#14: How Typeform revisited their people-first ethos ✍️
Navigating a critical cultural shift at Typeform, bringing much-needed wonder and freshness to routine pitches, and learning to leverage the scarce resource of founder-time.
Hi there,
Welcome to the fourteenth edition of The Baton. A fortnightly newsletter that brings you three, hand-curated pieces of advice drawn from the thoughtful founder-to-founder exchanges and interviews taking place on Relay and the interwebz. So, stay tuned!
In this edition, you’ll find instructive and inspiring pickings from the brains of Typeform’s (and VideoAsk’s) David Okuniev, LatelyAI’s Kate Bradley Chernis, and Pilot’s Waseem Daher.
#1. David Okuniev, co-founder of Typeform and VideoAsk, on a difficult cultural change that Typeform underwent and the critical merging of “heart” and “brain" they needed to scale. (Source: SaaS Club)
I don’t think it happens to that many startups, we were just on a tear, basically. I mean, we had created a really great atmosphere in the office, it was a very open culture, a lot of freedom, just a lot of motivations. It’s the early days, you know, just a small group of people like really killing it! So yeah, the first three years was just yeah, were very, very smooth sailing. But, you know, like for all things to reach new plateaus of growth, you have to get a bit more serious with the business.
And I think this especially kind of like, hit home in the last year and a half or two, where, you know, we built, like I mentioned, built a very kind of, let’s say, people-first culture, which meant that, you know, we didn’t put a lot of boundaries around around people. So there was a lot of freedom, a lot of goodwill, but, you know, you can do that when you’re 30 or so people in the company. When you start crossing 150 people it becomes a bit more complex.
And actually, I think we reached a point in the company’s size where there was a serious, you know, a significant lack of accountability. And we were seeing like, issues with, you know, speed of execution, so forth. And I think that was because we didn’t operationalize things well enough. Because we felt, you know, everything was fine, we were just growing, growing, growing. And you know, we didn’t need to worry about those things enough.
But obviously, like I say, when you start getting further down the line, you have to start really, let’s say, maturing a little bit as a company and putting some processes in putting some structure and a bit of hierarchy. Otherwise, what you have is just many people looking in different directions. And you know, it’s a hard journey. It’s a lot of ups and downs.
#2. Kate Bradley Chernis, co-founder and CEO of LatelyAI, shares her public-radio inspired, profoundly unique process to reclaim (and hone) the lost art of pitching. (Source: Jill Soley's blog)
I definitely think of pitching as a form of marketing. Naturally, there’s even different messaging because it’s a different audience, investors versus customers. One of the key things, though again, is to put that human touch, that accessibility, front and center. Naturally, I fall back to radio for lessons learned…
For example, the weather comes over the wire and it’s all scientific, talking about cumulus clouds and a 37.4% chance of rain — you would never read that. The human way is: “Grab an umbrella on your way out the door just in case, there’s a small chance of rain.” By the way, this is a trick I’ve also taught my sales team, how important it is to mold their scripts to their own voices, to their own vernacular.
Which is exactly how I write my pitches — including all of my slang words, speaking the way I normally speak. And then I learn it… I don’t memoize it. I put 20 pennies in a jar and have another, empty jar next to me and I do the pitch 20 times a day, moving the pennies from one jar to another, so that before the actual pitch, I’ve literally done it a couple of hundred times. I make sure to power through all the mistakes so I also learn how to get out of each one of them. This way, it all becomes instinctive.
The other thing that works for me, because of radio, is that I learn aurally — meaning that I hear the frequency and the cadence of the words, like a song. So when I practice, I say the same phrases the same way, with the same rhythm, in the same tone, in the same pitch, each time. Because when I write, I’m always hearing the writing in my mind. Sound and writing go hand-in-hand to me. And I think that’s essential to communicating, naturally, to zero in on that human element.
I also choreograph the pitch, slightly, so that I always stand on the same side of the screen — even if that means not using the lectern provided. That also means extending my hand out in certain places or pointing at certain components of the slides the same way, every time.
Consistency comes into play as well. Because by the time I’m done with a series of pitch events, my entire team pretty much knows the pitch by heart as well. As a company, we can be one voice.
#3. Waseem Daher, co-founder and CEO of Pilot, lays out a comfortingly objective assessment of “founder-time” and lists how he has learned to deploy this scarce resource across stages. (Source: Relay)
Founder-time is my scarcest resource—how can I maximally leverage it?
If we’re in the early days of being bootstrapped, I will just necessarily do a lot myself (because you have to). In that way, I’m converting founder time into $ saved, which is a high-leverage activity at this point in the company’s life.
If we’ve raised some money, the highest-leverage thing I can do is help the business grow. So if I can thoughtfully deploy dollars to buy time (especially in places where hiring the expert will do it in a higher-quality way anyway), I’ll do that
If we’ve started to achieve scale, the highest-leverage place for me to use my time is to help the organization work on the right things, move faster, etc. To do that, that generally means that I can’t do the thing—I have to help build the machine capable of doing the thing, and then I spend my time trying to adjust the machine.
Easier said than done, of course.
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Until next time,
Astha and Akash