

Sometimes they’ll match it. Sometimes they won’t. Sometimes they’ll come close enough that you’ll pull the trigger because it’s such an exciting opportunity. You should always give it a shot, though.

I’m including this because lots of people have pinged me about it. I don’t know how much people can take away from it, but I’ll put it out there anyway. I’ll include what tips I can.

I was able to get ballpark numbers from every company before I disclosed any numbers. Here they are, anonymized and randomized. The format is base salary+bonus / 4yr stock package / signing bonus.
Alpha: 180k / 150k / 0k (218k/yr)

Bravo: 180k / 200k / 30k (238k/yr)

Charlie: 140k / 180k / 30k (193k/yr)

Delta: 160k / 220k / 50k (228k/yr)

Echo: 160k / 200k / 30k (218k/yr)

Foxtrot: 165k / 210k / 30k (225k/yr)
I thought it was pretty interesting how closely most of the numbers aligned despite not being able to see each other’s initial offers. That must be the going rate… or something.

Anyway, once I had all of the offers, it was time for constant communication for me. I called my least-favorite offer and told them what the best offer was and asked them to close the gap as much as possible. Once those numbers moved, I talked to more companies. I usually had daily or every-other-day update calls with my recruiters, and they sounded like this:
Bravo: Any updates from your end?

Me: Yeah, I was able to get some preliminary numbers from Foxtrot. They were thinking somewhere in the ballpark of $225k TC, but Delta says they will comfortably beat that. I wasn’t blown away by the offer, but given Delta’s position on it, that’s probably the low end of what I’ll end up signing.

Bravo: Great, thanks so much for sharing that. I’ll talk to the team and see what I can do. We’d love to have you!
Alpha refused to negotiate and refused to move their deadline, so they were out of the running pretty quickly.

Once everyone had a chance to move their numbers, it looked like this:
Bravo: 180k / 220k / 75k (254k/yr; +16k)

Charlie: 140k / 200k / 30k (198k/yr; +5k)

Delta: 160k / 220k / 50k (228k/yr; no movement)

Echo: 160k / 250k / 30k (230k/yr; +12k)

Foxtrot: 180k / 240k / 30k (248k/yr; +18k)
More rinse and repeat. My goal was to whittle down the offers once I had things moving in the direction I wanted. It was a logistical nightmare keeping up with six companies during this. It was also becoming clearer that there was a gap that some companies couldn’t overcome.

I also had a lot more time to think about company culture and perks/benefits, so certain companies began to pull away from each other. I didn’t formally reject any offers until I signed my final offer, but mentally, I wrote off a few of the companies and stopped negotiating with them. I just asked them for a few more days to decide.

Recruiters constantly told me they couldn’t up their packages anymore, but inevitably, they always did. I’m sure a ceiling exists and I’m sure it’s rarer to get number past a certain point, but it was dangerously close to a lie to continuously tell me they couldn’t go any higher (“you don’t have the experience”) and then watch them up their offer by 10%. Part of doing business, I guess. 🤷‍️

After another round of negotiation (and a few days), it was down to three:
Bravo: 180k / 250k / 75k (261k/yr; +23k/yr from initial)

Delta: 170k / 250k / 50k (245k/yr; +17k/yr from initial)

Foxtrot: 180k / 250k / 50k (248k/yr; +18k/yr from initial)
At this point, it had been something like a week and a half of negotiation, and this after months of interviews/prep. I was so ready to be done. I had decided based on product, culture, pay, perks, benefits, reputation that it was between Bravo and Delta.

Delta wanted me to give a final number and commit to it. They were extremely insistent that I provide one.

I told them to give me a few hours and called my recruiter from Bravo.

I explained that Bravo had a lot that I respected more than Delta, but that Delta wanted me to verbally commit to a number to move forward.

I was going to work at Bravo or Delta. They were offering similar packages, but I didn’t know how high I could push Delta on the last counter. I also wasn’t comfortable playing that game.

Break in case of emergency

Everyone gets one last ask. You’ve been building up to a point where you get to launch your most powerful salvo — use it wisely.

For me, this was that moment. It was time.

I asked Bravo to up their package by a meager $5k yearly in stock (a very small ask in retrospect…), something companies are far more flexible on. I said if they could do that, I would sign and be confident I didn’t leave too much on the table. He said he’d get back to me and that he was confident we could work something out.

Bravo’s recruiter emailed back and said he worked out a new package for me and wanted to run it by me over the phone. I already knew at this point that if he met my ask (180k / 270k / 70k, TC 265k) that I would sign right then and there. I’d thought long and hard about this last little dance.
Bravo: I heard back and got approval for a new offer and I wanted to see what you thought. We’d like to offer you a {salary + annual bonus} of $180,000. In addition to that, we would like to offer $400,000 in RSUs that vest over four years. Lastly, I was able to get approval for a $90,000 {signing bonus + relocation expenses} package. That would put your four-year compensation package at around $1,210,000, or an annual compensation package of around $300,000. What do you think?
Uh, what do I think? What do you think I think?
Me: Yeah, I’ll sign that.

Bravo: Really? Awesome!
And that was that. No, there’s no embellishment here. My final ask was for $265k/yr and I was offered around $300k/yr. I don’t know if that was due to the goodwill I had built up with the recruiter or if they were concerned I’d defect. Whatever it was, I’m fine with it. :)

I’m going to summarize a lot of the above in a more digestible way:
\* 🤑 Get multiple offers. Obviously this is way easier said than done, but even if it adds a lot of stress to your life, it certainly pays off. With interviews being quite a bit of a crapshoot, it’s tough. If you want to get a new job, though, don’t put your eggs in one basket and do what you can to try to get at least two offers.
\* 🙊 Don’t lie. I wasn’t personally asked to provide evidence of other offers, but my friends definitely have been. It’s not worth it to lie, especially when your candidate profile is saved at various companies. Good luck getting into a company that catches you.
\* 🤗 Be kind and respectful. Recruiters are people, too. They’re also the people that act as the path for you getting into your dream company. You don’t need to schmooze them, but be friendly. Help them help you! You may have competing philosophies, but both of you want the same thing in the end: a signed offer from their company.
\* 🗣 Be (selectively) communicative. Make it very clear to everyone what your timelines are and if you’re waiting on other companies. Keep people in the loop. We hate getting ghosted by recruiters and I’m sure recruiters hate being ghosted by us. Let them know if you’ve signed another offer or if you’re no longer considering theirs. Let them know if other companies have sent you offers and share the names if you think it’ll help your case.
\* 👎 Don’t give a minimum (unless it makes sense). You don’t want to give a lower number than a company would have offered you, but you also don’t want to waste anyone’s time. If you know a company won’t be competitive at first, let them know what the other company’s range is. If they’re out, they’re out. Your time is better spent talking to companies you’d actually go to.
I imagine this is what whiteboard interviews looked like in the 1950s
\* 🌠 Shoot for the sky. Transparently, my goal was to get a total comp of around $180k. That was the number where I’d quit my current job. I ended up getting over 50% more than that. I didn’t think it was possible for someone with two years of experience to do so. Don’t set a limit in your head of what you can think you can get or it may discourage negotiating.
\* 🚫 Don’t reject an offer until you’ve signed another one. You never know what could happen. You don’t want to leave someone hanging on your decision when there is no way on earth you’d sign their offer. But even if an offer isn’t competitive, you’d still sign it if the other companies lost their headcount. Keep your options open. You earned it.
\* 🤔 Think a lot and whittle down your offers. Over the course of your negotiations you’ll converge on the one or two offers you think are “best”. As that happens, focus your time on the ones that make sense, and don’t waste brain cycles on the ones that don’t.
\* 🤦🏻‍♂️ Bonus: don’t tell teams you’re disinterested in them. I’ve seen people “negotiate” by asking for a larger packages by saying they’re less interested in the company. This sounds like a recipe for disaster — why would you tell a company you don’t want to work for them? Find a new slant.
* 🎉 Everything above worked. The final offer I signed was ~$300,000 in total yearly compensation (over four years, including a variable annual bonus, and amortizing the signing/relo package). I negotiated it up from ~$225,000*, an increase of 33%.
After my previous post, I primarily saw three questions:
\* How did I negotiate?
\* How much was I offered?
\* Which offer did I take?
I answered two of those three here. Maybe you can piece together the rest. I’d rather provide value than advertise for my employer. I don’t want the focus here to be on the decision I made for my life. I’d rather help everyone else get to make the same decision.

There’s also much more in-depth, less-anecdotal pieces I’d recommend reading. There’s [4]this legendary one from [5]Patrick McKenzie and [6]another from [7]Haseeb Qureshi. What you see here is more of a collection of my personal thoughts (and a response to all of the questions I got regarding numbers).

[8]Please follow (and chat with!) me on Twitter if you want to provide feedback or if you have any questions. I’d love to hear if there are other topics you’d like to read about. I’ve been getting a ton of DMs on Twitter and Discord and I’ve tried to help out where possible. I vastly prefer responding on Twitter, though, so if you want to chat, try there first.

Happy negotiating. 😊
\* the initial offer didn’t talk about a relocation package; my guess is I would have received it anyway, so the starting value was likely higher
References

Visible links
1. https://blog.usejournal.com/@bayareabelletrist?source=post_header_lockup
2. https://blog.usejournal.com/i-interviewed-at-six-top-companies-in-silicon-valley-in-six-days-and-stumbled-into-six-job-offers-fe9cc7bbc996
3. http://www.levels.fyi/
4. https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/
5. https://medium.com/@patio11
6. https://medium.freecodecamp.org/ten-rules-for-negotiating-a-job-offer-ee17cccbdab6
7. https://medium.com/@hosseeb
8. https://www.twitter.com/bayareabell

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64 and unemployed: One man's struggle to be taken seriously as a job applicant

David Wimsett's resume is expansive, and potential employers are always keen to meet with him. When they finally do, however, the interviewer's disposition quickly switches from enthusiastic to…
Article word count: 859

HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19022000
Posted by myth_drannon (karma: 4770)
Post stats: Points: 126 - Comments: 86 - 2019-01-28T23:09:10Z

\#HackerNews #and #applicant #job #mans #one #seriously #struggle #taken #unemployed

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Article content:



by David A. Wimsett

Itʼs an unpleasant routine. I send out resumes. I am careful to make sure my details go back only 20 years. There are no dates attached to my education history. Phone calls come. We talk about my background and experience. Some respond enthusiastically. We arrange a physical meeting.

I dress in a suit. My hair is cut in a business style. I rehearse answers to questions I will likely be asked and practice responding in a professional, personable manner.

I arrive. "Hello. I applied for your position as a software project manager." I extend my arm.

The interviewer pauses and looks at me for a moment. "Iʼm the head of human resources. Please sit down."

David Wimsett is from Kentville, N.S., and works every day to find a job. (Submitted by David Wimsett)

They work hard to maintain a blank expression. Theyʼre trained to do that. But I can see past that right away. Their eyelids drop slightly, almost imperceptibly. So do their inner eyebrows. Few would notice. But I am a project manager. Iʼve learned to constantly and carefully observe people to detect subtle, unconscious facial expressions that reveal hidden emotions.

The signs I inevitably get from interviewers are ones of disapproval and disappointment. The decision has already been made: too old. Out of touch with technology and youth. Not with it.

Actually, I am very much with it. Every year, I read the equivalent of a university semesterʼs worth of books and attend seminars to keep up with the industry and its latest trends. As a project manager, I work well with younger colleagues and form effective teams. My experience of nearly four decades allows me to spot patterns and trends to deliver effective solutions through wisdom and good judgment.

This does not seem to matter. I am 64. I am too old.

"Weʼll get back to you," they say. They never do.

I have used all of my savings, including retirement accounts. Iʼve sold everything I own of value. The one asset I have left is a 10-year-old car. It is my only means of transportation to job interviews out of my area. I have extended my credit to pay bills and purchase prescription medications. I am now deeply in debt and behind on payments. I get constant phone calls from the bank.

"I have used all of my savings, including retirement accounts. Iʼve sold everything I own of value," David Wimsett said. (Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press)

"Sir, you are behind on your scheduled payment. When can we expect to see the money?"

"I donʼt have any money I can give you at the moment. I have been unemployed for a long time."

The callerʼs voice takes on a belligerent tone. "You have a contractual agreement to pay a minimum amount every month. When will you make a payment?"

"As I said, I have no income and I donʼt know when I will have any."

Now, the voice become threatening. "If we donʼt see a payment soon we will be forced to send the account to an outside collection service, who will sue you."

"If you do, you will be paying lawyers and getting no money because I have none. But I have an interview next week and they were very enthusiastic on the phone."

A pause comes. The voice returns with authority. "Very well. We will check back in two weeks."

The calls come from a different person each time. I have to repeat the same story over and over. A credit counsellor advised me to be polite and answer truthfully. It takes huge effort to control my anger when callers insinuate that Iʼm hiding money somewhere. I only lost my composure once.

All my efforts are focused on getting work. I subscribe to internet job boards and make contacts every day. It can take hours to craft a custom version of my resume and cover letter to hit all the right points a company has put in its job description. And whatever I write has to get through automatic screening programs that look for keywords before they are ever get into human hands.

I work to nearly midnight, seven days a week, to reach as many people as I can.

Wimsett says the application process always goes well until heʼs face-to-face with an interviewer. (CBC)

Of course, not having a job takes much more than a financial toll. It causes me deep emotional distress. It is highly embarrassing. I donʼt talk to anyone about it. It can sometimes take me half the night to fall asleep while my mind runs over my situation and I search for options. When I do doze off, I sleep for nine or more hours. I question my worth and abilities. The stress is unrelenting. It affects my blood pressure, my heart and my digestion. My usual disposition is positive, but I have felt the smothering claws of depression on more than one occasion.

In my twenties I went through a divorce, at which time I took sole custody of my six-year-old son and raised him on my own. I entered the computer industry. The pay was good and the work steady.

That was then.

I am now 64 years old.

Click "listen" above to hear the essay.

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income without work - Leistungsloses Einkommen für die "have" - kein BGE für die "not have"

Prof Dr Kreiß says that 550 Billion USD/€ are transfered not because someone worked hard, but because someone owned something. (pay without work)

i say, if it is possible just by “owning” something/company/property to make MORE MONEY than if you would work your ass off, than this economic system is funamentally broken and people have every right to demand their independence from it, because then it is just the same as with kings and queens and nobility in the middle-ages.

Prof Dr Kreiß sagt, dass jährlich 550Mrd€ an leistungslosem Einkommen/Renten/Mieten/Gebühren von Arm nach Reich fließt.

Egal wie viel Reich leistet. Reich = die die etwas haben, von denen die nichts haben.

Ich behaupte, wenn es möglich ist, nur mit “NICHTS TUN” d.h. nur mit Besitz Einkünfte zu generieren, dann ist diese (sonst so auf Leistung fixierte und optimierte) DYSFUNKTIONAL/DEFEKT!

… dann ist an diesem Wirtschaftssystem MASSIVE etwas faul, ein KLARES FOUL-SPIEL an der Menschheit.

Wenn andere mit NICHTS TUN MEHR VERDIENEN, wie wiederum andere, welche sich den ARSCH aufreißen, dann sind wir im feudalen Mittelalter.






https://altcoopsys.org/2018/09/28/prof-dr-christian-kreis-10-jahre-finanzkrise-ist-sie-uberwunden-oder-steht-eine-neue-bevor/

\#money #alternative #reform #systems #vollgeld #bge #altcoopsys #alternatives #alternativgeld #OsOfSociety #OperatingSystemsOfSociety #SystemPhilosophy #dinero #dollar #euro #yen #rubel #sustainability #resilience #complementary #complementarycurrency #cooperation #monetaryreform #financialreform #financialsystemreform #financialcrisis #mortagecrisis #debtcrisis #suprimecrisis #occupywallsreet #occupyfrankfurt #finance #geldsystem #geldreform #moneysystem #financialsystem #economics #ecologicaleconomics #economy #capitalism #kapitalismus #system #sklaverei #enslavement #geld #besitzt #property #privatization #privatisierung #nobility #feudalism #king #queen #work #jobs #job #unemployment
Originally posted at: https://altcoopsys.org/2019/01/15/income-without-work-leistungsloses-einkommen-fur-die-have-kein-bge-fur-die-not-have/

The 40M dollar job

Introducing an exclusive extract of Just Fired, my novel currently in progress. The 40 million dollar job is part of a completed chapter. Feel free to subscribe to stay informed.
Article word count: 1759

HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18868312
Posted by ibudiallo (karma: 722)
Post stats: Points: 139 - Comments: 70 - 2019-01-09T20:08:53Z

\#HackerNews #40m #dollar #job #the

---

Article content:



Introducing an exclusive extract of [1]Just Fired, my novel currently in progress. The 40 million dollar job is part of a completed chapter. Feel free to subscribe to stay informed.

I was at my desk wearing headphones that played no music when I heard my name being called. I do not listen to music while I work. In fact, I cannot work while listening to lyrical music. The only reason I wear headphones is to repel those invaders that are so excited about the open office plan. They come to distract you without any warning. Usually a long persistent silence repels them.

I ignored the call and focused my eyes on a single pixel pretending it was the most important thing in the world. A second later, he patted me on the shoulder. I had no choice but to take off my silent headphones and turn to him. It was the VP of Tech, and he needed my help.

"I need your help," he said while handing me a yellow folder containing a resume. "I want you to interview this guy. He passed the test, but I suspect he got some help."

"OK," I said. "Iʼll go through his resume and let you know. Iʼll come to your office after lunch."

"Hmm... Can you just take a quick look right now, he is in Cool Sets waiting."

This was the very first interview I was asked to take part in, I was to evaluate a candidate for his technical skills and I was not prepared. Cool Sets was the smallest of the interview rooms. It was named so after the CEO thought it would be a good idea to have employees come up with names for each meeting room. Cool Sets was once a closet, and we thought it only fair to give it a name that would remind us of its origin.

I took a notebook, and went to the closet where I met Jason. Jason was a man in his late forties and had been recently laid off from his previous job. I come from a culture where you are required to respect your elders. Here I was interviewing a man that was twice my age. I was uncomfortable, but I could clearly see that he was much more uncomfortable than I was.

The job was for a front-end position, which was my expertise. I wanted to make it as short and simple as possible so we can get it over with. Jason struggled. Itʼs not that he didnʼt know the answers, but his hand was shaking when he wrote the code on paper. I reassured him that syntax is not important as long as the general idea is there. He started each question well but then he would just butcher the ending. I thanked him for his time then asked him to wait while I see what was to be the next step.

The VP of Tech was waiting for me at his desk.

"So, should we hire him?" He asked.

"I think he was stressed out, but Iʼm sure with a little refresher he can do just fine." I had not prepared for the interview, I was in no position to deny someone a job. Jason was hired. But to the best of my knowledge, they never let him write a single line of code.

Few months went by and I was asked to update an internal tool. The task was to write a script that would refresh dozens of pages at a random interval. I thought it was a ridiculous task, but a job is a job. I made the update on my machine, but before I deployed it on the server I decided to have a little chat with the people using the tool. There is often a disconnect between people who use the tool and those who develop it, so I wanted to make sure I was not breaking any functionality.

Jason was the main guy using this tool. He was excited to see me and was eager to talk. I sat down next to him and enthusiastically asked him what he was working on.

"Well, I make sure that these website are always working." He opened up the page on his computer where I saw the dozen or so web pages opened in a grid and each loaded. "I refresh the page and see which one of them fails. When a page fails, it turns gray, or sometimes thereʼs a big X, or there is a message that says it failed. Then I find the person responsible for it and send them an email."

"Thatʼs interesting." I replied. When I walked away, I couldnʼt help but replay the scenario in my head. His job was to refresh a page and monitor which website failed. Itʼs like his manager was punishing him. His job was bullshit and my task had been to automate that bullshit. With my new update, he wouldnʼt have to refresh the page anymore, just sit down and watch the screen.

Eventually, someone would write a script that pings each website, read the error code and notify the developers if there is a failure. Very common practice today. And, theyʼd have to find another job for Jason.

Every time I read about Bullshit jobs, I am reminded of Jason. Though, I prefer Alain De Bottonʼs term better: [2]Misemployement. Itʼs not that the people who are misemployed are so unskilled that these jobs are all thatʼs available to them. In fact, it didnʼt take long for me to feel an acute sense of uselessness at my own job.

My bullshit job was nothing like Jasonʼs. I had the important title of Operation Engineer, and the actual work was important. I worked on this project that I will call Floodlight. I was the main developer after the previous lead was assigned to a new secret department. What made my work feel important were the praises from upper management. They often said that we used to pay 40 million dollars a year to run a call center that did a bad job. "But now, with Floodlight, a single engineer is running the show."

When the time came for me to leave the company, in good faith, I gave them a three weeks notice so that the transition would go as smooth as possible. I wanted my absence to be unfelt. The next person would take over without any interruption of work, no one would even notice. It would be like I came back the day after my last, only I will have a different face and a different name. So I documented all my work.

From the time I came in, to the moment I left the premises, I wrote down all the things I did. I left post-it notes on all the hardware I worked on. I left comments on all the applications I worked on. I wrote documents after documents. I wrote about known failures of the system. I wrote about unknown but possible failures. I wrote about the dangers of wanting to upgrade the system.

I presented it all to my manager. I gave her a list of every single task I performed and what a potential hire would need to know to replace me. I called ex-coworkers and asked them if they are open for a job. I probed them and selected the best three potential hires. I gave my manager their information and I left in the best possible terms.

From time to time, these candidates would call me and ask if there were any news.

"Itʼs a large company." I would tell them. "Things happen in a very slow pace here, but they happen. Be patient."

Three months down the line, I am standing in line ordering a coffee and I am patted on the back. Itʼs one of my old teammates. We exchange pleasantries and remember the good old days, [3]before the machine. Then he tells me that as soon as I left, our manager took all my recommendations to the director. The director was not impressed.

"Can we just, um, eliminate that position."

And whisk! The position was eliminated that same day. Itʼs an incredible feeling. Itʼs not the same as getting fired, but it brings up a similar feeling.

I remember the times when I would get calls in the middle of the night about an outage. I would get up and rush to work without brushing my teeth or washing my face. At least once a week, the business team would meet and propose a new tool to perform a new task. Theyʼd invite me to their meeting and I would tell them: "We already have that data. I will add a new page to the current tool to display it."

Just like that, their plans to build a cool promotion inducing application in two to three months was resolved in a day. What could have resulted in tens of thousands of dollars of their budget was now a quick task that would only cost them hundreds of dollars.

I felt I was important in this company. But as soon as I left, they fired my job, turning all my work into a useless cog in the system. In less than a year, "they dismantled the entire department," my recruiter told me. She was now having a hard time placing developers in the company. We laughed about it, but it was a sad laughter. More like a suppressed cry. My department had been lifted clean out of existence.

In work, I had found dignity. But as I navigate through my career, I realize that any job you hold, no matter how important it seems, can be swept from under you at any moment. For me, 40 million dollars was a titanium plaque I hung on my wall of achievements. To this company, it was busy work. They dismantled Floodlight. But to the best of my knowledge the problem it used to solve is still there waiting for a manager in need for a promotion.

The misemployed is aware that his work is unimportant. But he does it anyway because of the salary he gets in exchange. In my career, I have had jobs that didnʼt make the world a better place, but somebody had to do it. But here, I genuinely believed that I was doing important work, though my employer did not think so.

In the true sense of the word, I was misemployed.

Previous: [4]Letʼs learn social media this time

References

Visible links
1. https://idiallo.com/book
2. https://www.theschooloflife.com/thebookoflife/unemployment-down-at-last-misemployment-bad-as-ever/
3. https://idiallo.com/blog/when-a-machine-fired-me
4. https://idiallo.com/blog/social-media-problem-to-solve-2019

HackerNewsBot debug: Calculated post rank: 116 - Loop: 150 - Rank min: 100 - Author rank: 22

Benchmark’s Scott Belsky has four magic words for entrepreneurs: ‘Do your fucking job’

#belsky #benchmark #entrepreneurs #four #fucking #job #magic #scott #words




Belsky, a venture partner at Benchmark and the CPO at Adobe, talks about his book “The Messy Middle” on the latest Recode Decode.

When we talk about startups, we overemphasize the exciting launches, exhilarating exits and demoralizing defeats — and we don’t talk enough about the middle part of the story, Adobe Chief Product Officer Scott Belsky says.

