Robert: 0:00

I said, I'll probably spend 80% of my time recruiting and so should you. They said,"That's crazy. Hey, we're not aligned on that." I said,"Have you guys ever scaled a team before? I can tell you, us achieving success is not just going to come through our own hard work. We need to find great people to come join here and fill in the holes that we have and find people that are ideally better than us, not people that are okay. We need to hire people that are brighter than us in a bunch of areas that push us."

Pablo: 0:30

Welcome to the Product Market Fit Show, brought to you by Mistrial, a seed stage firm based in Canada. I'm Pablo. I'm a founder turned VC. My goal is to help early stage founders like you find product market fit. Welcome to the Product Market Fit Show. Today we have Rob, the CEO of Float, a startup that offers companies a smart corporate card that's tied to spend management software. The company's based in Toronto, they have about 60 employees, and a raised over$40 million. Rob, it's a pleasure to have you here today.

Robert: 1:04

Thanks for having me.

Pablo: 1:06

So the topic of today's episode is a little different than most. It's how to build a high-performing team. I think it's particularly interesting because many other topics we do on the show are kind of tied to a specific point in time of a startup, but you're always building a high-performing team. You're always managing a team. That's one of the biggest things you need to do as CEO, is get the right people on the bus and get them kind of steering the right way. So I think this is a topic that applies to everyone, and frankly, I've never met a founder that didn't care about this, so everybody does care. Everybody should care. So I'm excited to jump into this with you. Maybe kind of to just set us off, one of the interesting things here is that you're the CEO of this company. You're kind of one of the founding team members, but you're not one of the original two co-founders, right? Maybe if you could take us through when you joined the company. I know you joined really early, but what that was like and what led you to join in the first place.

Robert: 1:59

Yeah, sure. So the backstory of Float, Float's actually gone through quite a journey and actually a few name changes. So Float started as a company called Equal Technologies. It was started by three co-founders. I was introduced to two of the co-founders who are my current co-founders of Float, Griffin Keglevich and Ruslan Nikolaev in January of 2021. The context essentially was they had been working on what was then at the time known as Journal. The company was called Journal. They had two co-founders at this point in time when I was introduced to them. They had built the product, the first version of the product. They had two or three customers that were testing it and providing them with some input and guidance. The third co-founder, Tom, had moved on from the business a few months earlier. They were now looking for a third co-founder and ideally a CEO. The backstory was the three of them were friends. They went to the University of Waterloo together, really, really bright computer science backgrounds. They basically were looking for someone that could help them scale the company. They thought they had something, but I think they weren't fully sure. What do we do with this now? How do we recruit a team? How do we take this to market? They were looking for someone to go and do that.

Pablo: 3:15

What struck you then? You have two really young, sharp but inexperienced type co-founders and a super early idea. What jumped out at you at the time?

Robert: 3:26

When I met Griffin and Ruslan, the first thing that struck me was what they had achieved on their own in a business that's pretty complicated. So they walked me through the product and I said,"Wow, you click a button and it creates this functioning Visa card that actually transacts." I think they bought me lunch, or they did something with the cards that just worked. I was like,"How did you do that?" They said,"Well, we have this partnership with Marquetta and when we issue the cards, it goes through people's trust." I said,"Yeah, but how did you set that up?" They said,"Well, we met with these advisors and they told us this, and then we went to this law firm and we did that." Every step of the way, every question I asked, what I saw was there was something relatively complex that they had figured out. The second thing that I really liked about them and that I took away from my experience at Uber is they were intense. I knew when I left Uber-- the thing that blew me away when I was at Uber was it's not easy to build a startup. You have to be intense. You have to be very deliberate. Griffin and Ruslan, they invited me, after our first meeting, to their daily standup. The standup ran-- it was 9:00 a.m. or 8:30, 7 days a week. And they were doing that every day, even just between the two of them. There wasn't even anyone else on the team yet. I just saw this insane work ethic and intensity and this conviction they were going to succeed and figure it out.

Pablo: 4:55

What did you do to get,-- because I think you ended up raising 5 million, which is a decent size seed round. What did you do to make that happen?

