SPEAKER_00: I had a mentor, a guy named Steve Wolski. One day, you know, we're talking about someone and he says, Dave, I'm going to show you the meaning of life. And he goes to the whiteboard and draws two circles, two concentric circles. I'm looking at that and said, like a target? I'm like, what's the meaning of life? He goes, the outside circle is what people think who they are. The inner circle is who they actually are. The best leaders are very self-aware. And I've remembered this for so long because when I see a leader failing invariably, it's because they're so self-unaware that they may have good intent, but the way it's coming across is really falling, you know, on deaf ears of people are just tuning them out and they're losing their team. When you lose your team, you've lost it as leader. And so many leaders just have no sense of the fact

SPEAKER_02: that their team doesn't respect them. This Week in Startups is brought to you by OpenPhone brings your team's business calls, texts, and contacts into one delightful app that works anywhere. Get 20% off your first six months at openphone.com slash twist. Embroker's startup insurance program helps startups secure the most important types of insurance at a lower cost and with less hassle. Save up to 20% off of traditional insurance today at embroker.com slash twist. While you're there, get an extra 10% off using offer code twist. And roots, invest in the only real estate investment trust that creates wealth for you and its residents at invest with roots.com slash

David Friedberg: twist. All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups, we're having our all star summer,

SPEAKER_07: turns out a great time grab a CEO, an all star CEO is a summer, they got a little bit of time. And what an incredible couple weeks we've had. My friend our mesh from HubSpot, he came on the pod just the other week Qualtrics founder Ryan Smith, who now owns the Utah Jazz. And today is no different. Dave it to cherry is here. He's a serial entrepreneur, currently the CEO of MongoDB. Do you like Dave or

SPEAKER_09: you like that? Either is fine. I've been called worse. What is your mom quality? She calls you

SPEAKER_11: death? I bet she got no, it's actually pronounced Dave like they've gone to the ball game like

SPEAKER_13: that. Unfortunately, she's no longer here. I'm sorry. Yeah, I always, you know, with the Indian

SPEAKER_07: names, I'm always like, I want to get it right. And it's, you know, it's typically a little bit hard. So I always try three or four times with my dyslexia. So you've been a startup founder before I remember you founded blade logic back in the day. And I guess you were a VC for a hot minute. How long

SPEAKER_16: were you a VC for? About two, two and a half years I started. So I wasn't planning to be VC. But as you

SPEAKER_19: may remember, after I took blade logic public, and then we ended up selling it to BMC for close to a billion, which in those days, actually meant something. And then I was trying to figure out what to do took some time off. And I joined the board of a few companies. And that when the does was one of the trend of like, VCs hiring operators, either founders or operating executives. And so I got to know the Greylock guys really well. And then they invited me to join. They wanted me to

SPEAKER_00: relocate to the West Coast, I joined as a venture partner. But in the middle of that, my wife decided to pull the plug. And she decided she didn't want to relocate out west for a variety of personal

SPEAKER_23: reasons. And so Greylock was very gracious, but I ended up staying there for about a year and a

SPEAKER_24: half. And then then I moved to a smaller venture firm called open view. And my nodal investment there was I did the second round of data dog, which ended up doing Oh, wow, that worked out too. Yeah. Yes.

SPEAKER_07: So explain to everybody what MongoDB is and the niche it's card for itself in the in the data database

SPEAKER_00: space. Yeah, so we're generally a way of us as a modern general purpose platform. So essentially,

SPEAKER_19: how people think about relational databases, we think and and now we know we have proof that customers can use a much more performance scalable and easier to use platform like MongoDB to essentially build amazing applications. So we had today have over 40,000 customers. We're about a $1.5 billion revenue company. And our customers range from almost every bank on Wall Street, every large telecom company, to startups you never heard of. In fact, we have tons of startups, including many AI startups who are building their applications on top of MongoDB. And the reason people use MongoDB is that

SPEAKER_00: the relational database was designed at the first white paper came out in 1970. But it was designed in an era where storage was really expensive. So basically, relational database is essentially a spreadsheet on steroids, where you can store a lot of information in rows and columns. The problem with that approach is that it's not very aligned to the way developers actually think and code. And so our founders who

SPEAKER_19: were actually, you know, built a company called DoubleClick that you may remember they acquired Google, they were dealing with massive amounts of data in those is the late 90s, where they're serving billions of ads per day. And they're Kevin O'Connor and Kevin Ryan. Okay, that's right. And, and Dwight Merriman was a CTO. So Dwight and Kevin and a gentleman named Elliot were the founders of MongoDB. And they constantly have to work around the constraints of the relational database and finally say, You know what, why don't we just build a database that we would want to use and that basically was the instant, MongoDB was instantiating of that insight. And the key insight

SPEAKER_00: there was to organize data and documents versus tables. And it's much more easy to organize data that way. It's much more aligned to a developers thinking code, it's very easy to add and change features and entries into the data model, and also is designed to be highly distributed. So you can really serve the most demanding and most sophisticated requirements. And that's essentially the way the

SPEAKER_33: company started, as you can imagine, you know, we first had to prove that we were more than a toy, because there was a lot of excitement of MongoDB, but could would people really trust us for mission critical workloads? We over time, we built a tons of

SPEAKER_00: features, including the highest form of data guarantees, like asset transaction support, and gave people confidence to do that. Then we

SPEAKER_33: decided to build a cloud service. And we were actually, probably the first, you know, you know, company to build a well known cloud

SPEAKER_01: service that ran across all the hyperscalers. And a lot of people were skeptical saying, how can you both partner and

SPEAKER_33: compete with the hyperscalers, because they're just gonna eat your lunch, everyone thought we're gonna be roadkill for AWS. And

SPEAKER_19: essentially, you know, one, we had amazing product market fit. And, and people just genuinely love the way MongoDB was

SPEAKER_01: designed and, and essentially, it was incredibly popular. The one other thing that we had that not many other open source companies have was that we had a much more restrictive license. So the hyperscalers couldn't take a free version of our technology with us. And so when they saw the popularity of MongoDB, they came out with their own document databases, but they're built on a very different architecture, in fact, built on a

SPEAKER_33: relational architecture. So there's severe feature and performance trade offs. And so our win rates

SPEAKER_00: against what we call the clones are very high. And over time, the hyperscalers realized we were so

SPEAKER_33: popular, and we're driving so much consumption of their cloud and store and compute services, that our

SPEAKER_34: relationships have changed, in fact, so much so that we are the only ISV that's on the management consoles of AWS, Azure, and GCP today. And we have incentives for customers to apply their credits towards an MongoDB, or what we call Atlas or cloud service. And then their salespeople also get compensated for selling Atlas. So it's sort of it's, we still partner and we still compete, but it's a very healthy relationship.