To rectify this problem, Belsky — the former Behance CEO who now spends his time at Adobe and Benchmark, where he is a venture partner — has written an advice book called “The Messy Middle.” On the latest episode of Recode Decode, he shared some of his favorite pieces of advice, which he said could apply to creative projects and new products as much as they apply to new companies.

“When [founders]have to let someone off, lay someone off, or kill a product that’s working but doesn’t have the growth rate that is required to break out ... these are always the difficult decisions to make because the easiest decision to make is to not make a decision yet,” Belsky told Recode’s Teddy Schleifer. “Sometimes you just have to whisper to yourself, ‘just do your fucking job.’ And then you liberate your team to be so much more productive and focused.”

“And so, how do you hold yourself accountable to doing that?” he added. “What are the little tricks or hacks? And I would always, literally, whisper to myself, ‘DYFJ,’ before some of these moments just so I could kick my ass.”

Killing projects or laying off employees can be fraught, emotional tasks, but Belsky said successful creators have to find the line between ignoring those emotions and blowing past them.

“The sensitivities we have to the people that we will impact with our decisions are good,” he said. “This is what makes us effective leaders, is understanding how people will feel, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that decision shouldn’t be made. Because by not making it, you contribute to that organizational debt ... that’s where you end up losing your A players who would rather work with a team where they can make the fricking decisions and move on.”

You can listen to Recode Decode wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts and Overcast.

Below, we’ve shared a lightly edited full transcript of Teddy’s conversation with Scott.

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Teddy Schleifer: I’m here with Scott Belsky, who’s the chief product officer of Adobe. He’s also the author of a new book called “The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture.” Scott, welcome to Recode Decode.

**Scott Belsky: **Thank you.

So, Scott is someone who I feel is very well known in the startup community overall. I feel like you have a lot of different hats. You’ve done a lot of things, right? You’ve had a company. You are obviously very tied into the design community. You seem to be like a seed investor in seemingly every interesting company. I don’t know how that happens. It’s just like every company that ... Part of it’s that I think you were early to the seed world and to the angel investing world.

Yeah. And a little bit of luck.

A little bit of luck, but ...

We talk about that, though.

I feel like your name’s everywhere. You’ve also had a formal job at a venture capital firm, and now you’re back at kind of a big, bad corporation, at Adobe. And your new book is sort of a memoir? I mean, in some ways it’s a memoir, of kind of ... It’s not, “Hey, on Thursday I had a great omelette.” But ...

I think I’m too young to write a memoir, but you know, this definitely was influenced by a lot of the experiences I had as a bootstrapped entrepreneur for five years, venture-backed for two years, three years of integration and acquisition, an adviser to many startups and also a venture investor. There was certainly a lot of prompts that came from my own experiences, but I also interviewed over 100 different folks for this book.

Yeah, so this was a journalistic project, in some ways. You were certainly using your relationships, but able to kind of ...

I was trying.

To, you know, put people on the couch and ask about what their life was like. So, just start off with ... Most folks don’t know who you are. How did you end up ... Let me ask this. What was your first Silicon Valley experience? I think you were at Goldman after college for a couple of years?

Yeah. I studied design and business as an undergrad, and had to kind of decide which path to choose. This is 2001, 2002, and at that time you kind of cut your teeth in business if you wanted to, or went the design route. And so I went to, of all places, a job on Wall Street, where a year and a half into it I was just very ... It was very clear to me I didn’t want to be in finance for the rest of my life. And then went to my manager, talked about it. She said, “Well, if you could have another job in the firm, what would it be?” I ended up taking this role in the executive office, focused on organizational development, leadership development, succession planning. It was almost like an internal management consultant job.

This is in New York. This is not here.

In New York.

**Okay. **

And I found myself actually using design again. I had Illustrator on my computer and I was actually trying to use visual and design to address the projects that I was given. And again, it was a kind of theme in my career, of using design to organize information and organize people.

So it’s during that next three years, still in this job at Goldman, but this new job ... that I was thinking, “Gosh. The most disorganized community on the planet is the creative world. This is hundreds of billions of dollars of creative production annually, done by people who are ultimately represented by agencies and headhunters. They never get attribution for their work.” And they were using, at the time, DeviantArt and Myspace and some of these other products to showcase their work online, and I thought there was an opportunity there. Which was the genesis of the idea of Behance, and getting into something that was well beyond what I was capable of doing at the time.

Got it. So you never thought about joining a massive design firm, or kind of going into the design world full-time, professionally? That was never something you ...

Not really. You know, I always loved design, but I always felt like I would do something in the intersection of both business and design.

Well, what was the ... I mean, was it seen as just not ... You know, obviously there’s a lot of designers who work in-house.

Yup.

You know, chief designer at Uber. Or folks who do nothing in technology at all, right? You could have a very nice life doing that.

Sure. I think at the time ... And I didn’t know the language of product design and user experience design. In fact, back then it wasn’t as common of a term. Like, you weren’t thinking beyond just a few companies. Every business wasn’t thinking about the experience that their customer is having, and all of the stuff we use today.

But that was always what I had a knack for. And I guess I was always trying to figure out how to apply that. That’s not just a traditional design skill set. It’s actually more about customer psychology, and what do they have to see as a default, and how do things stroke their ego as the user product that breeds retention? These are the things that I have language for now, but didn’t then. But I was always trying to find out what the application is of these interests.

Right, right. So you leave Goldman in like mid-2000s. 2005, 2006?

Yup.

And you start Behance immediately?

Yes.

Okay. So, what was the moment? What was the moment where you thought, you know, “I want to do a startup.”

Well, I think it was frustration. I actually think that most great products and projects are born from some degree of frustration. For me it was all my friends, who were creatives of different kinds, whether architects or illustrators or designers.

**Because you’re in New York at this point. **

I was in New York. And again, I went to school with a lot of folks who became designers and I had a lot of friends in this community, and I felt they were some of the most talented, yet disorganized, people I knew. And I figured, you know, they always go to conferences and read books about creativity and design. That’s actually the last thing they need. They don’t need more ideas. They need more execution. They just need to have a better system for how they showcase their work and keep their portfolios updated. And so, the idea behind Behance was a company to organize the creative world, as opposed to boost productivity or creativity or connect people with each other.

That was always one of those principles of the company was we’re not gonna use the word “creativity.” We’re actually always gonna focus on organizing and boosting productivity in the creative world. And that started, of all things, as a paper product.

Paper. That’s like the white, eight-and-a-half by 11?

Yeah. We actually made notebooks for creatives to get organized. There’s a funny story we can get to later, the fact that one of our partners of Behance was Garrett Camp, who had just bought back StumbleUpon, and he was ...

Yup. This is, later, the founder of Uber.

Right, and he was using our action books for his own work. I was actually in a meeting a few years later where he whipped out a little sketch of a little side project of his to get cars on demand. And it was one of our action books that he was showing me this idea that became Uber.

Okay. There you go. So you guys didn’t, you guys were ... Just, you were very tapped in at that point to the New York creative scene. You don’t raise any money, right? You were using the word startup. This was a startup at the time.

So, we were bootstrapped. I mean, this is back in ...

Okay, so maybe you just thought of it as, like, a company?

What smart VC would invest in a company that’s doing a paper product and has a conference to bootstrap themselves and has this idea of building a massive online network yet doesn’t have any experienced engineers on their team that have done such a thing?

So, were you bootstrapped intentionally, or was it that you were pitching and people were saying no? What was the experience there?

We weren’t pitching. Maybe it was partly because I knew what the answer would be.

Okay.

We were resolute on being a bootstrapped company that could actually choose its own destiny. And always in the back of my head I was wondering during that five-year period, “Maybe we’ll go solo.” You know?

I knew Jason Fried and those guys, and I kind of looked up to the way that BaseCamp had been built, and I thought, “Maybe we can kind of own our own destiny here and be somewhat a lifestyle business.” And in fact, we were set up as an LLC, where everyone had compensatory units and could be compensated based on profits. And so, we had that going for a period of time, up until a moment where I realized I was strangling the potential of the team.

Bootstrapping, by the way, is just a company without venture funding.

Correct.

So then, you guys eventually take some money from Benchmark, right? Is that the ...

No, from Union Square Ventures.

Okay. It’s not from Benchmark, okay. How soon was that, in between that and the company being sold?

Yeah, so it was actually, it all happened pretty quickly. Five years in, we raise a round from Union Square Ventures, Chris Dixon, Jeff Bezos, a few other angels, and then we’re off to the races.

Regular angels, like Jeff Bezos. You know, making angel investments all the time.

We got lucky on ... And then these ... You know, small, syndicated folks, we probably raised probably around $6 million, but we had not really raised any venture funding before, so it was kind of our first round, but also an A.

And then, the long story short, about a year later, it just became very clear, after Adobe had made this transition from software to services, it needed to build a community to build the relationships with their customers, of which they didn’t have, really ... You know, it used to be you’d fill out this postcard and send it in if you bought a boxed software. Now you were, on a monthly basis, having a relationship with a company.

So, it just became clear to me that we were the perfect fit, and the opportunity was right, and we had so little dilution. And I figured, “Okay. Are we gonna raise a series B and then a series C?” I kind of did the math on that part of the outcome, and then I also thought about ... For our customers, and for the team, where did we belong, and where would be the best sort of mothership, so to speak?

Yeah. You sold it for, like, I think 150-ish, right?

Yup.

And then you spent a couple years in round one in Adobe.

Yeah, so three years.

Okay. This is round one.

And I went in saying, “I’m not sure how this is gonna go.” At first I was overseeing just Behance and the integration. And then I really started to get excited by this promise of Creative Cloud, which was really, at the time, a business model innovation as opposed to a series of product innovations.

But I was thinking, “You know, if we’re actually delivering updates every month, as opposed to every 18 months, and we have these services that we can build ... “ Like, what does that really mean? And at the time, Dave Wadhwani was head of the Creative Cloud business. He went on to become CEO of AppDynamics. You know, right before ...

Sure.

And then they ended up almost going public, and then getting acquired. But he was my boss at the time and he said, “Well, what do you want to do here?” And I figured, “Well, let’s start to build some of these services and mobile products.” So that was kind of my second job at Adobe, beyond Behance, during my first three years there.

Got it. And so, then you had this really interesting part of your career, which was very public in some ways, which was the joining of Benchmark. Right?

Mm-hmm.

So, Benchmark. Obviously one of the most well-known venture capital firms. Hire people pretty rarely. Very small, very tight-knit.

Yup.

You joined when? From Adobe? Straight there from ...

Yeah. So, I think ... You know, I learned a lot about myself in this process.

At this point, you are a well-known seed investor, kind of on the side. This is not your full-time job.

Right. So, all along the way, being at the intersection of design and technology. My role with Behance, being in the right place and some of the right times, like the story with Garrett.

Yup.

And working closely with people like Ben Silverman, you know, from the seed stage of Pinterest, and working with Kayvon and Joe from Periscope, and going through, with them, the acquisition into Twitter ... That’s actually how I originally met Peter Fenton. And so, having this role with a number of different entrepreneurs, I became convinced that I should be an investor.

It’s one of those things where everyone’s telling you, “This is what you should do next. You should do this next.” You start to believe it, potentially, if you don’t know this part of yourself yet. And I always love working with product teams and investing in the potential of a product and the potential of people. And then I said, “Well, if I love doing this, and I think I’m pretty good as an investor, I should just join a great firm.” And so, the opportunity to join Benchmark and spend a lot of time with that team, you know, it just seemed like the perfect fit.

And then, I think pretty quickly, I realized, or I felt like I had hung up my spurs, and it just wasn’t the application of my own superpowers. You know? Everyone has to feel like, where are they in their zone most, and I just realized I love the earlier stage of working with products and helping sort of develop product strategy. And I think that from an operator’s standpoint, that means that I should be building products, and from an investor’s standpoint, that means I should really be in the seed stage.

Yup.

So then I found myself in this kind of awkward position where, you know, “Do I want to do this for the next 15 years?” — I mean, it’s a major commitment — “or not?” And I think with my partners, the question was, what’s the right fit for me and what should I be doing? And that’s when, six or so months in, I made that transition to venture partner, and then figured ... Which I remain to this day.

But then, went back and said, “Okay. Well, where am I most happy and where do I feel fully utilized?” And to me, there was no question. My perfect balance is building products and solving product problems, and working with early-stage teams to find their product market fit.

Right. That was very unusual, though. Right? I mean, obviously in Silicon Valley, people join these venture firms, especially august ones like Benchmark, and it’s seen as, like, “you made it” sort of career moves.

Yeah, it’s hard. And it also makes you wonder, like, “Gosh.” You know? I had never really had a moment in my career until that point where I felt like I had made the wrong decision, or that I sort of failed, and how I felt I would take the next 10-plus years of my life. And so, it’s hard not only to extract yourself from a decision you’ve made, but also to keep the relationships strong.

Yeah, right.

And then, also figure out what you want to do next after that point. Because, as you know, when you join a big venture firm like this, you’re suddenly labeled as, “You’re a VC. This is what you’re gonna do forever.” And I was ...

Venture people are almost sort of famous in Silicon Valley, right?

That was difficult. Right. And then of course, the headlines don’t always help in this regard.

Sure.

But I think what I learned from that period, and I certainly ... You know, this had an influence on some parts of the book, as well. First of all, life is iteration, right?

Yeah.

Trying to do things. And should I be beating myself up for taking a step, just because everyone says this was what I should do, as opposed to really validating that myself? You know, I think I certainly learned something from it. But at the end of the day, I also learned a ton from being a full-time part of the Benchmark team for over six months, and having these ongoing relationships with the firm that I do now. So, it’s hard to have regrets.

Yeah, and we talked about the role of external pressure, which, I think, it sounds like part of it is listening to other people.

Yeah.

That’s something that entrepreneurs think about. Very quickly ... Just as of, what? Six months ago? 10 months ago? You’re now back at Adobe for round two. How’d that happen?

Yeah. You know, rotating into this venture partner role, I started to kind of stick my finger into many different things. And one of those things was serving as a consultant for Shantanu, who’s the CEO of Adobe. He knew me, obviously, very well, from my first three years there, and was very excited about some of the prospects for the creative products.

I mean, the company’s been doing extraordinarily well, but I think the products are starting to reach an inflection point now where they can transcend the desktop and actually legitimately be multi-surface systems, and also, there’s a market expansion opportunity now.

Adobe has a great reach to the creative professional world, but these days everyone wants to be creative and express themselves visually. Social marketing teams want to be able to output professional-grade creativity. The YouTube generation wants to be able to cut professional-grade video without having to learn a tool like Premiere Pro, which is pretty complicated. And so there were just these various inflection points and he asked me to come in and work with the teams a little bit, which I did. And I didn’t really have in my mind that I would come back. I, in some ways, severed the umbilical cord to my own company.

“Never again at Adobe.”

Oh, it was 10 years from start to finish at Behance and Adobe. That era of my life, even though I actually really enjoyed it, I just said, “Okay, it’s time to move on.” But when he started to socialize this notion of a chief product officer role and what that could entail in terms of bringing design and product and engineering together and starting to cut through a lot of the decisions that should have been made but weren’t, what I like to call it organizational debt, I thought it was a really interesting thing that I thought I was the right person to do. And the fact that they were willing to allow me to continue to do my noncompetitive seed investing and have this venture partner role and continue this book project, I think that I really appreciated that about the company’s flexibility.

**Let’s talk a little bit about the bones of the book here. We were talking before about, you seem to have taken incredible notes. I’m always amazed whenever I read some book from ... It makes me think I’m not taking enough notes in my life. Though maybe it will be easier with email drafts and ... But you read all these political books and it’s basically like people have contemporaneous notes of meetings with Nixon. **

But you have these great anecdotes from various parts of your life, also have done some interviews. I’d love to just hear how you tackle this. I know this has been a book that you’ve been thinking about writing for a while. Obviously, when you start signing up with professional people in the book industry, it puts fire under your ass a little bit.

Yep.

**How did this come together? **

About five to seven years ago, I started an Evernote file called “A Journey In Between Insights.” That’s what I called it at the time.

**This is on Evernote. This is not, it’s not note cards that are like stuffed in between ... **

That is correct. It’s an Evernote notebook, I guess. And whenever I would find myself on a phone call with an entrepreneur at 1:00 a.m. making a very bold and gut-wrenching decision, or find myself in a board meeting, or found myself in an interesting moment, whether it was as an entrepreneur or post-acquisition, big company or in a venture pitch, right? When there was something that I would think about that was somewhat counterintuitive that I wanted to think about more, I would just write it down. And then I would come back to them oftentimes.

It was just a way of me processing my own set of tactics and prompts that were relevant to me and I would want to share with other entrepreneurs and that sort of thing. And this book, this notebook over the years, amassed over 800 or so notes. I know I was on a flight at one point a few years ago and said, “I should just start to actually tag them. Figure out if there’s some theme.”

At this point you’re not thinking about it as a book, you’re thinking about as observation.

Yeah, sort of personal way.

It’s almost like things you wish you could tweet.

Yeah, and some of them I would tweet occasionally. So I went through and I realized that there was actually an interesting theme amongst them. First of all, they were all about, generally, navigating the volatility between the start and the finish. And I’ve always been frustrated by our obsession with headlines, no offense.

**No, no. **

Right?

That’s fair, yeah.

But the starts. We love to celebrate when people leave and start something new or people get funding and then we love celebrating whether it’s an acquisition, an IPO or a bankruptcy. We love the pithy starts and finishes, and then there’s volatility in between, it’s very hard to tie a bow around. It’s a little too dynamic to be summarized, and therefore basically goes overlooked.

The fascination for me was, all of these insights essentially relate to volatility and they really fall into three camps: During the lows, optimizing whatever is working, and then that final mile, how to not screw it up.

Yup. So let’s talk a little bit about each of those. I totally agree. Obviously, people, not just the press but observers, right? If you’re an entrepreneur and you have a friend who is another entrepreneur, it’s like, “Oh, you started the company, great.” And then like, “Oh, how’d the company go?” And obviously in terms of the actual hours spent, most of it is just grinding away.

Totally.

**Things are on fire or slightly better. But I guess people would say, “Yeah, he’s doing his job. How’s it going?” “It’s still going on.” **

Right, right.

Move on. So the beginnings. Do you feel like the way that people begin companies these days is ... What’s the lesson in this book for people who are thinking about beginning companies?

Yeah. Well, a few different things. I think that when you embark on a bold project that is likely to span the course of years, right? A few things. First of all, there are too many companies, especially in Silicon Valley, that are started out of a passion for a solution to a problem, as opposed to empathy with the customer suffering the problem. I actually think a lot of work ...

**“I want to do x because I’m interested in x,” rather than someone else ... **

Yeah.

Someone else, people care about ...

There needs to be a better this, there needs to be a better that, or the world suffers from this and I’m going to solve it. And then we embark and build a team of people who are passionate about the market opportunity in the solution. And then you end up with something ...

**It’s kind of like a hero complex. **

It is a bit and you end up with something that’s typically at least, if not more, 30 degrees off what the customer ultimately needs. The really mundane yet critical thing to do in this process, of course, is to be shoulder to shoulder with the customer suffering. Which is why a lot of the best teams in the early stages are not building scalable solutions yet, they’re just building something that really hits the nail on the head for the customer. And then once you figure that out in a non-scalable fashion, then you start to think, “Okay, how do we do this in a way that might be, dare I say, profitable in the future?” So I think that the the empathy-before-passion piece...

I also think that we typically fool ourselves into thinking that the vision for what this might be five years from now is enough to keep the team engaged on an everyday basis. And I talk about, in the book, this notion of short circuiting your reward system so that the stuff that you typically rely upon for progress indication, like revenues and customers, when that stuff isn’t there, how do you keep people engaged? I would go on the record saying I think the competitive advantage of most startups is just sticking together long enough to figure it out.

Right. Just not giving up.

Especially hard, by the way, in Silicon Valley with all these headlines of companies that seemingly are doing better than you are. And you’re constantly questioning, should I be here? I’ve been heads down, grinding for two years, seems like we’re not making any traction. And so-and-so just raised $30 million from this company. What am I doing wrong? And that’s one of the disadvantages, I believe, of being in a hot spot, is that your loyalty and the collective perseverance of a team is at risk at all times.

**Yes, totally. And then in the middle stage, which is the whole point of the book. **

Yeah.

Do you think that too many people are ... I think that the value of the book here is the fact that if there’s an entrepreneur out there who is going through a messy middle, they probably think, “I screwed up,” right? Like things aren’t getting better. And the whole point of the book here, it seems to me, is that there’s a way to ... That this is common. And this isn’t just entrepreneurship or startups. Marriages have ups and downs, friendships have ups and downs.

By the way, it’s the best-case scenario.

**Yeah. **

The volatility, first of all is ... There is something to be mined from this volatility. It’s — at its lows is where we build the muscle memory. I like to say that resourcefulness is more important than resources, and you only get resourcefulness from having to be constrained.

And when I think about Joe Gebbia and the team at Airbnb and their two iterations before the third that worked, or I think about Ben Silbermann consistently being underestimated by the tech media and being discounted because a lot of his customers were middle-American moms in the beginning. And I think about, the teams that I actually most admire are those that have endured a lot of anonymity, ambiguity, uncertainty, and have in some ways mined those lows to build great process and great culture.

And I would just say that in this volatility, we’re not our best selves at the lows, obviously, because we make decisions out of fear. We’re not our best at the highs because we are making decisions, oftentimes falsely attributing the things that we did to the things that worked. And so the message of this middle part is to have tactics, to make the most and endure the lows and then optimize the hell out of anything that works.

**Yeah. So the book is organized into these little five-page ... It’s very easy to read even if you only had 10 minutes on the bus or something like that. **

Yep.

What are some of your favorite lessons? My favorite one is the “Do your fucking job” one, which ... Do you want to explain that?

Yeah, sure. In the endurance section — which was the hardest part to write, by the way, it’s painful to write and read — it’s just about the moments where you’re not sure how to do something or where you are, where you’re going. And it’s actually the reality of anyone’s journey. This is not particular to people that are not doing well. It’s a part of any bold journey.

But the “do your fucking job” piece is about what I and others that I interviewed do for themselves when they have to let someone off, lay someone off, or kill a product that’s working but doesn’t have the growth rate that is required to break out. And these are always the difficult decisions to make because the easiest decision to make is to not make a decision yet, but when you’re just ... Sometimes you just have to whisper to yourself, “just do your fucking job.” And then you liberate your team to be so much more productive and focused.

And so, how do you hold yourself accountable to doing that? What are the little tricks or hacks? And I would always, literally, whisper to myself “DYFJ” before some of these moments just so I could kick my ass.

**Well, you need to be ... you need to be a cold, emotionless killer. **

Yeah. I think that I also talk in the section about how the sensitivities we have to the people that we will impact with our decisions are good. This is what makes us effective leaders, is understanding how people will feel, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that decision shouldn’t be made. Because by not making it, you contribute to that organizational debt, right? That accumulation of decisions that should have been made but weren’t. And that’s where you end up losing your A players who would rather work with a team where they can make the fricking decisions and move on.

Yeah. What’s another one of your favorite lessons from the book?

Well, I think that another one is a ... Gosh, there’s a lot. It’s breaking the long game down into chapters and I talk about how Ben did that at Pinterest. I talk about short-circuiting the reward system piece, which I mentioned earlier. I share a story about how in the early days of Behance, we would type in “Behance” to Google and it would always say, “Do you mean enhance?” “Do you mean enhance?” And it was like, “Dammit, we’re a mistake.”

And actually it was good, because that was one of those near-term things we could optimize towards and feel progress. And so lo and behold, one day we typed in Behance, it actually said Behance. And then I think six months later, it was back in 2007, 2008, Beyonce became super popular and we lost our SEO again. So lots of little ...

**Startups are luck, right? **

Lots of little funny things like that. And there are a bunch of things ... The last thing I would just say is, I equate this journey in the early stages with all the volatility, it’s like a five- to 10-day road trip with the windows blocked out and your team in the back seat and they have no idea where the hell they are. And if you just keep driving, because you know where you’re going, no one’s going to be with you anymore, they’re going to start to freak out.

But if you can narrate your team through the journey and merchandise progress to the team, manufacture wins along the way that are not fake wins but are celebratory milestones that matter but may have otherwise been ignored. There’s this whole system of narration that leaders need to do for their team in the endurance stage. And a lot of folks don’t do it because they’re freaking out, themselves. And it’s important.

