almost none of them fitting the original purpose of the site</a>.</p>\n<p>I’d like to offer an alternative to the conventional “great idea” theory of startups for first time founders to consider. This guide can help you walk the path from nothing to a launched minimal viable product (MVP). This is by no means the only path to an MVP and I don’t know if it’s the best path, but it is a path that I’ve seen work for a number of YC companies.</p>\n<h2>The Order of Operations</h2>\n<p>Here’s where I’d start: Is there any particular problem that you are passionate about? For younger founders, that problem can come from your experience growing up, from your family/friends, your personal interests, or from school. For older founders it could also come from experiences at work, being married, or being someone’s partner. For the Airbnb founders, their original problem was how to pay rent. For Justin.tv/Twitch the original problem Justin and Emmett had was what startup should we work on next. Some problems seem important and impactful at the beginning and others feel like trivial toys. I’ve seen both types grow into billion dollar companies.</p>\n<p>Once you decide on a problem, find some friends and brainstorm potential solutions to the problem. Those friends can be other people who also have the same problem but they don’t have to be. They can be people you went to school with, people from work, or people you’ve met in your personal life. What’s probably most important is that you pick friends who are smart and fun to brainstorm with. When someone is fun to brainstorm with &#8211; instead of rejecting potential solutions as they are said aloud &#8211; they riff on the solutions and improve upon them. If you’re not technical I’d encourage you to brainstorm with friends/colleagues who are. If you pick the correct friends to talk to, sometimes the result of this brainstorm is a solution or idea that you can get really excited about. This is the spark that can make your startup come alive. Because the people you brainstormed with feel some ownership for the solution you came up with together, this is the perfect time to ask them to work with you to actually build that solution. A great brainstorm can often not only provide you with an idea, it can also provide you with co-founders (so pick your brainstorming partners carefully).<sup id=\"footnoteid1\"><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"#footnote1\">1</a></sup></p>\n<p>At this point the most important thing to make that spark turn into a fire is to work together to build and launch a minimal viable product (MVP). An MVP is the smallest possible product you can build that allows you to start offering your service to users. Often times you need very little software to start. Resist the temptation to build your complete solution because in reality you have no idea whether it will work. Better to build an extremely stripped down version of your solution and start seeing if users actually want to use it. Airbnb’s first version had almost no features (no map view, no profiles, no messaging, no payments, etc) and they referred to it as “Airbnb Lite” and built it in under a month. It’s totally okay if you need to do a bunch of manual work that doesn’t scale on the backend, is users actually want what you are making you’ll have time to fix everything and make it scale later. Once you have your first users of any kind, you have a startup. That being said, you still need someone with the technical skills to ship the MVP.</p>\n<p>Once you’ve put your MVP together, there’s a ton of startup advice to follow. Here are a few resources I recommend:<br />\n&#8211; <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://blog.ycombinator.com/ycs-essential-startup-advice//">YC’s Essential Advice</a><br />\n&#8211; <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html/">Paul Graham&#8217;s Essays</a><br />\n&#8211; <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://pmarchive.com//">Blog Pmarca</a></p>\n<h2>Two Failed Orders of Operations</h2>\n<p>There are a couple of paths I see first time founders walk that often lead them to failure.</p>\n<p><strong>1) Come up with an idea and then pitch investors.</strong><br />\nUsually these founders think that investors, by investing, will validate their idea and that if they can’t raise money &#8211; they don’t have a good idea. Good investors are interested in teams who are actually in the process of executing their idea and tend to shy away from teams that are just pitching their idea.</p>\n<p><strong>2) I have an idea but can’t write code and none of my co-founders can either.</strong><br />\nThese founders want to pay someone else to build their product. Then they’ll launch it, try to raise money, and build out a tech team. The problem there is that good investors are actually investing in the team you’ve built. If you are building a tech startup and no one on your team can write code or do the technical work necessary, the bar to raise investment is much much higher. In my experience you have to have 10x the amount of traction to get a good investor to overlook a non-technical team. Also, in general the problem with outsourcing engineering is that the people you outsource aren’t as motivated as you are and are often fairly expensive.</p>\n<h2>Counterexamples</h2>\n<p>There are a lot of counterexamples to the “failure” scenarios I described above, both for first time and repeat founders. What I will tell you is that building a successful startup is extremely hard and when you choose to follow one of the failure paths &#8211; often your road is much harder and less likely to lead to success. Why make things more painful on yourself?