Robert: 5:03

We essentially decided to time it. We said, okay, there's two catalysts here that will get around together. One is let's bring on a bunch of new customers. We're not going to have a revenue story, but let's bring on 60 customers. Let's see if we can get 60 customers, go from 3 to 60 in 8 weeks or something like that. That would be a great story that could get seed investors excited. Then also to tie it into me joining, it was a bit of a story. We have two co-founders that have already built something that have very different skill sets primarily around product and engineering. I'm joining; I've got experienced building teams and scaling teams. It's a match made in heaven. For the next six weeks, nothing matters except getting 60 customers. That's the only way anyone is going to invest in this business.

Pablo: 5:50

Gloss over all the details of that for a second and fast-forward a little bit. You raised this$5 million, which is an impressive feat of its own. Now, I mean, now starts the building and obviously the hiring part of it all. You have money in the bank, you have a product, and you have customers that are ready to adopt this product. Where do you start? I guess my question is do you have a few candidates in mind and you just bring them on? Do you go through kind of a-- I mean, the team is so small. Do you take the time to think through what the culture's going to be? Do you already have a preexisting management philosophy? What's your first move at that point?

Robert: 6:25

Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. I'd say the first thing is before I joined, I drafted a document to Griffin and Ruslan. They were very upfront from the beginning. They said,"We're bringing on a CEO. Neither of us wants to be the CEO." I was excited to see in them a trust in that we don't need to be involved in everything. We need to be aligned. Hey, if you want to deal with investors and the board and sales and marketing, go for it. One of the first things I sent them was an email laying out my cultural values, the leadership values and principles that I thought would be critical for me. I said,"I'd like us to co-create them and let's agree to them, but these are non-negotiables for me. These are things that are really important." They were things like bias fraction and urgency, customer obsession, the importance of meritocracy, this idea that high-performing startups treat people equally in that whoever is best positioned to do something in the business is the person that should do it. We don't get fixated on titles. Even co-founders' roles will evolve over time. If we're going to recruit great people into here, we can't be so protective about what our roles and responsibilities are as co-founders. We agreed to that upfront. The first thing that we did when I joined was institute something pretty basic. I'm laughing because I saw last night that Elon Musk has requested every single person at Twitter sends them a weekly update of what they're working on and they're going to achieve, atUber we called weekly kills or dies. It was this idea that on Monday, you'd send everyone on your team, what are the things that you'll get done this week that are critical? I was a bit dramatic, but it was like, you either kill them or they kill you and so you die. We built a culture pretty quickly, which was on Monday morning-- they were already doing standups. So the thing that I introduced was on Monday-- I created the all hands deck for the team. The ritual was at 9:00 a.m., we meet, I run and we run an all hands where we talk about what are we going to get done for the week ahead that must get done. We created this notion table. It was pretty tactical and it was just kills or die. So next to everything was what are we going to get done, what does the outcome look like? Then a single person, the DRI and we used that term very early on that's responsible for it. It could be in engineering, Griffin was going to get something done. We needed to push out new code. Ruslan was working on front-end design. Sean, our sales rep was going to do 20 demos. I was going to meet or build the deck for our fundraise. On Friday we would then have a wrap-up and we would go, this is what we said we would do. We'd go in a circle and it was mutual accountability. What did we get done? Why did it get done? Why did it not get done? That created a huge amount of momentum and urgency and also focus. I mean, there was lots of points in time where within a few weeks, I kind of got comfortable saying, no, everyone's not focused. This is all that matters. I remember distinctly one of the Mondays saying the team was really scattered. We wanted to do all these things that were hinged on the assumption we were going to raise this round. I said,"Hey, if we don't close these customers, there is no money in the bank. There will be no round and Float, or at the time, Journal won't exist in 90 days. So everyone stop working on this stuff and let's just get these customers done." So that was the most important starting ritual for us.