Do you feel like this is something that ... What’s the pitch here to someone who’s listening, who’s not in startups, not in tech?

Oh my gosh, this applies ... I have some feedback from early readers. They’re like, “Hey, if you substitute the word relationship for venture,” or “new product in a company” to “venture,” or “book project.” I also did interview writers and artists for this book, as well, and I have a bunch of parallels for some of these other industries. Because in essence, anything bold enough has this volatility. Also, we’re not hardwired for this stuff. The average life expectancy in the 17th century was 27 years old or something.

**There was no messy middle. There’s just life and death. **

Well, I mean, the idea of spending five to 10 years on a project when life expectancy is so low is pretty unwise.

**It’s very bold, though. So there you go. **

It is bold, but we’re fighting against our own human tendencies, as well as society’s desire to kill off anything that’s new and threatening. So there’s a lot to be considered in any walk of life, for bold, creative pursuits.

**You have been around a lot of really interesting startups really early. We talked a little about Pinterest, but I’d love to hear the story about ... Probably the startup you’re most closely identified with outside of yours is Uber. How did that happen? We’ve talked before about Garrett Camp, who was the founder, one of the founders of Uber, but how did that relationship blossom? And you were a very early investor in it, presumably made a good amount of money on this. How did this relationship happen? **

Garrett and I have known each other for many years and we’re both product-minded investors and leaders, and when he had bought back StumbleUpon from eBay… I forget the exact date, it was probably in the 2007, 2009, whatever time frame. I was a bootstrapped, meaning no venture capital-backed company, Behance CEO, way overwhelmed with my own responsibilities. We were doing a few different partnerships between StumbleUpon and Behance at the time, because Behance content performed well in StumbleUpon, we were finding more ways to work together and become friends.

He was in New York in my office, which was also adjacent to my apartment. This is back in the day, and at the end of the meeting, he whips out some sketches of what he was thinking about as a mobile app to be able to get a car without having to call and book and wait for ... You know, schedule in advance. I remember my first thought being, “You gotta be kidding me. You just bought back StumbleUpon from eBay and you’re thinking about launching a mobile app livery company? This isn’t a good idea for you. I mean, literally, how do you handle that?”

He was just tinkering with this, and I think he was also, of course, in the process of bringing together some folks to run this full-time so he could continue doing his job and maybe serve in some sort of founder and chairman-type role.

Right. And how involved were you in the early days?

In the early days, we would just talk about product, so he would pitch, we’d talk about ... I remember one story, which I talk about a little bit in the book, because I had learned from him around this was this importance of narrating or developing the brand and the message before the product. Because one of the earliest things I remember him talking about was the distinction between a brand that everyone aspired for, as opposed to one that felt accessible. So there was this question of, is it “everyone’s personal driver,” which is aspirational, or is it more like a “taxis on-demand,” which is an accessible ...

You’re talking about what is the slogan, essentially, right?

Yeah. Well, slogan, but also, it informs the design. The brand itself, is it sleek and seems expensive, or does it seem affordable and accessible?

Right. “Everyone’s personal driver” sounds like, “Why do I need a personal driver? I make 60K a year.”

Yeah. I think that the idea of ... They actually ended up going with the everyone’s personal driver as a way to make people want to aspire to have something that they wouldn’t ordinarily have been able to have.

I feel like that’s not very active in the branding now, but ...

I think it’s probably evolved, for sure, but it’s actually another thing to think about, is that the right playbook at one time in the business can become the absolute wrong playbook at another time in the business. Both from how it’s led, as well as what the brand and the message should be and whatever else.

I think that the decision to make an aspirational brand to start probably got the right first adopters, and then launched it in the right way.

**Yep. So then, another one is Pinterest. **

Yeah, so Pinterest ...

I’m sure that your background, obviously, in design helped.

Yeah, Ben couldn’t raise his seed round on the west coast, so he resorted to coming to the east coast.

Had to do with the Scott Belsky’s of New York rather than the real people.

I mean, the riffraff! And Pinterest was a grid-based design system. And it was extraordinarily visual and that was very much what Behance was at the time. And so that’s how we connected. And Ben has always had a drive towards engaging designers in his products. And what I also noticed when I first met Ben, even though they were just kind of testing an early version of Pinterest at the time, they just rotated from a previous incarnation of the business.

I noticed while the traffic was very low to Behance, it was like a high-growth low number. And I remember being curious about some of the decisions that Ben had made. Like, for example, this is at a time when bookmarking sites like Delicious didn’t even have visuals. And any other website that had visuals like Tumblr and others, when you click on an image, it would bring you within the site, because it was always an optimization for pageviews. Everyone on the web was optimizing for pageviews. You wanted to keep the customer in.

And what Ben did was the opposite. When you click on an image, you actually went out. You went to an external URL. Which, while it minimized their pageviews, which looked bad on paper to some investors and that’s maybe why they had struggle raising money, but they were driving traffic. And so all of the recipients of this traffic, these click-throughs, were like, “Whoa, what is this Pinterest thing?” And that, of course, led to them incorporating “pin” buttons and all the other stuff.

So I found that sort of contrarian view of developing a web product at the time very interesting. And that’s what brought me in as a product adviser. And when he was raising his seed round, I said sure, and I remember, this was actually my first-ever seed investment.

Oh, really, okay.

My wife was like, “What are you fucking doing?”

It’s like, “What is this, charity?”

”You’re barely paying yourself.”

But I also felt like I could learn a lot from him, and Ben had a west-coast network as well, and I think it was one of those decisions that I made for different reasons and it worked out.

**Obviously paid off. **

So far, so good.

You obviously have a full time job at Adobe, Benchmark … how much seed investing do you do these days? I feel like I still see your name on lots of stuff.

Listen, I get to meet a lot of folks now that are doing things that overlap ... Overly value product design and are looking to build design teams and product teams. And when different firms introduce me to companies that they’re excited about, if I really resonate with the product and the vision, then I’ll participate as an investor. And I do try to save some time every week to meet with entrepreneurs because it keeps me on my toes, it helps me understand, also, how they’re designing their products.

I have products like Adobe XD now that I’m aggressively trying to help meet the market’s needs. And to be able to work with the most forward-thinking design product teams is really helpful in my day job, and it keeps me on my toes and it feeds another appetite that I have. So I try to make the time for it.

Do you feel like you gravitate, still, towards startups that have design at its core?

I do.

You’re not doing some enterprise software company, right?

Yeah, I’m not doing tons of blockchain stuff. I think, on the enterprise side, I do do a few things where I believe that they value that belief, that consumerizing experiences is actually a competitive advantage in the enterprise, which I do believe. And then I’m focused ... I’ve been doing a lot of work on these direct-to-consumer brands and the picks-and-shovels companies.

Warby Parker ...

And worked with Warby Parker, Sweetgreen, Roman, Outdoor Voices, a bunch of companies in that space. And then I’m also ... I’m super interested in products like Airtable and others that are sort of enterprise, but also consumer. And they’re adopted, usually, on a one-by-one basis. But then before you know it, teams and companies get on board.

There’s a lot investors that would sit in your shoes these days, I think, that the opportunity set isn’t really there anymore. You hear this from some consumer investors who feel like ...

It’s a lazy comment that they make.

It is a mainstream comment, though. It sounds like you think it’s lazy.

I think that whenever we start to discount the probability of something extraordinary going on, is when you find something extraordinary going on. So I love when folks are discounting the consumer sector or discounting the whole world of direct-to-consumer brands as non-venture bankable or ... To me, that’s an example of where people are starting to get lazy, and they’re starting to generalize. So that gets me curious.

The thing about traditional venture capital is it’s transactional. You’re always trying to get ahead of traction. And so you can’t help but always be bringing in all the data around you of what people are saying is getting traction and not getting traction. It makes you very tilted on the world before you.

I always find that great investors really tune in to certain curiosities that they have that others don’t. And then through that insatiable curiosity about a topic or an area of opportunity, end up asking the right questions and finding the right opportunities.

Is there anything about the startup world ... I know a lot of your book is about what individual leaders should do differently. Is there anything about the startup world, having done this ... You’re somewhat of an old guard, even though you’re not that old, in the seed investment world at least. But what would you change? If you were in charge of designing the way that startups raise money or operate ...

Oh man, where do I get started here?

Softball headed up.

Yeah, there’s a few different... They range in the spectrum from somewhat obvious to maybe a little bit polarizing in terms of my ideas on that front. But it goes without saying that the abundance of capital feeds laziness on all sides of the spectrum. From... The LPs become less discriminant where they put their money.

LPs are the investors, venture capital funds own investors who have endowments, hospitals, stuff like that.

Right. And then the venture capitalists and their intern have too much money, and they start to be a little less discerning. And then companies figure, “Since I can raise the money, I should raise the money.” And here’s the tricky part: Sometimes that’s right. I know Stewart Butterfield’s come on record saying, “Hey, I’m going to raise money for Slack at this foundation because I can.” And with his velocity of a company that makes sense for him.

But I don’t think it makes sense for most folks because then, that’s the whole ... You have resources as carbs and resourcefulness as muscle. You’re going to just throw carbs at every problem and you’re not going to end up having anything ...

The carbs were really good though, that’s the thing.

They taste so good at the time and they really make your problems go away for a moment. But not over time.

So I think that there’s constraints in the system that I would love to see. And I advise companies to not get ahead of themselves. Because I have seen so many businesses that I’ve invested in that haven’t done as well, go out after a big seed or A round. And then have to do either an even-money or down round, and then their employees get this message that the last two years have been for nothing and investors start to demand more aggressive terms. And it’s sort of the beginning of the end in many cases. So that’s one thing.

And the other thing I would say is, it would be interesting here on the bold idea side...

Yeah. What’s the most polarizing opinion possible?

We always have the SAFE notes and standard ways that companies raise money, whether it’s a convertible note or equity. But there’s no standardized way of companies returning capital and saying, “Okay, this isn’t working.”

I’ve been in some companies that started as a big data play and became an online car-sales thing and then switched to a third thing. And as an investor I’m just like, “I didn’t invest in the second or the third incarnation of what you’re doing. And you’re just kind of using the money at this point to triangulate in the ether.”

What if there was a way for companies to be able to, at some point say, “Hey, I’m just going to push the eject button because this isn’t working.” And then have a agreed-upon way that capital resolves all debts, maybe compensates the founders a little bit and just lets everyone go on their merry way as opposed to stringing out a long, painful, 10-year death journey.

Especially because you can be in there for a very long time. You invest in 2012, in 2018 the company’s pivoted four times, the founders are ...

And founders struggle with this. I talk to founders who say they don’t want to let down their investors, therefore they’re going to keep at it. And I’m like, “Well, if you have less conviction now then you did when you knew nothing, then eject.”

But there’s no standard way of winding that down and returning, without questions asked. And it would just be interesting if it was more commonplace and accepted for the eject button, and for an actual incentives in that instance, that sort of take care of everyone at that moment.

That is very controversial, and I don’t know if it’s entirely a financial question as much as it is people don’t want to say they failed at it, right? And financially, yeah, you can certainly come up with a structure where... That’s why shareholders will sometimes sell their shares in the secondary, or find some other way to eject.

But most of it’s basically ... I feel like there were times where founders basically just kind of ghost, right? And you don’t really get any updates and you sort of assume it’s shutdown.

It’s funny, I was talking to an entrepreneur the other night, he was telling me that at Google, they’re writing terms sheets to employees that have ideas that would want to leave. And they’re basically saying, “We’ll fund your seed, essentially, with a few million bucks.” Like large amounts. And your equity continues to vest for two years. Your Google equity.

Google equity, right.

But if it doesn’t work you just kind of pick up where you left off at Google. And so I think it was their way of saying, “Hey, these top people want to leave and start their thing, and we know that most of those things don’t end well. And the cost of recruiters and getting a Google employee that will perform really well is so high, we’ll just write these term sheets to people and have these conditions and keep their equity vesting, so that they feel like this opportunity to just come right back in if it’s not working.”

It’s interesting, because actually ...

Google is sort of betting on the person’s going to fail.

Well actually, it’s funny, I was hearing this and I was thinking, “Oh, actually, this is super smart of Google.” Because it also gives the entrepreneurs this weird exit opportunity that in two years, if it’s not working, they can just kind of go back and pick up where they left off.

Save face and go back.

Which is not a healthy dynamic for a startup. You actually have to feel like you have it all on the line and you have everything to prove for yourself and there’s no safety net. So I’m actually not sure if it’s a good idea for the entrepreneurs. I think it’s brilliant for Google.

We’ll leave it there. Scott, it was great talking to you. Thanks for coming on the show.

Thanks, Teddy.

Benchmark’s Scott Belsky has four magic words for entrepreneurs: ‘Do your fucking job’

#belsky #benchmark #entrepreneurs #four #fucking #job #magic #scott #words




Belsky, a venture partner at Benchmark and the CPO at Adobe, talks about his book “The Messy Middle” on the latest Recode Decode.

When we talk about startups, we overemphasize the exciting launches, exhilarating exits and demoralizing defeats — and we don’t talk enough about the middle part of the story, Adobe Chief Product Officer Scott Belsky says.

To rectify this problem, Belsky — the former Behance CEO who now spends his time at Adobe and Benchmark, where he is a venture partner — has written an advice book called “The Messy Middle.” On the latest episode of Recode Decode, he shared some of his favorite pieces of advice, which he said could apply to creative projects and new products as much as they apply to new companies.

“When [founders]have to let someone off, lay someone off, or kill a product that’s working but doesn’t have the growth rate that is required to break out ... these are always the difficult decisions to make because the easiest decision to make is to not make a decision yet,” Belsky told Recode’s Teddy Schleifer. “Sometimes you just have to whisper to yourself, ‘just do your fucking job.’ And then you liberate your team to be so much more productive and focused.”

“And so, how do you hold yourself accountable to doing that?” he added. “What are the little tricks or hacks? And I would always, literally, whisper to myself, ‘DYFJ,’ before some of these moments just so I could kick my ass.”

Killing projects or laying off employees can be fraught, emotional tasks, but Belsky said successful creators have to find the line between ignoring those emotions and blowing past them.

“The sensitivities we have to the people that we will impact with our decisions are good,” he said. “This is what makes us effective leaders, is understanding how people will feel, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that decision shouldn’t be made. Because by not making it, you contribute to that organizational debt ... that’s where you end up losing your A players who would rather work with a team where they can make the fricking decisions and move on.”

You can listen to Recode Decode wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts and Overcast.

Below, we’ve shared a lightly edited full transcript of Teddy’s conversation with Scott.

---

Teddy Schleifer: I’m here with Scott Belsky, who’s the chief product officer of Adobe. He’s also the author of a new book called “The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture.” Scott, welcome to Recode Decode.

**Scott Belsky: **Thank you.

So, Scott is someone who I feel is very well known in the startup community overall. I feel like you have a lot of different hats. You’ve done a lot of things, right? You’ve had a company. You are obviously very tied into the design community. You seem to be like a seed investor in seemingly every interesting company. I don’t know how that happens. It’s just like every company that ... Part of it’s that I think you were early to the seed world and to the angel investing world.

Yeah. And a little bit of luck.

A little bit of luck, but ...

We talk about that, though.

I feel like your name’s everywhere. You’ve also had a formal job at a venture capital firm, and now you’re back at kind of a big, bad corporation, at Adobe. And your new book is sort of a memoir? I mean, in some ways it’s a memoir, of kind of ... It’s not, “Hey, on Thursday I had a great omelette.” But ...

I think I’m too young to write a memoir, but you know, this definitely was influenced by a lot of the experiences I had as a bootstrapped entrepreneur for five years, venture-backed for two years, three years of integration and acquisition, an adviser to many startups and also a venture investor. There was certainly a lot of prompts that came from my own experiences, but I also interviewed over 100 different folks for this book.

Yeah, so this was a journalistic project, in some ways. You were certainly using your relationships, but able to kind of ...

I was trying.

To, you know, put people on the couch and ask about what their life was like. So, just start off with ... Most folks don’t know who you are. How did you end up ... Let me ask this. What was your first Silicon Valley experience? I think you were at Goldman after college for a couple of years?

Yeah. I studied design and business as an undergrad, and had to kind of decide which path to choose. This is 2001, 2002, and at that time you kind of cut your teeth in business if you wanted to, or went the design route. And so I went to, of all places, a job on Wall Street, where a year and a half into it I was just very ... It was very clear to me I didn’t want to be in finance for the rest of my life. And then went to my manager, talked about it. She said, “Well, if you could have another job in the firm, what would it be?” I ended up taking this role in the executive office, focused on organizational development, leadership development, succession planning. It was almost like an internal management consultant job.

This is in New York. This is not here.

In New York.

**Okay. **

And I found myself actually using design again. I had Illustrator on my computer and I was actually trying to use visual and design to address the projects that I was given. And again, it was a kind of theme in my career, of using design to organize information and organize people.

So it’s during that next three years, still in this job at Goldman, but this new job ... that I was thinking, “Gosh. The most disorganized community on the planet is the creative world. This is hundreds of billions of dollars of creative production annually, done by people who are ultimately represented by agencies and headhunters. They never get attribution for their work.” And they were using, at the time, DeviantArt and Myspace and some of these other products to showcase their work online, and I thought there was an opportunity there. Which was the genesis of the idea of Behance, and getting into something that was well beyond what I was capable of doing at the time.

Got it. So you never thought about joining a massive design firm, or kind of going into the design world full-time, professionally? That was never something you ...

Not really. You know, I always loved design, but I always felt like I would do something in the intersection of both business and design.

Well, what was the ... I mean, was it seen as just not ... You know, obviously there’s a lot of designers who work in-house.

Yup.

You know, chief designer at Uber. Or folks who do nothing in technology at all, right? You could have a very nice life doing that.

Sure. I think at the time ... And I didn’t know the language of product design and user experience design. In fact, back then it wasn’t as common of a term. Like, you weren’t thinking beyond just a few companies. Every business wasn’t thinking about the experience that their customer is having, and all of the stuff we use today.

But that was always what I had a knack for. And I guess I was always trying to figure out how to apply that. That’s not just a traditional design skill set. It’s actually more about customer psychology, and what do they have to see as a default, and how do things stroke their ego as the user product that breeds retention? These are the things that I have language for now, but didn’t then. But I was always trying to find out what the application is of these interests.

Right, right. So you leave Goldman in like mid-2000s. 2005, 2006?

Yup.

And you start Behance immediately?

Yes.

Okay. So, what was the moment? What was the moment where you thought, you know, “I want to do a startup.”

Well, I think it was frustration. I actually think that most great products and projects are born from some degree of frustration. For me it was all my friends, who were creatives of different kinds, whether architects or illustrators or designers.

**Because you’re in New York at this point. **

I was in New York. And again, I went to school with a lot of folks who became designers and I had a lot of friends in this community, and I felt they were some of the most talented, yet disorganized, people I knew. And I figured, you know, they always go to conferences and read books about creativity and design. That’s actually the last thing they need. They don’t need more ideas. They need more execution. They just need to have a better system for how they showcase their work and keep their portfolios updated. And so, the idea behind Behance was a company to organize the creative world, as opposed to boost productivity or creativity or connect people with each other.

That was always one of those principles of the company was we’re not gonna use the word “creativity.” We’re actually always gonna focus on organizing and boosting productivity in the creative world. And that started, of all things, as a paper product.

Paper. That’s like the white, eight-and-a-half by 11?

Yeah. We actually made notebooks for creatives to get organized. There’s a funny story we can get to later, the fact that one of our partners of Behance was Garrett Camp, who had just bought back StumbleUpon, and he was ...

Yup. This is, later, the founder of Uber.

Right, and he was using our action books for his own work. I was actually in a meeting a few years later where he whipped out a little sketch of a little side project of his to get cars on demand. And it was one of our action books that he was showing me this idea that became Uber.

Okay. There you go. So you guys didn’t, you guys were ... Just, you were very tapped in at that point to the New York creative scene. You don’t raise any money, right? You were using the word startup. This was a startup at the time.

So, we were bootstrapped. I mean, this is back in ...

Okay, so maybe you just thought of it as, like, a company?

What smart VC would invest in a company that’s doing a paper product and has a conference to bootstrap themselves and has this idea of building a massive online network yet doesn’t have any experienced engineers on their team that have done such a thing?

So, were you bootstrapped intentionally, or was it that you were pitching and people were saying no? What was the experience there?

We weren’t pitching. Maybe it was partly because I knew what the answer would be.

Okay.

We were resolute on being a bootstrapped company that could actually choose its own destiny. And always in the back of my head I was wondering during that five-year period, “Maybe we’ll go solo.” You know?

I knew Jason Fried and those guys, and I kind of looked up to the way that BaseCamp had been built, and I thought, “Maybe we can kind of own our own destiny here and be somewhat a lifestyle business.” And in fact, we were set up as an LLC, where everyone had compensatory units and could be compensated based on profits. And so, we had that going for a period of time, up until a moment where I realized I was strangling the potential of the team.

Bootstrapping, by the way, is just a company without venture funding.

Correct.

So then, you guys eventually take some money from Benchmark, right? Is that the ...

No, from Union Square Ventures.

Okay. It’s not from Benchmark, okay. How soon was that, in between that and the company being sold?

Yeah, so it was actually, it all happened pretty quickly. Five years in, we raise a round from Union Square Ventures, Chris Dixon, Jeff Bezos, a few other angels, and then we’re off to the races.

Regular angels, like Jeff Bezos. You know, making angel investments all the time.

We got lucky on ... And then these ... You know, small, syndicated folks, we probably raised probably around $6 million, but we had not really raised any venture funding before, so it was kind of our first round, but also an A.

And then, the long story short, about a year later, it just became very clear, after Adobe had made this transition from software to services, it needed to build a community to build the relationships with their customers, of which they didn’t have, really ... You know, it used to be you’d fill out this postcard and send it in if you bought a boxed software. Now you were, on a monthly basis, having a relationship with a company.

So, it just became clear to me that we were the perfect fit, and the opportunity was right, and we had so little dilution. And I figured, “Okay. Are we gonna raise a series B and then a series C?” I kind of did the math on that part of the outcome, and then I also thought about ... For our customers, and for the team, where did we belong, and where would be the best sort of mothership, so to speak?

Yeah. You sold it for, like, I think 150-ish, right?

Yup.

And then you spent a couple years in round one in Adobe.

Yeah, so three years.

Okay. This is round one.

And I went in saying, “I’m not sure how this is gonna go.” At first I was overseeing just Behance and the integration. And then I really started to get excited by this promise of Creative Cloud, which was really, at the time, a business model innovation as opposed to a series of product innovations.

But I was thinking, “You know, if we’re actually delivering updates every month, as opposed to every 18 months, and we have these services that we can build ... “ Like, what does that really mean? And at the time, Dave Wadhwani was head of the Creative Cloud business. He went on to become CEO of AppDynamics. You know, right before ...

Sure.

And then they ended up almost going public, and then getting acquired. But he was my boss at the time and he said, “Well, what do you want to do here?” And I figured, “Well, let’s start to build some of these services and mobile products.” So that was kind of my second job at Adobe, beyond Behance, during my first three years there.

Got it. And so, then you had this really interesting part of your career, which was very public in some ways, which was the joining of Benchmark. Right?

Mm-hmm.

So, Benchmark. Obviously one of the most well-known venture capital firms. Hire people pretty rarely. Very small, very tight-knit.

Yup.

You joined when? From Adobe? Straight there from ...

Yeah. So, I think ... You know, I learned a lot about myself in this process.

At this point, you are a well-known seed investor, kind of on the side. This is not your full-time job.

Right. So, all along the way, being at the intersection of design and technology. My role with Behance, being in the right place and some of the right times, like the story with Garrett.

Yup.

And working closely with people like Ben Silverman, you know, from the seed stage of Pinterest, and working with Kayvon and Joe from Periscope, and going through, with them, the acquisition into Twitter ... That’s actually how I originally met Peter Fenton. And so, having this role with a number of different entrepreneurs, I became convinced that I should be an investor.

It’s one of those things where everyone’s telling you, “This is what you should do next. You should do this next.” You start to believe it, potentially, if you don’t know this part of yourself yet. And I always love working with product teams and investing in the potential of a product and the potential of people. And then I said, “Well, if I love doing this, and I think I’m pretty good as an investor, I should just join a great firm.” And so, the opportunity to join Benchmark and spend a lot of time with that team, you know, it just seemed like the perfect fit.

