How to set up people operations for web3 founders | Jeanne Tsan

Transcript

[Music] thank you I'm so excited to be with you here today to talk about how to set up your people operations because if you do so early on you actually will save yourself a lot of Heartache time and energy so for the past 18 years I've been building people operations from scratch for companies like Airbnb and wework and for the past three years I've been in crypto working on cello the layer 1 protocol and as Jeff mentioned I'm currently a partner at a16z crypto Leading the People practice I'm Jeannie and I love working with Founders like yourself and hopefully

today I can share some of my learnings and experiences that can really set you up for success so every single time I've joined a company and have had to set up the people practices from scratch I tend to think of my words similarly like building a house you want to start with the planning and the design phase before you can actually jump in to start to build the foundation I encourage Founders to think a lot about what you want to actually build and get clear on the type of culture and Company you want to build for your employees so what is people operation well it can actually involve a lot of different

things so today we're actually going to focus on three main areas creating your blueprint Free People operations designing your culture and building the foundation of your people programs at the end we'll have some time for Q a as well so let's start with our blueprint before building anything you want to create a blueprint so that you can have a rough sketch to capture the basic layout and dimensions this will actually allow you to think about the scale and scope of the people operations that you actually need to build and determine what decisions that you actually want to make now that will save you time and energy later so one of those first decisions that you'll have to make is around your

talent strategy think about your business goals for the next 12 to 24 months what are the skills and the qualities that you need if you actually need to hire technical Talent how much experience is actually needed the more senior the talent the more autonomous that they'll be able to operate but just know they will actually be more expensive as well if you hire people with less experience they might be easier to recruit for and if you're looking for a technical Talent with less experience I recommend that you partner with a coding boot camp this is a great way to really find passionate and motivated folks who are wanting to get into crypto but remember that you will need to take

the time and energy to teach and Mentor them along the way and once you've identified all of the roles that you want to hire for I recommend that you create a hiring plan and some of my colleagues median Craig will talk a little bit about that later on in the program another consideration regarding your talent strategy is where your people will be located if you will have a remote team that is fully distributed time zones will make a big impact so that will factor into how people work together as a team many crypto companies are fully distributed as it widens your talent pool and it also encourages decentralized ways of working [Music]

but remember that with no in-person interaction you're going to have to make a greater effort to create that connection generally you should get together at least twice a year and if your budget allows getting together as often as quarterly will help you build trust and understanding and how to work best with each other lastly lock in your budget for the next 12 to 24 months this will allow you to get to the next round of fundraising and hopefully will keep you focused and on track in your budget you should include salaries for all of your critical hires that you need to get to the next business milestone in addition create a cap table with your equity and token allocation if that's what you'll be giving as well generally

you would allocate between 10 to 20 percent of your equity for employees and remember to not only include new higher grants but any refresh grants that you want to give along the way as well as promotional grants for your employees and lastly include costs for benefits in any employee related expenses I generally like to earmark about 30 percent of your budget to cover these costs and with any building project there actually may be some hidden costs along the way so try to build in a buffer if you can ensuring that you have a blueprint will actually save you time and energy because it will actually allow you to visualize the company that you're trying

to build and identify any potential problems that you'll come across along the way and it will ensure that you anticipate any costs that's associated with building your team so now that you have your blueprint we'll start to design your culture the design phase is creating the vision for your company and when it comes to people operations it's actually all about the culture culture can be a competitive Advantage when you're trying to attract and retain top talent and while culture is something that is hard to define universally Ben Horowitz actually once said if you're not intentional with your culture two-thirds of it will be accidental and the rest will be a mistake and given that ninety percent of startups fail I hope to share with you

some ways that you can be intentional with your culture so that you can build a strong team to help you drive your business success so the first step is really just to sit down and articulate your culture for yourself when you sit down you actually forced to articulate it in a clear and concise way this process can help you gain a deeper understanding of your company values and what they actually mean to you writing down your values can help you identify any inconsistencies or contradictions in your actual thinking you ensure that your actions are aligned with your values as well having your values articulated can help you hold yourself accountable to your behaviors and make choices that are