</p>\n<p>By no means do I think this is the only path but when founders ask me to recommend a path, this is the one I recommend. It’s the most effective one I’ve seen in getting founders past the first major hurdles of putting something out and finding initial funding.</p>\n<hr />\n<p><strong>Note</strong><br />\n<b id=\"footnote1\">1.</b> Now, what if you’re not technical and don’t have access to technical people? Often what I tell future founders is go work at a startup and make those friends. At the end of the day, having the right founding team is such a fast track to to building a successful startup that it’s worth investing a year or two building those relationships before you start.<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"#footnoteid1\">↩</a></p>\n<p><em>Thanks to Carolynn Levy, Adora Cheung, Daniel Gackle, and Craig Cannon for reading drafts of this post.</em></p>\n<!--kg-card-end: html-->","comment_id":"1102388","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/wordpress/2018/03/One-Order-of-Operations-for-Starting-a-Startup-by-Michael-Seibel.jpeg","featured":false,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2018-03-20T02:29:32.000-07:00","updated_at":"2021-10-20T12:13:46.000-07:00","published_at":"2018-03-20T02:29:32.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710b0","name":"Michael Seibel","slug":"michael-seibel","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/Michael.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Michael Seibel is a Group Partner and Managing Director, Early Stage at YC. He was the cofounder and CEO Justin.tv and Socialcam. Socialcam sold to Autodesk in 2012 and Justin.tv became Twitch.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/michael-seibel/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71174","name":"Advice","slug":"advice","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/advice/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a7116d","name":"Essay","slug":"essay","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/essay/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710b0","name":"Michael Seibel","slug":"michael-seibel","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/02/Michael.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Michael Seibel is a Group Partner and Managing Director, Early Stage at YC. He was the cofounder and CEO Justin.tv and Socialcam. Socialcam sold to Autodesk in 2012 and Justin.tv became Twitch.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/michael-seibel/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71174","name":"Advice","slug":"advice","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/advice/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/one-order-of-operations-for-starting-a-startup/","excerpt":"More often than not, when I talk to a talented technical person who’s thinking\nabout becoming a founder, their number one blocker is that they don’t have an\nidea. At some point during their formative years they learned that every great\nstartup started with a great idea and if the idea isn’t amazing (usually as\njudged by peers, parents, or other people with little startup experience), the\nstartup will fail.\n\nMy first startup’s idea (really Justin Kan’s idea) was to create a live reality\nTV show w","reading_time":5,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null},"mentions":[],"related_posts":[{"id":"6348578e2184dc0001eebf80","uuid":"e6a0a134-b255-40e8-b7be-01494afbabe8","title":"Learnings of a CEO: Matt Schulman, Pave, on Hiring","slug":"learnings-of-a-ceo-matt-schulman-pave","html":"<p>Welcome to the third edition of Learnings of a CEO. You can read previous editions <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/blog?query=learnings%20of%20a%20CEO\%22>here.

Pave helps companies plan, communicate, and benchmark employee compensation. Today, the company has 160 employees, more than 3,500 customers, and is valued at $1.6B. Founder and CEO <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/matthewschulman?lang=en\%22>Matt Schulman</a> has created one of the most comprehensive and thorough recruiting processes, which has made him one of the most successful recruiters in the YC community. We sat down with Matt to hear his insight on <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.workatastartup.com/companies/pave-2/">building a team</a> in the early stages of his company and today as a CEO of a growth-stage company. </p><p><strong>Many of the first Pave employees were hired as a contractor before converting to a full-time employee. Would you recommend this strategy to founders? </strong></p><p>I strongly recommend the contract-to-hire setup in the early days of a startup, as it led me to have a 100% close rate with the candidates we wanted to convert to full-time. This strategy worked for two reasons: </p><p>1) By the end of the contract, the contractors had poured weeks of energy into the work – learning the code base and investing their time – and getting to know potential coworkers. This escalated their sense of commitment.