SPEAKER_07: And if I remember correctly, you know, I remember in the early days of startups, Web 2.0 ish coming out of that sort of movement, right after the great financial crisis, a lot of startups were looking for affordable solutions, they're not going to go roll up and do some Oracle database, MongoDB was just a really easy choice for one or two or three development teams at a startup to get up and running and not have to pay a fortune or get it for free in the open source license, or just pay, you know, a very small amount of money, a couple 100 bucks a month or less, to get up and running. This is a pattern that didn't exist before that getting startups to become your base and then growing with them. So you had a lot of startups grow with the product, maybe you could talk a little bit about that as a growth strategy.

SPEAKER_11: Yeah, so what you have to realize is for startups, their biggest constraint is how much can their

SPEAKER_19: development teams produce because by definition, they're small teams. And one of the most attractive things about MongoDB is that the speed of development is so much faster, people can build new features, add new capabilities, because developers spend about 80% of the time working with data, if you think about any application, one of the biggest problems that developers can figure out is when to present the right data to the right audience at the right time, with the right security constraints, so on and so forth. And so when you can make it very easy to work with data, you can dramatically increase developer productivity. So that's why people gravitated to MongoDB is that because of the document model, it just becomes so much easier to work with data, which by definition

SPEAKER_34: means developers can move faster. So that's essentially why they decided to go and why MongoDB what go with MongoDB and why MongoDB be so popular today.

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SPEAKER_07: to start your free trial and get 20% off. So I guess the big question that every founder, especially ones who have large repositories of data are thinking about today and their customers are asking about is artificial intelligence and, you know, using different AI models to analyze their data process their data. Of course, you have this issue. Uh, the data you mentioned privacy, you mentioned security, really dangerous to point some model at a database, because they might incorporate it into the language model, it might do some learning based on it. And then obviously, you know, you have massive privacy issues. So as a CEO, now you've been doing this for multiple decades, tell me about your reaction to just the last, I guess it's about nine months now since chat GPT 3.5 came out, and the pace this is all going and what your customers are asking you for.

SPEAKER_19: Yeah, so obviously, it's been a profound impact on our industry. I might be staying the blind in the obvious. What we've seen is almost 1500 customers since that announcement build AI applications on top of MongoDB. And we think AI is going to be a big driver for our business one because it'll increase developer productivity. You know, you could argue the statistics, say anywhere from 20 to 50% with code generation tools and automated testing tools.

SPEAKER_00: So by definition, there's no development team I know of who doesn't have a backlog of things that they want to accomplish. And now, if you increase their productivity, you can just generate more applications. The second thing it does, it basically enables development teams to increase the scale and

SPEAKER_19: ambition of what they want to build, like the sophistication of those applications. And by definition, if you are building more and more sophisticated and, and performant applications, you need a platform that can really address and serve those needs. So we feel like we're beneficially there. One of the hot things in our space is something called vector databases. And vectors, essentially a way for people to prevent hallucinations based on data coming from LLMs, and as also marry private data with public data, because not everyone wants to put all their data and say open AI or any other LLM out there. And so we just announced a vector capability, unlike other people who are using point solutions, one of the challenges in our industry is, there's almost like a single function database for RV, almost every use case time series graph, you know, caching, etc. Our belief is that it's much better for developers to have one, elegant, unified platform to

SPEAKER_00: enable them to have a wide, to enable them to do a wide variety of use cases, and also have a wide variety of deploying models, whether they're deploying their own data center in the cloud, or say an edge device. And so we've introduced vector, it's in public

SPEAKER_19: preview right now, and interest is very high. And that will just enable development teams to build applications even faster

SPEAKER_52: using MongoDB.

SPEAKER_07: And how do you look at the staffing of a modern day tech company? Because we've seen what Elon did over at Twitter, Google, Facebook, getting fit, cutting, you know, they kind of got ahead of their skis, I assume you did a riff,

SPEAKER_55: I'm not sure. During last year, you can correct me if I'm wrong. And but we're seeing this massive gain developers are

SPEAKER_07: reporting, you know, depending on the developer, 20%, 50% more efficiency. So how do you think about scaling technology companies when especially things like copilot and writing code seems to be where the greatest lift is right now? So do you think these companies become, you know, one where the writing of a job description is more work than just putting a little bit of AI on making the existing team faster, and then what that means for profitability of these

SPEAKER_61: companies?

SPEAKER_63: So you said a couple things there. So yeah, you know, I'm old enough where I've seen down cycles, I think

SPEAKER_19: anyone 35 or younger has never seen a down cycle before this one, and anyone 40 or younger has never managed to a down cycle. Unfortunately, I'm older than that. So the good news is that, that I've seen some down cycles. So we never, you know, ran the business at, you know, growth at all costs. Now, when we went public, we were trailing 100 million in revenue and

SPEAKER_00: a negative 40% operating margins. And today, we're about a $1.5 billion revenue run rate business with 12% operating margin. So we've grown the business very quickly, but also shown a lot of operating leverage. And we've done that by being very disciplined about how we invest and run the business. So we never actually did like a kind of company wide rift, we did do some surgical risks, say, like we had too many recruiters, given our growth was slowing down. And then we may have had some excess sales capacity in regions where we didn't see that the market was as big as we originally thought, but we've not

SPEAKER_19: done a company wide rift. In fact, one of the things we've really forced our leaders to do is real performance management. Because one of the things I think rifts do is basically, that's the easy way out to cut costs, but you don't really develop the muscles and knowing how to have high defined high expectations, you know, hold people accountable, and then reward people are doing great, but also hold people accountable who are maybe not performing. And that's a muscle that I think a lot of younger leaders do not have. And that's something

