Luc Levesque: recommendation

Transcript context

…Yeah. I want to spend more time on this, but before we move on, you also have another Zuck story. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Zuck recruited you personally to join Facebook/Meta. Is that true? And then if true, what was that like to be recruited by Zuck personally? It was an interesting experience, very intense, but also one of the reasons for it was I was living in Canada and my family was there and I had some strong personal reasons why I couldn't leave Canada. But yeah, we had a lot of discussions with Mark. I won't get into the micro details of it, that's more Mark's story to tell than mine. But a few takeaways from going through that experience. As a leader, hiring is the most important thing as we all know. It's a craft and a skill that I'm always working on refining. I have my own playbook that I'm constantly tweaking, testing out different approaches, trying to find the best talent and assessing them and trying to close them and bringing them on board. So I learned a lot through that experience with Mark. A couple things that stood out were the first one would be that Mark really involved the entire executive team. It wasn't just me talking to recruiting or talent or HR or just Mark, it was the entire executive team. That's something that I think a lot of leaders don't take advantage of. I've seen leaders, I've certainly done this at times where you go it alone or you're working with recruiting, but the reality is all the leaders, all the execs in the company know how important it's to bring in talent and they're always more than happy to help. So that's something that I think more leaders should do is really recruit all of their peers and their leaders in the company to help close. And that's certainly something that happened when I was in discussions with Mark and Facebook about joining. The second one, which I had I suppose never experienced before, was that they made it very personal. I had these reasons why I couldn't leave. So initially I was excited by the opportunity, but I couldn't see myself moving to California for personal reasons. And through discussions, Mark basically involved my wife, involved my spouse in this, Andrea. We flew down, had dinner with him and Priscilla, his wife. Andrea had ended up meeting with many of the executives at Facebook and really talking through what was holding us back, why we couldn't come, potential options and ideas for how we could come down. But involving somebody's spouse and family I think is a really good idea because it's a very personal decision to change company. It involves more than just that person you're talking to, it involves the whole family. So that was something that I think is an important thing to have in your kind of playbook for hiring, is really think about the whole person's family and involve them if you can. In fact, Toby did this as well at Shopify. He flew down here with Fiona and we had breakfast with Andrea and them and reviewed a few offers when I joined Shopify. And then the third thing is just to be absolutely relentless and don't give up and don't let momentum drop. It took seven months for me to go from, "This is amazing, exciting, but there's no way I can make this work" to, "Okay, let's move to Palo Alto." entless and don't give up and don't let momentum drop. It took seven months for me to go from, "This is amazing, exciting, but there's no way I can make this work" to, "Okay, let's move to Palo Alto." And Mark, the execs, a variety of leaders there were in discussions for months and months and months and never letting the momentum die. That's something that I think is really important. No doesn't necessarily mean no, and in this case it definitely wasn't the case. I had the same experience with Toby at Shopify where we've been talking about working together for over 10 years now. And then finally the timing was right and I was able to join the company. So just be relentless, involve the family, involve the spouse if you can, and recruit some help from other executives in the company. Those were some of the things that stood out through my experience. But yeah, it was a pretty wild time in my life.…

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