Varun Mohan: belief

Transcript context

…Oh, right. Okay. I want to talk about that, the sales learning that you guys had. Okay. But let's close out this hiring conversation. So we talked about what you look for... To tell you it's the time to hire, what do you look for in the people that you interview and hire? One of the key pieces that we look for, we have a very high technical bar. So assuming that they actually meet the technical bar, I think we sort of look for people that are really, really passionate about the mission of what we're actually trying to solve and people that are willing to work very hard. I think one of the things that we don't try to do is convince people, "Hey look, we are a very chill company and it's great to work here." I think, no, this is a very exciting space. It's very competitive. You should expect us to lose if the people at the company are not kind of... They're not working very hard. And I think one of the biggest dog whistles I hear is, when I ask people how hard are you willing to work, some people actually ultimately say, "Hey, I work very smart." And I basically ask them a question, "If we have many smart people at our company that also work hard, what's the differentiator going to be? Are you just going to pull them down?" Because I think one of the things that's true about companies is it's like this massive group project. And I think the thing about a person that is not pulling their weight that's bad. It's not the productivity, right? At some point when the company becomes many hundreds of engineers, I'm not going to be thinking about the one engineer that's not pulling their weight. It's the team of people they work with that are almost basically saying, "Is this the bar internally at the company? Is this the expectation?" And I guess, Lenny, if I told you you have a team of five people and the four other people you're working with just don't care, how much are you going to feel like you should care? Not too much.…

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