SPEAKER_00: we're very, very focused on. Obviously, in the startup area, we're seeing very lean startups who are, you know, two, three, five person teams who are building apps. I think the jury's out about how productive developers can be. I think some of these tools are quite nascent. So I wouldn't say that people are declaring victory that, you know, they suddenly found a panacea to their issues. But clearly, people are very, very focused on using some of these AI tools to improve productivity, we see a lot of focus on testing and automated testing, we see a lot of code generation, we think how to get 80% of the way there, but then you need to kind of go in and then look at the code carefully and make sure there's no issues. So there's no question is going to be a boon to developer productivity. But I think

SPEAKER_19: that it's still early days yet. But we clearly see a lot of startups who are trying to use AI tools to reduce the OPEX costs of building apps. And I think I think there's a way that's going to

SPEAKER_00: come. But again, I want to say most development teams I talked to have a laundry list of things they want to do that they can't do. So I don't see them initially using AI as a way to cut costs, but just using AI to kind of get more out the door faster, just to be able to serve the market and the

SPEAKER_07: customers getting through the backlog faster seems to be what this year has been about, right? I mean, people are just getting more done with the same size team, which is amazing, right? Great for customers and great for companies and great for margin. Like you're saying you've been through this before. I assume you went remote you had to during COVID. And you're an old school guy like

SPEAKER_71: me. We both have been through the dot com bust. We've both been through the great financial crisis, and then this insanity, which was particularly brutal, I think for everybody. So how do you look at

SPEAKER_07: remote work? And are you hybrid remote? Do you think something's been lost? You know, is your is your thinking on a dynamic in terms of going back to the office?

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I'll say a couple things. One, I think the toothpaste is out of the tube. I don't think

SPEAKER_33: you can ever force people to come back to the office five days a week, eight, 10 hours a day, I think those days are long gone. We do believe in in a kind of the value of getting together on site.

SPEAKER_00: And so we have a hybrid approach to how we do work. And I know there's a lot of things. I mean, we're based in New York, and there's a lot of the banks are trying to force people to come back, but you see them kind of trying to do that. But then they're kind of, you know, relaxing the rules, because it's hard to get people to come back, especially with the friction of commute, you're a New York guy. So you know, if you live in the boroughs, it could be anywhere from an hour to hour and a half commute into into Manhattan. And that's three hours a day for someone. And if you can make them more productive by working from home, and then pick and choose when to come in for meetings for quarterly reviews, for planning sessions, etc, that makes more sense to us. So we're a hybrid culture attendance has been quite good this summer, we're seeing Tuesday to Thursdays, 50 to 60% attendance in New York, and other locations may be slightly less, but so our offices are actively used. We've not cut back on real estate, because at least in our major offices, because we see a lot of active usage. But obviously, we're being cautious about how quickly we expand into, you know, either expanding capacity in

SPEAKER_76: our major offices or adding new offices.

SPEAKER_07: Why do you think people are coming back? You think that they miss it? Or do you think the management is saying, Hey, listen, in order to hit these targets, we need to work as a team better. And it's a culture issue, or an accountability issue? What do you think is driving?

SPEAKER_81: I see younger people wanting to be in the office, one, they probably live in smaller apartments and

SPEAKER_00: homes where they may not have the space to work comfortably at home. To if you're a young person, I mean, a lot of people meet their partners at work or work surroundings. So there's an incentive to meet people in New York is a fun city. So people maybe want to go out afterwards, grab a bite to eat or go out for drinks or do something else. So a lot of our younger folks actually want to come to the office, and work from the office, I would say the more the senior folks, they pick and choose the moments when they come in, again, you know, tied to specific meetings, or events or planning sessions that we're having. So I almost joke on site is like the old off site for more senior people. And then obviously, if you haven't, you know, if you're a leader of a team, especially younger people, you need to be on site to mentor, give guidance, assess how things are going. So I I'm we're not so rigid in terms of like, you have to be in the office three, four or five days a week, depending on your role. But we do encourage people to come to the office. And then it's really up to them, the leader of that team, or say the VP of that, you know, department to really determine what the right operating cadence is. But my belief

SPEAKER_01: is if someone works hard at work, they're going to work hard at home, if someone doesn't work hard at work, they're not going to work hard at home. So what we do is to hold our leaders accountable to

SPEAKER_82: make sure they're getting the productivity out of their teams. And that seems to have worked for us.

SPEAKER_07: Yeah, that is I think every manager's nightmare is you look at some of these subreddits where they

SPEAKER_86: have like a subreddit called overworked. And specifically the development community. It's kind of like a joke. Oh, yeah, I got three jobs. It was, I had somebody who said, I have an ethical

SPEAKER_07: question on one of our investments. We have somebody who works at Google, and they want to work for us too. But they said their Google job takes two hours a day. And they can do it off hours. So is it any wants like a, you know, a very modest salary to come work for us full time. And I was

SPEAKER_71: like, that's completely unethical. Like, you can't possibly hire that person. Yes. But the founder was

SPEAKER_87: like, I don't know. I mean, I needed to develop her. It sounds like he's perfect. And I was like, no, you cannot do that. That person is breaking matters. Yes. Yes. And they're breaking every

SPEAKER_89: agreement. And on an ethical moral basis, it's insane. It is insane. And that would not be

SPEAKER_00: tolerated here. Yeah. So and I think, you know, to me, ethics is what people do when no one's looking. And so this person is doing this. I think what what I encourage that person to do is instead of working two hours and getting a job done, go to your boss and saying, What more can I do? Because I'm ambitious, and I want to do more. And if they don't want to give you more than say, maybe I shouldn't be here anymore. So I think that I just will not fly here. Listen, I work with super early

David Friedberg: stage companies at launch, like literally year zero, they haven't even incorporated yet. And then we hit the Series A, people have 1000s of dollars in MRR, and they maybe they've only raised a couple 100,000 before that Series A, and they don't have their insurance set up. And in fact, we recently had a great startup that didn't have D&O. And we had to really stop everything because they were having board meetings, they were making massive decisions, there were legal issues. And they didn't have the basic D&O insurance that protects directors and officers. So we send them right to Embroker. Embroker is business insurance built specifically for startups, a single application will help your startup get four quotes, for four lines of coverage in 15 minutes, think about that four quotes, four lines 15 minutes. And they're going to connect you with one of their expert brokers for unmatched service that goes beyond your policy, we use it at launch, it's easy peasy, lemon squeezy, it's easy breezy. What more do I need to tell you? I use it, I love it. A lot of our startups use it, they love it. Try Embroker today with the code twist, and you'll get 10% off their startup package in broker.com slash twist. That's E M B R O K E R.com slash twist. And use

