Letter #62: Eric Vishria (2013)
Partner at Benchmark | What Every Founder Needs to Know About Building a Management Team Before It's Too Late
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Today’s letter is a transcript of Eric Vishria’s 2013 talk at FirstRound Capital’s CEO Summit titled What Every Founder Needs to Know About Building a Management Team Before It’s Too Late. At the time, Eric was the CEO of startup Rockmelt, which also happens to be possibly the first “startup” whose product I actively chose to use (way back in middle school!) and was disappointed to see shut down. As Peter Fenton noted in Letter #47, Eric calls himself a failed entrepreneur, but still navigated to sell Rockmelt (to Yahoo! for ~$70mn). Eric then joined Benchmark, where he is still active as a Partner today.
I hope you enjoy this talk as much as I did!
(Transcription and any errors are mine.)
Related Letters (other Benchmark Partners)
Letter #14: Bill Gurley
Letter #43: Sarah Tavel
Letter #47: Peter Fenton
Letter #49: Miles Grimshaw
Transcript
All right, I'm gonna fly through this in like five minutes and then maybe take a couple questions. So I generally think that most management advice is worthless. Because management is all about situation-specific stuff. So I'm going to proceed to give you five minutes of management advice, even though I think most of it's worthless.
So your mileage may vary. But the good news is, everything in here is inspired by my biggest fuck-ups on building my management team. So hopefully you won't make the same mistakes that I made. And I've made a lot of them. So first thing, if you aren't working on building your management team now, start. Start now. And don't stop. You'll never stop.
There's a tendency in startups, and this was a big mistake I made, to say Let's hit a milestone. And then once we hit that milestone, we'll go hire a marketing person, a BD person, an Eng person, whatever it is. Let me tell you, executive recruiting is a pain in the ass. Finding the right people is a pain in the ass. Interviewing them is pain in the ass. Closing them is a pain in the ass. The comp negotiation is a pain in the ass. Like everything about it, it's super time consuming. Once you hit that milestone, and you're growing gangbusters, you are not going to be able to do three executive recruiting things at the same time. Like, it ain't happening. So you want to start now, figure out the position that's most impactful for your company, right now. Start. You're gonna do Eng, then you'll do BD, then you'll do marketing, then you'll do your CFO, whatever. And I guarantee you, as soon as you fill those positions, you're gonna have to start over again, because you're going to be replacing or upgrading someone that you've just hired. So start now and don't stop.
So you've identified the position, you want to fill first, on your team. Get clear, get really, really, really clear on what you need, and what you don't need in that position. This is the hardest thing to do. If you do this--this is different than a job description--so if you do this, then you will be able to cut down on the actual time involved and filling the positions. So what do I mean by this?
I was hiring a marketing person. I'm like, Okay, I'm interested in someone who's great at paid user acquisition because we want to do that. And great at virality because Rockmelt spreads virally. And we've done pretty well with PR, so we need someone who's good at PR. And we need someone who... we're trying to build a long term brand, so we need someone who's good at long term brand. So those were the four aspects that I was interested in.
Let me tell you: nobody exists who's great at all four of those things. That person doesn't exist. That is a unicorn, and if you find one, great, hire him. But for the rest of us on Earth, you got to prioritize. You can find someone who's good at all those things...
Good is not the goal. Good doesn't help you. Hire for strength in the couple, one, maybe two, maybe three areas that matter. That's it. Hire for strength in those areas. Hire someone who's world class in the area that is most impactful for you. Don't hire someone who's kind of good at everything. A good way to kind of bound what you're looking for is shorten the time horizon. So forget about what you're going to need two years from now. Think about what you're going to need for the next 12 months. Because the truth is, that's all the visibility you have as a startup. You have 12 months of visibility. So think about Okay, over the next 12-18 months, what do I need out of this role, and that's all that matters. Short and concise. Getting this definition right? That is the hard thing. That is going to be the most contentious thing that happens. Your board will have opinions on it, your team will have opinions on it. So ultimately, you have to decide what it is and what it isn't that you're looking for. And get that communication to everybody who's going to be on the team. This is where you have to have the balls to overrule your team and overrule your board. Because they're gonna all have opinions on this.