consistent with those values and ultimately is a tool for you and your team to reference especially in times of stress when facing difficult decisions when you're done articulating your values there actually isn't one right way to share your values some companies have a deck like Netflix some companies integrated into their handbook like buffer and some posts a Blog online like coinbase do whatever feels right for you and your team but remember that writing it down doesn't end there your values should be brought to life through your behaviors and decisions that you actually make every day as your team grows you will have folks who may actually interpret your values differently thus demonstrating how your

values actually show up in your day-to-day work will be critical when you start to scale your team as you sit here and think do you have one or two values that you already identified for your company and if so how do you demonstrate those values today and how do they affect your decisions that you're making now next establish remission and vision this will provide a clear Direction and purpose to help your team understand what you're trying to achieve and give meaning to their work as you continue to grow having a mission and vision will also keep your team focused on what is most important as it will provide a lens through which they can evaluate different options and make decisions that support your company's

goals so once you've articulated your culture and have established your mission and vision you can actually start to use that to build your company identity when candidates can understand what it is like to work for you it will help you attract and retain the right Talent employees will likely be more motivated and committed to their work if they share in your vision and purpose and thus leading to Stronger Employee Engagement when I joined Airbnb in 2011 we actually did not have our values articulated and we were quickly expanding and growing into over 17 offices worldwide across Europe latim and APAC

but our Founders knew that actually it was time to set our values so that we could start to build it into our people operations once we lock down our six core values which were be a host Be A Serial entrepreneur Champion the mission and raise the adventure simplify in every frame matters we actually embedded them everywhere in our recruiting process we created core values interviewers in our onboarding program we ensure that our managers and our people team welcomed all new hires as the ultimate host and in a performance review process we really encourage behaviors that brought our values to life

five years later we actually grown to over three thousand employees and our culture had actually shifted in an effort to re-evaluate our values we actually decided to Sunset two of the values simplify and every frame matters because we actually felt there were too aspirational and didn't help in building the culture that we wanted so as you sit down and think about the culture that you want to design remember that it's not just what you say but it's actually what you do that actually makes up your culture once you've created your culture docking values you'll want to bring it to life doing so will actually help support a positive workplace and culture because that will have a significant impact on your employee engagement

productivity and performance a great way to reinforce a culture and values to actually use your communication tools slack Discord Zoom Google Hangout are all great tools to help you communicate effectively day to day however how you behave and how you can use those tools will actually help Define your culture and values at sallow connectedness was one of our core values we ensure that using slack we have social channels like social pets where you can you know post pictures of your your your animals which was really really popular one of my favorite channels was our praise Channel where anywhere in the com

anyone in the company could actually hop in and give kudos to anyone else on the team when I saw leaders and founders of cello jumping in it was great to see them lead by example and really reinforce the importance of connectedness in our day-to-day another way that we value connectedness at cello was actually through our team meetings when I joined cello in 2020 during the pandemic I had interviewed onboarded completely remotely and never met anyone in person in our team meetings we actually had an opening question every single time which really helped make a difference for me sometimes the questions were really silly like if you were part of a sandwich what part would you be and why

or it could be sharing your favorite place that you've traveled in the past when I started to meet some of my team members a year later I really actually felt close and connected to them already and I think having these opening prompts in the beginning of our team meetings made a big difference Daisy and Kristen are actually going to be talking tomorrow a little bit more about remote culture so stay tuned for for that session but whatever tools that you use if you are thoughtful in how you utilize them it would actually it will actually play a great role in shaping your company culture one of my favorite ways to build your culture is actually to find some ways to create rituals within your team

rituals are a great way to reinforce your values provide opportunities for celebration encourage participation from everyone on the team at Airbnb we had actually a lot of rituals in the early days we had mustache Mondays tea time Tuesdays formal Fridays and we when we started to hire globally we'd actually would do that all together it was really really fun another way to build rituals is actually through your team meetings even though you may be small having team meetings is actually a great way to give everyone context for company decisions and provide updates on what everyone is working on this is also a great opportunity to actually build trust and encourage

feedback and productive discourse when you start to become a larger team you will find that you will spend a lot of time on internal communication thus building the foundation on how you communicate decisions is share information now well we'll ensure that everyone stays in sync so that they can focus on building the company lastly ensure that you're setting up your operating model by communicating that with everyone on your team when Claire Hughes joined stripe she created an open document on her operating approach which explained to her team how best to work with her you can actually go online and see how she framed it and everything