And then, I think pretty quickly, I realized, or I felt like I had hung up my spurs, and it just wasn’t the application of my own superpowers. You know? Everyone has to feel like, where are they in their zone most, and I just realized I love the earlier stage of working with products and helping sort of develop product strategy. And I think that from an operator’s standpoint, that means that I should be building products, and from an investor’s standpoint, that means I should really be in the seed stage.

Yup.

So then I found myself in this kind of awkward position where, you know, “Do I want to do this for the next 15 years?” — I mean, it’s a major commitment — “or not?” And I think with my partners, the question was, what’s the right fit for me and what should I be doing? And that’s when, six or so months in, I made that transition to venture partner, and then figured ... Which I remain to this day.

But then, went back and said, “Okay. Well, where am I most happy and where do I feel fully utilized?” And to me, there was no question. My perfect balance is building products and solving product problems, and working with early-stage teams to find their product market fit.

Right. That was very unusual, though. Right? I mean, obviously in Silicon Valley, people join these venture firms, especially august ones like Benchmark, and it’s seen as, like, “you made it” sort of career moves.

Yeah, it’s hard. And it also makes you wonder, like, “Gosh.” You know? I had never really had a moment in my career until that point where I felt like I had made the wrong decision, or that I sort of failed, and how I felt I would take the next 10-plus years of my life. And so, it’s hard not only to extract yourself from a decision you’ve made, but also to keep the relationships strong.

Yeah, right.

And then, also figure out what you want to do next after that point. Because, as you know, when you join a big venture firm like this, you’re suddenly labeled as, “You’re a VC. This is what you’re gonna do forever.” And I was ...

Venture people are almost sort of famous in Silicon Valley, right?

That was difficult. Right. And then of course, the headlines don’t always help in this regard.

Sure.

But I think what I learned from that period, and I certainly ... You know, this had an influence on some parts of the book, as well. First of all, life is iteration, right?

Yeah.

Trying to do things. And should I be beating myself up for taking a step, just because everyone says this was what I should do, as opposed to really validating that myself? You know, I think I certainly learned something from it. But at the end of the day, I also learned a ton from being a full-time part of the Benchmark team for over six months, and having these ongoing relationships with the firm that I do now. So, it’s hard to have regrets.

Yeah, and we talked about the role of external pressure, which, I think, it sounds like part of it is listening to other people.

Yeah.

That’s something that entrepreneurs think about. Very quickly ... Just as of, what? Six months ago? 10 months ago? You’re now back at Adobe for round two. How’d that happen?

Yeah. You know, rotating into this venture partner role, I started to kind of stick my finger into many different things. And one of those things was serving as a consultant for Shantanu, who’s the CEO of Adobe. He knew me, obviously, very well, from my first three years there, and was very excited about some of the prospects for the creative products.

I mean, the company’s been doing extraordinarily well, but I think the products are starting to reach an inflection point now where they can transcend the desktop and actually legitimately be multi-surface systems, and also, there’s a market expansion opportunity now.

Adobe has a great reach to the creative professional world, but these days everyone wants to be creative and express themselves visually. Social marketing teams want to be able to output professional-grade creativity. The YouTube generation wants to be able to cut professional-grade video without having to learn a tool like Premiere Pro, which is pretty complicated. And so there were just these various inflection points and he asked me to come in and work with the teams a little bit, which I did. And I didn’t really have in my mind that I would come back. I, in some ways, severed the umbilical cord to my own company.

“Never again at Adobe.”

Oh, it was 10 years from start to finish at Behance and Adobe. That era of my life, even though I actually really enjoyed it, I just said, “Okay, it’s time to move on.” But when he started to socialize this notion of a chief product officer role and what that could entail in terms of bringing design and product and engineering together and starting to cut through a lot of the decisions that should have been made but weren’t, what I like to call it organizational debt, I thought it was a really interesting thing that I thought I was the right person to do. And the fact that they were willing to allow me to continue to do my noncompetitive seed investing and have this venture partner role and continue this book project, I think that I really appreciated that about the company’s flexibility.

**Let’s talk a little bit about the bones of the book here. We were talking before about, you seem to have taken incredible notes. I’m always amazed whenever I read some book from ... It makes me think I’m not taking enough notes in my life. Though maybe it will be easier with email drafts and ... But you read all these political books and it’s basically like people have contemporaneous notes of meetings with Nixon. **

But you have these great anecdotes from various parts of your life, also have done some interviews. I’d love to just hear how you tackle this. I know this has been a book that you’ve been thinking about writing for a while. Obviously, when you start signing up with professional people in the book industry, it puts fire under your ass a little bit.

Yep.

**How did this come together? **

About five to seven years ago, I started an Evernote file called “A Journey In Between Insights.” That’s what I called it at the time.

**This is on Evernote. This is not, it’s not note cards that are like stuffed in between ... **

That is correct. It’s an Evernote notebook, I guess. And whenever I would find myself on a phone call with an entrepreneur at 1:00 a.m. making a very bold and gut-wrenching decision, or find myself in a board meeting, or found myself in an interesting moment, whether it was as an entrepreneur or post-acquisition, big company or in a venture pitch, right? When there was something that I would think about that was somewhat counterintuitive that I wanted to think about more, I would just write it down. And then I would come back to them oftentimes.

It was just a way of me processing my own set of tactics and prompts that were relevant to me and I would want to share with other entrepreneurs and that sort of thing. And this book, this notebook over the years, amassed over 800 or so notes. I know I was on a flight at one point a few years ago and said, “I should just start to actually tag them. Figure out if there’s some theme.”

At this point you’re not thinking about it as a book, you’re thinking about as observation.

Yeah, sort of personal way.

It’s almost like things you wish you could tweet.

Yeah, and some of them I would tweet occasionally. So I went through and I realized that there was actually an interesting theme amongst them. First of all, they were all about, generally, navigating the volatility between the start and the finish. And I’ve always been frustrated by our obsession with headlines, no offense.

**No, no. **

Right?

That’s fair, yeah.

But the starts. We love to celebrate when people leave and start something new or people get funding and then we love celebrating whether it’s an acquisition, an IPO or a bankruptcy. We love the pithy starts and finishes, and then there’s volatility in between, it’s very hard to tie a bow around. It’s a little too dynamic to be summarized, and therefore basically goes overlooked.

The fascination for me was, all of these insights essentially relate to volatility and they really fall into three camps: During the lows, optimizing whatever is working, and then that final mile, how to not screw it up.

Yup. So let’s talk a little bit about each of those. I totally agree. Obviously, people, not just the press but observers, right? If you’re an entrepreneur and you have a friend who is another entrepreneur, it’s like, “Oh, you started the company, great.” And then like, “Oh, how’d the company go?” And obviously in terms of the actual hours spent, most of it is just grinding away.

Totally.

**Things are on fire or slightly better. But I guess people would say, “Yeah, he’s doing his job. How’s it going?” “It’s still going on.” **

Right, right.

Move on. So the beginnings. Do you feel like the way that people begin companies these days is ... What’s the lesson in this book for people who are thinking about beginning companies?

Yeah. Well, a few different things. I think that when you embark on a bold project that is likely to span the course of years, right? A few things. First of all, there are too many companies, especially in Silicon Valley, that are started out of a passion for a solution to a problem, as opposed to empathy with the customer suffering the problem. I actually think a lot of work ...

**“I want to do x because I’m interested in x,” rather than someone else ... **

Yeah.

Someone else, people care about ...

There needs to be a better this, there needs to be a better that, or the world suffers from this and I’m going to solve it. And then we embark and build a team of people who are passionate about the market opportunity in the solution. And then you end up with something ...

**It’s kind of like a hero complex. **

It is a bit and you end up with something that’s typically at least, if not more, 30 degrees off what the customer ultimately needs. The really mundane yet critical thing to do in this process, of course, is to be shoulder to shoulder with the customer suffering. Which is why a lot of the best teams in the early stages are not building scalable solutions yet, they’re just building something that really hits the nail on the head for the customer. And then once you figure that out in a non-scalable fashion, then you start to think, “Okay, how do we do this in a way that might be, dare I say, profitable in the future?” So I think that the the empathy-before-passion piece...

I also think that we typically fool ourselves into thinking that the vision for what this might be five years from now is enough to keep the team engaged on an everyday basis. And I talk about, in the book, this notion of short circuiting your reward system so that the stuff that you typically rely upon for progress indication, like revenues and customers, when that stuff isn’t there, how do you keep people engaged? I would go on the record saying I think the competitive advantage of most startups is just sticking together long enough to figure it out.

Right. Just not giving up.

Especially hard, by the way, in Silicon Valley with all these headlines of companies that seemingly are doing better than you are. And you’re constantly questioning, should I be here? I’ve been heads down, grinding for two years, seems like we’re not making any traction. And so-and-so just raised $30 million from this company. What am I doing wrong? And that’s one of the disadvantages, I believe, of being in a hot spot, is that your loyalty and the collective perseverance of a team is at risk at all times.

**Yes, totally. And then in the middle stage, which is the whole point of the book. **

Yeah.

Do you think that too many people are ... I think that the value of the book here is the fact that if there’s an entrepreneur out there who is going through a messy middle, they probably think, “I screwed up,” right? Like things aren’t getting better. And the whole point of the book here, it seems to me, is that there’s a way to ... That this is common. And this isn’t just entrepreneurship or startups. Marriages have ups and downs, friendships have ups and downs.

By the way, it’s the best-case scenario.

**Yeah. **

The volatility, first of all is ... There is something to be mined from this volatility. It’s — at its lows is where we build the muscle memory. I like to say that resourcefulness is more important than resources, and you only get resourcefulness from having to be constrained.

And when I think about Joe Gebbia and the team at Airbnb and their two iterations before the third that worked, or I think about Ben Silbermann consistently being underestimated by the tech media and being discounted because a lot of his customers were middle-American moms in the beginning. And I think about, the teams that I actually most admire are those that have endured a lot of anonymity, ambiguity, uncertainty, and have in some ways mined those lows to build great process and great culture.

And I would just say that in this volatility, we’re not our best selves at the lows, obviously, because we make decisions out of fear. We’re not our best at the highs because we are making decisions, oftentimes falsely attributing the things that we did to the things that worked. And so the message of this middle part is to have tactics, to make the most and endure the lows and then optimize the hell out of anything that works.

**Yeah. So the book is organized into these little five-page ... It’s very easy to read even if you only had 10 minutes on the bus or something like that. **

Yep.

What are some of your favorite lessons? My favorite one is the “Do your fucking job” one, which ... Do you want to explain that?

Yeah, sure. In the endurance section — which was the hardest part to write, by the way, it’s painful to write and read — it’s just about the moments where you’re not sure how to do something or where you are, where you’re going. And it’s actually the reality of anyone’s journey. This is not particular to people that are not doing well. It’s a part of any bold journey.

But the “do your fucking job” piece is about what I and others that I interviewed do for themselves when they have to let someone off, lay someone off, or kill a product that’s working but doesn’t have the growth rate that is required to break out. And these are always the difficult decisions to make because the easiest decision to make is to not make a decision yet, but when you’re just ... Sometimes you just have to whisper to yourself, “just do your fucking job.” And then you liberate your team to be so much more productive and focused.

And so, how do you hold yourself accountable to doing that? What are the little tricks or hacks? And I would always, literally, whisper to myself “DYFJ” before some of these moments just so I could kick my ass.

**Well, you need to be ... you need to be a cold, emotionless killer. **

Yeah. I think that I also talk in the section about how the sensitivities we have to the people that we will impact with our decisions are good. This is what makes us effective leaders, is understanding how people will feel, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that decision shouldn’t be made. Because by not making it, you contribute to that organizational debt, right? That accumulation of decisions that should have been made but weren’t. And that’s where you end up losing your A players who would rather work with a team where they can make the fricking decisions and move on.

Yeah. What’s another one of your favorite lessons from the book?

Well, I think that another one is a ... Gosh, there’s a lot. It’s breaking the long game down into chapters and I talk about how Ben did that at Pinterest. I talk about short-circuiting the reward system piece, which I mentioned earlier. I share a story about how in the early days of Behance, we would type in “Behance” to Google and it would always say, “Do you mean enhance?” “Do you mean enhance?” And it was like, “Dammit, we’re a mistake.”

And actually it was good, because that was one of those near-term things we could optimize towards and feel progress. And so lo and behold, one day we typed in Behance, it actually said Behance. And then I think six months later, it was back in 2007, 2008, Beyonce became super popular and we lost our SEO again. So lots of little ...

**Startups are luck, right? **

Lots of little funny things like that. And there are a bunch of things ... The last thing I would just say is, I equate this journey in the early stages with all the volatility, it’s like a five- to 10-day road trip with the windows blocked out and your team in the back seat and they have no idea where the hell they are. And if you just keep driving, because you know where you’re going, no one’s going to be with you anymore, they’re going to start to freak out.

But if you can narrate your team through the journey and merchandise progress to the team, manufacture wins along the way that are not fake wins but are celebratory milestones that matter but may have otherwise been ignored. There’s this whole system of narration that leaders need to do for their team in the endurance stage. And a lot of folks don’t do it because they’re freaking out, themselves. And it’s important.

Do you feel like this is something that ... What’s the pitch here to someone who’s listening, who’s not in startups, not in tech?

Oh my gosh, this applies ... I have some feedback from early readers. They’re like, “Hey, if you substitute the word relationship for venture,” or “new product in a company” to “venture,” or “book project.” I also did interview writers and artists for this book, as well, and I have a bunch of parallels for some of these other industries. Because in essence, anything bold enough has this volatility. Also, we’re not hardwired for this stuff. The average life expectancy in the 17th century was 27 years old or something.

**There was no messy middle. There’s just life and death. **

Well, I mean, the idea of spending five to 10 years on a project when life expectancy is so low is pretty unwise.

**It’s very bold, though. So there you go. **

It is bold, but we’re fighting against our own human tendencies, as well as society’s desire to kill off anything that’s new and threatening. So there’s a lot to be considered in any walk of life, for bold, creative pursuits.

**You have been around a lot of really interesting startups really early. We talked a little about Pinterest, but I’d love to hear the story about ... Probably the startup you’re most closely identified with outside of yours is Uber. How did that happen? We’ve talked before about Garrett Camp, who was the founder, one of the founders of Uber, but how did that relationship blossom? And you were a very early investor in it, presumably made a good amount of money on this. How did this relationship happen? **

Garrett and I have known each other for many years and we’re both product-minded investors and leaders, and when he had bought back StumbleUpon from eBay… I forget the exact date, it was probably in the 2007, 2009, whatever time frame. I was a bootstrapped, meaning no venture capital-backed company, Behance CEO, way overwhelmed with my own responsibilities. We were doing a few different partnerships between StumbleUpon and Behance at the time, because Behance content performed well in StumbleUpon, we were finding more ways to work together and become friends.

He was in New York in my office, which was also adjacent to my apartment. This is back in the day, and at the end of the meeting, he whips out some sketches of what he was thinking about as a mobile app to be able to get a car without having to call and book and wait for ... You know, schedule in advance. I remember my first thought being, “You gotta be kidding me. You just bought back StumbleUpon from eBay and you’re thinking about launching a mobile app livery company? This isn’t a good idea for you. I mean, literally, how do you handle that?”

He was just tinkering with this, and I think he was also, of course, in the process of bringing together some folks to run this full-time so he could continue doing his job and maybe serve in some sort of founder and chairman-type role.

Right. And how involved were you in the early days?

In the early days, we would just talk about product, so he would pitch, we’d talk about ... I remember one story, which I talk about a little bit in the book, because I had learned from him around this was this importance of narrating or developing the brand and the message before the product. Because one of the earliest things I remember him talking about was the distinction between a brand that everyone aspired for, as opposed to one that felt accessible. So there was this question of, is it “everyone’s personal driver,” which is aspirational, or is it more like a “taxis on-demand,” which is an accessible ...

You’re talking about what is the slogan, essentially, right?

Yeah. Well, slogan, but also, it informs the design. The brand itself, is it sleek and seems expensive, or does it seem affordable and accessible?

Right. “Everyone’s personal driver” sounds like, “Why do I need a personal driver? I make 60K a year.”

Yeah. I think that the idea of ... They actually ended up going with the everyone’s personal driver as a way to make people want to aspire to have something that they wouldn’t ordinarily have been able to have.

I feel like that’s not very active in the branding now, but ...

I think it’s probably evolved, for sure, but it’s actually another thing to think about, is that the right playbook at one time in the business can become the absolute wrong playbook at another time in the business. Both from how it’s led, as well as what the brand and the message should be and whatever else.

I think that the decision to make an aspirational brand to start probably got the right first adopters, and then launched it in the right way.

**Yep. So then, another one is Pinterest. **

Yeah, so Pinterest ...

I’m sure that your background, obviously, in design helped.

Yeah, Ben couldn’t raise his seed round on the west coast, so he resorted to coming to the east coast.

Had to do with the Scott Belsky’s of New York rather than the real people.

I mean, the riffraff! And Pinterest was a grid-based design system. And it was extraordinarily visual and that was very much what Behance was at the time. And so that’s how we connected. And Ben has always had a drive towards engaging designers in his products. And what I also noticed when I first met Ben, even though they were just kind of testing an early version of Pinterest at the time, they just rotated from a previous incarnation of the business.

I noticed while the traffic was very low to Behance, it was like a high-growth low number. And I remember being curious about some of the decisions that Ben had made. Like, for example, this is at a time when bookmarking sites like Delicious didn’t even have visuals. And any other website that had visuals like Tumblr and others, when you click on an image, it would bring you within the site, because it was always an optimization for pageviews. Everyone on the web was optimizing for pageviews. You wanted to keep the customer in.

And what Ben did was the opposite. When you click on an image, you actually went out. You went to an external URL. Which, while it minimized their pageviews, which looked bad on paper to some investors and that’s maybe why they had struggle raising money, but they were driving traffic. And so all of the recipients of this traffic, these click-throughs, were like, “Whoa, what is this Pinterest thing?” And that, of course, led to them incorporating “pin” buttons and all the other stuff.

So I found that sort of contrarian view of developing a web product at the time very interesting. And that’s what brought me in as a product adviser. And when he was raising his seed round, I said sure, and I remember, this was actually my first-ever seed investment.

Oh, really, okay.

My wife was like, “What are you fucking doing?”

It’s like, “What is this, charity?”

”You’re barely paying yourself.”

But I also felt like I could learn a lot from him, and Ben had a west-coast network as well, and I think it was one of those decisions that I made for different reasons and it worked out.

**Obviously paid off. **

So far, so good.

You obviously have a full time job at Adobe, Benchmark … how much seed investing do you do these days? I feel like I still see your name on lots of stuff.

Listen, I get to meet a lot of folks now that are doing things that overlap ... Overly value product design and are looking to build design teams and product teams. And when different firms introduce me to companies that they’re excited about, if I really resonate with the product and the vision, then I’ll participate as an investor. And I do try to save some time every week to meet with entrepreneurs because it keeps me on my toes, it helps me understand, also, how they’re designing their products.

I have products like Adobe XD now that I’m aggressively trying to help meet the market’s needs. And to be able to work with the most forward-thinking design product teams is really helpful in my day job, and it keeps me on my toes and it feeds another appetite that I have. So I try to make the time for it.

Do you feel like you gravitate, still, towards startups that have design at its core?

I do.

You’re not doing some enterprise software company, right?

Yeah, I’m not doing tons of blockchain stuff. I think, on the enterprise side, I do do a few things where I believe that they value that belief, that consumerizing experiences is actually a competitive advantage in the enterprise, which I do believe. And then I’m focused ... I’ve been doing a lot of work on these direct-to-consumer brands and the picks-and-shovels companies.

Warby Parker ...

And worked with Warby Parker, Sweetgreen, Roman, Outdoor Voices, a bunch of companies in that space. And then I’m also ... I’m super interested in products like Airtable and others that are sort of enterprise, but also consumer. And they’re adopted, usually, on a one-by-one basis. But then before you know it, teams and companies get on board.

There’s a lot investors that would sit in your shoes these days, I think, that the opportunity set isn’t really there anymore. You hear this from some consumer investors who feel like ...

It’s a lazy comment that they make.

It is a mainstream comment, though. It sounds like you think it’s lazy.

I think that whenever we start to discount the probability of something extraordinary going on, is when you find something extraordinary going on. So I love when folks are discounting the consumer sector or discounting the whole world of direct-to-consumer brands as non-venture bankable or ... To me, that’s an example of where people are starting to get lazy, and they’re starting to generalize. So that gets me curious.

The thing about traditional venture capital is it’s transactional. You’re always trying to get ahead of traction. And so you can’t help but always be bringing in all the data around you of what people are saying is getting traction and not getting traction. It makes you very tilted on the world before you.

I always find that great investors really tune in to certain curiosities that they have that others don’t. And then through that insatiable curiosity about a topic or an area of opportunity, end up asking the right questions and finding the right opportunities.

Is there anything about the startup world ... I know a lot of your book is about what individual leaders should do differently. Is there anything about the startup world, having done this ... You’re somewhat of an old guard, even though you’re not that old, in the seed investment world at least. But what would you change? If you were in charge of designing the way that startups raise money or operate ...

Oh man, where do I get started here?

Softball headed up.

Yeah, there’s a few different... They range in the spectrum from somewhat obvious to maybe a little bit polarizing in terms of my ideas on that front. But it goes without saying that the abundance of capital feeds laziness on all sides of the spectrum. From... The LPs become less discriminant where they put their money.

LPs are the investors, venture capital funds own investors who have endowments, hospitals, stuff like that.

Right. And then the venture capitalists and their intern have too much money, and they start to be a little less discerning. And then companies figure, “Since I can raise the money, I should raise the money.” And here’s the tricky part: Sometimes that’s right. I know Stewart Butterfield’s come on record saying, “Hey, I’m going to raise money for Slack at this foundation because I can.” And with his velocity of a company that makes sense for him.

But I don’t think it makes sense for most folks because then, that’s the whole ... You have resources as carbs and resourcefulness as muscle. You’re going to just throw carbs at every problem and you’re not going to end up having anything ...

The carbs were really good though, that’s the thing.

They taste so good at the time and they really make your problems go away for a moment. But not over time.

So I think that there’s constraints in the system that I would love to see. And I advise companies to not get ahead of themselves. Because I have seen so many businesses that I’ve invested in that haven’t done as well, go out after a big seed or A round. And then have to do either an even-money or down round, and then their employees get this message that the last two years have been for nothing and investors start to demand more aggressive terms. And it’s sort of the beginning of the end in many cases. So that’s one thing.

And the other thing I would say is, it would be interesting here on the bold idea side...

Yeah. What’s the most polarizing opinion possible?

We always have the SAFE notes and standard ways that companies raise money, whether it’s a convertible note or equity. But there’s no standardized way of companies returning capital and saying, “Okay, this isn’t working.”

I’ve been in some companies that started as a big data play and became an online car-sales thing and then switched to a third thing. And as an investor I’m just like, “I didn’t invest in the second or the third incarnation of what you’re doing. And you’re just kind of using the money at this point to triangulate in the ether.”

What if there was a way for companies to be able to, at some point say, “Hey, I’m just going to push the eject button because this isn’t working.” And then have a agreed-upon way that capital resolves all debts, maybe compensates the founders a little bit and just lets everyone go on their merry way as opposed to stringing out a long, painful, 10-year death journey.

Especially because you can be in there for a very long time. You invest in 2012, in 2018 the company’s pivoted four times, the founders are ...

And founders struggle with this. I talk to founders who say they don’t want to let down their investors, therefore they’re going to keep at it. And I’m like, “Well, if you have less conviction now then you did when you knew nothing, then eject.”

But there’s no standard way of winding that down and returning, without questions asked. And it would just be interesting if it was more commonplace and accepted for the eject button, and for an actual incentives in that instance, that sort of take care of everyone at that moment.

That is very controversial, and I don’t know if it’s entirely a financial question as much as it is people don’t want to say they failed at it, right? And financially, yeah, you can certainly come up with a structure where... That’s why shareholders will sometimes sell their shares in the secondary, or find some other way to eject.

But most of it’s basically ... I feel like there were times where founders basically just kind of ghost, right? And you don’t really get any updates and you sort of assume it’s shutdown.