</p><p>2) I was flexible on working hours – open to them working nights or weekends. This made it easier for the candidates who were busy with full-time employment to say yes to working with Pave and earn extra income on the side. </p><p>To convince people who were employed to work for Pave as a contractor on top of their current job, I framed the process as a mutual evaluation. This is an opportunity to evaluate the company and come to a mutual decision at the end of 2, 4, or 6 weeks together – no pressure. We paid them a fair market rate, and as mentioned, we were flexible on working hours. One contractor worked their day job until 5:00pm and then on Pave from 6:00pm-2:00am, for example. They were excited to be able to build something from the ground up and work closely with me at the earliest stage of the company – which is another strategy I used to encourage people to work with us. </p><p>Before Pave, I was an engineer at Facebook and regularly worked on side projects. These projects were my fun, guilty pleasures because when I built something from the ground up, I felt an emotional attachment to the work. Usually engineers at large companies feel part of a machine, but when they build something full-stack from the ground up, there’s a magical allure to that work. I gave those contractors ownership over the work and often jammed out with them – working side by side at all hours. (One note: I did not have the contractors touch customer PII.) Within weeks, we’d both know whether Pave would be a good fit, and if so, we were already committed to each other.</p><p><strong>What were you looking for in early employees? </strong></p><p>When starting to build out the team, I was given a tip that the first 10 hires would set the tone for the next 100. Because of this, I personally recruited 100% of the early Pave employees. I sourced people, took phone screens, went to dinner, coffee, and on walks with candidates, and spoke with them for hours on Zoom and Facetime. It was an all-encompassing process. But I found that early advice to be accurate: The first 10 employees are the most important aspect in the company’s life cycle – other than finding product-market fit – and recruiting has to be the founder’s priority.</p><p>When recruiting for the first ten employees, I wasn’t looking for experts in specific areas but generalists with rapid career growth, passion for our mission, and a hunger to work. Those early employees readily tackled whatever fire we were facing that day from engineering work and sales to back office and HR. I also had a deep level of trust with those first ten hires, as they were all in my network. </p><p>Today, I still look for mission alignment and hunger but there are times I need to hire a specialist. I identify the tightest set of criteria for the role and only talk to people who fit that criteria. This is very different from the early days when I was solely looking for generalists who could fill multiple roles.</p><p><strong>How did you convince those early employees to join Pave? </strong></p><p>I always found ways to continue our conversation even when I could sense the candidate wanted to turn down the offer. I would do this by scheduling future conversations – saying that I needed to share something new with them – and then I would get to work writing a Google Doc that showed how I planned to invest in their career. We still use this strategy at Pave today, but it has evolved and is now affectionately called the collaborative Google Doc.</p><p>The collaborative Google Doc is shared with the candidate and used throughout the entire interview process. The document outlines expectations for the role and frames the interview process in stages, communicating which stage the candidate is in at any given time to ensure we are working within their ideal timeline. We encourage the candidate to comment and add their thoughts to the document, including feedback for me and their thoughts on the interview process.</p><p>As we get further into the interview process, I get more specific about what I’m looking for in a candidate. And when we get even deeper, I write multiple pages on what I’ve learned about their career aspirations through our conversations and backchanneling, and how I’m going to support them. </p><p>When it comes to backchanneling for potential executive hires, I try to talk with at least 10 people and ask, “If I have the privilege to be this person's manager, I want to set them up for the utmost success. What are your specific recommendations about the best ways to set this person up for success and unleash their full potential?” This 360 review is shared with the candidate right before I deliver the compensation package. I outline what I learned about their strengths and weaknesses, and specific ways that I’ll push them and support them.</p><p>When I communicate compensation, I lay out all the facts, including cash amount, equity (shares and dollar amount), and the benefits package. In addition, we also share:</p><ul><li>The salary band for the role (and implicitly their position in it).</li><li>The level that the employee will be in the organization, along with more information on our leveling framework and what each level means.</li><li>The methodology for determining the compensation, like the market data we use (75th percentile for similar stage companies).</li><li>Broader information on compensation philosophy, including how someone moves through the band, gets promoted, etc.</li><li>Additional info on equity: current preferred price, current post money valuation, details on vesting, PTE window, 409A price, and more – essentially everything they need to determine the actual value of the grant.</li></ul><p>We’re ultra transparent about compensation because compensation should not be a guessing game; people deserve to understand every aspect of their compensation package and how it was derived. I then offer to meet live to answer any questions or discuss feedback – or ask them to leave their comments in the Google Doc. Most candidates will ask questions in the document, as it can be more approachable.