as Founders the way that you work will have a tremendous impact on how the rest of your team works with you and with others that's building your self-awareness early on and sharing that with your team as well as encouraging everyone to share it with each other we'll help you increase your culture resilience when challenges arise and the business and teams evolve do you know what your strengths and your weaknesses are if you don't a quick way is reach out to five people that you worked with with in the past and ask them what your strengths and weaknesses are and see if their answers are similar there are also a lot of tests that you can take online like strengths finders and insights Etc if you already know what your strengths

are have you ever considered that your strengths can be overused take Focus for instance great for achieving your goals but when you're hyper focused you can actually neglect other parts of your life like relationships and self-care which isn't really great overall these are just some ways for you to start to build your self-awareness and connect it to how it affects your work and others around you so the last part we'll focus on today is building the foundational pupil programs now that you have your blueprint for your people operations and a sense of your culture and values you now have the elements to lay the foundation of your house

as Founders you all know this you have a lot on your plate and you have a lot of things to do every day so here are five common people programs that will actually help save you time and energy if you set them up now some of these will be quicker for you to set up others may have multiple conversations I'm actually around all week so if you want to set up office hours I'm happy to be a thought partner and help you think through some of these areas as well so to start even if you're less than 10 employees it is important to establish a compensation framework as it will help you avoid any future pain points of inequity in the future foreign to begin determine your pay strategy by

incorporating your talent strategy one of the key decisions that you'll have to make is will you adjust compensation based on an employee's location if you're unsure and you have budget constraints this is actually pretty common and actually can save on labor costs however if you do want to be location agnostics because you have a distributed team know that most companies use the highest cost of labor market or their HQ to set the compensation ranges this can actually give you a Competitive Edge but this approach will actually be very costly as your company continues to grow so make sure you understand your cash and Equity ramifications I've actually seen this compensation

strategy come at a cost where we went from a bull to a bear Market some companies had to make the really hard decisions to do layoffs given the impact that it had on your cash and Runway next try to use Market data for benchmarking this will give you insight into the salaries that other companies are offering some common tools that we see early stage startups use are pave and Carta when filtering the data try to use total Capital raise versus valuation because this will actually align with your affordability of talent based on your budget and while it's very common to pay at 50 of the market given how competitive the talent Market is we've actually seen

some companies pay at 75th and even 90th percentile of the market in order to attract and retain the top talent however if you can't pay that much given your you know cash constrained this is where giving a bigger Equity package can be an attractive solution for your candidates next establish salary ranges if you plan a recruiting in the U.S be aware that recently some states such as California New York Washington have recently started to implement paid transparency laws where you're actually required to include salary ranges in your job postings and given that this is actually a really hot current Trend I wouldn't be surprised if this becomes more of a

normal practice everywhere in the world thus I recommend that you get ahead of the curve and actually create your salary ranges now even if it's not required and then lastly once you've gone through the exercise of using the market data and setting your pace strategy your salary ranges write up your compensation philosophy based on the decisions that you have made to you as a guideline moving forward you can include your total compensation which should include your base equity and token if applicable and also tie in the upside of the equity with your mission and your vision so that candidates can fully understand the opportunity and reward in joining your team

you can do this by highlighting key Milestones of the company needs to hit along the way and draw a direct correlation to how the candidate can actually add value if you discuss future valuation range potential anchor it back to the vision this is also a great opportunity to highlight your culture and values so that they can weave it all together when they're looking at your offer that you're giving them now they have hired folks and have determined how much you want to pay it is important to ensure that you're supporting your employees well-being setting up benefits for a small team can be challenging especially in the US so I would consider partnering with a professional employer organization also

known as a peo that provides HRS services such as payroll and benefits Administration to small businesses companies like deal or Rippling can actually help simplify the process of setting up the benefits as well as handle the administrative tasks on your behalf I would focus at looking at vendors who have really good customer service or account management models as this will make a difference when you have any benefit issues having someone to call or contact to help resolve an issue will actually make the world difference when you have a million other things to do that day and having a good peo will actually ensure you stay up to date with any employment laws and regulations that could actually change pretty frequently

