April 30, 2023
Rob Khazzam, Founder of Float (ex-Uber GM) | How High-Performing Teams Lead to Product Market Fit
What's the most important asset of any startup? It's easy. The talent. The software you build is not defensible. It can be replicated. The team you build is what's special. And the culture you develop is what's unique. In this episode, Rob shares some incredible advice from his days at Uber and as the CEO of Float on how to build a high-performing team. He talks about hiring A+ talent by spending 80% of his time on recruiting and paying 90th percentile. He shares his hiring philosophy about ...
What's the most important asset of any startup? It's easy. The talent. The software you build is not defensible. It can be replicated. The team you build is what's special. And the culture you develop is what's unique.
In this episode, Rob shares some incredible advice from his days at Uber and as the CEO of Float on how to build a high-performing team. He talks about hiring A+ talent by spending 80% of his time on recruiting and paying 90th percentile. He shares his hiring philosophy about hiring with high conviction (appropriately called "F--K Yes and F--K No"). And he talks at length about what culture is and how to make it work for your startup.
If you're running a team of any size, you have to check this out. Guaranteed at least three tips you can copy or your money back!
02:00 - Float's Backstory
06:25 - A CEO's First Move
09:59 - "Kills or Dies"
15:57 - Cultural Values and Hiring
18:36 - Radical Candor
25:17 - Recruiting and Sourcing
28:55 - "A" Players
32:32 - Work-Life Balance
35:48 - Compensation Benchmarking
38:35 - True Product Market Fit
WEBVTT
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I said, I'll probably spend 80% of my time recruiting and so should you.
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They said,"That's crazy.
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Hey, we're not aligned on that." I said,"Have you guys ever scaled a team before?
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I can tell you, us achieving success is not just going to come through our own hard work.
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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.
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We need to hire people that are brighter than us in a bunch of areas that push us."
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Welcome to the Product Market Fit Show, brought to you by Mistrial, a seed stage firm based in Canada.
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I'm Pablo.
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I'm a founder turned VC.
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My goal is to help early stage founders like you find product market fit.
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Welcome to the Product Market Fit Show.
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Today we have Rob, the CEO of Float, a startup that offers companies a smart corporate card that's tied to spend management software.
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The company's based in Toronto, they have about 60 employees, and a raised over$40 million.
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Rob, it's a pleasure to have you here today.
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Thanks for having me.
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So the topic of today's episode is a little different than most.
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It's how to build a high-performing team.
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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.
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You're always managing a team.
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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.
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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.
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Everybody should care.
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So I'm excited to jump into this with you.
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Maybe kind of to just set us off, one of the interesting things here is that you're the CEO of this company.
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You're kind of one of the founding team members, but you're not one of the original two co-founders, right?
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Maybe if you could take us through when you joined the company.
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I know you joined really early, but what that was like and what led you to join in the first place.
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Yeah, sure.
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So the backstory of Float, Float's actually gone through quite a journey and actually a few name changes.
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So Float started as a company called Equal Technologies.
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It was started by three co-founders.
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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.
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The context essentially was they had been working on what was then at the time known as Journal.
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The company was called Journal.
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They had two co-founders at this point in time when I was introduced to them.
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They had built the product, the first version of the product.
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They had two or three customers that were testing it and providing them with some input and guidance.
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The third co-founder, Tom, had moved on from the business a few months earlier.
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They were now looking for a third co-founder and ideally a CEO.
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The backstory was the three of them were friends.
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They went to the University of Waterloo together, really, really bright computer science backgrounds.
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They basically were looking for someone that could help them scale the company.
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They thought they had something, but I think they weren't fully sure.
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What do we do with this now?
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How do we recruit a team?
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How do we take this to market?
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They were looking for someone to go and do that.
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What struck you then?
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You have two really young, sharp but inexperienced type co-founders and a super early idea.
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What jumped out at you at the time?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The second thing that I really liked about them and that I took away from my experience at Uber is they were intense.
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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.
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You have to be intense.
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You have to be very deliberate.
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Griffin and Ruslan, they invited me, after our first meeting, to their daily standup.
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The standup ran-- it was 9:00 a.m.