</p><p><strong>For every open role at Pave, a Slack channel is created to drive urgency and ensure no detail goes missed. Tell me about this process. </strong></p><p>As a seed-stage company, I was creating Slack channels for every role. Today, Slack channels are created for roles that I’m involved with – like hiring a head of finance or VP of engineering. The process still looks the same, however. </p><p>I create a Slack channel for that role and add relevant stakeholders. Every morning I ask for an update. What’s the movement? Have we sourced any more candidates? Have we talked with candidates X, Y, and Z? I do this to keep the process moving forward every day. I also post updates – sharing with the team when I spoke with a reference, for example. When we extend an offer, I use this Slack channel to encourage stakeholders to reach out to the candidate through text messages or Loom videos. </p><p>Loom videos are an interesting medium. If you’re a candidate and receive six Loom videos from different people at the company, it may feel bizarre and a bit overwhelming. But the videos show we are excited about the candidate and also gives insight into our energetic culture. </p><p><strong>You also review email copy and do drip campaigns for candidate outreach. Tell me about this. </strong></p><p>We have a pre-written email sequence that is sent from me or the hiring manager depending on the context, and then we use <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/gem/">Gem to automate this. The response rates for these campaigns are much higher than if the emails were coming from a recruiter. Before the emails are sent out, I’ll spend 30 minutes personalizing 30 emails (one to two sentences at the onset of the email) that will be sent to target profiles. And then it’s important you do a drip. If you only send one email, most of the time the candidate won’t respond. I find sending a third email with a short message like, “Hey, any thoughts?” leads to the most responses. </p><p><strong>How do you think about where your job ends and your team begins when it comes to recruiting?</strong></p><p>Today, if I’m not the hiring manager, I delegate and come in only at the end of the process for a sell call. The process looks vastly different if I’m the hiring manager. I spend a lot of time reviewing resumes and identifying the top 25 profiles in the space. Every outreach to them is very personalized, and I have time to do this because I focus on quality over quantity of candidates. Quality over quantity was a big lesson for me, actually. At first, I would look at all inbound resumes and thousands of applicants. But I have come to realize that I have more success when I map out the market and find the top 25 candidates in the space. Then I'll find a way to get one of them in the door.</p><p><strong>Describe the ideal candidate for senior-level positions when Pave was a smaller company. </strong></p><p>As a company of 35 people, we didn’t need managers who delegated – which has merit at a later-stage company. We needed people who would personally take on the hard work. Often, first-time founders hire someone senior for optics reasons. Instead, you should look for someone earlier in their career who has grown at a crazy high slope – often referred to in the tech industry as a high-slope candidate versus a Y-intercept candidate. There is a time and place for both types of hires, but as a 35-person startup, almost always go for the slope, not the high Y-intercept. And in some cases, you may meet exceptional candidates with both high slope and high Y-intercept. This is the dream case!</p><p>Another mistake first-time founders can make is rushing hires by trying to squeeze them in before a term sheet. Don’t try to meet some arbitrary deadline or cliff date. If it takes six months or a year to hire an executive, that’s ok – wait for the right person.*<br><br><em>*This answer has been updated to clarify the founder’s intention behind the statement.</em></p>","comment_id":"6348578e2184dc0001eebf80","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/10/BlogTwitter-Image-Template--8-.jpg","featured":true,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2022-10-13T11:23:10.000-07:00","updated_at":"2022-10-26T08:44:29.000-07:00","published_at":"2022-10-17T09:00:11.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":"Pave Founder and CEO Matt Schulman has created one of the most comprehensive and thorough recruiting processes, which has made him one of the most successful recruiters in the YC community.","codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710a7","name":"Lindsay Amos","slug":"lindsay-amos","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/Lindsay.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Lindsay Amos is the Senior Director of Communications at Y Combinator. In 2010, she was one of the first 30 employees at Square and the company’s first comms hire.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/lindsay-amos/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71181","name":"YC Continuity","slug":"yc-continuity","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/yc-continuity/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71174","name":"Advice","slug":"advice","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/advice/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71152","name":"Founder Stories","slug":"founder-stories","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/founder-stories/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71158","name":"Leadership","slug":"leadership","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/leadership/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71170","name":"Startups","slug":"startups","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/startups/"},{"id":"634d76fe3f2ab90001338eb9","name":"#21831","slug":"hash-21831","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"internal","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/404/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71155","name":"Growth","slug":"growth","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/growth/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710a7","name":"Lindsay Amos","slug":"lindsay-amos","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/02/Lindsay.