It’s funny, I was talking to an entrepreneur the other night, he was telling me that at Google, they’re writing terms sheets to employees that have ideas that would want to leave. And they’re basically saying, “We’ll fund your seed, essentially, with a few million bucks.” Like large amounts. And your equity continues to vest for two years. Your Google equity.

Google equity, right.

But if it doesn’t work you just kind of pick up where you left off at Google. And so I think it was their way of saying, “Hey, these top people want to leave and start their thing, and we know that most of those things don’t end well. And the cost of recruiters and getting a Google employee that will perform really well is so high, we’ll just write these term sheets to people and have these conditions and keep their equity vesting, so that they feel like this opportunity to just come right back in if it’s not working.”

It’s interesting, because actually ...

Google is sort of betting on the person’s going to fail.

Well actually, it’s funny, I was hearing this and I was thinking, “Oh, actually, this is super smart of Google.” Because it also gives the entrepreneurs this weird exit opportunity that in two years, if it’s not working, they can just kind of go back and pick up where they left off.

Save face and go back.

Which is not a healthy dynamic for a startup. You actually have to feel like you have it all on the line and you have everything to prove for yourself and there’s no safety net. So I’m actually not sure if it’s a good idea for the entrepreneurs. I think it’s brilliant for Google.

We’ll leave it there. Scott, it was great talking to you. Thanks for coming on the show.

Thanks, Teddy.

Benchmark’s Scott Belsky has four magic words for entrepreneurs: ‘Do your fucking job’

#belsky #benchmark #entrepreneurs #four #fucking #job #magic #scott #words




Belsky, a venture partner at Benchmark and the CPO at Adobe, talks about his book “The Messy Middle” on the latest Recode Decode.

When we talk about startups, we overemphasize the exciting launches, exhilarating exits and demoralizing defeats — and we don’t talk enough about the middle part of the story, Adobe Chief Product Officer Scott Belsky says.

To rectify this problem, Belsky — the former Behance CEO who now spends his time at Adobe and Benchmark, where he is a venture partner — has written an advice book called “The Messy Middle.” On the latest episode of Recode Decode, he shared some of his favorite pieces of advice, which he said could apply to creative projects and new products as much as they apply to new companies.

“When [founders]have to let someone off, lay someone off, or kill a product that’s working but doesn’t have the growth rate that is required to break out ... these are always the difficult decisions to make because the easiest decision to make is to not make a decision yet,” Belsky told Recode’s Teddy Schleifer. “Sometimes you just have to whisper to yourself, ‘just do your fucking job.’ And then you liberate your team to be so much more productive and focused.”

“And so, how do you hold yourself accountable to doing that?” he added. “What are the little tricks or hacks? And I would always, literally, whisper to myself, ‘DYFJ,’ before some of these moments just so I could kick my ass.”

Killing projects or laying off employees can be fraught, emotional tasks, but Belsky said successful creators have to find the line between ignoring those emotions and blowing past them.

“The sensitivities we have to the people that we will impact with our decisions are good,” he said. “This is what makes us effective leaders, is understanding how people will feel, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that decision shouldn’t be made. Because by not making it, you contribute to that organizational debt ... that’s where you end up losing your A players who would rather work with a team where they can make the fricking decisions and move on.”

You can listen to Recode Decode wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts and Overcast.

Below, we’ve shared a lightly edited full transcript of Teddy’s conversation with Scott.

---

Teddy Schleifer: I’m here with Scott Belsky, who’s the chief product officer of Adobe. He’s also the author of a new book called “The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture.” Scott, welcome to Recode Decode.

**Scott Belsky: **Thank you.

So, Scott is someone who I feel is very well known in the startup community overall. I feel like you have a lot of different hats. You’ve done a lot of things, right? You’ve had a company. You are obviously very tied into the design community. You seem to be like a seed investor in seemingly every interesting company. I don’t know how that happens. It’s just like every company that ... Part of it’s that I think you were early to the seed world and to the angel investing world.

Yeah. And a little bit of luck.

A little bit of luck, but ...

We talk about that, though.

I feel like your name’s everywhere. You’ve also had a formal job at a venture capital firm, and now you’re back at kind of a big, bad corporation, at Adobe. And your new book is sort of a memoir? I mean, in some ways it’s a memoir, of kind of ... It’s not, “Hey, on Thursday I had a great omelette.” But ...

I think I’m too young to write a memoir, but you know, this definitely was influenced by a lot of the experiences I had as a bootstrapped entrepreneur for five years, venture-backed for two years, three years of integration and acquisition, an adviser to many startups and also a venture investor. There was certainly a lot of prompts that came from my own experiences, but I also interviewed over 100 different folks for this book.

Yeah, so this was a journalistic project, in some ways. You were certainly using your relationships, but able to kind of ...

I was trying.

To, you know, put people on the couch and ask about what their life was like. So, just start off with ... Most folks don’t know who you are. How did you end up ... Let me ask this. What was your first Silicon Valley experience? I think you were at Goldman after college for a couple of years?

Yeah. I studied design and business as an undergrad, and had to kind of decide which path to choose. This is 2001, 2002, and at that time you kind of cut your teeth in business if you wanted to, or went the design route. And so I went to, of all places, a job on Wall Street, where a year and a half into it I was just very ... It was very clear to me I didn’t want to be in finance for the rest of my life. And then went to my manager, talked about it. She said, “Well, if you could have another job in the firm, what would it be?” I ended up taking this role in the executive office, focused on organizational development, leadership development, succession planning. It was almost like an internal management consultant job.

This is in New York. This is not here.

In New York.

**Okay. **

And I found myself actually using design again. I had Illustrator on my computer and I was actually trying to use visual and design to address the projects that I was given. And again, it was a kind of theme in my career, of using design to organize information and organize people.

So it’s during that next three years, still in this job at Goldman, but this new job ... that I was thinking, “Gosh. The most disorganized community on the planet is the creative world. This is hundreds of billions of dollars of creative production annually, done by people who are ultimately represented by agencies and headhunters. They never get attribution for their work.” And they were using, at the time, DeviantArt and Myspace and some of these other products to showcase their work online, and I thought there was an opportunity there. Which was the genesis of the idea of Behance, and getting into something that was well beyond what I was capable of doing at the time.

Got it. So you never thought about joining a massive design firm, or kind of going into the design world full-time, professionally? That was never something you ...

Not really. You know, I always loved design, but I always felt like I would do something in the intersection of both business and design.

Well, what was the ... I mean, was it seen as just not ... You know, obviously there’s a lot of designers who work in-house.

Yup.

You know, chief designer at Uber. Or folks who do nothing in technology at all, right? You could have a very nice life doing that.

Sure. I think at the time ... And I didn’t know the language of product design and user experience design. In fact, back then it wasn’t as common of a term. Like, you weren’t thinking beyond just a few companies. Every business wasn’t thinking about the experience that their customer is having, and all of the stuff we use today.

But that was always what I had a knack for. And I guess I was always trying to figure out how to apply that. That’s not just a traditional design skill set. It’s actually more about customer psychology, and what do they have to see as a default, and how do things stroke their ego as the user product that breeds retention? These are the things that I have language for now, but didn’t then. But I was always trying to find out what the application is of these interests.

Right, right. So you leave Goldman in like mid-2000s. 2005, 2006?

Yup.

And you start Behance immediately?

Yes.

Okay. So, what was the moment? What was the moment where you thought, you know, “I want to do a startup.”

Well, I think it was frustration. I actually think that most great products and projects are born from some degree of frustration. For me it was all my friends, who were creatives of different kinds, whether architects or illustrators or designers.

**Because you’re in New York at this point. **

I was in New York. And again, I went to school with a lot of folks who became designers and I had a lot of friends in this community, and I felt they were some of the most talented, yet disorganized, people I knew. And I figured, you know, they always go to conferences and read books about creativity and design. That’s actually the last thing they need. They don’t need more ideas. They need more execution. They just need to have a better system for how they showcase their work and keep their portfolios updated. And so, the idea behind Behance was a company to organize the creative world, as opposed to boost productivity or creativity or connect people with each other.

That was always one of those principles of the company was we’re not gonna use the word “creativity.” We’re actually always gonna focus on organizing and boosting productivity in the creative world. And that started, of all things, as a paper product.

Paper. That’s like the white, eight-and-a-half by 11?

Yeah. We actually made notebooks for creatives to get organized. There’s a funny story we can get to later, the fact that one of our partners of Behance was Garrett Camp, who had just bought back StumbleUpon, and he was ...

Yup. This is, later, the founder of Uber.

Right, and he was using our action books for his own work. I was actually in a meeting a few years later where he whipped out a little sketch of a little side project of his to get cars on demand. And it was one of our action books that he was showing me this idea that became Uber.

Okay. There you go. So you guys didn’t, you guys were ... Just, you were very tapped in at that point to the New York creative scene. You don’t raise any money, right? You were using the word startup. This was a startup at the time.

So, we were bootstrapped. I mean, this is back in ...

Okay, so maybe you just thought of it as, like, a company?

What smart VC would invest in a company that’s doing a paper product and has a conference to bootstrap themselves and has this idea of building a massive online network yet doesn’t have any experienced engineers on their team that have done such a thing?

So, were you bootstrapped intentionally, or was it that you were pitching and people were saying no? What was the experience there?

We weren’t pitching. Maybe it was partly because I knew what the answer would be.

Okay.

We were resolute on being a bootstrapped company that could actually choose its own destiny. And always in the back of my head I was wondering during that five-year period, “Maybe we’ll go solo.” You know?

I knew Jason Fried and those guys, and I kind of looked up to the way that BaseCamp had been built, and I thought, “Maybe we can kind of own our own destiny here and be somewhat a lifestyle business.” And in fact, we were set up as an LLC, where everyone had compensatory units and could be compensated based on profits. And so, we had that going for a period of time, up until a moment where I realized I was strangling the potential of the team.

Bootstrapping, by the way, is just a company without venture funding.

Correct.

So then, you guys eventually take some money from Benchmark, right? Is that the ...

No, from Union Square Ventures.

Okay. It’s not from Benchmark, okay. How soon was that, in between that and the company being sold?

Yeah, so it was actually, it all happened pretty quickly. Five years in, we raise a round from Union Square Ventures, Chris Dixon, Jeff Bezos, a few other angels, and then we’re off to the races.

Regular angels, like Jeff Bezos. You know, making angel investments all the time.

We got lucky on ... And then these ... You know, small, syndicated folks, we probably raised probably around $6 million, but we had not really raised any venture funding before, so it was kind of our first round, but also an A.

And then, the long story short, about a year later, it just became very clear, after Adobe had made this transition from software to services, it needed to build a community to build the relationships with their customers, of which they didn’t have, really ... You know, it used to be you’d fill out this postcard and send it in if you bought a boxed software. Now you were, on a monthly basis, having a relationship with a company.

So, it just became clear to me that we were the perfect fit, and the opportunity was right, and we had so little dilution. And I figured, “Okay. Are we gonna raise a series B and then a series C?” I kind of did the math on that part of the outcome, and then I also thought about ... For our customers, and for the team, where did we belong, and where would be the best sort of mothership, so to speak?

Yeah. You sold it for, like, I think 150-ish, right?

Yup.

And then you spent a couple years in round one in Adobe.

Yeah, so three years.

Okay. This is round one.

And I went in saying, “I’m not sure how this is gonna go.” At first I was overseeing just Behance and the integration. And then I really started to get excited by this promise of Creative Cloud, which was really, at the time, a business model innovation as opposed to a series of product innovations.

But I was thinking, “You know, if we’re actually delivering updates every month, as opposed to every 18 months, and we have these services that we can build ... “ Like, what does that really mean? And at the time, Dave Wadhwani was head of the Creative Cloud business. He went on to become CEO of AppDynamics. You know, right before ...

Sure.

And then they ended up almost going public, and then getting acquired. But he was my boss at the time and he said, “Well, what do you want to do here?” And I figured, “Well, let’s start to build some of these services and mobile products.” So that was kind of my second job at Adobe, beyond Behance, during my first three years there.

Got it. And so, then you had this really interesting part of your career, which was very public in some ways, which was the joining of Benchmark. Right?

Mm-hmm.

So, Benchmark. Obviously one of the most well-known venture capital firms. Hire people pretty rarely. Very small, very tight-knit.

Yup.

You joined when? From Adobe? Straight there from ...

Yeah. So, I think ... You know, I learned a lot about myself in this process.

At this point, you are a well-known seed investor, kind of on the side. This is not your full-time job.

Right. So, all along the way, being at the intersection of design and technology. My role with Behance, being in the right place and some of the right times, like the story with Garrett.

Yup.

And working closely with people like Ben Silverman, you know, from the seed stage of Pinterest, and working with Kayvon and Joe from Periscope, and going through, with them, the acquisition into Twitter ... That’s actually how I originally met Peter Fenton. And so, having this role with a number of different entrepreneurs, I became convinced that I should be an investor.

It’s one of those things where everyone’s telling you, “This is what you should do next. You should do this next.” You start to believe it, potentially, if you don’t know this part of yourself yet. And I always love working with product teams and investing in the potential of a product and the potential of people. And then I said, “Well, if I love doing this, and I think I’m pretty good as an investor, I should just join a great firm.” And so, the opportunity to join Benchmark and spend a lot of time with that team, you know, it just seemed like the perfect fit.

And then, I think pretty quickly, I realized, or I felt like I had hung up my spurs, and it just wasn’t the application of my own superpowers. You know? Everyone has to feel like, where are they in their zone most, and I just realized I love the earlier stage of working with products and helping sort of develop product strategy. And I think that from an operator’s standpoint, that means that I should be building products, and from an investor’s standpoint, that means I should really be in the seed stage.

Yup.

So then I found myself in this kind of awkward position where, you know, “Do I want to do this for the next 15 years?” — I mean, it’s a major commitment — “or not?” And I think with my partners, the question was, what’s the right fit for me and what should I be doing? And that’s when, six or so months in, I made that transition to venture partner, and then figured ... Which I remain to this day.

But then, went back and said, “Okay. Well, where am I most happy and where do I feel fully utilized?” And to me, there was no question. My perfect balance is building products and solving product problems, and working with early-stage teams to find their product market fit.

Right. That was very unusual, though. Right? I mean, obviously in Silicon Valley, people join these venture firms, especially august ones like Benchmark, and it’s seen as, like, “you made it” sort of career moves.

Yeah, it’s hard. And it also makes you wonder, like, “Gosh.” You know? I had never really had a moment in my career until that point where I felt like I had made the wrong decision, or that I sort of failed, and how I felt I would take the next 10-plus years of my life. And so, it’s hard not only to extract yourself from a decision you’ve made, but also to keep the relationships strong.

Yeah, right.

And then, also figure out what you want to do next after that point. Because, as you know, when you join a big venture firm like this, you’re suddenly labeled as, “You’re a VC. This is what you’re gonna do forever.” And I was ...

Venture people are almost sort of famous in Silicon Valley, right?

That was difficult. Right. And then of course, the headlines don’t always help in this regard.

Sure.

But I think what I learned from that period, and I certainly ... You know, this had an influence on some parts of the book, as well. First of all, life is iteration, right?

Yeah.

Trying to do things. And should I be beating myself up for taking a step, just because everyone says this was what I should do, as opposed to really validating that myself? You know, I think I certainly learned something from it. But at the end of the day, I also learned a ton from being a full-time part of the Benchmark team for over six months, and having these ongoing relationships with the firm that I do now. So, it’s hard to have regrets.

Yeah, and we talked about the role of external pressure, which, I think, it sounds like part of it is listening to other people.

Yeah.

That’s something that entrepreneurs think about. Very quickly ... Just as of, what? Six months ago? 10 months ago? You’re now back at Adobe for round two. How’d that happen?

Yeah. You know, rotating into this venture partner role, I started to kind of stick my finger into many different things. And one of those things was serving as a consultant for Shantanu, who’s the CEO of Adobe. He knew me, obviously, very well, from my first three years there, and was very excited about some of the prospects for the creative products.

I mean, the company’s been doing extraordinarily well, but I think the products are starting to reach an inflection point now where they can transcend the desktop and actually legitimately be multi-surface systems, and also, there’s a market expansion opportunity now.

Adobe has a great reach to the creative professional world, but these days everyone wants to be creative and express themselves visually. Social marketing teams want to be able to output professional-grade creativity. The YouTube generation wants to be able to cut professional-grade video without having to learn a tool like Premiere Pro, which is pretty complicated. And so there were just these various inflection points and he asked me to come in and work with the teams a little bit, which I did. And I didn’t really have in my mind that I would come back. I, in some ways, severed the umbilical cord to my own company.

“Never again at Adobe.”

Oh, it was 10 years from start to finish at Behance and Adobe. That era of my life, even though I actually really enjoyed it, I just said, “Okay, it’s time to move on.” But when he started to socialize this notion of a chief product officer role and what that could entail in terms of bringing design and product and engineering together and starting to cut through a lot of the decisions that should have been made but weren’t, what I like to call it organizational debt, I thought it was a really interesting thing that I thought I was the right person to do. And the fact that they were willing to allow me to continue to do my noncompetitive seed investing and have this venture partner role and continue this book project, I think that I really appreciated that about the company’s flexibility.

**Let’s talk a little bit about the bones of the book here. We were talking before about, you seem to have taken incredible notes. I’m always amazed whenever I read some book from ... It makes me think I’m not taking enough notes in my life. Though maybe it will be easier with email drafts and ... But you read all these political books and it’s basically like people have contemporaneous notes of meetings with Nixon. **

But you have these great anecdotes from various parts of your life, also have done some interviews. I’d love to just hear how you tackle this. I know this has been a book that you’ve been thinking about writing for a while. Obviously, when you start signing up with professional people in the book industry, it puts fire under your ass a little bit.

Yep.

**How did this come together? **

About five to seven years ago, I started an Evernote file called “A Journey In Between Insights.” That’s what I called it at the time.

**This is on Evernote. This is not, it’s not note cards that are like stuffed in between ... **

That is correct. It’s an Evernote notebook, I guess. And whenever I would find myself on a phone call with an entrepreneur at 1:00 a.m. making a very bold and gut-wrenching decision, or find myself in a board meeting, or found myself in an interesting moment, whether it was as an entrepreneur or post-acquisition, big company or in a venture pitch, right? When there was something that I would think about that was somewhat counterintuitive that I wanted to think about more, I would just write it down. And then I would come back to them oftentimes.

It was just a way of me processing my own set of tactics and prompts that were relevant to me and I would want to share with other entrepreneurs and that sort of thing. And this book, this notebook over the years, amassed over 800 or so notes. I know I was on a flight at one point a few years ago and said, “I should just start to actually tag them. Figure out if there’s some theme.”

At this point you’re not thinking about it as a book, you’re thinking about as observation.

Yeah, sort of personal way.

It’s almost like things you wish you could tweet.

Yeah, and some of them I would tweet occasionally. So I went through and I realized that there was actually an interesting theme amongst them. First of all, they were all about, generally, navigating the volatility between the start and the finish. And I’ve always been frustrated by our obsession with headlines, no offense.

**No, no. **

Right?

That’s fair, yeah.

But the starts. We love to celebrate when people leave and start something new or people get funding and then we love celebrating whether it’s an acquisition, an IPO or a bankruptcy. We love the pithy starts and finishes, and then there’s volatility in between, it’s very hard to tie a bow around. It’s a little too dynamic to be summarized, and therefore basically goes overlooked.

The fascination for me was, all of these insights essentially relate to volatility and they really fall into three camps: During the lows, optimizing whatever is working, and then that final mile, how to not screw it up.

Yup. So let’s talk a little bit about each of those. I totally agree. Obviously, people, not just the press but observers, right? If you’re an entrepreneur and you have a friend who is another entrepreneur, it’s like, “Oh, you started the company, great.” And then like, “Oh, how’d the company go?” And obviously in terms of the actual hours spent, most of it is just grinding away.

Totally.

**Things are on fire or slightly better. But I guess people would say, “Yeah, he’s doing his job. How’s it going?” “It’s still going on.” **

Right, right.

Move on. So the beginnings. Do you feel like the way that people begin companies these days is ... What’s the lesson in this book for people who are thinking about beginning companies?

Yeah. Well, a few different things. I think that when you embark on a bold project that is likely to span the course of years, right? A few things. First of all, there are too many companies, especially in Silicon Valley, that are started out of a passion for a solution to a problem, as opposed to empathy with the customer suffering the problem. I actually think a lot of work ...

**“I want to do x because I’m interested in x,” rather than someone else ... **

Yeah.

Someone else, people care about ...

There needs to be a better this, there needs to be a better that, or the world suffers from this and I’m going to solve it. And then we embark and build a team of people who are passionate about the market opportunity in the solution. And then you end up with something ...

**It’s kind of like a hero complex. **

It is a bit and you end up with something that’s typically at least, if not more, 30 degrees off what the customer ultimately needs. The really mundane yet critical thing to do in this process, of course, is to be shoulder to shoulder with the customer suffering. Which is why a lot of the best teams in the early stages are not building scalable solutions yet, they’re just building something that really hits the nail on the head for the customer. And then once you figure that out in a non-scalable fashion, then you start to think, “Okay, how do we do this in a way that might be, dare I say, profitable in the future?” So I think that the the empathy-before-passion piece...

I also think that we typically fool ourselves into thinking that the vision for what this might be five years from now is enough to keep the team engaged on an everyday basis. And I talk about, in the book, this notion of short circuiting your reward system so that the stuff that you typically rely upon for progress indication, like revenues and customers, when that stuff isn’t there, how do you keep people engaged? I would go on the record saying I think the competitive advantage of most startups is just sticking together long enough to figure it out.

Right. Just not giving up.

Especially hard, by the way, in Silicon Valley with all these headlines of companies that seemingly are doing better than you are. And you’re constantly questioning, should I be here? I’ve been heads down, grinding for two years, seems like we’re not making any traction. And so-and-so just raised $30 million from this company. What am I doing wrong? And that’s one of the disadvantages, I believe, of being in a hot spot, is that your loyalty and the collective perseverance of a team is at risk at all times.

**Yes, totally. And then in the middle stage, which is the whole point of the book. **

Yeah.

Do you think that too many people are ... I think that the value of the book here is the fact that if there’s an entrepreneur out there who is going through a messy middle, they probably think, “I screwed up,” right? Like things aren’t getting better. And the whole point of the book here, it seems to me, is that there’s a way to ... That this is common. And this isn’t just entrepreneurship or startups. Marriages have ups and downs, friendships have ups and downs.

By the way, it’s the best-case scenario.

**Yeah. **

The volatility, first of all is ... There is something to be mined from this volatility. It’s — at its lows is where we build the muscle memory. I like to say that resourcefulness is more important than resources, and you only get resourcefulness from having to be constrained.

And when I think about Joe Gebbia and the team at Airbnb and their two iterations before the third that worked, or I think about Ben Silbermann consistently being underestimated by the tech media and being discounted because a lot of his customers were middle-American moms in the beginning. And I think about, the teams that I actually most admire are those that have endured a lot of anonymity, ambiguity, uncertainty, and have in some ways mined those lows to build great process and great culture.

And I would just say that in this volatility, we’re not our best selves at the lows, obviously, because we make decisions out of fear. We’re not our best at the highs because we are making decisions, oftentimes falsely attributing the things that we did to the things that worked. And so the message of this middle part is to have tactics, to make the most and endure the lows and then optimize the hell out of anything that works.

**Yeah. So the book is organized into these little five-page ... It’s very easy to read even if you only had 10 minutes on the bus or something like that. **

Yep.

What are some of your favorite lessons? My favorite one is the “Do your fucking job” one, which ... Do you want to explain that?

Yeah, sure. In the endurance section — which was the hardest part to write, by the way, it’s painful to write and read — it’s just about the moments where you’re not sure how to do something or where you are, where you’re going. And it’s actually the reality of anyone’s journey. This is not particular to people that are not doing well. It’s a part of any bold journey.

But the “do your fucking job” piece is about what I and others that I interviewed do for themselves when they have to let someone off, lay someone off, or kill a product that’s working but doesn’t have the growth rate that is required to break out. And these are always the difficult decisions to make because the easiest decision to make is to not make a decision yet, but when you’re just ... Sometimes you just have to whisper to yourself, “just do your fucking job.” And then you liberate your team to be so much more productive and focused.

And so, how do you hold yourself accountable to doing that? What are the little tricks or hacks? And I would always, literally, whisper to myself “DYFJ” before some of these moments just so I could kick my ass.