SPEAKER_55: the code twist for 10% off. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. I just wonder like, I don't

SPEAKER_07: know what your first job was, you know, your first five or 10 years in the industry. But man, it was so formative to be in an office to be around people with 10 2030 years and see, you know, wow, there's a 50 year old CEO over here, here's how they're behaving. Oh, there's the sales team. Here's how they're behaving. This is how the culture works. These are the people who get in early. These are the people who stay late. These are the people who crush it. These are the people who are screwing around. And maybe their careers aren't going the way they want them to I feel like something massive has been lost for young people, especially maybe you could talk a little bit

SPEAKER_99: about I completely agree. Like like you, I learned a lot by observing other people's behavior, what

SPEAKER_00: to do and what not to do. And I think that on the job, education learning is something you just can't get from a book, you can't like watch a YouTube video to learn, you just got to be in and watch how people do and I learned so much. And my whole philosophy on leadership is you're always a student of the game, not a master of the game, because you're always listening and learning. And if you think you're the master, no matter how senior you are, you're going to hit a wall because things are changing so quickly that and for young people, there's no better way to kind of learn than seeing you know, what other people do both do well and not do well. So I completely agree with you. So we try and encourage our younger employees to come to the office more or say they're in a sales role where they're more remote that they get a lot of, you know, inspection of what they're doing and they, you know, and their leaders or their manager will go with them on sales calls to help them get their first couple of deals, you know, assess them how to handle meetings, assess them on how they qualify an opportunity. And same with a young developer, right? Like, you know, really sitting down. And, you know, we expect a lot of our leaders to be coaches, right, in terms of coaching them, whether it's doing code reviews, whether it's, you know, planning, whether it's how they,

SPEAKER_101: you know, think about a design document, so on and so forth. So that on the job learning is so

SPEAKER_07: incredibly valuable, I can agree. How do you think about hiring today, there's generational differences, you and I, I think, are Gen X, you know, and millennials, and, you know, maybe the generation after them, maybe they value work differently, they may not be as driven, there may be, you know, just differences generally, how do you think about hiring and inspiring,

SPEAKER_71: you know, this, these next couple of generations to do their best work, and also cutting people who just

SPEAKER_55: can't get it done, you know, do you have some thoughts on just generally talent management?

SPEAKER_105: Yeah, so, I mean, this is, I mean, a question I think every CEO and every leader has to deal

SPEAKER_00: with, I mean, we obviously try and hire people who are really ambitious, who want to really make an impact, who bring both a high degree of skills and, you know, competence, whether they're a young

SPEAKER_19: person, they have a good academic track record, and you can just tell that they're busting at the scenes to make an impact, and as well as hire senior people who still feel like they're very passionate and are very driven. Clearly, we're not perfect in hiring, and we've mistakes are made. And I think this is back to leadership. I believe any organization is the quality of an organization is directly correlated with quality of leadership. And I also believe that people perform to what you inspect, versus what you expect. So we have a culture where there's a high degree of inspection

SPEAKER_00: of what people are doing, how things going. And even things, you know, one of the things I think young leaders struggle with is how to give feedback, because one of the hardest things that a young leader can do is knowing how to hold people accountable. So for example, we teach people, hey, first, you have to be clear on expectations. And the first time you give someone feedback, you know, you're kind of calibrating on those expectations. You know, Joe, this is what I meant. Here's what I really expect, etc. Now, the next time you give feedback, which is essentially the second time you give feedback, now you're holding someone accountable. And what I find is that most

SPEAKER_108: young managers, one, they're not clear on what the expectations of the role or the project or the initiative is. So that's problem number one. So two, they kind of give some very mealy-mounted feedback that the person kind of says, you know, I expect more here and that. And then what typically

SPEAKER_109: happens is at the end of the year, they give someone a week review and the person's pissed saying like, well, you didn't tell me that this was above. So it's kind of a weird dynamic. So we really get our leaders to try and be much better at being clear on expectations. And then you can give feedback relative to those expectations. In terms of more specific on hiring, one of the things I look for, obviously, it depends on someone who's a little bit more senior is I try and understand, you know, what transitions are made from job to job. If you think about it, one of the most important decisions you can make in life is what company or what job are they going to take, you know, above Beyonce choosing your partner. And so what I'm trying to understand is why did it go from company A to company B, and from company B to company C? Now, I'm expecting every company to be a home run. But I'm trying to really understand their thought process, because what it's telling me is how careful and deliberate are they in making that decision. And if they're very cavalier, or they say, I followed my boss to company B, then I'm saying, how thoughtful are you

SPEAKER_110: going to be about making decisions here at MongoDB? So that's something that's a really great.

SPEAKER_07: Yeah, that's a really astute one. Because, yeah, if you don't take your own career, and make that decision thoughtfully, with, you know, some precision, like what decision are you going to make here, I also love the, hey, we're going to set expectations, but we're going to inspect your work. And I think, you know, trust, but verify is just such an important, you know, operating philosophy, we do this all the time with due diligence, and we'll have people say to us when we're investing in companies, and you were an investor for a little bit, hey, you know, you're, you're putting only, I don't know, 500k into the seed round, you're asking for more diligence than the lead was putting in two million. And I'll say, Okay, you know, we still want to talk to three customers, and we still want to see your IP assignments. And we still have to look at bank statements to make sure that you know, this is all here, because we have LPS, and we want to make sure that if something goes awry, we've at least done. And it's uncomfortable, right? Sometimes it's uncomfortable to inspect somebody's work. But if you're doing it with the right intent, and it's to make them better. The right person should look at it like coaching. Like, this is amazing. Somebody's looking at my work and telling me how to do it better. If you've got a problem with this, you probably don't want to be exceptional in your career.