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Lindsay Amos is the Senior Director of Communications at Y Combinator. In 2010, she was one of the first 30 employees at Square and the company’s first comms hire.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/lindsay-amos/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71181","name":"YC Continuity","slug":"yc-continuity","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/yc-continuity/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/learnings-of-a-ceo-matt-schulman-pave/","excerpt":"Welcome to the third edition of Learnings of a CEO. You can read previous editions here.","reading_time":7,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null},{"id":"62d8038a3644180001d72a0d","uuid":"1d8947c7-4bd1-4f7c-8175-e3750393a8d1","title":"Learnings of a CEO: Max Rhodes, Faire","slug":"learnings-of-a-ceo-max-rhodes-faire","html":"<p>Every year, 200 YC companies go through our <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/about#continuity-1\">post-accelerator programs</a>. These programs provide founders with the resources they need to build a company all the way through IPO. One area covered extensively is how to scale as a CEO of a growth-stage company. </p><p>Outside of the YC community, little has been documented on best practices to be an effective CEO. We want to help founders everywhere scale and build enduring companies — and today, we’re launching a new series to do just that: Learnings of a CEO. </p><p>We’re kicking off this series with Max Rhodes, the co-founder and CEO of <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.faire.com//">Faire, a one-stop shop for wholesale. Before Faire, Max was an early product lead at Square, where he worked on the Cash App and was a founding member of Square Capital. Max and his co-founders were part of the <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/faire/">W17 batch</a> and <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/growth-program/">F18 Growth Program</a>, and YC led Faire’s Series B and doubled down in their C-G rounds. Today, Faire has over 1,000 employees. </p><p><strong>How has your job as a CEO changed from seed stage to Series G?</strong></p><p>Much of my time is spent setting the vision and strategy for Faire and driving the execution of that strategy. This often feels like driving an aircraft carrier versus a speedboat, which is how I often describe leading a seed-stage company. In the early days, we were on a six-week product cycle, decisions were centralized (often with me making those decisions), and the entire company met daily for standups to stay aligned on our goals. Today, we are on a six-month product cycle, decisions are decentralized, and we have built systems that hold people accountable without needing consistent touchpoints. </p><p>As a thousand-person company, the number of products and features we can build has greatly increased, and we have to map out our strategy for the next 6-12 months to keep teams aligned. Communicating the strategy to the entire company requires multiple channels and repetition. We have a strategy doc that I collaborate on with the leadership team and share with the company; updates are provided at the half-year mark. We hold all-hands, where I share what is top of mind. We also have biweekly business review meetings, which are open to anyone; we also make the notes accessible. </p><p>Being able to decentralize decision making starts with hiring the best people and then arming them with the right information. Outside of meetings, we use OKR templates, track the history of our milestones, and create a collective body of work (in Notion and Google Slides) to provide everyone with direction. </p><p>We’ve organized the company in a way that lets us hold people accountable without needing constant touchpoints. The product development strategy is broken down into focus areas that each get assigned to a team. Each team is self-sufficient and has all of the technical and go-to-market people it needs. The team works autonomously to reach a metric. Every metric ties back to a top-level company goal, ensuring that teams are solving real customer problems.</p><p><strong>As you've grown, what changes have you had to make to keep everyone at your company aligned?</strong></p><p>We’ve experimented a lot: strategy docs, all-hands, documenting our 5Ss (the five most important initiatives across the company), and OKRs. There are pros and cons with OKRs. We use them as a guidepost rather than a measuring stick, to make sure we’re consistent in our planning and getting realigned on goals. </p><p>As we grow, some systems break. For example, I used to hold a biweekly business review meeting with each team. This was great when the company was broken up into three teams. With more than 15 teams, it became inefficient and borderline impossible. Eventually, these teams were organized into pillars, and each pillar was held accountable with a biweekly business review. My goal is to always find a balance between how much time it takes to coordinate versus execute, while designing information flows that don’t turn into silos. </p><p><strong>What's your advice to other founders on how to hire executives?