So once you're clear on that, then go find world class in this and whatever those areas are. Quick story. So we have two really important partnerships: one with Facebook, one with Google. I negotiated those partnerships. So I'm hiring a BD person, so I'm like, Wow, we go through the deals and this person is like giving me all this advice on what they could have done better, and how they could have structured things better, etc, etc. And I'm like, Wow, this is great. So I send that candidate to go interview with Ben Horowitz, who knows a lot about deal-making. And Ben calls me up after he interviewed him and said, Eric, that guy sucks. And I was like, Really? He gave me so much advice on what I could have done better. And he said, Eric, don't forget, you suck too.
Really, really good advice. I'm not a deal guy. So being better than me at doing deals doesn't mean jack shit. It's not harder... It's not hard to find someone who's better than you guys are at marketing or engineering or whatever, anything outside of your domain. It's just not that hard. That's the lowest possible bar. The bar has to be world class in whatever you need. And you probably can't identify world class in domains that you're not an expert in. And so you have to find experts, and you have to use those experts to help you interview. And the first thing that you're going to give that expert is: This is what I'm looking for. And this is what I ain't looking for. And then get those people to help you identify world class in the areas that matter. Better than you does not equal world class. That's a good lesson.
Okay, so now you have this person, and you're bringing them onboard. Don't forget, it's a management team. So the dynamic matters a lot. And you really want to involve the right people on your team at the right stage. Give your team time to gel. I personally want like, every week to have fist-pounding on the table kind of discussions, have the contentious, have those things, because I think that's really productive. But this is a style thing. And then last point: if you do nothing else, if you do nothing else, if you look at the great chief executives in tech of our time, if you look at Gates, if you look at Zuckerberg, if you look at Jobs, even if you look at Larry Page, I think they all have one similarity. And it's they did this: every single person they added to the management team--and this is like, keep in mind, you're gonna keep doing it for years and years and years and years--every person they added to the management team raised the bar. Was literally better in their domain than everybody else on the team was in their domain. And as soon as you do that, if you do that, you will ultimately be unstoppable. Because your team just keeps getting sharper and sharper and sharper and sharper. And as soon as that person comes on board, everyone else is like, Oh, shit, I got to step up my game too. And that was like one of the best things that happened to me.
About six months ago, when we brought on our BD guy, and my Eng Director, and our first one on one after that was like: Oh, I realized I have to step up my game now. And that kind of iteration ends up being super, super important.
So that's my quick lessons learned on building out a management team. I have two minutes to take any questions if anybody has any. Or not. Yeah.
Inaudible audience question.
Yeah, so it all starts with the definition. It's a great question. The interview process is not a standard interview process. In that it's not just like, Okay, here are all the people that they need to meet. What you have to start with is, What is the definition of what I'm looking for, and who are the people that I can involve in the process to best figure out and identify world class in that domain. So it's very, very different. And then, what you can tag onto the end are like, Okay, I need them to meet all of the members of my team, or I need them to meet all the members of the team that they will be managing. Like, those are good practices. But first, you want to make sure you get what you need done, which is identifying world class in whatever that talent area is.
All right. Any other questions? Yeah.
Inaudible audience question.
But we're not all looking for the same world class. That's the thing. This is--well, but there's a finite... Look. There is no such thing as world class marketing. So like, just chew on that. There's some domain inside of it, there's something specific that you need done within that, within marketing, or within BD, or within whatever. So there is no--that's the thing. There's a lot more world class people if you can get clear on what you need. And that's the mistake people make. They're like, Oh, we need world class marketing. What the hell's world class marketing? It doesn't mean anything. What's world class running engineering? It doesn't mean anything.
There's a lot of different ways to do it. And so it's figuring out--the clarity is around the definition. And if you do that, then that ends up being... you'll end up realizing there's a lot more people. And if you think in the 12 month horizon, the reason the 12 month horizon is important is because after 12 months, the person may scale, hopefully they scale, your business may change, you may have to hire over them, you may have to replace them, but those are all facts of life. But what you got to do, you're not going to get to 12 months if you don't do that.
Alright, I think I'm out of time so I'll leave it at that.
Wrap-up
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Excellent find, Kevin! 👍🏽