Mentions personal use of The Hard Thing About Hard Things.

Transcript context

…Amazing. That was a fruitful question from Leo, and we might come back to this topic. By the way, this also applies to organizations. I mean, the way that I used to get all this information about how to run organizations is I started a company, Totality, and my co-founder and I, we did a terrible job running that company. What happened was I didn't have any learnings from that which I could share with people because it was just worst practices, not best practices. But then 10 years later, I thought to myself, well, how could I have done that better? How could we have done that better? So, I picked up a book, a business book, it was High Output Management by Andy Grove. I read it and I was like, "Oh my God, here are all the answers. " And then I read another book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz was like, "Oh my God, there are even more answers. " I just kept reading more and more business books, and every one I read, they were just chock full of answers. But then I needed to test whether or not these really worked, so that's when I started coaching and I started testing them in companies, but I had to let the people know here, do this, but they weren't going to read a 350 page book. I had to summarize it in two pages and then share it with them, and then they did, and then they implemented it and it worked. Then I had all these summaries, and then I started to create my own summaries of little niche cases that weren't in any book that I'd read. That's where all these writings came from. Then one day, someone that I was coaching said, "Matt, you got to take all these writings. They're a book, you got to publish them." And I said, "No, I don't." My friend said, "Well, how about I do all the work? How about I take care of the editing and the publishing?" And I was like, "Okay, if you want to do that, great." That was Alex MacCaw. Others had offered before, but he was the one that actually followed through all the way to the end. That was it. That's how the book was born. But I realized also, recently, that many of my most radical ideas, I can't get anyone to test them because I'll say, "Hey, I think you should do blank." And the CEO will say, "That sounds crazy. Matt, can you point me to other examples of other people that have done this and it's worked?" And I say, "No, this is an original thought that came out of my head. No one's done it before that I know of." They're like, "Okay, well I'm not going to be the first." Then I realized I needed an organization to test my most radical ideas, and also all of my CEOs had been asking me to create software because I have a methodology and it's step one, step two, step three, and you do it in one-on-ones and then a methodology for a team meeting and then a methodology for feedback and then a methodology for every different motion in the company. It's all in Google Docs. And they said to me, "Matt, this is amazing. I love this one-on-one process. I love your team process, but I don't want to have to teach each of my reports the way you've taught me. ll in Google Docs. And they said to me, "Matt, this is amazing. I love this one-on-one process. I love your team process, but I don't want to have to teach each of my reports the way you've taught me. I'd like it just being softer. I just hit a button and boom, it happens automatically." At first, I said, "No, that's not interesting to me. I'm not a developer. You, Brian Armstrong, you're a developer and you have a thousand engineers that work for you. Why don't you go create it?" But in the end, I said, "Okay, this could be fun." So, I hired a team of developers and we started to create the software, and one, the product is working. But two more importantly, I now have a team of humans that we work together that I can start testing my more radical ideas out with. I would say about half of them are wildly successful and the other half complete duds. It almost seems like one are the other. But now I have my own basically laboratory to test things. Of course, when I see radical things that other people are doing, I try them in our organization, and it's phenomenal. I'll tell you the most radical one. I was asking one CEO, I said, "Have you ever let someone go and regretted it?" He said, "No." And I said, "Well, then you don't know what the bar is because the bar of where you should be letting people go is here, and the bar that you've let people go is here. So until you get close to that line, you don't know what that line is." He said, "Wow, that's true." Then I thought about it and I thought to myself, uh-oh, I have never let anyone go that I regret it, so I don't know where the line is. Then I thought, oh no, I've got to go into my team and let someone go, and here's the problem. We've already done talent density, we've already done the Netflix thing. If someone is meeting expectation, we let them go. We've already let all those folks go. So on our team, it's only outperformers. So, I thought there was one guy, he's an outperformer, no question about it, and super positive, an amazing guy and can do anything and is happy to do everything. But there wasn't much left for him to do because everything else was being covered. I talked to my number two and said, "Can you do what you're doing and what he's doing?" And she said, "Give me two weeks," and she did. She came back and said, "Yeah, I can." So, we let him go. Now, when I let someone go, I try to do it with a massive amount of compassion because I know it's brutal. I mean, losing your spouse, your home, and your job, these are the three most traumatic things that can happen to you. When that happens, of course you go into massive fear and the brain shuts down, so I want to be there and help them through that process and actively help them find their dream job because there is a place that absolutely needs them. So, what I do is I become their agent and I say, "I want to help you discover what it is that your ideal role is, and I want to help you create it or land it." I did that with him. Turns out, what he wanted to do was go start a company and create a new product so he could just start that day one.…

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