</strong></p><p>First, clearly outline the outcomes you need the person to drive. Then, design a rigorous hiring process that evaluates whether they’ll be able to drive those outcomes and whether they share the same values as your company. We use a combination of behavioral interviews and work studies, where we see how they’ll perform at the job. We also extensively check references. </p><p><strong>What is Faire’s culture? What do you do to cultivate it?</strong></p><p>Our culture can be described by our five values. These underpin both why we are here and how we operate as a team. We’re still in the early days of building what this company will someday become and these operating principles help everyone at Faire maintain the spirit of entrepreneurship:</p><ol><li>We serve the community.</li><li>We seek the truth.</li><li>We are owners.</li><li>We embrace the adventure.</li><li>We are kind.</li></ol><p>To create this culture, it’s all about mechanisms. It starts with hiring. If we’re able to hire people who hold the same values and bring a new lens to the work, cultivating this culture is easy. We also embed the values into our feedback cycle and reward people for living them out. We give weekly shoutouts and recognize people, as well as hold quarterly value awards.</p><p><strong>Advice you would give to future leaders? </strong></p><p>Starting a company is hard, but it’s a lot easier if it’s something you care about, something that will impact the world. 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You can read the first edition <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/learnings-of-a-ceo-max-rhodes-faire/">here. </p><p><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://zapier.com//">Zapier was founded in 2012 by <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/wadefoster/">Wade Foster</a>, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/bryanhelmig?lang=en\%22>Bryan Helmig</a>, and <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/mikeknoop/">Mike Knoop</a>. The founders went through YC’s <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/zapier/">Summer 2012 batch</a> and <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/growth-program/">S18 Growth Program</a>, and today, Zapier automates work by connecting with over 5,000 apps. The company has been profitable since 2014 and is valued at $5B – with 700 employees working remotely. Wade, Zapier CEO, shared his learnings growing into the role of a growth-stage CEO. </p><p><strong>How has your job as a CEO changed from leading a 3-person company in 2012 to a 700-person organization today? </strong></p><p>In the early days, you’re in the trenches with your co-founders and early employees splitting up tasks and touching nearly every part of the business. Often you’re writing code, selling products, recruiting, and helping with HR and finance functions. Today, Zapier is almost a team of 700 – and as we’ve grown, people have taken more and more duties from me to help the company grow and scale.</p><p>Now, one place I feel I am most needed is the vague concept of setting the vision and communicating that vision — and then ensuring everyone understands what we are doing, why it’s important, and their role in getting that done. This came naturally to me when we were small and I was in the trenches with everyone and communicating constantly. But as we hired more folks, I realized leaders were interpreting the vision to their team somewhat differently. I learned that if you are not communicating the vision well, you'll have teams that seem to be working on random projects. In isolation this isn’t bad, but as a collective set of tasks, you discover their work doesn’t fit into the vision. </p><p>We now repeat the vision over and over again in many formats. We put the vision in writing and it's constantly referenced; it's communicated at our all-hands; we bring in customers to talk about Zapier’s impact; we show data, so charts and figures can help tell the story; we have a company podcast. </p><p>When people inside the company start to turn the vision into a meme or Slack emoji, I know they really get the vision. Diagnostic tools, like employee engagement surveys, also help me understand how well employees understand why their role is important. It’s also evident when reviewing roadmaps. If a team’s tasks are tight and cohesive, I can tell they’ve been making tough decisions to align to the vision; if there are a bunch of random tasks, I can tell the vision hasn’t been communicated clearly. As a CEO, you have to ask, “Tell me how this is aligned,” and force those conversations to occur. Over time, people will get more comfortable with these types of assertive exercises. </p><p><strong>As you've grown, what changes have you had to make to keep everyone at your company aligned?</strong></p><p>We host weekly all hands, bring customers in to talk at those all hands, are transparent with metrics, and make sure those metrics are reflective of the good and the bad. Ultra transparency with metrics has served us well, as they are motivating and help people get aligned. People start to ask, \"How do we get these bad metrics to the good category?\" and then work towards change.</p><p>Being candid has also served us well. Whether at all hands, on a podcast, or solely talking with one of our leaders, we have candid conversations about why we didn’t hit a goal, why we were off schedule, why a deal didn’t close – and then immediately dive into what we think needs to happen next. The goal is to give awareness to the organization, so that in various meetings and forums people can try to figure out how to improve those areas.</p><p><strong>What's your advice to other founders on how to hire executives?