SPEAKER_115: I couldn't agree more. And, you know, one of the things I think, I heard this quote on a podcast

SPEAKER_23: that a guy by the name of Jeremy Giffon made that who used to be a tiny, which is kind of a holding

SPEAKER_00: company. Yeah, sure. And the comment he made was the only enduring edge in life is psychological

SPEAKER_99: as human nature doesn't change. Things like grit, things like managing your ego, things to be

SPEAKER_109: comfortable with low status, being unconventional, having long term orientation are so critical to success, but so hard to do because it's so contrary to human nature. And to your point, like when someone comes to themselves, you know, I want to, this is a tile I want, I'm not coming. You know, while I understand that you want to be paid fairly for your work, when you get so obsessed by a title, or so obsessed by managing your ego, or so obsessed about status, you know, I start wondering about that person. And, and similarly, when you're talking to a startup, and they almost take umbrage that you want to do rigorous due diligence, I'm like, you guys are going to be, we're going to be partners for the next 10, potentially 10 plus years, you know, don't we want to start the relationship in the right way, you know, and just build a relationship, you need to be incredibly transparent. So it's always to me a

SPEAKER_101: red flag when people behave that way. And I gravitate to people who obviously are more legal and got more low ego and low status. And that's kind of the way I run my life.

SPEAKER_07: Yeah, the ego thing is very interesting to me. I've seen this many times, where people want credit for work they haven't done yet. This is the huge pet peeve I have just as a manager, investor in companies. And just when I was working briefly for other people, twice in my life, this weird group of people who would like to get the title or the compensation for work that they are going to accomplish in the next year or two. And as well, how about you do the work, and then we give you the reward, maybe talk about incentives and how you think about incentives. Because people do seem to be quite entitled these days. And you know, we, we did this to ourselves in the 90s. You know, it and tech, it was just people expected to work 6070 hours a week, you're expected to stay till nine o'clock, you expect to come in on the weekend if you had a project. And then Google started giving people massages and doing their dry cleaning and babying them and being their, you know, surrogate parents. And we coddled people, let's be honest. So how do you think about entitlement and managing that?

SPEAKER_121: You know,

SPEAKER_11: you know, if you saw some of the questions as to get in some of my whole hands, you know, there were

SPEAKER_00: people who felt very entitled. You know, one question I got recently was obviously with inflation spiking up, you know, are we going to increase everyone's salary by X percent to match inflation? And what I explained to them was, I said, I didn't get this question when inflation was essentially zero, that people are saying, well, you know, don't give me a raise, right? So what we do is match the market. Now the market does reflect the cost of living does reflect inflation, you know, you know, into that number, but we're not just going to, you know, increase people's salaries because inflation is high for the last six months. That makes no sense. And some people took umbrage with that. And, you know, what I was trying to explain to them is that, you know, we try and be competitive with the market, but we have an obligation to our investors to be able to manage a business as

SPEAKER_01: efficiently as possible. Now, luckily that percentage of people were small, but those are the kind of questions and quote, unquote, the entitlement, you know, you're referring to. In general, I think if you

SPEAKER_108: explain people the why, they kind of get what you're trying to do. Now, some people may not want to listen to the why, or some people may not like the why. But if you've really done a good job, explain the why for what you're doing and why you're doing it, I mean, and how you're doing it,

SPEAKER_109: then that becomes, you know, a much easier conversation to have. And, and, and, you know, we explained to our employees when we started, we had a, what we call an issue called raising the bar, where we said, Hey, investors expectations are changing. You know, I started seeing the tea least change last summer, I got my executive team essentially aligned around like, we have to change

SPEAKER_00: our, you know, the how we kind of run the business, we have to drive more efficiency. And one of the things we asked was to, you know, have a 5% number of people who did not meet expectations. You thought that I'd asked for someone to give up their firstborn child when I when I did this, right? And, and I,

SPEAKER_126: you know, one out of 20 people, it's just so we're framing it correctly here. Put 20 people rank them who came in 20. Do they need to be here or not? You know, exactly. I mean, exactly. But as you

SPEAKER_130: imagine, there was a lot of uproar. And then I explained to them, I showed them the data. I said,

SPEAKER_01: we have 8% non regretted attrition in the company, typically, every year. So by definition,

SPEAKER_108: we're happy to see 8% of our people leave. But the problem is that we're not more proactive about that. We need to be much more proactive about that. And I'm only asking for 5%. And when people started doing it, then I started getting feedback from VP as well, it was surprisingly easy to do the 5%. I said, what does that tell you? It says that we're not doing as good of a job we should be on

SPEAKER_01: performance management. So these are the muscles that we're trying to build with our leaders in

SPEAKER_00: terms of being much more rigorous. And you're right, you know, in the days when you're competing for talent, and Google and Facebook are throwing money and all these perks, and we're competing for the same people, it's hard sometimes to, to, you know, not feel like you got to bend backwards to acquire these people. But I think the world has changed. And and now we have to get our

SPEAKER_52: leaders to, you know, run the business much more rigorous.

SPEAKER_44: Hey, everybody. Today, I'm joined by Roots CEO Dan Dorfman. Dan, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Jason. Tell everybody here in the audience, what is Roots? And what makes it different than the other real

SPEAKER_136: estate investing platforms? I'm a complete neophyte.

SPEAKER_135: Roots is a REIT with a little twist. Sorry, I had to do it. We are the first real estate portfolio that we know of that builds wealth for both our investors and our residents. And we've created a unique win-win model that creates partners and not tenants. We built this model because I've spent my entire career in real estate investment, 13 years. And what you always hear from people is, hey, location, location, location, but location at the end of the day, doesn't actually pay your bills. And location doesn't let you know when there's a small leak that will create mold in the future. The people do. And the people who rent your properties are really the people who generate your profits. And when those people are your partners, it really creates this amazing scenario. And it's this model that's helped us grow our fund over 36% in the last two years.

SPEAKER_86: Fantastic. How can people learn more about this opportunity, both on the tenant side or on the investor side? Check us out at investwithroots.com backslash twist.

SPEAKER_138: All right, everybody go to investwithroots, no spaces, no dashes.com slash twist to sign up and start investing today.

SPEAKER_07: What they all find, this is universal across all companies. When you cut a couple of people who are weak, uh, and who aren't getting the job done, the people at the top are like, thank you, finally, because I know I'm busting my ass. And I know that that person isn't. And it felt profoundly unfair to me. And the reason why a players leave is because the B players or the C players are, you know, allowed to stick around. I mean, Steph Curry does not want to see somebody who shows up late for the gym, you know, and leaves an hour early, and he's busting his ass and he's the greatest shooter of them, you know, like, you gotta, you gotta be able to keep pace. And inevitably, what we've learned, I think over the last two years with the cuts and the optimization and the austerity is, um, smaller teams, uh, that are optimized this way perform better. It's not a matter of throwing bodies

SPEAKER_136: at things. It's a matter of efficiency in the team chemistry, right?

