'Recruiting is a Privilege'

Recruiting, I believe, is thought about incorrectly by 95% of companies. I happen to be fortunate in joining a company in 1995 straight out of this place that was led by a founder CEO who I believe was in the 5% that deeply understood this and said, recruiting is a mission-critical function. For our business, and there's nothing more important that we are doing than hiring great people. That is absolutely core. It is not my side task, an obligation that I may or may not get to. It was priority number one. He signaled it in his own behavior. Joe would literally be on a call with a, 21-year-old kid out of Stanford, out of MIT, out of CMU or Rice, amongst the best CS departments and grads in the country, convincing them that they had to come join us on our journey down at Trilogy in Austin, Texas. They had to come, and they were going to make a difference. And he hung up the phone. And by the way, as a signal that we were doing the right thing, you would know a couple hours later that same kid was getting a phone call from a guy named Bill Gates. Because Gates understood and built Microsoft from day one around that same philosophy that talent was everything. And he personally— and by the way, by that time, even in 1995, Microsoft was already a multibillion-dollar revenue company. And he was still picking up the phone and calling 21-year-old kids straight out of school because he knew That is the lifeblood of your company. If you can win the war on talent, everything else changes. And so there's just lots and lots of examples about how, again, focus on people. Focus on people and you'll build an extraordinary business. In our case, and because by the way, I love this quote from Jim Collins' book. I'm sure a lot of folks here in the room have read Good to Great. That the only great regulator of building great companies at the end of the day is getting, attracting, and then keeping great people. Like, that is usually the ultimate constraint. It is not any of these other things that he enumerates here. It is about being able to do that. And so when I got to SendGrid a handful of years ago, I wanted to make sure that we were bringing that same passion around recruiting. That I was fortunate enough to grow up with, to be exposed to early. And to me, when I was 21, I was like, well, I had never seen anything else. So I just assumed that's what most companies did. I saw for the rest of my career that that actually was not the way that most companies worked around recruiting. That people often thought about recruiting as the thing I have to do after my day job. And I've already got a full plate, and I don't know when I'm gonna be able to fit this in. And they thought about it as an obligation. And one of the things we had to do was flip that and be like, no, no, no. Recruiting is a privilege. Because that means we as a company, all your teammates here are saying, we choose you to go represent us, to go convince the best talent out there that they want to come join us, and to go and filter and make calls on what I believe is the single most important decision we make every single week, week in and week out, and that is who we decide to give the next hoodie to. Because you get that right, you get one 10x, you know what they call these 10xers, somebody that is a distinctive ad for the role you need, and it's a game changer for that whole function, for that whole team, sometimes for your whole company. You get that thing wrong, man, Getting the wrong hire, making that decision incorrectly, is expensive and painful. And you can't— again, it's all about the people. So focusing on the people. So privilege— recruiting is a privilege, not an obligation. I felt so passionately about this. Anybody remember the movie Jerry Maguire? I can't remember age groups here. But so I wrote the equivalent of a Jerry Maguire manifesto on why recruiting was so important. It was a 6-page document. And I sent it out to our team and I said, this is how passionately I believe. Let's now debate every line in here until we feel comfortable it represents our collective view. And then we sent it out to the entire company. And we said, recruiting is everyone's number one priority. I never want to hear we couldn't do that interview slate or we lost that candidate because we couldn't get enough people together for the interview and they took another job with somebody else. It is our number one priority always. And if you come to me and say, this project, Samir, slipped by 3 days because this team of people went and did that interviewing, I will say, bravo, thank you for doing that, good call. That's how I know you're prioritizing the way that I would want you to.