Pablo: 9:59

Maybe take me through just that kills and dies and that whole thing. I think there's a lot of value to it. There's organization, there's accountability, there's alignment, there's just visibility, as you know, from management to see what everybody's doing and there's focus, right? What's the biggest thing you think you get out of doing that? What's the biggest reason for why you want to have that kind of level of that weekly cadence and that level of clarity in terms of what everybody's working on?

Robert: 10:26

Execution orientation. I mean, the simplest way to achieve results as a small early stage startup is to shrink the timeline through which you measure progress. So instead of saying, what are we going to get done this month, you say, what are we going to get done this week? What are we going to get done today? So as an example, instead of saying we're going to try to close 60 customers by the end of the month, that's hard. You don't know for a month whether you're on track and what does it mean in any given day to make progress? So I would break it down to our sales rep and say if our close rate is, I don't know, 50%, we got to talk to 120 customers, probably a lot lower than that. So it's more like, we got to talk to 500 and therefore, you need to talk to 25 companies a day. I think it was really that this idea that strategy and planning of little value at an early stage company, it's about execution. So it was really about bias fraction urgency, and people enjoy that. Something happens when you do this, when you break tasks into these little things. People get excited to report on Friday I got that thing done. Similarly, when people don't get things done, something interesting happens. It's not about leadership or hierarchy. They don't want to come on a call with their coworkers and let their coworkers down. Myself included, I was like, I'm the CEO, but I said I would do something and I didn't. I think it creates accountability and it creates urgency that--

Pablo: 11:49

What happens? That's a question because I think at the beginning, everybody gets excited about any sort of new kind of management thing, right? Let's call that what it is, and you put it into place and everybody's excited because it's new and it kind of seems to work. I mean, you can read so many books about so many things you can do. Something like this, it's what happens when the thing doesn't get done, right? How do you maintain that level of-- that bar? I guess the down-- not the downside, but where this could fall off is people start not getting things done and nothing really happens. Then kind of the culture evolves to well, you say what you're going to do and then you get what you can done. If you can't, you can't and you move on. Then the whole exercise loses its entire value. How do you keep that bar high where that accountability keeps being a driving force throughout?

Robert: 12:35

Yeah, and I mean, we're still figuring this out at Float because believe it or not, we do versions of this now with 65 people and we do monthly o OKRs now. We're evolving it now. It's all breaking because I'm screen sharing on a G-sheet with almost 70 people and we're going line by line of what we got done and what we didn't. It doesn't scale. So we're evolving it now. I think the important thing is to have those tough discussions to emphasize to people that having ideas and insights and creating decks and plans is great, but at the end of the day, startups thrive on outcomes. You can create sales strategies, you can do all these things, and in some cases those are important to do, but the goal is the goal. The customer outcome is the customer outcome. We either built a product that customers used or they didn't. Our intentions and all the process that we created to try to do that is interesting, but it's not paying the bills. It's not helping us actually move the ball forward. That was something I emphasized to the team and it's a fine line. You have to build psychological safety. You have to have people feel comfortable. If it's just you as the leader holding people accountable, I don't think that's great culture. You should trust that if you don't join the call or if you miss it one week, that the team will have a really productive discussion. So when we don't get things done, I think it leads to reflection of why was that? So I would emphasize, hey, if we didn't hit one of these things, just chair two minutes. Why not? Sometimes people would say, I set too big of a goal; it was unrealistic. Sometimes that's true. In other cases, it's I was unfocused. I wrote this down and then I spent Monday through Wednesday reading on a bunch of articles about X, Y, and Z and I didn't actually do the thing that I needed to do. So I think that that was productive and yeah, it does lead to tough conversations, right? I had tough discussions with even my co-founders, everyone on the team along the way, myself included, of saying, hey, we said we were going to do this. It doesn't seem like we did. Why not? Did we agree this was important? Yes. So why didn't we do it? I think that's important and clarifying for teams. You really need that and painting things as existential is a big part of that. The thing that I always emphasized our team, particularly our engineers was is everyone enjoying building this product? Are we excited about what we're doing? People would say yes. I'd say, do we want to keep doing this? They'd say yes. I'd say, well, for us to even be able to keep doing this, we need to achieve X in the next 60 days or else this whole thing comes crashing down. That changes as you raise more money. That concept that startups are existential I think is important and motivating.