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or 8:30, 7 days a week.
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And they were doing that every day, even just between the two of them.
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There wasn't even anyone else on the team yet.
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I just saw this insane work ethic and intensity and this conviction they were going to succeed and figure it out.
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What did you do to get,-- because I think you ended up raising 5 million, which is a decent size seed round.
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What did you do to make that happen?
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We essentially decided to time it.
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We said, okay, there's two catalysts here that will get around together.
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One is let's bring on a bunch of new customers.
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We're not going to have a revenue story, but let's bring on 60 customers.
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Let's see if we can get 60 customers, go from 3 to 60 in 8 weeks or something like that.
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That would be a great story that could get seed investors excited.
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Then also to tie it into me joining, it was a bit of a story.
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We have two co-founders that have already built something that have very different skill sets primarily around product and engineering.
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I'm joining; I've got experienced building teams and scaling teams.
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It's a match made in heaven.
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For the next six weeks, nothing matters except getting 60 customers.
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That's the only way anyone is going to invest in this business.
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Gloss over all the details of that for a second and fast-forward a little bit.
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You raised this$5 million, which is an impressive feat of its own.
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Now, I mean, now starts the building and obviously the hiring part of it all.
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You have money in the bank, you have a product, and you have customers that are ready to adopt this product.
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Where do you start?
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I guess my question is do you have a few candidates in mind and you just bring them on?
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Do you go through kind of a-- I mean, the team is so small.
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Do you take the time to think through what the culture's going to be?
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Do you already have a preexisting management philosophy?
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What's your first move at that point?
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Yeah, I mean, it's a great question.
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I'd say the first thing is before I joined, I drafted a document to Griffin and Ruslan.
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They were very upfront from the beginning.
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They said,"We're bringing on a CEO.
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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.
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We need to be aligned.
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Hey, if you want to deal with investors and the board and sales and marketing, go for it.
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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.
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I said,"I'd like us to co-create them and let's agree to them, but these are non-negotiables for me.
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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.
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We don't get fixated on titles.
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Even co-founders' roles will evolve over time.
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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.
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We agreed to that upfront.
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The first thing that we did when I joined was institute something pretty basic.
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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.
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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?
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I was a bit dramatic, but it was like, you either kill them or they kill you and so you die.
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We built a culture pretty quickly, which was on Monday morning-- they were already doing standups.
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So the thing that I introduced was on Monday-- I created the all hands deck for the team.
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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.
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We created this notion table.
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It was pretty tactical and it was just kills or die.
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So next to everything was what are we going to get done, what does the outcome look like?
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Then a single person, the DRI and we used that term very early on that's responsible for it.
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It could be in engineering, Griffin was going to get something done.
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We needed to push out new code.
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Ruslan was working on front-end design.
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Sean, our sales rep was going to do 20 demos.
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I was going to meet or build the deck for our fundraise.
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On Friday we would then have a wrap-up and we would go, this is what we said we would do.
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We'd go in a circle and it was mutual accountability.
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What did we get done?
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Why did it get done?
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Why did it not get done?
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That created a huge amount of momentum and urgency and also focus.
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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.
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This is all that matters.
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I remember distinctly one of the Mondays saying the team was really scattered.
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We wanted to do all these things that were hinged on the assumption we were going to raise this round.
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I said,"Hey, if we don't close these customers, there is no money in the bank.
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There will be no round and Float, or at the time, Journal won't exist in 90 days.
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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.
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Maybe take me through just that kills and dies and that whole thing.
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I think there's a lot of value to it.
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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?
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What's the biggest thing you think you get out of doing that?
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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?
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Execution orientation.
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I mean, the simplest way to achieve results as a small early stage startup is to shrink the timeline through which you measure progress.
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So instead of saying, what are we going to get done this month, you say, what are we going to get done this week?
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What are we going to get done today?
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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.
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You don't know for a month whether you're on track and what does it mean in any given day to make progress?
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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.
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So it's more like, we got to talk to 500 and therefore, you need to talk to 25 companies a day.
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I think it was really that this idea that strategy and planning of little value at an early stage company, it's about execution.
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So it was really about bias fraction urgency, and people enjoy that.