SPEAKER_141: Yeah, so I remember, um, you know, my seminal first fire, it was a seminal moment for me when I had to fire my first person. And I was like, you know, my hands were shaking, knees shaking, sweating bullets.

SPEAKER_00: And what got me over the hump was realizing if I don't solve this problem, I'm penalizing all the good people to your point who are doing, you know, great work. And, and now when I, you know, when you talk to younger leaders, you know, one of the questions you ask people is like, what do you think people say about you when you're when you leave the room? Do you think, Joe, that you're a great leader, because you're letting you know, that employee get away with coming in late leaving early and not, you know, doing their job? And what do you think the message is being? What do you think the message is being sent to everyone else on the team? So when you start, you know, you know, framing things that way, all of a sudden, you can see the light bulbs popping, saying, Oh, my God. And because people are so nervous about holding people accountable and so nervous about like dealing with issues, you know, you know, that, you know, handling confrontation. And this is one of the other things like, you know, a lot of people talk about the hard skills, you know, how good of a developer are you? How good of a salesperson are you? How good of a marketer are you? But in some ways, those soft skills, which I don't think are really soft, like knowing how to give

SPEAKER_33: and receive feedback, knowing how to deal with, you know, confrontation, knowing how to, you know,

SPEAKER_01: set aspirational goals and try and get people to think about doing things that they don't even themselves think is possible. You know, those are skills that are so critical to building a great business that not many people talk about, but it's so important, and something that we try and focus on

SPEAKER_146: here.

SPEAKER_07: Yeah, I remember the first time I had to fire somebody, and there was everybody was unanimous, this person was just doing a terrible job. And so, you know, you always have to have two or three people in the room. So I got the president of the organization, my friend Carol Martesco, if he hears this, he'll laugh. And, you know, we tell the person I got my knees shaking a little bit under the table. Listen, you know, the assignments haven't been on time. You know, we're letting you go. Here's two weeks severance. We wish you well in your career. Just can't believe you're doing this. I'm the hardest working person here. But my, my president

SPEAKER_87: organization standing behind her. And he just goes, like, this, she can't see his reaction, he just like rubs his eyes. And what's obvious to me, a lot of times the people who actually don't

SPEAKER_07: bring it are completely delusional, they actually don't know, and you're doing them incredible mitzvah, you're doing them the greatest thing in the world, which the HR person who had coached me, Sonny Bates, in New York, she had told me, you know, like, you're doing this person a favor, they're gonna have a soft landing, they're gonna find another job, but they need the feedback in the world, that they're not hitting the notes, and that this is not how you can succeed in your career. And after that, I was like, pretty fine with it. I don't take joy in having to cut somebody, it's a failure of management that you hired them and didn't manage them. But you also can't be a psychologist, you cannot do therapy with people at work or fix whatever happened in their childhood or whatever personal problems they have, to make them hit the notes, that's not your job, you can set expectations, they hit it, they hit it, you can do some professional development. But yeah, I think

SPEAKER_61: sometimes young managers try to do too much to help a person.

SPEAKER_151: So I had a mentor, a guy named Steve Wolski used to be the chairman CEO of a company called PTC,

SPEAKER_19: which was a killer software company in the 90s. In fact, you know, they were growing at over 100%

SPEAKER_99: a year with like 40% operating margins, and was a direct sales organization. So he ended up being my mentor when I was building and running BladeLogic and actually

SPEAKER_00: ended up recruiting him on the board and actually asked him to be chairman. And so he one day, you know, we're talking about someone and he says, Dave, I'm going to show you the meaning of life. And he goes to the whiteboard and draws two circles, two concentric circles. I'm looking at that like a target. I'm like, what's the meaning of life? He goes, he goes, the outside circle is what people think who they are, the inner circle is who they actually are. And what basically the point he was trying to make was that the best leaders are very self aware, they're, they're self aware in terms of how they're coming across, you know, what biases they have, what triggers them in terms of anger or frustration, what makes them happy. But they're also very situationally aware about like how their messages are landing with their teams and their organizations and all that. And I remember this for so long, because when I see a leader failing, invariably, it's because they're so self unaware that they may have good intent. But the way it's coming across is really falling, you know, you know, on deaf ears, or people are just tuning them out, and they're losing their team. And, and some people can react and quickly correct, but a lot of people can't. And it's amazing to me, you know, it's a hallmark of great leaders is how self aware they are. And that's something that I try and pay a lot of attention to. Because when you lose your team, you've lost it as leader. And so many leaders just, just, you know, have no sense of the fact that their team doesn't respect them. And a big reason, one of the big reasons I realized is that bad news travels very slowly up the organization. But good news will find me anywhere I can be on a freaking island in Bali, and they'll call me, you close that sale. Yeah, close that sale. We got that

SPEAKER_108: great engineer that 10X engineer. Right, but bad news will travel very slowly. So I'll give an example. We got a customer situation, the customer says the product doesn't work, we're throwing you out, blah, blah, blah, blah. The account team, the account manager goes, holy shit, tells his boss, the boss tells his boss. And by the time it gets to me, hey, we're having a problem with Acme company,

SPEAKER_00: but we're on top of it. And, and so, as a senior leader, you can very quickly get inoculated from bad news. And then you get flat footed when that Acme company sends you, you know, that they're not renewing, or they're basically throwing you out the door. So whenever I hear bad news, I always assume two things. One is far worse than what people are telling me. And two, that I'm the last to know. And so the joke inside this company is like, when I hear bad news, I'll stop and say,

SPEAKER_01: tell me more and dig and invariably, you find out that there's a lot worse stuff going on. And everyone knows it's like, whenever a bad leader leaves, you always find out there's a lot worse that was going on than you even knew. And so, and so, but, but, but you need to create a culture, but this is where companies run the problems, they don't create a culture where it's okay to share bad news, right? They only want to hear good news or the people shoot the messenger. So everyone said,

