Garrett Lord: belief

Transcript context

…Okay, this is incredible. So, a few elements of what allowed this to succeed within a decade-old company. And by the way, so you're at 200 million a year in revenue with the traditional business. You're going to, as you said, blow past 100 million in the first year of this new business. So, it's wild that in the first couple years, if things continue to go this way, you'll exceed the run rate of a business that took you 10 years to build. Incredible. To make this successful, a few of the things I noted as you were talking, one is clearly you were just in founder mode. You're the lead of this new business. You weren't delegating it to someone, "Hey, go start this thing." You dedicated people, "Here, we're going to pick people. You have nothing else going on, this is your new job. You're going to work on this stuff." You worked in different part of the office. There's a metrics-based cadence. It's just like, let's stay really diligent about here's how it's going, here's where we're going, here's our track, here's our KPIs, things like that. Anything else there that you felt really important to making this work? Because a lot of companies are going to try to do this, I imagine, and so I'm curious what else you found important to make this work. Yeah. I mean, I just really believe in separate and everything. Separate engineering team, separate design team, separate accounts and operations team, separate finance team. Early on, everything was separate. People only had one job and one job only, and that was making Handshake AI successful. We had a couple integration points more, and I had an incredible executive team and a core part of business, and now there's becoming more and more involvement. But our executives that have built Handshake for a long time ran the core business, and I focused 80 plus percent of my time and attention on just this. And we hired an incredible engineering leader like Avery, who ... We have a lot of entrepreneurs, people that have started companies inside the company. Or pardon me, people that started companies before. That was huge. A lot of familiarity with hiring talent that have only worked at early stage companies so [inaudible 00:54:44] that feels super comfortable with ambiguity. We were also way more upfront around this is going to be chaotic. Just owning that narrative in front of all hands at the core company, owning it directly with the team. We have a separate all hands, we have separate onboarding, we have a separate recruiting team. I had some connection points, but mostly separate. And I think that was absolutely critical. We took some of the top people, I mean, we have great people in the core business, we took some great people from the core businesses and basically said, "Sorry, I know you love your old team. I know you love what you're doing. Will you join us in Handshake AI?" And they completely forego their historical responsibilities and came over. That became really critical with engineering when things started to scale and topple, and we're growing so quickly we took some of our top senior engineers, who were very entrepreneurial, and principal engineers, staff of engineers, parachute them in. It's been awesome to ask some of the most talented people in the core business like, "Hey, do you want to come over here and do this?" And sometimes they say no. They're like, "I don't want to work most of the weekends." The number of 2:00 AM, 3:00 AM nights we done in this business, I mean, it's quite regular. People sometimes don't want to commit to that, but we've been up front, like here are the expectations for this team. It's an insane pace. If you want to be a part of one of the fastest growing businesses in Silicon Valley, you can join it. The ownership too has also been huge, like owning this outcome, and we have this motto to leave nothing to chance. For a while there we drew the number of days in the year on the whiteboard and it was like, there will never be a time like this. I've never seen anything like it, I doubt I'll ever feel anything like this in business again where there's unlimited demand and it's just our ability to execute against it. And so, we had this motto like leave nothing to chance. it, I doubt I'll ever feel anything like this in business again where there's unlimited demand and it's just our ability to execute against it. And so, we had this motto like leave nothing to chance. How do you make sure that three months are not six months? You have no regrets. Get on the plane to go talk to a customer, make the late night push, check the data six times over again, ship the extra feature that helps. And really, a huge celebratory culture too. It's very flat so there really isn't this principle of ... There's so many people putting up points, directly calling out the people that are putting up points and creating a really fun environment around impact I think has been awesome.…

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