</strong></p><p>Hiring executives is one of the hardest things you’ll do as a CEO. It's hard to determine when to start hiring executives, exactly what you’re looking for in an executive, and then find that person. </p><p>The best way to figure out when to start hiring executives is to meet with people who are unquestionably good executives at companies a stage or two further along. With no intention to hire them, meet with the VP of Engineering, VP of Marketing, and VP of People and ask, \"What are the things you do? What makes you great at this job? What do people in your job disagree on?”. Get as smart as you can on this topic and then compare and contrast what that set of leaders is telling you with how your company operates. If these executives wouldn’t bring anything new to the table, you may not be ready for that type of leader. This starts to help you answer the when part of the equation – and also the what, because you start to see what these folks are capable of and what they are not. </p><p>Part of determining what you should look for in an executive is understanding your own strengths and weaknesses. This requires honesty with yourself and internalizing feedback you have received. (I encourage folks to work with executive coaches and get 360 performance reviews.) Figuring this out helps you start to realize, \"Okay, within my executive team, I need people who will compliment me in these ways.\" Otherwise, you risk hiring a team that is quite capable and competent at their function, but actually may not work well with each other or with you.</p><p><strong>What is Zapier’s culture? What do you do to cultivate it as a remote company?</strong></p><p>We have a strong set of values that we align around. One is default to action. We hire folks who are action-oriented – and we have to as a distributed company; folks aren’t in situations where they notice someone next to them is stuck on something. So, they need to be curious, self-starters, and (figuratively) scratch and itch when they see something that doesn’t satisfy their innate drive. </p><p>Next, we value defaulting to transparency because folks who are action-oriented should be equipped with a ton of context. The mission, strategy, metrics, goals, systems and processes – all of it – is well documented and organized so people can find them and take action.</p><p>We also have a feedback-oriented culture. I teach a course on feedback to all the new folks to ensure they understand how to ensure they understand how to give and receive feedback effectively because it helps us grow. </p><p>The rest of our values are outlined <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://zapier.com/jobs/culture-and-values-at-zapier/">here, but these are some of the things that drive Zapier’s culture – and as you scale, it’s crucial to create different forums to communicate these values. We have an internal tool we named Async, which is email meets Reddit. The platform is public by default, anyone can post, and information can be targeted at different groups or people. We find this is great for long-form substantive topics that have a longer shelf life (1-2 weeks) versus Slack channels (1-2 days). We also hold all hands and have a company podcast, where we capture evergreen content. For example, when we have key moments in the company history, we’ll break it down: Why we did this thing, what led to that decision, the outcomes, why it is an important moment, etc. We have found podcasts to be helpful when onboarding new folks. </p><p><strong>Why did you decide to not raise any additional funding since your seed round?</strong></p><p>The only funding we took in the history of the company was a $1.3M seed round in 2012. This was partially philosophical and partially about the business. </p><p>The three of us co-founders had worked at a fast-growing, bootstrapped company owned 50/50 by two brothers. When we came out to the Valley (we were from Missouri), we started to hear this line of thinking, “No great company has ever done X.\" Some of these statements would center around the impact of venture funding, and I was dismissive in part because I had this counterexample from my time in Missouri. So, when we raised the seed round, we decided to treat it like the last round we’d ever raise.</p><p>Our second reason for not raising multiple rounds: Across the founding team, we had all the skill sets to do every job inside the company. That meant we didn't have to hire to make progress in the early days. We even had rules in place around hiring like, “Don’t hire until it hurts.” </p><p>Then there was the third, rational component: We were able to grow quickly without external funding because of Zapier’s network effect on our developer platform side. We're able to have low customer acquisition costs (mostly through organic channels), and this is intrinsic to how Zapier works. </p><p>Along the way, some of the philosophical thinking fell by the wayside by observing other companies and realizing fundraising is a tool like anything else. There are moments when it can help you, and there are moments when it can hinder you. You should strive to understand when external funding is a good tool to use versus when it is not – and then apply it if it makes sense for you.</p>","comment_id":"62f15573ab52db0001d3b642","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/08/BlogTwitter-Image-Template.jpg","featured":false,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2022-08-08T11:26:59.000-07:00","updated_at":"2022-08-15T12:08:14.000-07:00","published_at":"2022-08-09T08:55:00.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":"Today, Zapier automates work by connecting with over 5,000 apps. 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