Jacob Warwick: recommendation

Transcript context

…Let me come at it from the other direction. A lot of people listening to this podcast are founders or hiring managers, managers. They may not be super excited to hear or giving people advice on how to negotiate harder for higher comp. What could you say to them to make them feel a little bit better about us sharing this sort of advice? I will challenge them as well. Now, how important of a priority is top talent and maintaining and retaining top talent to you? When we're thinking about how quickly the speed of innovation is happening, you've had a lot of great AI guests on the channel recently, right? The exponential curve of growth is increasing. If you hope to stand a chance, you need to attract the top talent and you need to keep that top talent because it's very expensive to replace them. I'm not suggesting that people beat you up for the sake of beating you up. This is a myth about negotiation that's adversarial. What I teach is how can we be more collaborative, so the conversation is, "Look, Lenny, as a founder, can you help me understand what's important to you, the value that this work will drive, and then naturally we'll come to terms that make a little bit more of a value exchange makes sense there." Oftentimes, some of the ways that we're breaking the boundaries of compensation isn't necessarily advocating for a busted base comp level and bonus percentage. Oftentimes, we're putting performance incentives, milestone triggers. If the company grows to 100 million ARR and I contributed this to it, what would that outcome look like? Would that be another tranche of stock or would that be cash or would that... We are getting more creative here. What's interesting is, for the longest time, I had a difficult time advocating for this. And having been a CEO and founder myself, I understand why you don't want to do it because it's hard. It's hard to make this. Everyone also thinks they're top talent. And when everyone thinks they're top talent, somebody's got to be lying. It can be difficult to understand that. So those that I've found are more confident to push towards performance-based tend to have more skin in the game, tend to want to stick around and see that success happen. Those are the types of people I want working for me if I want to be a very competitive organization. I have started to have these conversations with a couple of Fortune 500 companies as well as some talent consulting companies, think big recruiting firms, where they've brought me in to advise on the comp committees so that they can get more creative with their structure so they don't lose talent. Because nobody wins when you hire a top performer and they leave in 10 months. The recruiting firm loses their pay, their performance pay. The company now has to go back and replace that person. It usually costs hundreds of thousands. And in some of the realms that we navigate in the Fortune 500, it will cost millions, if not tens of millions, to replace the lost IP there. So the argument here is, "It's okay to get creative. Reward it when you see it." I'm not suggesting give everyone everything in the company and totally ruin your business model. But if you want to be competitive, be competitive with your pay as well. That's a great answer. We were chatting before we started recording this and you shared that you've helped people negotiate with many of the guests on this podcast, like people that they were hiring, and you helped them get higher comp.…

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