SPEAKER_108: what incentive do I have to say, you know, what's going on? But conversely, if you they see that there's a box, you know, that bad news is quickly corrected, then this only, you know, there's a meritocracy

SPEAKER_00: around here, like, you know, there's a bias to action, people are going to respond to issues. So people get more and more comfortable surfacing bad news. And I do this even my board meetings, like, I never start with good news, I'm always talking about what's going bad. And I count and I coach younger CEOs who many of them have a massive imposter syndrome, because I know that because I was there and say, if you tell us experienced board member that everything is going great, they're either going to think a you don't know what you don't know, or be you're lying, right? Because even the best run companies, something's blowing up somewhere, right? So start off bad news. And the more you share bad news, the more trusting your board becomes. And now they're not saying that

SPEAKER_108: now they're saying, Okay, Dave's not hot, you know, this is not hiding anything from me, how can I help Dave solve these problems, it completely changes the dynamic, but it takes,

SPEAKER_01: you know, vulnerability is a skill as a, I would say a strength, not a weakness, but it takes time to

SPEAKER_59: really understand it. Yeah, that I had to create systems for this because it was a blind spot I had,

SPEAKER_07: you know, people would not tell me the bad news, because they didn't want to upset me, which is reasonable, you know, who, you know, shoot the messenger is a term for a reason, like everybody knows that colloquialism. And so what I did was, you know, I had somebody on our team set up a little script that sends any founder, we meet with 30 days, 60 days after we meet with them, hey, it was great meeting with you, you met with this person on the team, we just wanted to check in and see how your business is going. And then if you could rate us on a scale of one to 10, how likely you are to recommend us to another founder, this is the people who we passed on investing in. So if you pass on investing, like, obviously, they're like, you're an idiot, you didn't realize my brilliance. And so we set this thing up. And you know, the fives and the sixes start coming in. These are classic detractors on the MPS score. And yeah, you know what the number one result is, I didn't get enough FaceTime with Jason or Jason didn't understand our business. Like literally, this was, you know, a blind spot where people just felt like I wasn't giving enough attention to the founders. And so we started rewarding that and I said, Listen, this is going to be scary to get this information. What I want you to do is start off the investment team meeting with two or three of the negative reviews, and then how we could have avoided them. It turned out a lot of times we'll email a founder and tell them, hey, we're not investing. And they don't get the email. It's a stupid thing. But emails go into spam or people miss emails. So now we like to get on the phone with them and email them and make sure that they know, hey, we're not investing. It's not a fit for this reason. But we're very impressed. We'd love to said,

SPEAKER_47: you know, this is the things we did like, we'd like to stay in touch. And you know, you can't fix things that are breaking like that unless you have a systematic feedback loop. And that's what I've

SPEAKER_162: tried to do is just institutionalize the bad news and embrace it and start every meeting with it.

SPEAKER_165: I think, you know, for startups, you know, the cycle time for feedback has to be really,

SPEAKER_00: really small, right? Because feedback is essentially what I consider tension is dynamism in the system. It's quite kind of essentially, you know, you can literally make the argument that, you know, being alive is all about kind of needing feedback and for startup like constantly getting feedback on how things going. And in this contrast, like a small startup versus a large bureaucratic organization like the, you know, motor vehicle agency in your state, right? The feedback loops are incredibly long, because people there don't care about what you think, they're just going to do what they're going to do, which is why government is so dysfunctional. And so the more time and space between feedback, the more problems you create. So it's faster, create a system where you can give feedback quickly, and you can act on feedback. And one of the challenges I see is, the biggest time gap is between, you know, seeing a problem and actually acknowledging a problem, right? People, there's so

SPEAKER_34: many people, like whenever you ask people, why did this project blow up? Or why did this customer leave? Or why didn't we know that this engineer wasn't that great, or really, really hard to work with? There were the signs

SPEAKER_00: were there everywhere, but people just didn't act on it, right? And so the more you get people to shorten that

SPEAKER_167: gap between seeing a problem and acting on problem, the more effective and more effective an organization you're going to have.

SPEAKER_07: Yeah. And so when you look at the sort of distraction, that's sort of crept into corporate America. I don't know if you know, Brian Armstrong from Coinbase or watch Tim have to deal with, you know, I'm assuming you slack or some Microsoft Teams or something like that. And then people decide, Oh, I'm going to go in the random channel. And I'm going to talk about, you know, whatever the cause of the moment is, or the social issue of the moment, or the political issue of the moment. How do you think about corporations staying focused on their mission? And do you believe that companies should be engaging? I mean, we've got

SPEAKER_71: tons of examples like this, but light, whatever, but putting those aside, and the woke stuff aside,

SPEAKER_07: just keeping the team focused on what matters, and maybe not the sort of side quests. How do you think

SPEAKER_11: about all that that's going on? Yeah, it's a tricky issue. I will tell you, like, the day after Trump won

SPEAKER_33: in 2016, I'd actually scheduled all hands meeting was just timing was coincidental. And I remember walking in, you know, the all hands meet was in New York, but we're piping in different offices,

SPEAKER_00: and you could hear a pin drop, you can just see everyone's face people. And as you imagine, you know, most of my employees are in cosmopolitan cities, they're highly educated, they're young, so you can imagine what part of the political spectrum they gravitate to. Sure. And they were, you know, there were people crying, like people, and I felt like if I couldn't, if I didn't acknowledge what had happened, I would just, you know, if again, being self aware, you know, no one really listened to what I have to say. So I said, Listen, the learning for me is that I was obviously in a news bubble, I had no, I did not believe Trump could win, I thought there was no chance in hell. But yeah, clearly, I was in my bubble. And what it forces me to realize is, you know, what are things that I'm not listening? What, you know, what are people saying that I'm not hearing? And it's forcing me to say, like, there's a part of this country where I'm just not connected to, and I got to do a better job of being more grounded about what's actually happening. And I just kind of use that as a teaching moment, and people appreciated that and, and all that. But you're right, I mean, you know, we went through George Floyd. You know, obviously, it was a very tragic incident, we went through a bunch of things, I did put up a, I sent out an email after George Floyd,

SPEAKER_99: like, I didn't fully appreciate what had happened. We had a board meeting that week, and I was kind of focused on my board meeting. But then I started seeing the news, I started seeing all the, you know, the riots, and then marches that were going on. And I felt like I had to say something, I just sent out