especially if you have team members in multiple countries next identify the costs an employee needs in the U.S most common benefit offerings include medical dental and vision on average health care costs equal to about 11 of your company payroll when considering what type of benefits to offer it is important to not only look at your current employees but the benefit needs of your future hires as well when candidates are valuing offers if they have any dependents family benefit coverage will be a key consideration I once had a company set up their benefits and since no one on their team had any dependents family coverage was actually overlooked but as they were

recruiting for their open roles their top candidate ask about family coverage and unfortunately the company didn't have anything to share the founders had to scramble around a bit and they ultimately were able to find a solution and luckily they still ended up hiring that individual lastly building flexibility in your benefits so that you can stay competitive especially when you don't have the same Financial Resources as larger organizations some ideas I've seen smaller companies be more flexible is provide cash stipends for things like work from home phone and internet and time off also try to look for ways that actually doesn't cost you much but aligns with their culture

flexible working Arrangements whether that is work from home or having the ability to adjust the working hours are considered very valuable by a lot of employees today as an extension of your benefits some of them will actually require you to establish clear expectations and guidance to provide consistency and fairness does having a small collection of policies will be helpful and when appropriate you can actually formalize them into a handbook when starting to create your policies it is important to integrate your company's culture and values to support your company's Vision emission this is actually another way to clearly communicate what behaviors are actually encouraged and what or not next identify and create the policies

that you actually need the most common policies are code of conduct and anti-harassment immigration sponsorship parental leave and paid time off having a code of conduct an anti-harassment policy and process will actually help you swiftly deal with any behaviors that violate respect inclusion and integrity and diversity if you are hiring folks that actually need sponsorship you will probably want a policy around that to be fair and consistent being open to sponsoring visas will actually help increase your diversity and competitiveness and even if you're small having a parental leave policy can help candidates and employees know that they are going to be supported during one of

the most important times of their lives when their family is growing and lastly decide on how you want to structure your paid time law some things to consider are will you have accrual or will you have unlimited is it all going to be paid or will you actually allow some unpaid time off as well according to sequoia's benchmarking report 65 percent of companies actually offer a flexible PTO policy but some things just to know if you have a flexible PTO policy that doesn't mean employees can take as much time as they want but no consideration for business and team needs so when you're writing your policy it

should be you are clear and and right right about making sure that there's some oversight and there are some approvals where so that you can deny PTO if needed to ensure that your team is able to still deliver on your deadlines and reach your team goals and lastly to actually minimize risk to your company regularly review your policies at handbook and update it to ensure compliance legal requirements could actually change pretty often and you always want to ensure that you're incorporating the best practices so now that you have your key policies and best practices in place when you start to welcome your new team members you now have the core components of a

great onboarding program does anyone remember the first day of work what questions did you have how did you feel how did others actually make you feel starting a new job can be very overwhelming and a good onboarding program can alleviate some of this by ensuring that they have the support and resources that they need to succeed as most folks in crypto on board remotely ensure that you have Logistics that work nothing can be more deflating than getting really excited about a new hire and welcoming them but only to have them sitting there and not able to do any work or connect with anyone else in addition it is important that your

new team member has all the required paperwork they've signed up for payroll and benefits and have all the relevant meanings in their calendar on the very first day creating this streamlined process and checklist and owners for each step creates an onboarding experience that reinforces your culture and values and nowadays there's actually a lot of checklists online that you can find there's an HR company that focuses on internal communication called pin p-y-n they have a great checklist that you that can help you think through the many many steps that that you have to do when you're welcoming a new team member because you want to make a great first impression Now setting clear expectations and goals

with a 30-60-90 plan could actually help reduce anxiety and stress the first 90 days is actually important to create many opportunities for new hires to meet and build relationships with other team members this can help new hires feel connected to their company and facilitates collaboration and teamwork with the written plan new hires can actually share where they want to contribute work and this will allow others to also integrate them into their current workflow as well and lastly a great onboarding program ensures that you're creating a feeling of belonging as Founders this is actually a great way for you to spend time with your new hires to share your company vision and Mission

here at a16z Ben Horowitz actually still meets monthly with every single new hired cohort to talk about the values and share stories when I joined it was actually really helpful for me to understand why these values really mattered and how I would actually see them reflected in my day-to-day if you were meeting with a new hired today how would you welcome them what would you want to say to them and how would you want to make them feel so now that you've hired your team you've onboarded them and things are humming along this is actually the perfect time for you to build a feedback framework to encourage strong communication collaboration and productivity