Pablo: 15:24

One of the things I wanted to touch on, you mentioned earlier, you said some cultures, some values, some cultural values. What makes a-- first of all, culture's such a loaded word. Second of all, I think it's really easy to come up with a list of 10 things that sound good to everybody. Hey, collaboration; hey, we should care about customers; we should try to have empathy. I mean, there's just things that are just so positive that it's like everybody will nod their h ead. What makes a good c ulture, though? What makes good cultural values that have real meaning, especially thinking for as a startup?

Robert: 15:55

Yeah, I think-- I mean we define them as their norms. They're the norms. For us, we view culture values as the norms, behavioral norms that guide how we operate on a day-to-day basis. I think we had seven or eight or maybe ten initially that we set. I created a document and drafted it and sent it around. We created a notion page around it. We talked about it as a team. Then I think the two really important things that you have to do to bring culture values to life and demonstrate to people first and foremost what they mean in action. The words can be interpreted in different ways. So you have to identify them. Then I think the really critical thing is you have to hire for them. So number one is right after I joined, I instituted most of the key practices that I learned as a"bar raiser" at Uber. This was a program. I was one of the first members of it. It was this hiring practice philosophy that they introduced, which was hiring bar-raising people and being extremely objective about it. I created a document which was like, here's how we're going to hire at Float. We have these competencies we look for in a given role, and then for all employees we look for these cultural values. Instead of just talking to people and then going, so what do we think, we would say-- I would email my co-founders and I would say, okay, we're interviewing, for example, our head of people, Megan Smith, who's now on our team. This is what this role does. In fact, my co-founders-- that was one of the challenges for me early at Float is most people at Float had never worked with people at a company before. So they didn't even understand what does good look like here? So I'd create a role intake and it was, this is what this person's going to do; these are the key competencies we need to see in them. Then beyond that, these are the cultural values we're going to test for. I created this practice that we're going to divide and conquer. So Griffin, you're going to test for these two competencies and these two cultural values only, and then Ruslan, you're going to do these and I'm going to do these and then we'll come back together. That really helped us hone in on how we test for what those cultural values are. It was just really about creating specific questions around them. I think the rubber meets the road when you make difficult hiring decisions and also occasionally, termination decisions. We met lots of great people who we wanted to hire and we said,"This person will probably kill it here but on these two or three cultural values, we really don't feel like they're a fit."

Pablo: 18:31

How do you test? Can you give us an example of like how you might test for especially the cultural values?

Robert: 18:36

Yeah, so one of the things that wereally hold dear at Float is this idea of radical candor. So we introduced that book to the team early. It's a mandatory reading for everyone on the Float team. Do you have the courage to say what's on your mind in the spirit of helping the business in a constructive way? One of the things that we look for in people is an ability and a willingness to do that regardless of whether it's personally comfortable for them. The best example is I say we should do something. Someone on the team thinks that that's dumb or doesn't make sense and maybe has context that I don't know but doesn't say it because I'm the CEO. That's something we explicitly looked for in people that they would not do. We wanted to find people who would share what they thought we should do, have opinions on the business, still be able to disagree and commit, but at least speak up about it if they felt it could help the customer or if it could improve our product. We would ask questions likein your prior role, who did you report to? Who did you work with? Did you ever-- have you ever given that person feedback? What have you done? Tell us about a time when you had conviction that the business needed to do something differently and a time that you had to address it. Sometimes you'd get a candidate saying deep down, I thought this, but So-and-so was my manager, or the CEO, or the VP of Ops, so ultimately it's their call. We would test for have you ever shared difficult feedback with someone? What's the most difficult feedback you've ever taken? We would look for evidence that someone would actually act in the business's and the team's best interest. That's an example of the types of questions we'd ask.