SPEAKER_00: a note, and actually still on LinkedIn, because people didn't ask me want to put on LinkedIn saying, you know, I just want to acknowledge that there's people who are really struggling with this, and we should be empathetic about what's happening and not just ignore it. So for me, I think saying you cannot talk about politics, you cannot talk about what's happening in the world at work is just not realistic. But I think you have to make sure that it doesn't basically become the thing that everyone talks about everyone forgets about work. So having like people to have an outlet without like it becoming so, you know, like, so destructive to like, you know, the organization is, is the balance we're trying to find and getting people distracted, and people do care, people do care about like, what values do we stand for? People do care about like, what is the kind of company? And one of the things I make clear is like, listen, I don't care who you

SPEAKER_33: look like, you know, where you're from, what God you pray to, or who you love, we want to make this a place where you feel like mom and baby's home, period, full stop, etc. And that's one of our core values. And we want to do everything in our power to do that. But we're not going to like, you know, react to every issue around the world. Because unfortunately, there's a lot of bad stuff that happens. And we just can't, you know, take our, you know, keep getting distracted by world events.

SPEAKER_145: important world event right now is immigration. You're an immigrant. Yes, you grew up in India,

SPEAKER_07: and then other places around the world. And a lot of the great CEOs of our time. A lot of them from India, in fact. And now we've got this weird thing in this country where we want to lock down the borders, we want to stop immigration, h1b visas are now being, you know, used in such a heavy handed way, I think to use a term, you know, you get laid off, you got to be out of the country in 30 days, even if you got a family. It's such a weak spot. It's such a Achilles heel for our country right now, that Canada sees it as an attack vector. And they're giving people these like 10 year golden visas. I was just in the UAE, they give a 10 year golden visa. They said, Hey, listen, if you're h1b, bring your family up here, we'll never kick you out, we'll give you as many years as you need. This is our way to compete with America. Maybe you can

SPEAKER_17: talk a little bit about what America should do in terms of recruiting talent, especially tech

SPEAKER_19: talent, entrepreneurial talent. Yeah, so first of all, I'll tell you, I've lived in Asia, I've lived in Europe, I've lived in Africa, and I've lived here, and I've actually lived in Canada for a little while, for a very short period of time and lived in the US. I still believe firmly that the

SPEAKER_33: US is, is the land of opportunity. It has enabled me to achieve things, there's no way I can achieve what

SPEAKER_52: I achieved in any other country. I'm so grateful for the United States for giving me the opportunities to give me. And I'm so grateful. I mean, I have, you know, being someone of Indian origin, I've dealt with racism and discrimination in other parts of the world. And yes, there's clearly that here,

SPEAKER_34: but I would tell you, I've never felt more accepted in any country like the United States. So I'm incredibly grateful for the opportunities this country has given me. And I'm really sad that our

SPEAKER_00: immigration policy is so dysfunctional. Because what made this country great was to attract people who want to seek opportunity, who want to say, hey, I want to create a better life for my family.

SPEAKER_33: Now, I do agree, you got to do it the right way. You can't just like break laws to come into this country. And my parents did the right way. In fact, my dad went back to graduate school in Cornell, he was in his mid 40s, decided to go back to school because he felt, ironically now that his Indian education would be valued. So you needed to have the pedigree of an American degree. And, you know, they eviscerated their balance sheet, you know, and started over. And I'm really grateful for the, for the what they did and the opportunities they gave, gave me. And I'm sad that our immigration policy is so dysfunctional, because I think, my sense is that Congress is fiddling around with immigration. And you have to place like Canada and other countries are seeing this as an opportunity. And I think people are so obsessed by the political dramas happening at the southern border, they're forgetting that there's so many talented people who are going to either, you know, you know,

SPEAKER_00: start companies or build great things, you know, etc. And, and, and, and, frankly, that's a sec, that's, you know, because they're so obsessed about what's happening at the southern border,

SPEAKER_33: all immigration has kind of come to a complete stop. And it's really sad. It's really, really sad. And so much so, like, we are now starting to build out development teams in other parts

SPEAKER_34: of the world, where we're starting to see great traction in Barcelona, you see a lot of Eastern Europeans moving to Barcelona. Berlin is another place, Dublin, obviously, we've always been there

SPEAKER_00: for a while. Sydney, Australia was we have incredible down there. Yeah. And like, and I worry that over time, you know, a lot of, you know, immigrants will say, America is no longer land of opportunity,

SPEAKER_52: or America, America doesn't want me anymore. So I could go somewhere else. And, and I worry about

SPEAKER_71: what the long term effects of this on the country. It's, it's been so weaponized and views by the political parties. Now, it's so obvious that we can just call these two different

SPEAKER_07: things. There are people who are illegally coming into the country. And then there's talent recruiting. And talent recruiting should be looked at, like, you know, this is a small number of people who are going to pay a massive amount of taxes, create a massive number of jobs, and who will, you know, give a competitive advantage to our country, and let us punch above our way. And then you could have compassionate, you know, the line out the door for people who are non, you know, skilled non technical, and you take in as many as you can. And this is where the point based system in Canada, in Australia, in New Zealand, and countless other countries has been very refined, but these politicians have weaponized it to a point of absurdity. We got 10 million open jobs in this country, we have the lowest unemployment in 50 years. You and I lived through times when I graduated college 92 93, man, nobody could get a job 20 30% unemployment amongst our contemporaries at that time. This is as good as it gets, folks, lowest unemployment in 50 years. Listen, this has been a great hour. Congratulations on your

SPEAKER_71: success. And I'd love to have you back on the program. Again, there's been just such a great,

SPEAKER_55: unexpected, delightful management discussion about a great number of issues and wish you great success

SPEAKER_187: with the AI products as well. Thanks, Jason, great to chat with you. All right, and we will see you all

SPEAKER_07: next time on our all star summer here at this week in startups, man, we're getting we're getting the

SPEAKER_81: greatest leaders. Can I make one comment? So we do have, we do have for those startups who want,

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SPEAKER_71: mongodb.com slash twist. I love that. That's amazing. And yeah, it's got that great history of growing with startups. And so it's great that you're given all those free credits, everybody go

SPEAKER_55: and get those free credits. Now they last and we'll see you all next time on this week in startups. Bye bye, everybody.