Vlad Loktev: recommendation

Transcript context

…Just have to align incentives with recruiting on that piece of it. So, one other area I wanted to spend time on is basically org design and hiring and people. So you were very good at building really effective teams, prioritizing them, bringing in amazing talent. What can you share about things you've learned about as the company is growing and org is scaling about org design hiring? So for me, one of the hardest things about building teams and going through hyper growth was the fact that you're going to lose a lot of friends on that journey. You just have to be prepared to say goodbye to your friend. Meaning when you start, you build really deep relationships with people. When you're a smaller startup, you typically have one-on-one interaction and you know everybody and you have that connection with people. And the reality is, if the company is truly going through hyper growth, most people are not going to scale. It is very rare for somebody to scale with the company. I mean, we actually, so at Index, we wrote a book, Scaling Through Chaos, and there was this crazy stat where basically when you look at many, many companies that reached a thousand people and were successful, when you look back to the first 10 employees, you realize that only two to three of those ten first employees stayed with the company when the company reached a thousand people. And that's just so indicative of what will actually happen in practice. There are certain skills that you have that are good for in the specific domain for a period of time and that time is not universal forever. At some point, everybody taps out and so just having that realization is, it's tough. It's tough emotionally. It was one of the hardest things for me as a leader, and I would say the way to break out of that is to ask for help and to try to learn as much as you can about what the next role for you is going to look like. So, that's one thing that I've learned. I would say another thing is that all org charts suck. There is no good org chart. Every single org chart has problems. So you can be organized around business units, you can be functionally organized, you can be organized around problems, and the reality is every single one of those constructs sucks. There are pros and cons to each approach. If you organize yourself into business units, the problem you typically run into is silos. When people start basically advocating for their business unit with little regard for other business units, if you're functionally organized, sometimes you create too many dependencies across the organization, and it becomes this matrix way of working, which could be challenging and as a result could be slower to ship product. Those are just examples. These are not universal issues, but those are examples where regardless of how you're organized, there are going to be problems. So for me, one learning was if you're having a problem and you're trying to solve this problem, reorganizing and a new org chart is rarely the solution. It's not about the boxes and how you configure the boxes. It's about the people in those boxes and it's about how those people work together because you just need to understand the cons of working a certain way. Then how do you design a process around your org structure to make sure that people connect and work really well together? gether because you just need to understand the cons of working a certain way. Then how do you design a process around your org structure to make sure that people connect and work really well together? So, my advice there also to founders who I talk to now, focus a lot less energy on actual org design, study the different types and just pick one and once you pick one focus on the people, the culture and how people work together.…

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