**Well, you need to be ... you need to be a cold, emotionless killer. **

Yeah. I think that I also talk in the section about how the sensitivities we have to the people that we will impact with our decisions are good. This is what makes us effective leaders, is understanding how people will feel, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that decision shouldn’t be made. Because by not making it, you contribute to that organizational debt, right? That accumulation of decisions that should have been made but weren’t. And that’s where you end up losing your A players who would rather work with a team where they can make the fricking decisions and move on.

Yeah. What’s another one of your favorite lessons from the book?

Well, I think that another one is a ... Gosh, there’s a lot. It’s breaking the long game down into chapters and I talk about how Ben did that at Pinterest. I talk about short-circuiting the reward system piece, which I mentioned earlier. I share a story about how in the early days of Behance, we would type in “Behance” to Google and it would always say, “Do you mean enhance?” “Do you mean enhance?” And it was like, “Dammit, we’re a mistake.”

And actually it was good, because that was one of those near-term things we could optimize towards and feel progress. And so lo and behold, one day we typed in Behance, it actually said Behance. And then I think six months later, it was back in 2007, 2008, Beyonce became super popular and we lost our SEO again. So lots of little ...

**Startups are luck, right? **

Lots of little funny things like that. And there are a bunch of things ... The last thing I would just say is, I equate this journey in the early stages with all the volatility, it’s like a five- to 10-day road trip with the windows blocked out and your team in the back seat and they have no idea where the hell they are. And if you just keep driving, because you know where you’re going, no one’s going to be with you anymore, they’re going to start to freak out.

But if you can narrate your team through the journey and merchandise progress to the team, manufacture wins along the way that are not fake wins but are celebratory milestones that matter but may have otherwise been ignored. There’s this whole system of narration that leaders need to do for their team in the endurance stage. And a lot of folks don’t do it because they’re freaking out, themselves. And it’s important.

Do you feel like this is something that ... What’s the pitch here to someone who’s listening, who’s not in startups, not in tech?

Oh my gosh, this applies ... I have some feedback from early readers. They’re like, “Hey, if you substitute the word relationship for venture,” or “new product in a company” to “venture,” or “book project.” I also did interview writers and artists for this book, as well, and I have a bunch of parallels for some of these other industries. Because in essence, anything bold enough has this volatility. Also, we’re not hardwired for this stuff. The average life expectancy in the 17th century was 27 years old or something.

**There was no messy middle. There’s just life and death. **

Well, I mean, the idea of spending five to 10 years on a project when life expectancy is so low is pretty unwise.

**It’s very bold, though. So there you go. **

It is bold, but we’re fighting against our own human tendencies, as well as society’s desire to kill off anything that’s new and threatening. So there’s a lot to be considered in any walk of life, for bold, creative pursuits.

**You have been around a lot of really interesting startups really early. We talked a little about Pinterest, but I’d love to hear the story about ... Probably the startup you’re most closely identified with outside of yours is Uber. How did that happen? We’ve talked before about Garrett Camp, who was the founder, one of the founders of Uber, but how did that relationship blossom? And you were a very early investor in it, presumably made a good amount of money on this. How did this relationship happen? **

Garrett and I have known each other for many years and we’re both product-minded investors and leaders, and when he had bought back StumbleUpon from eBay… I forget the exact date, it was probably in the 2007, 2009, whatever time frame. I was a bootstrapped, meaning no venture capital-backed company, Behance CEO, way overwhelmed with my own responsibilities. We were doing a few different partnerships between StumbleUpon and Behance at the time, because Behance content performed well in StumbleUpon, we were finding more ways to work together and become friends.

He was in New York in my office, which was also adjacent to my apartment. This is back in the day, and at the end of the meeting, he whips out some sketches of what he was thinking about as a mobile app to be able to get a car without having to call and book and wait for ... You know, schedule in advance. I remember my first thought being, “You gotta be kidding me. You just bought back StumbleUpon from eBay and you’re thinking about launching a mobile app livery company? This isn’t a good idea for you. I mean, literally, how do you handle that?”

He was just tinkering with this, and I think he was also, of course, in the process of bringing together some folks to run this full-time so he could continue doing his job and maybe serve in some sort of founder and chairman-type role.

Right. And how involved were you in the early days?

In the early days, we would just talk about product, so he would pitch, we’d talk about ... I remember one story, which I talk about a little bit in the book, because I had learned from him around this was this importance of narrating or developing the brand and the message before the product. Because one of the earliest things I remember him talking about was the distinction between a brand that everyone aspired for, as opposed to one that felt accessible. So there was this question of, is it “everyone’s personal driver,” which is aspirational, or is it more like a “taxis on-demand,” which is an accessible ...

You’re talking about what is the slogan, essentially, right?

Yeah. Well, slogan, but also, it informs the design. The brand itself, is it sleek and seems expensive, or does it seem affordable and accessible?

Right. “Everyone’s personal driver” sounds like, “Why do I need a personal driver? I make 60K a year.”

Yeah. I think that the idea of ... They actually ended up going with the everyone’s personal driver as a way to make people want to aspire to have something that they wouldn’t ordinarily have been able to have.

I feel like that’s not very active in the branding now, but ...

I think it’s probably evolved, for sure, but it’s actually another thing to think about, is that the right playbook at one time in the business can become the absolute wrong playbook at another time in the business. Both from how it’s led, as well as what the brand and the message should be and whatever else.

I think that the decision to make an aspirational brand to start probably got the right first adopters, and then launched it in the right way.

**Yep. So then, another one is Pinterest. **

Yeah, so Pinterest ...

I’m sure that your background, obviously, in design helped.

Yeah, Ben couldn’t raise his seed round on the west coast, so he resorted to coming to the east coast.

Had to do with the Scott Belsky’s of New York rather than the real people.

I mean, the riffraff! And Pinterest was a grid-based design system. And it was extraordinarily visual and that was very much what Behance was at the time. And so that’s how we connected. And Ben has always had a drive towards engaging designers in his products. And what I also noticed when I first met Ben, even though they were just kind of testing an early version of Pinterest at the time, they just rotated from a previous incarnation of the business.

I noticed while the traffic was very low to Behance, it was like a high-growth low number. And I remember being curious about some of the decisions that Ben had made. Like, for example, this is at a time when bookmarking sites like Delicious didn’t even have visuals. And any other website that had visuals like Tumblr and others, when you click on an image, it would bring you within the site, because it was always an optimization for pageviews. Everyone on the web was optimizing for pageviews. You wanted to keep the customer in.

And what Ben did was the opposite. When you click on an image, you actually went out. You went to an external URL. Which, while it minimized their pageviews, which looked bad on paper to some investors and that’s maybe why they had struggle raising money, but they were driving traffic. And so all of the recipients of this traffic, these click-throughs, were like, “Whoa, what is this Pinterest thing?” And that, of course, led to them incorporating “pin” buttons and all the other stuff.

So I found that sort of contrarian view of developing a web product at the time very interesting. And that’s what brought me in as a product adviser. And when he was raising his seed round, I said sure, and I remember, this was actually my first-ever seed investment.

Oh, really, okay.

My wife was like, “What are you fucking doing?”

It’s like, “What is this, charity?”

”You’re barely paying yourself.”

But I also felt like I could learn a lot from him, and Ben had a west-coast network as well, and I think it was one of those decisions that I made for different reasons and it worked out.

**Obviously paid off. **

So far, so good.

You obviously have a full time job at Adobe, Benchmark … how much seed investing do you do these days? I feel like I still see your name on lots of stuff.

Listen, I get to meet a lot of folks now that are doing things that overlap ... Overly value product design and are looking to build design teams and product teams. And when different firms introduce me to companies that they’re excited about, if I really resonate with the product and the vision, then I’ll participate as an investor. And I do try to save some time every week to meet with entrepreneurs because it keeps me on my toes, it helps me understand, also, how they’re designing their products.

I have products like Adobe XD now that I’m aggressively trying to help meet the market’s needs. And to be able to work with the most forward-thinking design product teams is really helpful in my day job, and it keeps me on my toes and it feeds another appetite that I have. So I try to make the time for it.

Do you feel like you gravitate, still, towards startups that have design at its core?

I do.

You’re not doing some enterprise software company, right?

Yeah, I’m not doing tons of blockchain stuff. I think, on the enterprise side, I do do a few things where I believe that they value that belief, that consumerizing experiences is actually a competitive advantage in the enterprise, which I do believe. And then I’m focused ... I’ve been doing a lot of work on these direct-to-consumer brands and the picks-and-shovels companies.

Warby Parker ...

And worked with Warby Parker, Sweetgreen, Roman, Outdoor Voices, a bunch of companies in that space. And then I’m also ... I’m super interested in products like Airtable and others that are sort of enterprise, but also consumer. And they’re adopted, usually, on a one-by-one basis. But then before you know it, teams and companies get on board.

There’s a lot investors that would sit in your shoes these days, I think, that the opportunity set isn’t really there anymore. You hear this from some consumer investors who feel like ...

It’s a lazy comment that they make.

It is a mainstream comment, though. It sounds like you think it’s lazy.

I think that whenever we start to discount the probability of something extraordinary going on, is when you find something extraordinary going on. So I love when folks are discounting the consumer sector or discounting the whole world of direct-to-consumer brands as non-venture bankable or ... To me, that’s an example of where people are starting to get lazy, and they’re starting to generalize. So that gets me curious.

The thing about traditional venture capital is it’s transactional. You’re always trying to get ahead of traction. And so you can’t help but always be bringing in all the data around you of what people are saying is getting traction and not getting traction. It makes you very tilted on the world before you.

I always find that great investors really tune in to certain curiosities that they have that others don’t. And then through that insatiable curiosity about a topic or an area of opportunity, end up asking the right questions and finding the right opportunities.

Is there anything about the startup world ... I know a lot of your book is about what individual leaders should do differently. Is there anything about the startup world, having done this ... You’re somewhat of an old guard, even though you’re not that old, in the seed investment world at least. But what would you change? If you were in charge of designing the way that startups raise money or operate ...

Oh man, where do I get started here?

Softball headed up.

Yeah, there’s a few different... They range in the spectrum from somewhat obvious to maybe a little bit polarizing in terms of my ideas on that front. But it goes without saying that the abundance of capital feeds laziness on all sides of the spectrum. From... The LPs become less discriminant where they put their money.

LPs are the investors, venture capital funds own investors who have endowments, hospitals, stuff like that.

Right. And then the venture capitalists and their intern have too much money, and they start to be a little less discerning. And then companies figure, “Since I can raise the money, I should raise the money.” And here’s the tricky part: Sometimes that’s right. I know Stewart Butterfield’s come on record saying, “Hey, I’m going to raise money for Slack at this foundation because I can.” And with his velocity of a company that makes sense for him.

But I don’t think it makes sense for most folks because then, that’s the whole ... You have resources as carbs and resourcefulness as muscle. You’re going to just throw carbs at every problem and you’re not going to end up having anything ...

The carbs were really good though, that’s the thing.

They taste so good at the time and they really make your problems go away for a moment. But not over time.

So I think that there’s constraints in the system that I would love to see. And I advise companies to not get ahead of themselves. Because I have seen so many businesses that I’ve invested in that haven’t done as well, go out after a big seed or A round. And then have to do either an even-money or down round, and then their employees get this message that the last two years have been for nothing and investors start to demand more aggressive terms. And it’s sort of the beginning of the end in many cases. So that’s one thing.

And the other thing I would say is, it would be interesting here on the bold idea side...

Yeah. What’s the most polarizing opinion possible?

We always have the SAFE notes and standard ways that companies raise money, whether it’s a convertible note or equity. But there’s no standardized way of companies returning capital and saying, “Okay, this isn’t working.”

I’ve been in some companies that started as a big data play and became an online car-sales thing and then switched to a third thing. And as an investor I’m just like, “I didn’t invest in the second or the third incarnation of what you’re doing. And you’re just kind of using the money at this point to triangulate in the ether.”

What if there was a way for companies to be able to, at some point say, “Hey, I’m just going to push the eject button because this isn’t working.” And then have a agreed-upon way that capital resolves all debts, maybe compensates the founders a little bit and just lets everyone go on their merry way as opposed to stringing out a long, painful, 10-year death journey.

Especially because you can be in there for a very long time. You invest in 2012, in 2018 the company’s pivoted four times, the founders are ...

And founders struggle with this. I talk to founders who say they don’t want to let down their investors, therefore they’re going to keep at it. And I’m like, “Well, if you have less conviction now then you did when you knew nothing, then eject.”

But there’s no standard way of winding that down and returning, without questions asked. And it would just be interesting if it was more commonplace and accepted for the eject button, and for an actual incentives in that instance, that sort of take care of everyone at that moment.

That is very controversial, and I don’t know if it’s entirely a financial question as much as it is people don’t want to say they failed at it, right? And financially, yeah, you can certainly come up with a structure where... That’s why shareholders will sometimes sell their shares in the secondary, or find some other way to eject.

But most of it’s basically ... I feel like there were times where founders basically just kind of ghost, right? And you don’t really get any updates and you sort of assume it’s shutdown.

It’s funny, I was talking to an entrepreneur the other night, he was telling me that at Google, they’re writing terms sheets to employees that have ideas that would want to leave. And they’re basically saying, “We’ll fund your seed, essentially, with a few million bucks.” Like large amounts. And your equity continues to vest for two years. Your Google equity.

Google equity, right.

But if it doesn’t work you just kind of pick up where you left off at Google. And so I think it was their way of saying, “Hey, these top people want to leave and start their thing, and we know that most of those things don’t end well. And the cost of recruiters and getting a Google employee that will perform really well is so high, we’ll just write these term sheets to people and have these conditions and keep their equity vesting, so that they feel like this opportunity to just come right back in if it’s not working.”

It’s interesting, because actually ...

Google is sort of betting on the person’s going to fail.

Well actually, it’s funny, I was hearing this and I was thinking, “Oh, actually, this is super smart of Google.” Because it also gives the entrepreneurs this weird exit opportunity that in two years, if it’s not working, they can just kind of go back and pick up where they left off.

Save face and go back.

Which is not a healthy dynamic for a startup. You actually have to feel like you have it all on the line and you have everything to prove for yourself and there’s no safety net. So I’m actually not sure if it’s a good idea for the entrepreneurs. I think it’s brilliant for Google.

We’ll leave it there. Scott, it was great talking to you. Thanks for coming on the show.

Thanks, Teddy.

Toxic DIRECTOR FROM WORK - how to deal with the informer at work

Toxic colleague from work can change your life into hell. He talks behind you, reports any lateness to work, sets others against you - coworkers and boss. Do not let it happen!

A toxic colleague at work , which is a problem for everyone around him. If you do not have time to sleep, most of us spend almost half of our adult lives at work. We spend eight hours a day in the company of the same people. Sometimes for many years. And although they are not always building contacts, whether we like it or not, we are caught up in relationships with the people we work with. Each of us brings emotions, expectations and individual experiences to these relationships.

In our private life, we choose our friends and we simply break the unpleasant relationships. At work, we are doomed to what fate will bring. And this one often plays tricks. Maybe you also have a problem with a friend who is sitting at the next desk ... Then this text is just for you.

Why a friend from work reports on me?
Seemingly everything is fine. Maybe he even smiles when you go to work in the morning. He praises the new hairstyle, appreciates the dress. Or ... he greets you with cloudy silence, pretending not to hear your "good morning". But you know well that there is disinterested malice behind the mask of indifference or the appearance of sympathy. In suspense you are waiting for further manifestations of hostility. And these you have almost every day. A toxic friend at the meetinghe pushes his ideas, depreciating yours. He ascribes your merits in a perverse way. He ruthlessly fights for the recognition of the boss. Secretly or quite openly leads his clever game into "my better". Is it a coincidence that it is she who is about to make the project you invented? That the boss is making you unpleasant remarks, though you do not deserve it at all? That the rest of the band is looking at you strangely? A toxic friend stretches around you a dense fog of dislike. Gossips behind your back, obligingly informs the boss about every stumble you miss, undermines your authority in the group. In a more or less explicit way (sometimes pretending to be kind) he runs his two-faced game. "Why is she doing this?", You think with despair after another weird day at work.

The reasons are usually deep in personality - and as you know, they shape all of our past experiences. Maybe you remind her of a girl from the neighboring yard she did not like when she was a kid? Maybe it carries insatiable ambitions and the need for domination, so it competes with you for a dream promotion? Or wants to be important at work, thereby compensating for personal failures?

Play toxic cards with a toxic friend
The situation is tolerable when the tension exists only between her and you. Worse, if your opponent manages to drag the rest of the team to his side. Then you can become a victim of group mobbing, and your life will really turn into a hell. In addition, the more frustrated the team (for example, a sense of pressure from management), the stronger will need a safety valve for their emotions in the form of someone on whom you can focus your reluctance.

You can, of course, ignore your friend's behavior, hoping that he will find another victim after some time. Indifference sometimes helps, but not always. In the long run, hiding behind a computer monitor may be disastrous to you. By retreating, you show your weakness, and thus put yourself in a lost position. You are threatening to be alienated and frustrated. Sooner or later you will lose respect in the group and in the eyes of the boss. Staying passive, you give your rival the satisfaction of winning. That is why it will be better to react. Just as?

The first step is a face-to-face conversation. If your opponent is convinced that you are afraid of confrontation, she will be unpleasantly surprised. Exposing her game, clearly, you demonstrate that now you are giving away the cards. In a conversation you simply reveal her intentions and set your own limits, saying that you do not want such behavior. Even if you do not get a full victory, it will strengthen you and improve your self-esteem. It is likely that your tormentor will deny, claiming that it is only your invention. Do not worry and keep yourselves firm on yours, if necessary threatening even sanction, or talking with the boss.

If such an "educative" lesson does not work, you should fulfill your threat and look for the support of authority. Ask your supervisor for an open conversation with three people (with the participation of a friend). A wise boss will know what conclusions to draw from such a confrontation and how he should intervene.

Look for allies in the fight against informers
Let's assume, however, that you can not count on "top" support or you do not want to involve management in your game. In such a situation, therefore, you have nothing else to look for allies in the group. This does not mean that you have to resort to intrigues and licks at the level of your opponent. However, it is worth taking up the challenge and fighting for your position.

Try to win over people, proving that you are a trustworthy, competent and kind person. Give others a gratuitous smile, appreciate their work, hurry with help when needed. Do not, however, fight for sympathy at all costs. Do not be used, do not take on the responsibilities of others, keep your own limits. If you treat yourself with respect, others will also respect you.

Hidden causes of informing
There is one more method: try to tame the enemy. Perhaps your opponent's reluctance is due to the fact that she has some serious problems and unloads her frustrations at work. Maybe her behavior is a hidden request for attention and support? Think about it and find a way to reach it. Get interested in her life. Notice her. When you go to work, you smile at the welcome without waiting for her smile. Ask for health, appreciate a nice look, even suggest a joint lunch trip. And in some time ... who knows - maybe you'll get a new friend. And if that does not happen, at least you'll feel better.

#work #job #coworker #career #psychology

Today's #unpopular #opinion:

#Attribution is overrated

What I agree with about attribution:
- It shouldn't be lied about who the author of the work is, in the same way in which lying about anything is bad.
- In the current economical framework, requirement of attribution is a little more justified for free as in freedom works, as an alternative reward for direct money. BUT by requiring an attribution, the artist is still dealing with #business -- they're buying an ad, just not with money, but with time invested in creating the ad. In this sense I find such works not purely independently created #art, but largely a product of the #market.
- Asking for attribution is totally okay as long as it is not a legal requirement of the license.
- It is a good habit to attribute works that you extensively reused if it is not a big hassle, no matter the license conditions. I always try to do this.

The main points why I think it's overrated and why everything should be public domain ( #CC0 ):

• The fact that attribution is not required legally doesn't mean it won't be attributed. In fact most people naturally do this, even with #publicdomain works. It is not like people are waiting for an opportunity to use a work without giving credit, there is no gain to such behavior. Not even in the commercial world!
• The idea of "everything has to be owned by someone" is a product of the """intellectual property""" #propaganda, and leaks to the #freeculture world. The #copyright cancer makes us believe we own any piece of fart (#pun intended) we involuntarily produce in order to participate in a lottery of "this can go viral and you can become rich just by chance". That makes us believe we have to sign under everything just in case. In fact, as #freeculture argues, this copyright lottery has a lot of very wrong side effect that make the net result negative. Let's not support this.
• One the side effects is that a required attribution creates real problems in practice. Creating a work based on many other works (personal experience: a Minetest texture pack) adds a lot of hassle, and requires the artist to keep a mile long list of every small work they used for any brush and small chunks of pixels or audio samples, with proper attribution format each individual artist requires. That is discouraging to creating new art and takes a bit of the precious energy of the artist away, making them not be able to fully concentrate on the art. A small mistake in such list makes you infringe on copyright as if you simply """pirated""" the work. For this reason, I personally filter out all free content that is not in public domain when creating derivative works -- so if you create an amazing work but license it CC-BY, I won't ever even see it.
• If the work is really great and does go viral, the original author will absolutely most certainly be found and credited even without an attribution requirement. Why? Simply because people are curious and do want to support that person to create more such work. It is society's interest to find the true author in order to make them create more great work. The fact that authorship can be stolen changes nothing about the requirement of attribution -- it can be stolen either way (and that is wrong).
• Love for creating art is a prerequisite for being an artist, and so the creative process is always a reward in itself. The net gain of creating art is therefore always positive for the artist, unlike as for example a factory worker, who hates their #job and has to be compensated with #money for doing it. The artist should require no compensation, which the attribution (an ad) represents. The fact that no one pays artists unless they fight for money is just a fault of #capitalism. So the attribution requirement may be a necessity at this specific moment, but we should admit that it is a hotfix of a faulty system and this should be eliminated eventually.
• Requiring attribution is saying I need attention. If you want attention, don't do art (in a broad sense, such as programming, math, ...). Start a food blog at #instagram.

So please, dear #freeculture friend, next time you #share your work, please consider the #CC0 option, as I do

After landing a lucrative job at a tech startup, I had made a terrible mistake

A cautionary tale about big money, long hours and a cultish devotion to tequila shots and team spirit
Article word count: 6222

HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18652652
Posted by wolco (karma: 1601)
Post stats: Points: 114 - Comments: 47 - 2018-12-11T01:29:01Z

\#HackerNews #after #had #job #landing #lucrative #made #mistake #startup #tech #terrible

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Article content:




Four years ago, I made what I hoped was an inspired leap. Since grad school, I’d worked as a journalist, food critic and editor, mostly at this magazine. Then Vision Critical, a tech start-up, came calling, and I saw a way to apply my skills to a growing industry. I’d recently turned 40 and was finally getting around to planning a family—if I was going to change careers, it was now or never. Vision Critical is what’s known in the tech world as a B2B company—a business selling to other businesses (as opposed to a B2C, which sells to consumers). Its software helps market researchers at Fortune 500 companies easily collect and analyze feedback from thousands of their customers, replacing older and slower research methods such as mailed surveys and in-person interviews. Vision Critical counted ESPN, Toyota, Hyundai, DeWalt, Adobe and LinkedIn as clients. In Canada, it had Maple Leaf Foods and Canadian Tire. But outside of those offices, it wasn’t a well-known company.

It had become trendy for tech companies to hire media refugees like me to serve as “brand storytellers” instead of spending millions on conventional advertising. Vision Critical had invented a position for me on the marketing team—senior director, content. I knew next to nothing about promoting software to market researchers, yet I would be overseeing an in-house propaganda machine of writers, videographers, graphic designers and social media managers. My salary would be double that of the average magazine editor. I signed the contract.

My new employer occupied two floors in a tower at Yonge and Bloor. On my first day, the office manager ordered me, the newbie, to push the afternoon beer cart. My co-workers lived for beer-o’clock. You probably assume, like I did, that tech start-ups are staffed exclusively with antisocial computer nerds. The reality is that the software developers (called “devs”) are usually outnumbered by sales, and the sales team was a testosterone-charged, protein shake–fuelled, almost all-male team. For all the aspirational talk of gender equality in tech, men far outnumber women, and most of the women on staff worked in “customer success”—account managers who in effect served as our clients’ personal assistants and whose ultimate responsibility was to ensure those valuable clients never “churned” (i.e., cancelled their contracts).