Pablo: 20:19

I think, by the way, you also highlighted there, what in my opinion makes a good cultural value, which is it involves trade-offs. What I mean by that is this is something I stole. I remember Zuckerberg talking about moving back fast and breaking things, which everybody knows, but the idea there being because you're moving fast, you're going to break things. That's the trade-off we're taking on explicitly as a startup, right? I think when you talk about radical candor, it's the same thing. It's the sort of thing that isn't like-- because the trade-off there is seeking agreement, seeking alignment, respecting hierarchies, which is a different way to operate, and something that by having radical candor, you're giving up a little bit on that and you're doing it explicitly and on purpose because you think that's the right thing to do for your business versus being nice. It's like, yeah, sure, right? I think thinking through the cultural values and the trade-offs you make and then acting them out, right? Again, you can put the stuff on the wall, but it's really the actions that'll determine what the culture truly is is what makes the difference between having meaningful cultural values and having words on a wall that don't-- that just don't matter all that much.

Robert: 21:26

I think as a leader or anyone in a business, the rubber meets the road when it comes to hiring. Are you actually willing to not hire someone who's great and you think will be great at the job who has an attitude or a style that doesn't work with your culture values? We met a lot of people who we thought were good but were really political. We met people who were really bright but were going to be super strategic but not get anything done. We were like, oh, on paper, this would be a great person, maybe, and we said no. We also developed-- one of the things we instituted from a hiring perspective was thumbs up, thumbs down. So before we hired anyone, before we shared feedback, we do debriefs and we'd say, before anyone says anything, don't tell us what you think about the person. On the count of three thumbs up, thumbs down. You couldn't be biased. If I was a thumbs up and Griffin was a thumbs down, Griffin couldn't wait to hear what I said. He'd say thumbs down. It was like, oh, interesting. Why were you a thumbs down? We'd talk it out. We did that and one of the things we started to do early that I remember was any time we were lukewarm on someone or it was like, oh, it's pretty good, we said no. We instituted, for lack better phrase, fuck yes or fuck no. So I would ask questions like, is the trajectory of the company going to change if this person joins? Is this person better than 50% of our team or more than 50% of our team? Do they raise the average of the company? Are they going to significantly contribute to living our cultural values? I remember interviewing a woman named Natalie White who's on our-- she was the first member of our customer success team. We interviewed her. She sent a deck of how to work with Natalie, why she's so passionate about the space. She was so passionate about joining Float. When we walked away from that debrief, we said,"That's the new bar. We're all a fuck yes." We all left that debrief going-- it wasn't just we want to hire Natalie. It was like-- the team was like, Rob, what do we need to do to hire this woman? How are you going to make sure we land her? We have to hire this woman. That led us to decide there's no more lukewarm yeses. It's only fuck yeses, strong yeses. We really wanted to hire people that really wanted to be there. So one thing we've screened out of Float since the beginning is anyone that's joining Float or appears to be motivated to join Float because it looks cool, it just raised some money, that's out. By the final rounds, if we don't see genuine enthusiasm for the product, the mission, if we don't see genuine research, if we don't see people having actually taken the time to learn the product, we don't hire them.

Pablo: 24:21

That's a good segue into this common thing, which I was thinking about prior to the episode, which is I think in order to build a high-performing team, you have to first get the right people on the bus. When you think about that part of it, it comes down to this other thing which is you want to work with A players. Now I've spoken to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of founders. Nobody has ever said to me, I'm okay with B players; I'm okay with C players. Everybody wants A players on their team. By definition, A players are probably top 10 percentile. You can argue that some A players will be A players here and not there, so there's that part of it. Everybody's competing for the same 10, 20% or so cream of the crop. Many questions on that, maybe. I'll ask a bunch of them and you can kind of tackle them differently, but how can you tell that somebody truly is or might very well be an A player and how do you convince them to join you, a fledgling startup that sure is hot at the time, but hey, these people have a lot of options.

