Crazy, energy-draining 2021 🫠
Beyond growth frenzy, Zapier's top-down, all-hands AI excursion, and an org-building lesson on expectations and modelling.
Happy new year! ☀️
Welcome to the 89th edition of The SaaS Baton.
A fortnightly newsletter that brings you hand-curated pieces of advice drawn from the thoughtful founder-to-founder exchanges and interviews taking place on Relay (curated with 💛 at Chargebee for Startups) and the interwebz. So, stay tuned!
In this edition, you’ll find the following instructive and inspiring pickings:
#1: Front App’s co-founder and CEO, Mathilde Collin, having ridden the euphoric, hyper-scale, boom-bubble peaks of 2021, reflects on how the past year’s slowdown has brought her closer to customers, biz fundamentals, and to her (most energetic) founder self.
#2: Zapier’s co-founder and CEO, Wade Foster, explains why they shut down (save for customer support) the company for a week (a first!) just so they could freely explore the bounds (both internal and external) of LLMs with everyone onboard.
#3: WP Engine’s founder, Jason Cohen, offers a brief, bristling reminder on what invariably gets teams to do their best work.
Finding these discerning founder takes valuable? Please consider sharing this edition with an ever-curious teammate or a much-cherished SaaS friend. 🙂 New readers can sign up here.
#1: Crazy, energy-draining 2021 🫠
(From: Front App’s Mathilde Collin) (Source: 1 to 1000)
It was energy draining for me to recruit in the crazy 2021…because I felt like I was selling. And I always want to be partly selling, but most importantly I want to assess the fit and I want to see some excitement on the other side as well.
It was almost like to get to the best candidates you had to talk to these people like ‘there’s a 1% chance that they might be interested, I’d rather take this 1% chance.’ So you end up with 99 conversations out of 100 who’re actually not that interested. Energy draining!
Now, it’s so different. Because you have amazing talent, so you’re still telling them what’s Front is all about, but you get so much energy in return because they’re so excited to go to a great company.
…
My level of energy in 2023 is much, much higher than 2021. And I can explain to you why. I think this comes down to going back to basics. Working on fundamental opportunities, problems, being very close to our customers.
When things were growing too fast it felt like I was working on our growth more than I was working on solving customer problems. So the things I was working on was, ‘what decision-making framework are we going to implement?’ And ‘what’s the new title that we’d implement for this level of seniority?’ I could go on and on.
And while some of it is interesting and a good learning opportunity, when that becomes 90% of what you do…
It’s just a very personal thing, I don’t get nearly as much energy as I get now as I’m actually thinking about: what to build next, how’s the market changing, tools are consolidating, AI is changing how companies approach communication. ‘Let’s validate with the market whether that’s what they want.’
I’m leading the marketing team right now. And it’s great. I feel like I’m doing work. We have so much to prove. I have much more energy.
…
One thing I’ve learned is, you could think that ‘ah, that’s true, because we’re founders, we started these companies so we care about this.’
This week, for example, our CFO came back from mat leave, so she was out for three months. She said that just within three months, these meetings seem night and day. Because we’re really talking about how do we believe our customers will get much more value at the end of the second half than where we’re now.
That gives energy to our CFO as well. Her job is really about scaling and hypergrowth seems intellectually challenging but it feels so right to put your customers at the centre of everything you do and this recession has forced us to do this.
In a way, two years ago, we were forced out of it. Because it was so crazy. I think it’ll remain a good learning opportunity forever.
Related Relay reading:
Geckoboard’s founder, Paul Joyce, on presenting a balanced view to fellow founders (As founders our job is to manifest something that exists only as an idea, into something real…That requires inspiration, research and just a sprinkle of delusional thinking…The problem comes when we do this without sensitivity and project it outward.)
#2: Zapier’s weeklong AI hackathon 🥽
(From: Zapier’s Wade Foster) (Source: The Peel)
The way my co-founder, Mike, talks about it [LLM], which I will lovingly steal is that it’s a brand new way of solving problems.
So one of the things that’s a start for any company to do is to go look at all the tough problems they’ve faced over say the last five years whatever timeframe…and look at those problems and say, ‘you know what, could an LLM help me this?’
For Zapier, that’s a big thing that we’ve been look at. ‘Okay, where are these problems that have been like really tough for us?’ Where we just felt like, ‘this is as good as it’s going to get.’ Where we’ve tried every angle and we’re out of ideas…
We’ve been looking at it from a couple of dimensions. One is internal operations. There’s a lot of operations in the company where we think LLMs can make things more efficient or bring new ideas to the table.