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Something happens when you do this, when you break tasks into these little things.
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People get excited to report on Friday I got that thing done.
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Similarly, when people don't get things done, something interesting happens.
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It's not about leadership or hierarchy.
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They don't want to come on a call with their coworkers and let their coworkers down.
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Myself included, I was like, I'm the CEO, but I said I would do something and I didn't.
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I think it creates accountability and it creates urgency that--
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What happens?
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That's a question because I think at the beginning, everybody gets excited about any sort of new kind of management thing, right?
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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.
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I mean, you can read so many books about so many things you can do.
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Something like this, it's what happens when the thing doesn't get done, right?
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How do you maintain that level of-- that bar?
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I guess the down-- not the downside, but where this could fall off is people start not getting things done and nothing really happens.
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Then kind of the culture evolves to well, you say what you're going to do and then you get what you can done.
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If you can't, you can't and you move on.
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Then the whole exercise loses its entire value.
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How do you keep that bar high where that accountability keeps being a driving force throughout?
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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.
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We're evolving it now.
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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.
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It doesn't scale.
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So we're evolving it now.
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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.
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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.
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The customer outcome is the customer outcome.
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We either built a product that customers used or they didn't.
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Our intentions and all the process that we created to try to do that is interesting, but it's not paying the bills.
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It's not helping us actually move the ball forward.
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That was something I emphasized to the team and it's a fine line.
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You have to build psychological safety.
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You have to have people feel comfortable.
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If it's just you as the leader holding people accountable, I don't think that's great culture.
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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.
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So when we don't get things done, I think it leads to reflection of why was that?
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So I would emphasize, hey, if we didn't hit one of these things, just chair two minutes.
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Why not?
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Sometimes people would say, I set too big of a goal; it was unrealistic.
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Sometimes that's true.
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In other cases, it's I was unfocused.
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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.
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So I think that that was productive and yeah, it does lead to tough conversations, right?
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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.
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It doesn't seem like we did.
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Why not?
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Did we agree this was important?
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Yes.
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So why didn't we do it?
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I think that's important and clarifying for teams.
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You really need that and painting things as existential is a big part of that.
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The thing that I always emphasized our team, particularly our engineers was is everyone enjoying building this product?
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Are we excited about what we're doing?
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People would say yes.
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I'd say, do we want to keep doing this?
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They'd say yes.
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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.
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That changes as you raise more money.
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That concept that startups are existential I think is important and motivating.
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One of the things I wanted to touch on, you mentioned earlier, you said some cultures, some values, some cultural values.
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What makes a-- first of all, culture's such a loaded word.
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Second of all, I think it's really easy to come up with a list of 10 things that sound good to everybody.
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Hey, collaboration; hey, we should care about customers; we should try to have empathy.
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I mean, there's just things that are just so positive that it's like everybody will nod their h ead.
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What makes a good c ulture, though?
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What makes good cultural values that have real meaning, especially thinking for as a startup?
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Yeah, I think-- I mean we define them as their norms.
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They're the norms.
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For us, we view culture values as the norms, behavioral norms that guide how we operate on a day-to-day basis.
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I think we had seven or eight or maybe ten initially that we set.
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I created a document and drafted it and sent it around.
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We created a notion page around it.
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We talked about it as a team.
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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.
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The words can be interpreted in different ways.
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So you have to identify them.
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Then I think the really critical thing is you have to hire for them.
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So number one is right after I joined, I instituted most of the key practices that I learned as a"bar raiser" at Uber.
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This was a program.
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I was one of the first members of it.
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It was this hiring practice philosophy that they introduced, which was hiring bar-raising people and being extremely objective about it.
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I created a document which was like, here's how we're going to hire at Float.
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We have these competencies we look for in a given role, and then for all employees we look for these cultural values.
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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.
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This is what this role does.
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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.
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So they didn't even understand what does good look like here?
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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.
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Then beyond that, these are the cultural values we're going to test for.
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I created this practice that we're going to divide and conquer.
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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.
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That really helped us hone in on how we test for what those cultural values are.
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It was just really about creating specific questions around them.
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I think the rubber meets the road when you make difficult hiring decisions and also occasionally, termination decisions.
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