Robert: 25:16

Yeah, it's tough. I mean, I remember when I joined, Griffin and Ruslan said to me,"How do you think you're going to allocate your time?" I said,"I'll probably spend 80% of my time recruiting and so should you." They said,"That's crazy. Hey, we're not aligned on that." I said,"Have you guys ever scaled a team before? I can tell you, us achieving success is not just going to come through our own hard work. We need to find great people to come join here and fill in the holes that we have and find people that are ideally better than us, not people that are okay. We need to hire people that are brighter than us in a bunch of areas that push us." They were like-- they were bought into that idea, but they just thought that the ratio is way off. Recruiting is a huge focus. I've probably spoken with thousands of people over the last 18 months. We've devoted an enormous amount of time to recruiting. I blocked time in my co-founders' calendars each week to say, you're not allowed to do anything from-- it was Tuesdays in particular. I think it was like 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. There's no internal meetings. This is recruiting time. You're either meeting candidates, sourcing candidates. We had sourcing competitions.

Pablo: 26:27

Sourcing, walk me through that like that.

Robert: 26:29

So one of the things that I think everyone learns and I learned this lesson the hard way-- if this rings a bell to anyone, I'd be curious. So you come in to run a business or a team or recruit for the first time. You spend 10% of your time recruiting for that role and 90% of your time doing the responsibilities of that job because you don't have anyone in it. Five, six months later, you haven't hired anyone. You're absolutely drowning now and you realize I need to flip that ratio and I need to spend 90% of my time recruiting. My philosophy has been, and I learned this at Uber, is you need to be militant about it. If you want to hire 10 engineers and you're a startup and you're going to close 10% of them, you need to literally speak to hundreds of people a month. I set goals for us and Griffin and Ruslan of this week, it's not even about hiring. The goal is not to hire someone. The goal is to speak with and have phone screens with 80 engineers. It was a race to see who could speak with 80 engineers first. To me, it's really simple. The the faster you talk to more people, the more likely it is you're going to find the person that ends up wanting to join your team or that you hire. So we focused on--

Pablo: 27:38

By the way, why not just-- thinking about that role, why not make your first hire a recruiter, internal recruiter who does at least the top of the funnel of that?

Robert: 27:46

Yeah, we could. We were too small at the time. I mean this was-- I'm talking about when we went from lthree people to ten. So it was really about engineering. We spent a lot of time doing that outbound recruiting. You're right; it is hard. At the early stages, we wouldn't interview them. We would say-- we called it a warmup. So we said in our first discussion with a candidate, they're not going to interview. Let's be deliberate about getting them excited about the business. In that case, I often spoke to them and I'd say,"Here's what we're doing at Float. Here's why this is really exciting. Here's what that opportunity looks like. Do you want to be a founding member of the team?" Getting from 4 people to 10 or 15 was the hardest. We spent hundreds of hours trying to convince engineers to join our team and no one wanted to. It took time and we met people everywhere. We went to coffee shops; I went to meet them. I offered to fly to them. I offered to meet their families. Many people that joined Float I recruited over six months. I went for walks with them. I went for dinners with them. I'm still doing that with people who still haven't joined and I hope to join one day. We invested a lot of time i nto recruiting.

Pablo: 28:55

Well, let's dive a little bit deeper into that because I think the best A players truly have so many options and maybe they're working at Facebook or Uber or some other amazing startup. They're making their ability, especially in engineering, to make ridiculous amounts of money that you can't or probably shouldn't pay is really high. How do you pull them away from that? Tell us a little bit more about that, about how you convince somebody like that to join you.