oftentimes Founders come to me asking to help them build a performance review process and a lot of times this is correlated to someone on their team hitting their one-year work anniversary however the first step to Performance Management isn't about creating a performance review process it's ensuring that you have a feedback dialogue already between you and your team members building the feedback framework starts with having regular 101s so that you can set clear expectations and feedback at every stage of the employment life cycle when you have a small team it may be easier to keep things flexible so you don't have dedicated time for your one-on-ones well within while this

fluidity can help move things along quicker it actually is a missed opportunity to establish a strong working relationship with each team member having dedicated time will ensure that you not only talk about operational topics but that you can discuss the individual growth and development as well and performance reviews actually don't have to happen once or twice a year you can start to have these conversations as you set goals and track progress along the way these are all moments to provide feedback and enhance accountability Studies have shown that having one-on-ones actually increases Employee Engagement and job satisfaction next create documentation

when you have a one-to-one dock with the notes of topics discussed and decisions made this will help clarify expectations and facilitates any follow-ups needed after the meeting this will be a great resource for you to refer back to as well when you start to have performance reviews or need to prepare for any feedback conversations as this will provide a record of what was discussed in the past do you currently have any feedback you want to share with anyone if you do have you decided when you're going to be able to share that feedback in a natural way in the context of work and lastly feedback actually doesn't only have to happen in a one-on-one setting but it could be done as a team as well

after Action reviews at the end of a project allows you an opportunity to give team members to reflect on another work identify areas for improvement celebrate successes and enhances communication between team members and establishing a consistent process for conducting these review will help you build a culture of feedback that will help everyone learn and grow all right so you now have built a strong foundation for your house however with any building you'll need to make fixes and repairs along the way in the 18 years that I've been doing this there are a few common challenges that I have encountered over and over again and I hope to share them with you and help you troubleshoot them if they

occur the first one is on compensation so even though you've been very thoughtful and created a compensation philosophy and paste strategy your team has grown significantly and you now have found that there's inequities in compensation this may have happened because you had to hire quickly or you had one person negotiate more than the other or you had a candidate with a competing offer and the only way to close them was to offer more money all of these situations are very common when you're trying to compete for top talent this reminds me of an early stage company that I was helping with where the founder came to me asked me to help them fix the inequities and compensation

all their direct reports were heads up heads of marketing heads of engineering heads of Finance so to troubleshoot the first question I asked is do you have a leveling framework turns out they didn't and when I looked at the backgrounds of each individual you had some people who had five years experience you had some people with 20 years of experience and what I found is that actually titles don't always align with the same level and thus to ensure that you're comparing similar roles with similar criteria I would actually recommend that you create a light leveling framework to create consistency having the simple leveling framework allows you to group similar roles and experiences and match them with the correct compensation bands

a secondary the founders often come to me is discuss issues around performance you may have an individual that isn't meeting your expectations or they seem to have low productivity or lack of communication I remember in my second year at wework I had a manager come to me wanting to put a team member on a performance Improvement plan to troubleshoot my first question I always ask is Have you communicated this feedback to the individual and do you think the individual is aware that they're actually not meeting your performance expectations then I would ensure that you have regular check-ins and create documentation turns out the individual was actually

going through something really personal they're going their divorce and they had like Child Care issues that they were trying to juggle as well and having the manager and the employee talk about what was going on allow the manager to help support the individual by giving them flexible working hours and a month later the performance actually improved the last area that I find that a lot of Founders come to talk to me about is around retention there's an early stage company that I was helping out who had 25 employees when they started they actually hired 20 people in the last year and when I joined they actually only had 28 people so that meant they had at 80 percent turnover

when I start to dig into the details of the folks who left and looked at their exit interview there are many comments around not knowing what was expected or feelings of not belonging so when I started started to troubleshoot I asked the team what does your onboarding process look like it turns out they didn't have a consistent onboarding program as they just left it up to each manager on the team and given that the team is fully remote not having a formal onboarding program was a missed opportunity to really help integrate these individuals into their team when you're small everyone should play a role on your team to help onboard your new team members as this will help ensure that they feel connected to not just the work but to the entire company

