Eoghan McCabe: evaluation

Transcript context

…Okay, so going back to how you actually did this thing. So, basically you described what many people think of now as founder mode, just top down, as you said, the third area, and just here's what we're doing. We're not going to sit around waiting for you to give me ideas. What did you do? What did that look like internally? There was a couple of things. One was we were burning a lot of money, so I cut a lot of costs aggressively. Canned a bunch of different projects. We had this big glorious office we were about to fit out and I'm like, we're about to hit negative growth territory, stop it. And a lot of companies were really stuck in the prior world where they just were used to being super successful, rich and wealthy and spent like drunken sailors. So, I stopped all of that, got really frugal in ways I never thought I would. I still haven't touched the interior design of this office. I'm in here, even though I call it the hotel Marriott, I'm sick of it. Anyway, that was one. Another was picked a lane. Strategically we were all over the place and I said, "We're doing service." Zendesk had been acquired a couple years prior. They were strategically, energetically, culturally dead. They were upsetting customers in the market. There's an opportunity there. We're doing service, forget all the other stuff, even though there was a lot of people in the company saying, well, shit, we still have $80 million of ARR that we're getting from the other thing and we're really good at that, and there's a big opportunity. There's other companies in this space worth billions. It was the type of decision that where I had to practice the professional CEO approach, which is, "Hey folks, what do you all think? Let's take everyone's input. Let's put it all down on a spreadsheet." Everyone had color beside all of the different options that we may take. Let's make a group decision. I said, "Sorry, this is what we're doing." So, I was very dictatorial in that respect. We had no one making decisions, so somebody needed to, even if I had some qualms about the decisions myself, I couldn't predict the future, but someone had to make a call. Obviously as soon as AI came around, I jumped hard on AI and announced that we were going to spend nearly $100 million of our own cash on that. We allocated a lot of capital, but I also restarted the culture. We had just a very comfortable culture as a lot of companies did. There was a lot of focus on social issues and a lot of complaining and dissatisfaction, and I rewrote the values designed to be a sharp knife to cut out the parts of the company that I just knew wouldn't be effective. So, I said that people must be resilient, that we had very high standards, that we'd work incredibly hard, that shareholder value was the most important thing that we'd optimize for. A lot of things that were controversial for this prior crowd. And then I designed these quarterly performance processes where not only would you get a mark or a grade for your performance against your goals that quarter, but you'd also get a score for your behavior against the values. And I hard coded a formula myself, and so I took it out of the manager's hands to say, if people got below a certain mark, respectfully and lovingly, we would say, thank you for your service. values. And I hard coded a formula myself, and so I took it out of the manager's hands to say, if people got below a certain mark, respectfully and lovingly, we would say, thank you for your service. We're going to go forward without you. And so you do that just a small number of quarters and you can start to shape an organization that's design and the image of the values you want to create. And obviously there was a lot of pain, a lot of satisfaction. There was attempts at soft coup, there was letters sent to the board, people really unhappy, but on the other side of it, the people left were the most incredible entrepreneurial, brave, inspiring, happy individuals you could possibly imagine. And then you hire in their image. We ran an anonymous employee survey, I think 15 or 16 months after I started aggressively working through the org and rebuilding the org and rebuilding the culture, and we had a 98 to 99% approval of management, leadership and new strategy. And this is coming from me having the lowest Glassdoor rating for a CEO I had ever seen when I came back. So, I just want to explain that being that deliberate about your culture and upsetting a lot of people is the path through which you can create a culture where people are super happy, super engaged, super aligned, and now we have just this highly performant organization. Yes, we're messy in many ways. So, that was a big part of it too. So, it was kind of strategically picking a lane. Remaking how we go to market, the pricing was a really, really big piece that had a big effect. Betting on AI and then culture. And I kind of buried the AI thing because frankly none of this would matter if we didn't bet on AI. So, the story could all be summed up by saying, when you ask what did I do, it was that we built Fin and that changed everything.…

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