Robert: 29:24

Well, I want to say one thing that I think is overlooked first. You mentioned A players, and I think it is true that there are-- every company has a definition of what an A player looks like to them. I think it's important to say it's different. I think the other dimension-- historically people talk about is this an A player or not. I think the other dimension is role and stage fit. I'm convinced that everyone can be an A player in the right context. Now, being an A player at Uber as a 30,000 person company is very different than being an A player at a five-person company. I learned that very early in my time at Uber. You can interview great people who are really smart but who might not be the right fit for a four-person team. There's too much ambiguity; it's too unstructured. There aren't enough resources and there's plenty of people, and you see this all the time in startups. People have success early but not later who are perfect for that early stage and super effective and are A players there, but later they're not because it's just a different level of scale. Iwould probe a lot for that. One of the best examples is someone-- most people who are A players at really big companies and have been there for a long time are probably not a fit. I met a lot of people from Uber and Amazon and Shopify who been at those companies for 10 years or 8 years, and it's like, these are not the right fit. These folks are probably a bit more risk-averse at this point in time. When I got to know people, I'd get them excited, but I also try to understand what are their motivations. So if someone says I'm on the verge of becoming a VP at Shopify and cash comp is really important to me; I'm about to have kids, stability is really important to me; I've just gone through a really stressful period in my career and I want to focus on work-life balance, it's not a question of whether that person's an A player or B or C. It's just this is probably the wrong fit. If I heard that in a discussion, I was very upfront with people about why this could be exciting but also what the downsides were. If I got the feeling this wasn't going to go anywhere, I just would stop investing time in it. I'd say let's, let's stay in touch. And maybe that will change. For people that really wanted a change, we interviewed and recruited many engineers from Shopify on our founding engineering team, and we had a lot of people who said Shopify's great, but it's a big company now. I want to work harder, I want to go faster, I wanna have a bigger impact, and I want to take the risks associated with doing that. We said, well, hey, here's why this might be interesting. We would share how fast the business is growing, which it was growing, why we think the product is exciting, and what the opportunity was for them specifically. Truthfully, you just have to do that thousands and thousands of times. I I think to hire our first two or three engineers outside of my co-founders, we probably had to touch, in one form or another, email communicate with, 500 engineers.

Pablo: 32:23

On that note, you mentioned work-life balance. Do you think work-life balance and startups can mix, should mix, especially in the early stages? Were you upfront about that to your candidates?

Robert: 32:32

Yeah, we were super upfront about it. I mean, I have a few thoughts. I think the definition of work-life balance needs to be restated. I don't view work-life balance as I work 40 hours a week and I don't work after 6 and I don't work weekends. That's not realistic in a startup. The totality of the amount of work you're going to do is going to be greater than that. So for me it's more about work-life integration. So for me, that means I have some control over my schedule. I have independence and autonomy. My employer and my team focuses on the outcomes of my work as opposed to how long I sit at my desk. Everyone does that a little bit differently. So as an example, I try to not work Saturdays. It's really important for me to not work on Saturday, but I don't mind working on Sunday because if I work on Sunday, it allows me to take off some of the load through week. For me personally, I have insomnia and if I work past 9 p.m., there's a very good chance that I probably won't fall asleep till 3 or 4 in the morning, and then the rest of my next day is ruined. That for me is the ability to say what works for me and what's going to allow me to do well, and how can I ensure that my life outside Float gets time and attention. The reality is it's hard and we're very u pfront with people. So I tell people and try to set expectations actually really low. Here's the opportunity you're going to have, outsized impact. You're going to do things here that influence and impact the whole company every d ay, every week. Second is career development. You're going to do more things here in less time that you probably have never done or not qualified to do, myself included. That's going to allow you to learn really quickly. Those are some of the benefits and if this works out, what's the opportunity you get to be in a business that grows really quickly? Hopefully there's equity upside. You get to be at the forefront of a business that is changing the way that finance and businesses are spending across Canada. We have lots of companies and great employees that use our product. If you're excited about that, then this is going to be awesome. If you want to work 9 to 5, that's exciting, but you've got a lot of other things going on in your life. It's totally cool, but don't join Float. We screened a lot of people out where I'd say, hey, you seem great. You're not going to be happy here. I don't want you to join and then leave. It's not going to make sense for either side. I think that everyone should just be a lot more open and upfront about what those trade-offs are. I always tell people, and especially young people on our team, in your career, I've learned you can have anything, but you can't have everything. There's a point in time to optimize for who you work with, the employer, brand, money, work-life balance. You can choose whichever one you want to optimize for, and I've optimized for different ones at any point in time in my career, but you have to be really deliberate about that.

Pablo: 35:20

The other thing I want to touch on-- I have a couple more questions-- is compensation. I think there's-- everything you sell and all the qualitative pieces and the fit, and then there's a point in time at which it comes down to some cold, hard facts about how much money am I going to make and how much upside do I have? How do you think about that in terms of what percentile you try to play at and then you're thinking around cash and then how much you can truly offset that with options and so on?