The sales bros remade the office into their frat house, hanging alma mater pennants over their desks, playing pranks, tossing mini-footballs and bringing bulk bags of Doritos to meetings. Sometimes they wore suits to impress clients, but mostly they worked the phones in Jays jerseys. They’d clang a cowbell every time a big deal got signed. Many were just a few years out of university and already making six-figure commissions.

Two weeks into my new job, I boarded a plane with 200 colleagues bound for the Hard Rock Hotel in Cancun. In case you’ve never been, here’s a snapshot: the lobby is a museum of pop star cast-offs, with vitrines of a lime green James Brown suit, a sequined Cher jumpsuit (is there any other kind?), and a pair of Britney Spears’s boots; the mini-fridges in the rooms contain full-size bottles of tequila, rum, vodka and whisky; and the DJ beside the main pool doesn’t take requests. Our sales, marketing and customer success teams had assembled there for SKO—the company’s annual sales kickoff, a combination training session, town hall and week-long party. The executives got their own rooms, and everyone else doubled up. I shared a room featuring a two-person hot tub with Bruce, another recent hire—he was known on the marketing team for calling long meetings to review intricately colour-coded Gantt charts. I’d been to many off-sites in my previous jobs, usually in nearby, windowless hotel conference spaces. Never had my employer flown me to a tropical resort. There was some work to do: we spent hours watching presentations on sales techniques, product updates and competitor analyses. At one point, for reasons unexplained, two of the sales directors hustled onstage a resort employee dressed in a Barney costume and did a little dance.
Staff would compete for the “sombrero of shame,” worn by the person who’d partied the hardest the previous night
The company had grown fast, and many of the SKO attendees were recent hires like Bruce and me. Yet I seemed to be the only person even mildly surprised when Andrew Reid, the company’s 30-something founder and a legendary partier, arrived at the first night’s party in Burt Reynolds aviators, a disco pantsuit and a flaming-red mohawk wig. He passed around tequila shots.

The presentations about sales targets and so on were really just a prelude to something more important. Our Cancun week was about building company culture. Culture is an obsession at start-ups. They talk about it nearly as much as they talk about sales targets. Our company culture, we were assured, was what set us apart from our competitors. Other companies might claim to be disruptors, but we were the true revolutionaries and world-changers. Old-school companies like the one I’d left were dismissively referred to as legacy industries—slow, pitiful and ready for retirement.

One afternoon, we split into teams and, equipped only with our cellphone cameras and our wits, competed to create the best promo video about our company culture. Competitiveness, I was discovering, was a core value. That week, we competed at beach volleyball, we competed at rounds of golf and we competed at knocking back margaritas. At the start of each Cancun morning, we’d all stumble into a conference room and Andrew Reid would summon to the stage the employee who’d partied the hardest the previous night. We’d cheer and whoop. It was an SKO tradition for that person to wear the “sombrero of shame” for the rest of the day.

I didn’t get to wear the sombrero, but I was having more fun than I’d ever expected to on a work trip. And, after the third or fourth night of tequila rounds, I was starting to feel like less of an outsider. My co-workers seemed genuinely interested in me and what I would be contributing to Vision Critical. This wasn’t a job in any sense I was familiar with—when the executives told us that we were all winners, everyone nodded in agreement instead of rolling their eyes. It felt good to be among people who looked to the future with so much irony-free optimism. Maybe I was also a super-competitive high-performer. Maybe we really were disruptors, revolutionaries and world-changers.

The last day, we boarded coaches for an outdoor supper club on the beach. It was formal night—dresses and heels, chinos and jackets. A mariachi band started up as we sat down to eat. There were more speeches about the great things we’d accomplish in the year ahead. If all went according to plan, the company was headed for an IPO—the start-up holy grail. We clinked glasses and hollered a little more.

Then, behind my seat, a bubble of commotion, a dropped beer bottle, laughter. I turned around to see three of the sales bros stripping off their clothes and running naked, full tilt, into the pitch-black surf.

If it seems like everyone you know is leaving their outmoded legacy job for a start-up, that’s because they are. The late-’90s dot-com boom and bust—when companies like pets.com burned through millions in venture capital funding and flamed out months after an IPO—largely passed over Toronto. It was a Silicon Valley phenomenon. Today’s boom is wised-up, diversified, global, and Toronto is one of its most active hubs. AngelList, a service that connects investors with tech entrepreneurs, counts more than 5,000 start-ups in the city. And some 400,000 people are working in tech in the Toronto, Peel and York regions—a number that’s growing by the thousands every year.

When I confessed to my media colleagues that I was abandoning them for tech, the reaction was surprise followed by jealousy. Tech was glamorous. I had a security pass to Silicon Valley North, and they didn’t. They’d seen stories about new start-up offices with meditation rooms, in-house baristas, free lunches, powered standing desks and beanbags as far as the eye could see. They wanted that. They wanted to leave the legacy industry death march. How could they get their own passcards?

Tech is where all the money is going. The mystical aura around start-ups—of fast wealth, fun and rooms full of brainiacs—is why the prime minister is always touting “superclusters.” That aura is also what seduces investors into betting millions on every tech founder with a half-decent PowerPoint pitch. The funding announcements from Toronto start-ups come so frequently that we’ve become blasé about the volume of money pumping into the industry. Ten years ago, tech entrepreneurs complained that Toronto would never take off because of a shortage of venture capital. Today, they’re fighting off interested investors. Wealthsimple, the online consumer investment service, has raised more than $167 million, the vast majority of it from Power Corp’s Paul Desmarais III. Wattpad, a company whose apps let self-publishers share stories (mostly teen girls writing fan fiction), has raised $101 million over six rounds of funding, including $38 million at the beginning of this year from China-based Tencent Holdings. Then there are the comparatively lesser piles of money raised by companies like the health benefits service League ($85 million), the marketing software company Uberflip ($44 million) and the “brand advocate” mobilization company Influitive ($41 million).

Vision Critical’s early funding came from Andrew Reid’s wealthy father, Angus Reid, who’d sold his market research company to Ipsos for $100 million. In total, Vision Critical raised $41.8 million from blue-chip investors. An especially large chunk came from OMERS Ventures, the tech speculation arm of the Ontario municipal workers’ pension fund. In the start-up world, your chances of success have as much to do with the impact of your tech as with the smarts and reputation of your investors. It doesn’t get much better than investment from OMERS Ventures, which supported three of Canada’s most recognized tech companies: the social media management software company Hootsuite, the learning management system D2L and, most famous of all, the e-commerce company Shopify, whose stock value has ballooned by 500 per cent since its 2015 IPO. Vision Critical was next. Get ready, our leaders said, to ride a rocket ship.

More proof of Vision Critical’s promise: Derek Smyth, the managing director at OMERS Ventures who led the investment in Vision Critical, left OMERS in 2014 to become our COO. Smyth was legendary in the Canadian tech world. He sat on a dozen boards and had a reputation as the Zen master of accelerated growth. He was imposing: as tall and broad as a bear, with a shiny bald dome and dad glasses. We rarely saw him; he was always on flights to the company’s satellite offices or to elite conferences, only replying to emails in the dead of night.
Some mornings, I had to reassure myself I hadn’t joined a cult. We were teammates, not co-workers, and our meetings would end with a rousing “Go team!”
Back when I was being vetted for the job, Smyth invited me for a lunch meeting. His assistant ordered us boxed salads and seated us in a boardroom. Smyth said he didn’t need to ask why I wanted to leave my magazine job—the answer was apparently self-evident. What he wanted to know was, what did I think of Vision Critical’s name? I paused, weighing whether it was a bad move to dump on the brand before I had even been hired. I opted for brutal honesty and said it sounded like a company from the early 2000s, possibly the name of a contact lens manufacturer. He nodded, hands forming a triangle under his chin. Great, he said—let’s change it.

Tens of millions in venture capital induces nausea. And panic. The bigger the investment, the more intense the pressure from your board and investors to deliver extremely fast growth and position for an IPO. Start-up founders all seem to believe in the principle of “10X” from the 2011 business book The 10X Rule, which argues that the only scale of growth worth pursuing is a target 10 times greater than your current size. Anything less is a waste of time. The objective is not to compete with other companies; it’s to obliterate them.

There are, broadly speaking, two categories of tech founders. The most common is the engineer who, slaving for hours in the proverbial garage, programs his (or, infrequently, her) way to glory and gets showered with millions by venture capitalists. He is the tech cliché—nerdy and socially awkward. He wears T-shirts and hoodies, no matter the occasion, and probably bought four dozen of the same T-shirt so he doesn’t need to waste time thinking about what to wear. He’s startled when his company scales fast and he suddenly needs to hire hundreds of staff and learn how to keep them happy. His approach to any decision about his software or his staff is that of an engineer: look at the data.

The other founder type is the rich or well-connected man (or, infrequently, woman) who, like Vision Critical’s Andrew Reid, has a clever idea for an app or a software service and enlists engineers to help him build and improve it. This type of founder styles himself as a visionary. He yearns for speaking invitations to elite tech summits. He wants to see his name in “40 under 40” lists, to be quoted regularly in Forbes, Fast Company and Bloomberg Businessweek. He closely follows the trajectories of his peers and burns with envy when they get more attention. Says The 10X Rule: the biggest problem in business is obscurity.

Andrew Reid had gone to film school in Vancouver, picked up HTML and Photoshop, and got into tech. He founded Vision Critical in 2000. By the time I was hired, he was in his late 30s, but his standard uniform, even when he took meetings with investors or clients, was that of a perpetual teen: scuffed Air Jordans, shredded skinny jeans and hair sculpted into Bart Simpson spikes. His office was cluttered with skateboards, vintage Mac computers and photos of himself snowboarding—he owns a chalet in the Rockies and takes his friends heli-skiing on weekends. In 2012, Vision Critical’s investors and board installed a confident CEO named Scott Miller, who had an impressive track record building global brands. The company moved Andrew into a different role—leading a non-revenue-generating division exploring new product ideas. He was also responsible for company culture, which involved making sure the company party had a good DJ and organizing the weekly movie night.
Our lingo was dense with acronyms. It took me a day of overhearing my teammates discuss tofu before I realized they were referring to TOFU, the top of the funnel
I was initially mystified by how a company that’s been around since 2000 could still call itself a start-up. It turns out it’s not unusual for software companies to hold on to the start-up classification long after the point when businesses in other industries would be considered established. Software companies are forever “pivoting”—changing their business plans, chasing emerging markets, pushing their platform in new directions. The day I joined, Vision Critical had some 700 staff and two main offices: most of the execs, the sales team and I were housed in Toronto, high above Yonge and Bloor, while Andrew Reid and the majority of the devs were in Vancouver, where they’d taken over part of a tower that used to house the Vancouver Sun newsroom. The company also had sales offices in the U.S., Europe, Asia and Australia. It was established, but it was also very much a start-up, and had only recently pivoted the business to cloud-based market research software.

Start-ups are all about change and believing it’ll pay off. Change is better than certainty, agility better than stability. Or, as one senior vice-president put it in a stump motivational speech, “We need to fix the plane and fly it at the same time.”

Some mornings, I had to reassure myself I hadn’t joined a cult. We certainly showed cult-like tics. We were teammates, not co-workers. We’d assemble for “standups”—team meetings in which, while standing in a circle, we’d report on the progress of the current “sprint” (project), identify “blockers” (self-explanatory) and end with a “Go team!”

Our cult’s lingo was dense with acronyms, which I figured was because speaking in complete words is too slow for such a fast-paced industry. On beanbags, at the pop fridge, and at the foosball table, we discussed KPIs (key performance indicators), CAC (customer acquisition cost), ROI (return on investment) and asked our BDRs (business development reps—junior salespeople) to update us on the latest developments in the CRM (customer relationship management software). It took me a day of overhearing my teammates discuss tofu before I realized they were referring to TOFU, the top of the funnel—marketing jargon for the degree to which a customer was aware of our products.

Six months in, I started to see through the acronyms and the carefully maintained optimism of my teammates. For all the talk of agility and disruption and 10X, there was a deep fear of fucking up. A bad decision about a product, a marketing campaign or a sales tactic could cost the business millions. When there was no data to back up a decision, we suffered paralysis.

Derek Smyth had given his blessing to look into a name change for the company. None of the executives, aside from perhaps Andrew Reid, was fond of the existing one. So we quietly hired an outside consultant to conduct a study of the brand and make a recommendation for a new name. The consultant spent months interviewing people throughout the company as well as its customers, studying the market, and leading a subset of employees through word-association exercises to pinpoint our core identity. In the end, he presented us with a handful of alternatives, all vaguely tech-sounding, none memorable. Worse: we had no compelling data to convince us that a new name would improve sales. The report got buried. We kept the company name.
Even the most junior marketing specialist was expected to be always on-call, day or night. Anything less was inconceivable
Just like Google’s “Don’t be evil” or Facebook’s “Bring the world closer together,” Vision Critical had a motto: “People matter.” It was supposed to encapsulate the value that clients got from the company’s software—reliable feedback directly from real people. It appeared on the “about us” page of the company’s website and on the T-shirts we wore to work. It was part of our sales pitch and was repeated, like a call to arms, at our company town halls. It struck me as hollow. Who, after all, believes that people don’t matter? We ignored the small irony that our clients had to use our software, a digital intermediary, to collect information about their customers—the people who mattered. What our software “disrupted” was the unpleasant tedium of a market researcher interviewing customers in person.

Despite the motto, the execs cared first and foremost about our work ethic and maximizing productivity. People I met at other start-ups said the same thing. The reason the company entrusted you with a laptop and a brand new iPhone (with unlimited data!) wasn’t because the company was cool—it was so you could take your work home with you, so you could always be reached and always be accountable. Even the beer cart was a ploy to own your time instead of letting you leave the office for a pub. If another team member “pinged” you in the middle of the night about the status of a project, you’d better respond or be labelled “not a team player.” It was a full-time job just keeping up with team communications: we exchanged messages over iMessage and Google Talk, over several dozen team channels on the team productivity apps Slack and Basecamp, over the chat function on our Salesforce database and, of course, by email. I’d had jobs where I had to be available after hours, but here even the most junior marketing specialist was expected to be always on-call, day or night. Anything less wouldn’t get us to 10X.

Here was the biggest surprise about working in tech: even though everyone wears their team T-shirts and hoodies, rah-rah chants at the monthly all-staff meetings and competes for the sombrero of shame at the tropical off-site, no one loves the start-up they work for. No one feels secure. No one is loyal. There’s no certainty your start-up will exist in a year—or next week.

I’d held on as long as possible to the fantasy, sold to me by Sesame Street, that the people in your neighbourhood—the newsstand operator, the dentist, the shop owner, the taxi driver, the teacher, and the grouch in the trash can—have jobs for life. That they’re fixed objects. If you need a newspaper, the newsstand operator will always be there. They’re the people you meet each day.

A job for life also meant that your job was your life. You went into teaching or sports reporting or proctology because it was a calling—it was who you were meant to be. But it’s been a long time since anyone has been able to count on a job for life. The tech industry led the way: our shift to precarious employment was hastened by more efficient algorithms, apps and Amazon. No legacy industry was safe from disruption. The 2008 financial reckoning forced companies—or gave them the excuse—to replace staff positions with cost-efficient contract workers and orchestrate attrition by a thousand humiliating cuts. Company pensions and RRSP matching now seem like quaint throwbacks to an innocent time. Our cubicles were replaced by Dickensian open-concept rows of computer terminals.

Precarious employment is the new normal. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives found that 22 per cent of Canadian professionals lack stable jobs or don’t feel secure in their full-time jobs, and that women are disproportionately affected. In the U.S., a study conducted by two leading economics professors found that “alternative work arrangements,” which include contract work and gig-economy income from companies like Uber and TaskRabbit, accounted for as much as 94 per cent of the net growth in jobs from 2005 to 2015. Peter Fleming, a professor of business and society at the University of London, writes in The Death of Homo Economicus, not without hints of disbelief and anger, that we live in a state of “wreckage capitalism.” Tech companies, he says, have cynically taken advantage of a generation of workers by packaging temporary “sharing economy” work as self-determination and delicious freedom. The same phenomenon drives the growth of co-working property managers like WeWork, which, capitalizing on the new reality of so many free agent workers without offices to call home, will rent you a temporary desk. The company plans to open a total of 20 shared workspace locations in downtown Toronto by 2020.

Pining for a long-term job was incredibly old-fashioned of me. A month didn’t go by without a hiring, a departure or a shift in the direction of the company. My marketing colleagues were forever burnishing their personal brands by @-mentioning influential marketers on Twitter and fluffing their profiles and skill sets on LinkedIn. They would often disappear to take calls with prospective employers. For the first time in my life, as soon as I updated my LinkedIn profile to “content marketer,” headhunters and recruiters contacted me, wanting to convince me of a great new opportunity. My teammates spoke of “Vision Critical years” as if they were dog years. So much happened every day—we juggled so many initiatives and worked so many nights and weekends—that a month felt like a year, and a year like an eternity.

Our work approach was lifted from The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation, another business book with a dedicated following at software companies. Every project my marketing teammates pursued was evaluated on whether it was “challenger enough.” The book’s thesis, in effect, is that the best marketing and salespeople are demonic Tony Robbinses who manipulate prospective clients with an onslaught of terrifying facts about why their seemingly stable world is about to crumble beneath them. The authors call this process “rational drowning.” Inspired by this approach, I’d poke at our prospective customers’ insecurities with blog posts, video testimonials and white papers addressing all the forces changing their industry, then hit them with even more bad news, pushing them deeper and deeper into the muddy waters of misery. If I did my job right, they would independently come to the realization that our software promised salvation.
The biggest surprise about working in tech: even though everyone rah-rah chants at the monthly all-staff meetings, no one loves the start-up they work for
In the media world, my goal was to get the story right and be worthy of the readers’ trust. In marketing, I was using my storytelling skills to manipulate our audience, to make them believe they had deep problems and ultimately point them to a salesperson who stood to make a huge commission.

After a year of preying on customers’ anxieties, I began attending a meetup of fellow Toronto tech marketers. There were representatives from big companies like Influitive and Wealthsimple and smaller start-ups like Pressly, Collage and Crowdriff. The agenda was to trade marketing tips, but each meeting inevitably became a group therapy session. We’d commiserate about our bosses, team tensions and the challenge of hiring from Toronto’s small talent pool for specialized roles. We’d also gossip about the companies that had just raised another round of funding, the ones that were rumoured to be burning through cash too fast and the ones that had badly missed their targets. We speculated about what start-up was positioning itself for an IPO or to be acquired. We all dreamed of getting in on the ground floor of a unicorn—a company that grows incredibly fast and hits a billion-dollar valuation.

In the office and at meetups, I ran into a breed of serial start-up employee: opportunists who would strategically jump from company to company, looking for the biggest payout. They’d usually stick with a company for one year—never more than four—then split. Their LinkedIn profiles read like Yellow Pages for Canadian tech. Someone eventually explained this phenomenon to me: most start-ups, including Vision Critical, offer employees stock options, but you can only buy them in stages. A quarter of your options vest on the first anniversary of your employment, and the remaining get released over subsequent years. Like office perks, stock options are a tactic to encourage you to feel personal investment in your work—if you perform at 110 per cent, and the company succeeds, then your options are worth more. These serial employees didn’t fall for it. Once they got their options, they moved on to another firm to acquire more. If one of those companies IPO’d, they’d walk away rich and retire before 40.

I wished I was smart enough to be a serial start-up employee. I liked my teammates and enjoyed the parts of my job that were most like my life back in media, but there was far more manipulation and tedium. My what-the-hell-am-I-doing moment came during a surreal debate I had with Andrew while helping him script a presentation for a high-stakes company conference. He wanted to make a point about how badly some companies (that is, companies that weren’t smart enough to use our software) treat their customers, and envisioned a slide emblazoned with the statement, “Don’t treat me like a piece of shit.” I tried to dissuade him on the grounds that the conference’s audience of prim market researchers wouldn’t appreciate profanity. I’d think I had him convinced, only to fall back into the debate. This went on for what felt like hours. Instead, he wondered if we could show the smiling poop emoji. He’d worn me down. Anyhow, it was his company—there was no stopping him. On the day of the presentation, the audience loved it. A month later, at the end of 2016, I received an offer from another tech company. I quit.

It was time for round two. I’d been recruited by Top Hat, then a seven-year-old Toronto tech start-up. The company’s software was used by professors, mostly at public colleges in the U.S., to quiz students in large lecture halls via their smartphones. The timing of my move felt right: Vision Critical was suddenly under a lot of scrutiny from business journalists and its investors because of a protracted fight between some board members and Andrew’s dad Angus, who remained a major stakeholder. Angus was displeased by the executives’ plan to sell off the company’s market research services division (close to his heart) and focus on its cloud-based subscription software. The executives, especially Derek Smyth, believed a software focus would better position the company for an IPO, but all the fighting raised doubts about whether the company was ever going to pull one off.

Part of Top Hat’s appeal to me was its size: just a couple of hundred employees in an office at Yonge and Carlton. I was “getting in on the ground floor,” with potentially more valuable stock options. The company was also swimming in venture capital—it had just raised a Series C round of $17 million. That buys a lot of beanbags. It also meant investors expected incredibly fast growth from tiny Top Hat. The newest rounds of investment were predicated on Top Hat going one giant, 10X-style step further: becoming an inescapable teaching platform with a lucrative digital textbook service. If we were successful, we’d displace legacy textbook publishers. Said the execs: we are disruptors, revolutionaries and world-changers.

Top Hat had genuine IPO momentum. The founders, Mike Silagadze and Mohsen Shahini, almost never left the office. They met while studying engineering at the University of Waterloo. Mike served as CEO. (There are three prominent start-up CEOs in Toronto named Mike—League’s Mike Serbinis, Wealthsimple’s Mike Katchen and Top Hat’s Mike Silagadze—and they’re known as “the Mikes.”) He was the type of engineer who solves problems by examining the data. He wore a Top Hat T-shirt or a Top Hat hoodie (or both) every day, without fail. He had a hands-on management style—he stood at a standing desk in the same open-concept room as everyone else, personally interviewed all new recruits and, even though he was always overcommitting to meetings, refused to hire an executive assistant. I really liked him: he was smart and accomplished but humble and always transparent—he didn’t play games.

Mike was analytical and data-driven but, like Andrew Reid, given to whims. One week, he was convinced we should buy all the billboards along the Gardiner so we could lure more high-performing sales team members. Another week, he wanted to do the same thing but throughout the subway. Neither came to pass.

To reach our revenue goals for 2017, the company had to nearly double the size of its sales team. Over the year, the marketing team would grow even faster: from five to 25. Soon we were too big for our office, and half of the staff relocated. The plan was for everyone to reunite in a new, three-storey Bloor-Yorkville headquarters with the usual start-up frills (foosball tables, beanbags, yoga sessions). We all joined a dedicated Instagram account with photo updates of the renovation.
I don’t miss the rowing competitions, the beanbag meetings, wearing the team T-shirts or pushing the beer cart
As we were planning to move into the new space, Mike decided he wanted an awesome sculpture in the lobby. (“Awesome” is a favourite superlative of tech founders.) As the guy in charge of our content marketing program and PR, I was somehow also responsible for the sculpture. Mike’s idea: a tree of knowledge. When I pointed out that Wattpad had a tree sculpture in its office, he backtracked. I proposed an open-call for artist submissions and ran through the costs of a competition and a guesstimate to manufacture the winning sculpture. After we’d moved in, the lobby became home to ping-pong and foosball tables. There was no more talk of a sculpture.

It didn’t take long to see that the culture at Top Hat wasn’t all that different from Vision Critical. The pressure to deliver was extreme and the hours long. The sales bros tossed mini-footballs and clanged a gong (instead of a cowbell) when they closed a big deal. At our monthly all-team town hall, while we drank beer and ate pizza, Mike would run through the names of the new hires, asking them to stand. It often seemed like a third of the people in the room were new. Was that really possible?

Staff morale was a constant preoccupation. Our weekly internal e-newsletter was mostly read for the upcoming week’s lunch menu and the list of “shout-outs” congratulating Top Hatters who lived and breathed company values. Our values: “Aggressive growth,” “Treat professors like heroes,” “Good in the woods” and “There is no I in Top Hat.” The first two are self-explanatory, the third a fanciful way of encouraging us to be resourceful under any circumstances, and the Kumbaya-ish “No I” value seemed in direct conflict with the general mood in every start-up of cutthroat one-upmanship. In a typical e-newsletter, team members would be congratulated for “being a savage BDR,” “being a true warrior” and “killing your quota.” Sales fought to be at the top of the leaderboard, the customer success team to complete the most calls in one day, and the marketing team for a weekly “marketing ninja” trophy. For a team bonding afternoon, we raced one another at an indoor rowing gym.