so in summary going back to our house analogy today we created the blueprint with your talent strategy we design your culture and values by being intentional and articulating them and lastly we went through some key foundational people programs that actually can help save you time and energy later on hopefully this can help you go from zero to one a little bit more effectively thank you so much for having me here today anyone has any questions I can actually start so in the form we got a question about creating benefit packages if you're a global company how do you do that without spending a ton of time and potentially cost on it as well yeah

that's a really great question so using a vendor like a peo that I mentioned like deal or Rippling that could actually bring in the experts so that you don't have to understand all the benefit requirements for every single company not sure who answered who asked the question but just bring in the experts and and that will help streamline the process for you hi thank you so much for everything um is there um like best practices reference for like everything that you just went over um in terms of like books or resources or anything else that we can reference on ongoing basis that's my question number on question number two that I've wandered my entire life I don't want to waste time and be too philosophical but what is the difference between Mission

and a vision yeah so um so let me ask the first question so we will provide this deck so you have some of the stuff that I talked about and also I'm happy to share more during office hours as well if you have like specific tools or things around because people operations could be so many different things I'm always here as a resource to kind of you know um put you in the right direction okay great yeah and then so mission and vision so mission is something that you're going it's it's a it's a it's a statement telling your employees um what you're doing and your vision is kind of like your long-term fifth year where you ultimately want to be and that

so that's from a Time Zone from a timeline perspective that's how you differentiate your mission as well as your vision so admissions like what you want to do you eventually get there and your vision is like you know ending world hunger which is like the vision but your mission to end world hunger could be to create a technology that will you know operationalize our food system or something like that so your mission is something that you're doing to get there and your vision is like ultimately like way bigger than just your your company right got it thank you um so I think being a good people manager is an incredibly difficult job especially as team size scales

how do you see kind of the correct balance between being a Founder which kind of has a lot of stuff that goes into it in addition to being a good people manager and would you say it's better to spend time on things like policy that scale across the org or things like one-on-ones with everybody on the team really interesting question I see them as the same I mean ultimately as a Founder you are the leader and as I mentioned like everything that you do will set the culture so spending one-on-one time with an individual is actually still being a leader to everyone in the company as well so you kind of have to do both I would have to say in my opinion excess thank you um so I just wanted to

get a sense of of the companies you worked at at what what were the kind of like break points where the culture broke um starting from like just Founders and like what were some of those like Milestones when everything was broken everyone's unhappy and also as a follow-up like how have you seen that be the same or different in remote or distributed companies yeah so I would say that there isn't one universal like thing like it's not like one universal size or Universal like you know thing that actually breaks because it's all about complexity and how much work that you're putting in in the

beginning so I've seen companies who are 25 employees where I felt the culture broke completely and I've seen companies scaled to in the hundreds and were fine and didn't break until they hit the Thousand Mark and I think the difference is all about how much effort the founders and the team members really spent on things like people operations because if you don't actually spend time building trusts and relationships you're not going to be able to communicate effectively or understand diversity of thoughts Etc so it's hard to say like exactly this is like when it breaks or it's more about what you should do and

what you shouldn't do at whatever size and scale that your company is at hey thanks um I'd love a candid thought about what things should we realistically cut corners on at this stage like you mentioned the Airbnb like defining the values example I believe at some point that's extremely important yeah uh but that also sounds like Airbnb was quite large opening 17 offices before doing that like should they have done it from the very beginning do you think it's actually a good more time to like really Define that or kind of Discover it more organically and then at some point it becomes urgent and you make

yeah that's a great question so Airbnb was actually less than 100 when I started and that's when we started to formalize our values and it was really critical at that time because we were going to double and double and double like every single quarter and so we needed to lay the foundation of our values to help people understand if you're sitting in India or you know France or Germany so that was really important to them now I think that you have a lot going on and if you're gonna if you're gonna start hiring like like doubling in size that's when you should really write down and articulate your culture and values because as I mentioned before it's fine if you don't do it now but your culture

will become accidental if you're not intentional with it and if that's okay with you like just know that like when you do have an opinion and one articulate your culture later it's gonna take a little bit of more effort for you and the rest of the team to kind of get everyone on the same page thanks you're welcome air fan actually wearing my data faculty t-shirt I love it yeah so my question really uh so Airbnb is known to have one of the best cultures in the valley so I really respect that a lot I think my I have two questions for you but the first one is what ritual did you find was your favorite that you felt like built the