Robert: 35:48

Yeah, so for compensation, I mean it's tough as a startup. You have to be scrappy. I think a couple of things that we kept in mind-- so one is it was important to us that everyone have equity in the company. Everyone at Float has equity in the company. From a cash compensation perspective, we want it to be competitive. When I joined Uber, it was a badge of honor. We took 75% pay cuts to join. I was being paid very, very little when I joined after five years in private equity investing. I think that's going to be the case for all startups. I think that there's a certain point in time if your talent strategy is what ours was, which is we only want to work with the best people, we want to be extremely picky and stubborn about talent. We don't want to sacrifice. You have to pay well. I think that has to be defined within the context of the startup you are. So as an example, we would use comp benchmarking and say we're a series A company or a seed company in Canada in technology. We want to benchmark our cash salaries to the 90 percentile for that cohort. Now that's not going to be competitive if you're coming from Shopify or Amazon or Uber or Google, but as I mentioned earlier, those people aren't the right fit for us at this stage in most cases. So that's not really a relevant comparison. We would benchmark generally to 80 to 90th percentile on cash and our cash salaries were and still are very competitive. That was a decision I shared with the board, which was, I'm telling you, I've done this before. I saw this at Uber. We have to be thoughtful about cash conservation, but it's also just not worth it because if we don't work with the best people, we're not going to have success anyways. We need to be competitive on cash. So we had the good fortune of doing that. We raised a fairly large seed and then a very large series A, but I think you need to do comp benchmarking and then you need to walk people through, and I did this on every offer, here's your cash salary; here's how we think about the equity value that we're granting you and how that can change over time. If you divide that by four years and you add that to your cash salary, here's what that amounts to. Here's how to think about that because 99% of employees, today even I think across the board don't really understand that.

Pablo: 38:00

Perfect. Well that makes a lot of sense. Maybe to wrap it up, I think at this point, talked a lot about how to bring the right people on the bus and a few different management styles and philosophies and culture. I think I'll end it with the question that we like to end it with, which is because this is after all the Product Market Fit Show, when did you feel like Float had true product market fit?

Robert: 38:25

Yeah, it happened shortly after we raised the seed. So we brought on the 60 customers. If I'm being honest, we didn't know what was going to happen. We prospected them. We did thoughtful discovery, but I think a part of me and a part of us was like, we'll probably bring these 60 customers on. The product will break and a bunch of them will churn and we'll have to figure out what to do about that, but that's tomorrow's problem. After we brought those customers on, they didn't churn. Most of those customers-- there were some pretty sizable ones that started to onboard really significant amounts of spend. We initially thought that our customers would spend 10, 20,$30,000,$50,000 maybe a month on Float. Within 60 days of closing our seed, we were seeing our customers onboard their entire teams onto Float. We saw them onboarding hundreds of thousands and then eventually millions of dollars a month in spend and talked to us about different problems than we thought. They talked to us about solving workflow problems. They talked to us about solving administrative problems. We had CFOs and finance teams talking about eliminating controllers or certain roles on their team because now Float was streamlining the expense process. So I think that was the moment and that led to almost 9, 10 straight months of 60 50, 75% monthly compounded growth and payment volume. Coming from Uber, that was very clear to me that that's the kind of growth that tells you you're onto something.

Pablo: 40:00

Awesome. Perfect. Well, we'll stop it there. I mean, just to recap, you joined a really, really early stage two-person company with a good founding nucleus in terms of talent and really just built on that. I mean, you had a product which obviously resonated, but I think you're very much in the execution game. I mean, there's not-- this isn't extremely deep IP like I think 90-plus percent of even successful startups. It really becomes about who's on this bus. Are you all aligned and going in the right direction? You keep that performance bar high so that things get done faster than other people that are trying to play a similar game. think y ou shared a lot of lessons that are going to be super valuable here. So thanks, Rob. Really appreciate it.

Robert: 40:45

Yeah, thanks a lot for having me. It was fun to do this.

Pablo: 40:48

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