Once a month, the “people team” (i.e, the human resources and recruiting staff) asked everyone to fill out a Net Promoter Score, a simple survey that asked if we’d recommend Top Hat as a place to work. Companies usually rely on NPS surveys to quickly assess if their products and services are making their customers happy—not as blunt instruments to measure internal morale. And if the score was low—as it often was, month after month, for the marketing team—the executives frowned and asked, without hiding their exasperation, what was wrong. Were the lunches not good enough? Did people want more flavours of pop? Should we book more rowing competitions?

We were told that the NPS was anonymous, but I had my doubts. At the start of last year, I became a net detractor—I wouldn’t recommend the company. I was burnt out, bored by the narrow scope of our marketing campaigns and irritated by the extra responsibilities I was told to gamely take on despite having little expertise or interest. I was also depressed by the constant churn of team members leaving for other jobs or, in one case, for a year of travel to places far away from BDRs, CRM, CAC and TOFU. At our weekly one-on-one meetings (what we booked in our calendars as “1::1”), my supervisor would probe, more pointedly than usual, about my mood. After months of this, at another uncomfortable 1::1, we agreed that I wasn’t a good fit. Two weeks later, I was free.

I don’t miss the acronym conversations, the rowing competitions, the beanbag meetings, pushing the beer cart or wearing the team T-shirts. If I ever go back to Cancun, I’ll skip the Hard Rock. In my Instagram feed, I’ll sometimes see photos of Top Hat and Vision Critical staff cheering each other on at ping-pong and group-hugging for the camera, and I can hardly believe that was my daily life. I meet regularly for drinks with two fellow ex–Vision Critical marketers—we’re stuck with one another for life, like survivors of a hostage-taking. In the year after I left Vision Critical, Andrew Reid resigned from his executive position to run a new start-up he called VC Labs. The company parties must be a lot less fun without him.

After leaving Top Hat, I met with recruiters and execs at a dozen start-ups about another marketing position. There was always something being revolutionized: meal delivery, small-business investment, retail-supply forecasting, mattresses, even corporate charitable giving. I’d talk about the challenger-style campaigns I’d produced, they’d brag about their team culture and perks, and I’d walk out feeling queasy and certain I’d never accept an offer.

Today, I’m back working in magazines—I’ve recently become an editor at Chatelaine. There’s no certainty the publication will exist in a year, or even next month. The same is true of every media company these days. But I fit on this team, and I’m happy.

Only after turning in my Top Hat laptop and security pass did I admit to myself that I was never a true disruptor. Tech companies always equate efficiency and speed with virtue and perfection. Top Hat’s software could very well make higher education more efficient but possibly less rewarding and meaningful for the student. The legacy textbook publishers the company wants to disrupt aren’t perfect, sure, but that doesn’t mean they need to be destroyed. Those publishers do many things very well, and they do them slowly, with great care, for a reason. We should resist change for change’s sake.

I’m being naïve, aren’t I?

This story originally appeared in the January 2019 issue of Toronto Life magazine. To subscribe, for just $29.95 a year, click [1]here.

References

Visible links
1. https://secure.torontolife.com/subscribe.php?key=C2018ARTC

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Ask HN: How to incorporate machine learning into day job?

I work for a small regional shipping company, mostly building CRUD apps and doing EDI integrations. I'd like to find a practical side project using machine learning and/or data science that could add value at work, but for the life of me I can't come up with any problems that I couldn't solve with a relational database (postgres) and a data transformation step. I've spent some time learning pytorch, numpy, and pandas but I know that if I don't use it, especially at work, I'll just forget everything I've learned. My boss is a dev and is generally supportive of learning new things and finding ways to innovate independently, so if I can come up with a good idea I'm sure he'll let me pursue it in my spare time. Has anyone tried to do this before? Any suggestions would be great.

HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18650646
Posted by s_c_r (karma: 52)
Post stats: Points: 128 - Comments: 51 - 2018-12-10T19:49:51Z

\#HackerNews #ask #day #how #incorporate #into #job #learning #machine
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Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview

Coming soon!
Article word count: 1602

HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929
Posted by jerryX (karma: 95)
Post stats: Points: 215 - Comments: 49 - 2018-11-30T05:25:49Z

\#HackerNews #after #google #interview #job #patent #tried #work

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Article content:




Openly sharing your work brings more attention to it, which is good, right? The answer, for me though, is often “it’s complicated.” This is what happened when I went to visit a giant tech company, in hopes for collaboration, but later found that they tried to patent some of my research instead!

Image by Leah Buechley

My work in electronic books started when I was still an undergrad, during a research internship where I made a pop-up book with lights and sensors in the pop-up elements. This was with my advisor Leah Buechley.

Since that time I’ve fallen in love with paper and electronics and books and storytelling. And have since played with other ways to combine electronics with books, such as a sketchbook with a power supply for “sketching” in circuits. As well as trying to tell stories with interactivity, such as a storybook about an LED named Ellie, who dreams to be a star.

sketchbook
[1]Screen Shot 2018-11-29 at 1.03.22 PM.png

Rewind to March 24, 2014, during the first year of my PhD at the Media Lab. I was invited to visit Google ATAP (Advanced Technology and Projects) to learn about some of their new projects in storytelling. I got to visit their space, meet some of my creative heroes and I shared with them all of my work in interactive books and storytelling.

visit

What started as just a visit quickly turned into a job interview. I was even invited to share my work directly with Regina Dugan, the director of ATAP at that time! I was excited, thinking perhaps I would be invited for a summer internship. It turned out they found my work so relevant that they offered me a job on the spot.

It was a tough choice: I had just started the first year of my PhD and would’ve had to take a leave from the program to pursue this project. After asking many people, the advice was clear: stay in school. So I decided to turn down the offer and continue pursuing my PhD. That’s where the glitter ends.

They’re trying to patent electronic pop-up books

Two years later, in March 2016 I find out from some paper engineering friends that some of the same people who had interviewed me had also applied for patents on interactive pop-up books with electronics. These patents covered many of the same things that had discussed, that I’d showed them, with no mention of my or others’ work in the field. I found out from a friend who followed a pop-up book blog—someone there was excited that google was researching book technologies and happened to publish a blog post about it.

pop up patent

Suddenly there was a possibility that a giant tech company might have a patent over technologies that we all wanted to develop and work on. A bunch of my fellow paper geeks were pretty worried.

So what do we do?

Well mind you, I found out about this about three weeks after I found out about the [2]LED stickers patent. Normally I would’ve thought “oh there’s way too much prior art” and this patent can’t pass. But after seeing what happened to LED stickers, I couldn’t be so sure anymore.

headblanket

That said, the fact that these two unrelated situations were happening simultaneously kind of made it all feel a bit absurd. And luckily, because I had experience from the first patent issue, I was able to be much more calm this time around!

• Don’t panic.
  Some of the best advice I ever got was to not let worry about legal matters distract you from what matters: doing your work. So after calming down, I…
• Make a prior art list. I made a list of all of my own publications involving books and electronics: academic papers, blog posts, videos, media and press. I also included work from others—it doesn’t have to be your own work; anyone’s work will do for prior art!
  prior art books
• Look up the patent application status on [3]USPTO.gov Public PAIR.
• Get legal help! Because these are not things to handle alone, especially if the patents are being filed by a giant company!

What we found

I looked up the patent application and luckily, this time the patent application was still being reviewed by the patent examiner. It had not issued! The provisional was filed August 29, 2014, months after my first interview and visit back in March 2014. Two of the inventors listed were the same people who had interviewed me.

[4]Screen Shot 2018-11-29 at 1.36.15 PM.png

First, because it was still a patent application, we could still submit prior art to it. My friend and collaborator Akiba generously did just that by submitting my research paper directly onto the application page.

Second, and very luckily for me, the director of the Media Lab Joi Ito knew the director of ATAP at the time, Regina Dugan. He was able to get in touch with her directly and we were able to quickly schedule a chat to address the situation.

mail convo

So we had a call directly with their team. As part of negotiations, they offered to add me as an inventor on the patent application if it meant the applications could stand. I said no, because in order for me to be an inventor on they patent they would have to add all the other inventors with similar working on books and electronics—I’m not the only one working on this. What I didn’t realize at the time is that there’s actually a huge difference between inventor and assignee.

An inventor is the one credited with creating the invention. The assignee actually gets the legal rights to the patent. A bit like an architect (the “inventor”) may design a house but it’s the home owner (the “assignee”) that gets to live in it, and typically those aren’t the same people. It’s the same situation here: Google ATAP would’ve still owned the patent rights even if I got to be listed as an inventor. Meaning even though I would be on the patent, I wouldn’t actually get rights to use the invention. Luckily I dodged that one, even though it was by accident!

Next the strange thing was that about a couple weeks into the conversation, Regina left Google ATAP and in the process, she put us directly in touch with ATAP’s senior council, who thankfully agreed to submit all of the prior art we had sent them to the USPTO as prior art for the patent application.

prior art books submitted

The patent application has since been rejected and abandoned, which means that for now the application is not being pursued as a patent. Even more good news: abandoned applications stay in the USPTO’s system, so it’s now prior art!

Good story, right?

In this case, I was incredibly lucky to have the support of a large institution (MIT) and even more lucky that we had a direct connection to ATAP through Joi to sort out the situation. I’m super grateful but realize that most other people in my position probably would not have had it so well. And I’m not sure what to tell them—unfortunately. Only that if one were trying to contact a large institution about patent issues, definitely do not do it alone and get a legal expert. Even in navigating the patent issues with ATAP, we also always had the guidance of lawyers and legal experts.

What did I learn?

My biggest fear was that my fellow paper engineering friends and I would not be able to further explore books and electronics if these patents went through.

However, It turns out that at many large companies who have their own internal patent attorneys, it’s common for employees to get bonuses in the thousands of dollars for just sharing their work with the IP team, turning the disclosure into a patent application. There’s bigger bonuses if the patent issues.

I’ve learned that there are even lunch sessions that companies have where people get to sit and chat with a patent lawyer to see if some patent could be drafted. If there’s a bonus attached, there’s even more incentive.

If students got the same bonuses for applying for patents, I can assure you there would be more patents coming from universities! What I mean is, it’s possible that sometimes people are less motivated by legal rights to a particular invention and more so by other incentives like getting financial bonuses, the validation and prestige of being a patent holder, or beefing up the patent statistics of a company for valuation purposes.

What about openly sharing work?

So in the end, unfortunately, I don’t have a perfect answer. Because on the one hand, sharing your work may lead to amazing collaborations with large companies that have the types of resources and expertise to get amazing, imagination-filled projects off the ground.

However, you may also run the risk of work being patented away. In this case of electronic pop-up books, it appears that the people on the team have since stopped working on the project and the outside world wont know whatever became of it. The good news, though, is that since the patents never went through, the project itself is still open for exploration. Meaning anyone can still continue innovating on electronic pop-up books without worrying about these patents!

Personally, I like to err on the side of sharing more. At the end of the day, it was my research papers and the published work of others that stopped the patent applications in their tracks. While sharing stuff out means more people see them, it also means there’s more prior art to draw upon to keep an idea open.

More importantly, sharing work publicly keeps the project can alive and inspires others to continue developing!

References

Visible links
2. https://patentpandas.org/stories/crowdfunding-backer-patented-my-project
3. https://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair

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You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

You're as likely to get a job interview meeting 50% of job requirements as meeting 90% of them.
Article word count: 1120

HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18549361
Posted by pixelcort (karma: 1699)
Post stats: Points: 126 - Comments: 85 - 2018-11-28T04:51:15Z

\#HackerNews #job #need #only #requirements #you

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Article content:



Project Manager needed. Must have 5+ years of experience, be Six Sigma certified, have advanced deep learning knowledge, and be able to perform surgery on occasion.
Who really has all that? Turns out, basically no one. You’re as likely to get a job interview meeting 50% of job requirements as meeting 90% of them.

[1]requirements_requiredSo requirement is a bit of a flexible word in this context, then…

We were curious about how many job requirements are actually required, so we analyzed job postings and resumes for 6,000+ applications across 118 industries from our database of users. We found that while matching requirements is important, you don’t necessarily need to match all of them.
\* Your chances of getting an interview start to go up once you meet about 40% of job requirements.
\* You’re not any more likely to get an interview matching 90% of job requirements compared to matching just 50%.
\* For women, these numbers are about 10% lower i.e. women’s interview chances go up once they meet 30% of job requirements, and matching 40% of job requirements is as good as matching 90% for women.
You only need 50% of job requirements

You’re just as likely to get an interview matching 50% of requirements as matching 90%. We saw a clear upward trend in interview rates based on matching requirements, but with an upper bound. When users applied to jobs where they matched 40 – 50% of job requirements, they were 85% more likely to get an interview than when they matched less, and applying to jobs where they matched 50 – 60% of requirements made them an extra 192% more likely to get an interview over the 40 – 50% matches.

But after that point, you’re in diminishing returns. Applying to jobs where they matched 60% or more of job requirements didn’t provide any additional boost in interview rate.

Job Search Tip #1: Apply for jobs once you match 50% of job requirements.

For women, the % of requirements required is lower

You may have seen stories before about how women in particular [2]don’t apply for jobs unless they’re 100% qualified. We wondered if they were on to something – maybe there’s gender discrimination at play and hiring managers look for women to meet more of the requirements. Turns out, our findings apply just as much to women as to men, and actually, for women, the chances of getting an interview start increasing as soon as you meet 30% of requirements.

[3]requirements_required_by_genderWomen get interviews at higher rates with fewer matched requirements – if only they applied to those jobs in the first place.

As you can see in the graph above, we see the same general trend for women as for men, but for women, you’re as likely to get an interview matching 40% of the job requirements as matching 90%. Note also that, [4]as we’ve seen in previous analysis, women in general have higher interview rates than men.

Yet, despite this, among our users, we’ve observed the same trend that has been studied elsewhere. Women are more likely to turn down jobs where they match some but not all of the qualifications – over the last 8 weeks, 64% of our female users rejected at least one job where they matched 50 – 60% of the requirements, while only 37% of male users did.

[5]requirements_required_feedback_rates

So, yes, women, you too should be applying to jobs where you don’t meet all the requirements.

Job Search Tip #2: Stop second guessing yourself – you DO deserve that job.

You’re not guaranteed to get an interview, even when you match 90% of job requirements

Base case scenario, you’re looking at about a 15% chance of getting an interview. Applying for jobs is still fundamentally a numbers game – the more applications you put in, the more likely you are to get an interview, and the more interviews you have, the more likely you are to get a job offer.

Put another way, if you want to get a job offer, the number of jobs you need to apply to is a function of your interview rate (what % of applications do you get interviews for) and your job offer rate (what % of interviews do you get job offers for), specifically: # of applications needed to get n job offers = n / interview rate / job offer rate

Interview Rate Job Offer Rate # of Applications Needed to Get 1 Job Offer
5% 5% 400
10% 10% 100
15% 15% 45

Clearly, improving your interview rate and job offer rate pay off, but what if you can’t find 45 jobs that are perfect matches for you? It never hurts to broaden your search to jobs that feel like more of a stretch. Sure, your interview rate will be lower, but that’s balanced by applying to more jobs.

Job Search Tip #3: Apply to as many jobs as possible to increase your chances of an interview.

No time to fill in all those applications? [6]We can help with that.

[7]appbotApplicationAssistant will fill out all those applications for you (and submit them at the best days and times too).

Summary

When you’re out looking for the perfect job, don’t be intimidated by a long list of requirements!
\* Even if you only match 50% of the requirements, you should feel confident hitting “apply.”
\* This applies just as much to women as it does to men (actually, even more so!)
\* Cast an even broader net to improve your chances of getting an interview.
Remember, getting an interview is your big break – it’s your opportunity to prove that you can do the job even if you don’t meet all the “requirements.”

Methodology

First, we randomly sampled 6,348 applications for 668 different users from TalentWorks. Then we extracted the qualifications from the original job postings and the users’ submitted resumes using proprietary algorithms. Finally, we grouped the results based on qualification match and regressed the interview rate using a Bagging ensemble of Random Forest regressors. All analysis and graphing was done using python with pandas, sklearn, scipy, and bokeh.

Why Are We Doing This?

With ApplicationAssistant right now, we [8]can boost the average job-seeker’s hireability by ~5.8x. But, what makes ApplicationAssistant work has been an internal company secret until now. We’re fundamentally a mission-driven company and we believe we can help more people by sharing our learnings. So, that’s exactly what we’re doing.

Creative Commons

We’re not only sharing this but also sharing all of it under the [9]Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. In other words, as long as you follow a few license terms, this means you can:
\* Share: Copy, redistribute the material in any medium or format.
\* Adapt: Remix, transform, and build upon the material.
References

Visible links
2. https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless-theyre-100-qualified
4. https://talent.works/blog/2018/01/08/the-science-of-the-job-search-part-i-13-data-backed-ways-to-win/
6. https://talent.works/automate-your-job-search?utm_source=blog
8. https://talent.works/automate-your-job-search/?utm_source=blog
9. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

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The Art of Job Interviewing

A modern guide to step up your interviewing game. Full of practical tips, templates and insights you can use before, during and after any job interview.
Article word count: 1470

HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18509678
Posted by hunglee2 (karma: 4018)
Post stats: Points: 90 - Comments: 60 - 2018-11-22T12:51:56Z

\#HackerNews #art #interviewing #job #the

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Article content:




Structured interviews have been proven to be twice as effective as unstructured interviews. But what are they? Well, in a structured interview every candidate is asked the same questions, all interviews follow the same order (phone call, onsite interview, trial day), while an unstructured interview is spontaneous and doesn’t follow any structure at all. That sounds fun, but it makes it hard to compare candidates. Not only that, biases could run loose (we’ll get into that later). Thatʼs why we prefer semi-structured interviews in which you use an interview agenda to structure your conversation but donʼt script every question in advance. ‍Creating an interview checklist and scorecard might sound like a lot of work, and putting all this in place will take more preparation time. But if you get this process right, you will seriously boost your chances of making the right hire for every future position.

After each interview you put your findings into a scorecard. This allows job interviewers to score an applicantʼs interview in a consistent way that allows for a fair comparison of candidates. And that’s what it’s all about, really.

Based on your [1]job brief you create a scorecard, a simple overview where you can score all candidates on skills, values, motivation and everything else you think is important for the job. Make sure to include all stages of your interview process (assignments and interview rounds) in your scorecard, so you have an overview of all your teamʼs findings when you compare candidates. ‍Note: Donʼt use your scorecard during the interview, thatʼs where the interview checklist comes in. More about that below.

[2]Open a scorecard template

‍After creating your score card itʼs time for the interview checklist. This is a simple list with everything you need to cover during the interview. Itʼs where you write your notes and what you use when filling in the score card after the interview. Even though you use your checklist, there shouldmore than enough room for spontaneity, so you get the best of both worlds.

Things you might want to include:

• Introduction to the company

organisational structure, mission, vision, strategy‍

• Areas you’d like to discuss based on your hiring values

that are based on your company values‍

• Areas youʼd like discuss based on the desired skillset for the position requirements, responsibilities, hopes for the future

‍

• What the candidate journey looks like

who does the interviews, how many interviews, is there an assignment?‍

• Practicalities
salary expectation, possible starting date, perks and benefits

• Next steps

Are there other candidates, time frame
[3]What questions should I ask?

Pro tip:There are lots of question techniques out there that claim to help you find out whether the candidate possesses specific skills that you’re after. Our preferred technique is STAR.

[4]Question techniques (STAR)

Facing a whole bunch of people across a table during an interview can be really intimidating, so never go into an interview with an interview team bigger than two. ‍Itʼs important to carefully select the two team members who will do the interview. We strongly recommend that you invite at least one colleague who will work closely with the future hire, preferably a team lead or a senior, so they can get a good look at their future colleague and ask (and be asked) insightful questions. For those of you new to the Hiring team: itʼs the group of colleagues responsible for successfully hiring a new team member. Theyʼre involved in the recruiting, interviewing and selection process. The number of people involved and their responsibilities may differ from company to company and job to job, however, the roles typically include:- HR manager- Recruiter- Team LeadOne of the team members is the facilitator who makes sure everything happens on time, in the right way.

Find a location that fits your company values and the job opening. We know some companies who let the candidate choose the location for the first interview and others who love to do their interviews in a café - it’s completely up to you, just make sure you feel comfortable there and that it relates to your company. If all this sounds a bit strange, then doing the interview at your office is great too. ‍Finally, it may sound obvious, but donʼt forget to make sure that there will be coffee, tea and other refreshments available.

Sometimes you meet a candidate for the first time and youʼre convinced itʼs the right person for your team. If youʼre confident enough about your gut feeling to vouch for this candidate, that makes you the loop Champion. From now on youʼre the hiring manager for this specific interview loop. This means that you will be available throughout the interview process to make the candidate feel safe and welcome. The loop Champion makes sure that communication with the candidate is good, promises are kept, and the candidate knows what to do and expect throughout the process. If this sounds like a lot, donʼt worry - not every hiring process needs a loop champion. Only make room for one when youʼre really, really enthusiastic :)

‍

Most of the interview experts we talked to always do a quick phone interview before sending out invitations for the first face-to-face interview. In a short call (15-20 minutes is enough) they ask the candidate for a short personal introduction and their salary expectations. This ensures that both the candidate and the employer are on the same page before they (potentially) meet for the first time.‍Here are a few things that we suggest discussing during the call:- Why this company?- Why this position?- Candidate experience- Candidate expectations- Salary indication

Itʼs a great idea to introduce the interview process to your team. Show them how to use it, tell them what to look for during an interview and explain the importance of semi-structured interviews. Remember, the more structured, the less biased :)

You look forward to going to work every morning and every candidate should be equally excited about coming to join your team. The best way to show them why is to share the values and vision that make your company unique. Nobody knows these better than you and your team, so get together to discuss which rituals and work best represent you. Once these are clear, everyone in the team can sell the company to anyone.

The interview team shouldnʼt share their opinions, notes and scorecards with each other until they’ve documented their findings in your hiring software (like [5]Homerun, for example). This will help make sure that they don’t influence each other’s opinions.

We’re all human, and we’re all biased, so the best thing to do is just accept this. To stay as neutral as possible during the interview process, identify what your biases are in advance and try to be constantly conscious of them. It helps to keep an eye on your scorecard so you don’t lose focus or get blindsided. ‍Another way to avoid bias is to always back up your opinion with rational statements when discussing candidates and their qualities with your colleagues. Not only will this make you sure about your gut feeling (or not), but it will help convince your colleagues to

• First-impression errorAllowing an initial judgment of a candidate — good or bad — to affect one’s feedback or decision.
• Groupthink
  ‍Allowing the opinions of others — good or bad — to affect one’s feedback or decision.
• Halo-horn effect
  ‍Allowing one major strength or weakness of a candidate to affect the overall feedback or decision, rather than thinking holistically.
  Applying for a job is a scary thing. The more someone is at ease, the better impression of them youʼll get. The best way to do this is to give your candidate a wonderful experience during your hiring process. The best way to start is to follow these steps after youʼve selected the candidates for the first round of interviews.
  
  Make sure the candidate knows when and where the interview will take place and what they can expect in the interview. Explain the process and cover how many interview stages there will be. Telling candidates this - and who are they having the interview with and which topics will be covered - will help them relax and let both sides be at their best on the day.
  
  Preparation is good for both sides! What this will be depends on which stage of the process youʼre at. At the start, you might just ask the candidate to do some reading, so send some information about your company together with any relevant good reads. If you want to get a taste of their talent, set them a small task in advance of the interview - but make sure it matches the job type. For example, at Homerun we always ask people to create a free demo account to make them familiar with our product. At a later stage of the process you may decide to add a more detailed (and demanding) assignment.

References

Visible links
1. https://medium.com/the-hiring-playbooks/2-how-to-write-a-clear-job-brief-55499a271f8c
2. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1B0kZ1wNDQC-3bD1--q6bCq8tqgw5vqCreYWHO1Zd0gM/edit#gid=413414263
3. https://www.artofwork.co/job-interviewing#
4. https://www.artofwork.co/job-interviewing#
5. https://www.homerun.co/

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