The second thing is where can we actually expose this to our customers and give them some of these capabilities as well. Turns out, there’s quite a bit of areas. We’ve got handful of places where Zapier’s gotten a lot better if you’re a user because we have LLMs powering key features.
…
We started to play around with it…12-18 months ago.
My co-founder, Mike, who was in a management role, was like: ‘you know I don’t think the best thing I can do for Zapier is to stay in this role, I think I need to go be an IC and figure out what are we going to do around AI and LLMs.’
This was pre-ChatGPT, so the world hadn’t been lit on fire yet…. But we were just experimenting, playing around, trying to figure out what’s going on with this stuff. Then, ChatGPT comes out and us, like the rest of the world, started to go, ‘Okay, what are we doing about this??’
So we had some smaller teams that were starting to work on this stuff. In a more organic, bottoms-up way. We were starting to get some pretty interesting things going. When GPT-4 launches…we start to go, ‘well, the capabilities are advancing really fast.’
‘This organic, bottoms-up approach fuelled by Brian and Mike, my co-founders’ love of what this is, is actually not fast enough.’
We need to sort of shake the company for the lack of a better word. So we said, ‘hey we’re going to call a AI hackathon and we’re going to shut the company down for a week,’ and say, ‘everyone inside the company is going to use AI tooling.’
However you want to do it. You can hack on it. You can use it as an end user. You can operationalise it. The idea was just to get people exposed to what’s going on in this world.
That was a big pivotal moment.
Because all of a sudden, that’s where all these interesting ideas for how can we take the product started to come to life. Instead of being just an interesting idea, we started to see these things show up on the roadmap.
Figure out how to get a v1. Figure out how to get it in front of customers. And because it was top-down, we sort of said, ‘we know you’ve got roadmaps, we know you’ve got all this stuff that’s going on and all that’s important but for a week we’re going to set that aside…’
It was kind of an important thing.
Because when you’ve got a business, it’s so easy to just put blinders up and be a one-track mind. But this is the type of thing that’s a paradigm shift, so it does require everyone to pick their heads up and just play and learn.
You need that space to understand, what are these things good at?
What are they bad at? Where is the future heading? What do you think is going to be possible six months or 12 months from now? What do you think is actually going to be not possible? It’s really going to be a tough thing. LLMs just won’t solve these types of problems.
#3: “…you get what you model”
(From: WP Engine’s Jason Cohen) (Source: Relay)
You get what you expect, and you get what you model.
When your attitude is that the team isn’t working well, and lots of things need to change, that expectation is felt.
When your attitude is that this team has all the ingredients of greatness already, and just needs a shift in policies or procedures or letting go of certain constraints or adding some enabling constraints or changing their philosophy or replacing just one “bad apple” person, or…. then that expectation is felt too.
Mostly though I find that modelling is the way.
When I’m engaged all the time, asking questions, poking in Slack, discussing in documents, asking ‘why not faster’ or ‘what’s another way,’ then others do too. Maybe they want to impress me. Maybe they now see that something better is possible. Maybe they’re just inspired by the energy.
Another thing I think is very important to model is honesty, especially about whatever is ‘bad,’ and with a constructive mindset.
When I dive in with a team, I specifically look for things that’s ‘bad’ or a ‘mistake’ or ‘broken’ or a ‘failure’ or other words people like to use, and then I call them out, and then explain why this is not a failure at all, but rather this is healthy and the way forward.
Example: If a feature we released doesn’t have usage, I say how great it is that we measure usage, so we can know that and do something about it. I say that all teams make features and sometimes they’re not used — that’s life!
We don’t love that obviously, we’d rather that didn’t happen.
But there’s no such thing as a team that never makes a feature that isn’t perfect. We’re so good, however, that we’re able to detect that, and then do whatever we want. We might want to kill the feature, or iterate it, or ask more questions of customers, or whatever else. Team decides.
Because the team is in command of the situation. That’s why it’s not a ‘failure.’
When you can be honest about ‘bad stuff,’ and see that ‘being in command and trying to be smart and trying to do the right thing and being honest’ is actually the expectation, then the team is free. Free to celebrate wins and call out misses and stay in command. That’s fun.
I believe this sort of thing brings the best work out of people.
🤝 Founder social:
Thanks for reading! 🌻
Team Relay (Chargebee for Startups)