most trust and really encouraged constructive discourse even from the shyest of the group um I've that's a really good question I've had so many different rituals that I loved name the top three yeah I would say especially when you have different cultures like doing something like you know at Airbnb we didn't formally dress up so doing like formal Fridays was really fun because you could be formal in any country right and it was really interesting to see and having that local lens how people would dress up formally and we share videos and

really saw people in a different way in a different light other than just like getting in a meeting and talking about work I think doing things where you can have something shared in common like that really was nice and fun um on top of everything else that you have to do every single day um I mean I think I shared some of my best ones my favorite ones like the praise channel that we did at solo like you know I think being remote and not meeting anyone in person it's nice to sometimes see that someone had a shout out for you and you didn't have to do something really really big it was just something small and and you know seeing

that the founders would actually do that as well really helped instill how important connectedness was for our team yeah that makes sense uh second question is more around budget so yeah Airbnb was very much heavier I like socks t-shirts stickers everything so what or how much would you say is a reasonable cap on on Marina early asking for a friend um I think identity is really important so enough where the team feels connected and can share an identity but you know you really want to be thoughtful with your swag because you don't want to be adding to the pollution in the world as well

um so you really don't need to spend a lot of money you know you can get creative but but having a sense of bringing bringing everyone together whether that is a mug or a t-shirt really helps people feel like they belong to a tribe so I don't think you have to go above and beyond like maybe like we did at Airbnb but having something shared is really nice actually at cello we were kind of anti-swag because we didn't want to add to the pollution in the world um and so we actually would share a story about

um you know the the beginning of money and they've had these like shells that didn't really cost anything and it's super small but it really helped us feel connected to everyone and to our mission as well cool thank you hi Judy hi experience working with Founders what's like the worst misconceptions or mistakes you've seen when it comes to management like what do you know Founders believe about people management that's just wrong I know I would ask you guys what do you believe as people management um I know I've been I feel like I've been really lucky maybe whenever I talk to Founders a lot of Founders are really

self-aware or maybe sorry there may not start as being self-aware but they're curious and they're really smart and they realize that you know there are a lot of things that they don't need to know so they'll read books they'll read blogs they'll talk to other people even if they're not good people managers themselves I find that having that curiosity is really important but maybe maybe a misconception is that you don't need to spend time on people and that it will just eventually happen if you're like working with someone else um I guess another way to think of it would be sometimes when I see Communications between team members there's not enough

thought or enough intention and making sure that you communicate the why behind decisions because all of us are actually really different even if some of us may seem similar we're actually really really different and what are your actual core values deep down and how you make decisions and so a lot of times when I see issues it's often not enough communication or taking the time to build a relationship and Trust right and follow-up question uh what book or blog would you recommend there's so many um on which topic on I guess people

management oh I'm for startups I guess in crypto specifically yeah well I honestly and I really do believe this then Horowitz wrote a couple of books on culture which I think is actually in the library if you haven't read it and I recently read his new one what you do is who you are he does a really great job to talking about how culture is not just what you say but really what you do and he weaves in really great stories like the Samurai and Etc and why you know building culture is really effectively how you show up um I think that's a really great book yeah thanks for all the great advice

um I had a question when hiring people who maybe have you know haven't worked at uh like you know at a startup before there's kind of like a different pace of work and decision making that takes place like how do you get them to kind of like operate at I guess at the same speed and also like be comfortable in that environment because it might be just like a lot faster and different than like you know what what they've done in like a traditional job yeah yeah definitely I think you know you can you can never underestimate being intentional on like why you do something so how are you communicating with folks like even how are you structuring your one-on-ones how are you inviting them or having um discourse on slack or whatever

communication tools that you use I think that you know taking a deeper look and like how do you operate you know I think Claire uh he's talks about how she operates but you know taking a look at your day-to-day like are you a morning person um that's do you have meetings uh in the mornings only but you have team members another different time zones so just having that self-awareness really starts with Founders and then also asking those individuals well how do they do the same things that you do how do they like to create presentations or have meetings what are their preferences and that way you can actually start to see what are the similarities and what the difference

is and then have a discussion on what you effectively can do together to build that onboarding to be a little bit more useful awesome thank you so much Genie that was fantastic [Applause] [Music]