Team Building: Getting the Most Out of Your Team with Less Resources w/ Bandwagon CEO Harold Hug

My name is Harold Hughes. I'm the founder and CEO of Bandwagon. We are an identity infrastructure company, so you can see us as a B2B SaaS company. We're headquartered outside Silicon Valley, as far as possible you could probably be, which is small town in South Carolina called Greenville, where my technical team and then our team is based. And so super excited to share with you all. So in the beginning, the context of this really goes to your team is the most important metric. Or point of traction that you can possibly have when it comes to building a team as— or building a company at an early stage, whether that is trying to find a customer number one, whether you're trying to bring on an investor, making sure that you're able to sell people on why they should, instead of other places, contribute their talent and technical expertise to your team is really, really important to do because it is your first sale ever. You're getting someone to to use their limited resources, their time and talent, to work for you and with you instead of Google, instead of Facebook, or instead of tons and tons of other startups out there. And so that's why we understand that it's important, but that doesn't mean that it's easy. And so we'll talk a little bit more about that. When we think through this, it goes into a little bit of what I just mentioned, the team being your first customer. Being able to convince someone to join your team is one of the things that I take a lot of pride in. I understand not only when I hire someone that I will be creating a job for them, but I also look at it as being able to provide for their families, right? And so being able to impact someone's household in such a way, you want to make sure that you have someone that is willing to contribute to the long-term impact of your company. Next, we talk about how great that impact is and how you measure it. This isn't— this can't just be a 1 1 2 type of conversation. This needs to be a 1 1 4, 1 1 5 or 10. And so being able to multiply the impact of your team members, especially early stage, is incredibly important because you only get so many shots at this, right? Everyone's familiar with the context of hire slowly and fire quickly. But at the same time, when you bring on the wrong person or don't add the right person, that can have a detrimental impact to your team. So you wanna try and find a way to make sure you're bringing on people who are adding a great amount of value to your team in whatever role you're bringing them on for. Lastly, we think about finite resources. Early-stage startup, for context, my company started out, I'm a solo founder, and then we were able to add a couple people and grow to now just about 10 people. Finite resources is really one of the bedrocks to this whole conversation, right? The context is, is that you don't have an unlimited amount of money, and you definitely don't have an unlimited amount of time when it comes to being able to recruit and train and hire these people. And so being smart about how you bring on talent is really what we want to talk about today. And during a pandemic, I think it's definitely important to make sure that we're addressing some of the constraints and challenges that exist in each of our industries. So if you have questions, please feel free to save them or ask them in the chat or save them to the end. My intention is to save about 12 to 15 minutes for us to answer questions from you all and have a really engaging roundtable and conversation. So the problem here, the problem, the biggest problem that we've experienced is that it is incredibly expensive to hire top talent. And so when you think through that, I know that we've had challenges in the past where we would offer someone and they would look at our offer, compare it to GitHub, or compare it to Google, right? And the economics just aren't there. Compounding that, when it comes to hiring, you've got a chicken or the egg where it's, I need my company to be in a position to hire certain leadership or certain technical or team talent, but I need people to get the company to that point. And so do you hire the really rockstar person from this organization, this FAANG company or whatever it is, and then hope that they can help bring your company forward? Or do you try and get your company forward with the B and C players that you can afford? And so that's definitely a tough one as well. And then lastly is competing against cash. We've seen this, as I talked a little bit on the first example, is that being able to compete economically is really, really challenging. I'll give you a couple of solutions that are actionable as we go through this today. So number one, I think about the fact that storytelling is so, so critical. To building a team. When we brought on our CTO, he has a PhD, he worked at Google, and had any number of other places that would have rather had his talents than Bandwagon. They would have definitely wanted him more than me and definitely would have paid more. But being able to tell the story of what we were building was incredibly important. It wasn't a matter of a cash grab. It wasn't a matter of disrupting some industry. Our story at Bandwagon specifically focuses on collaboration. And the value of individuals creating a better outcome for more. And so I think through that when I think of many of these companies, some of them you've probably competed with or heard of, they talk about how they're gonna disrupt the fast food industry or disrupt the clothing industry. I try and encourage folks to try and think through, is there an opportunity to talk more about collaboration, more about how you are addressing a large opportunity in a space that's well-defined where there are major players and being able to weave a story that shows that your team members can understand, hey, listen, this isn't us going up as David and Goliath, as that's going to look— seem pretty daunting, but being able to tell a story that helps them understand where they fit into the company as it is today, as well as where they fit into the company going forward. Next, once you've gotten that person on board with the idea of working for you, it's incredibly important to try and be creative with your offer letters. Having worked in corporate America, I spent about a decade where your standard offer letter was, you're going to make this much in salary, this is how much your bonus opportunity is, this is how much vacation you have, and that's pretty much it. But one of the things I always thought was pretty off-putting about those offer letters is that they assumed that the same two— two people who are applying for the same position would be motivated by the same offers, be motivated by the same variables. And so for our offer letters, we try to be incredibly creative. We try and say, hey, listen, we are willing to pay you between X amount of dollars and Y amount of dollars and between A amount of stock and B amount of stock. Because in that case, we get to see not only what people are thinking as far as, you know, are you in a financial position to where the cash is really important? And because of that, you should take the cash. Or are you in a position where we can motivate you with incentive and ownership? Another thing we think through is the titles conversation. I happen to be the CEO. I don't care as much about my title or anyone else's, but being able to understand what people are motivated by really helps with your offer letters. And I've seen people who are more interested in moving because you change their title from software engineer to senior software engineer, or from junior software engineer to full-stack software engineer. And so being able to be creative with your offer letters is something that you all have, that we have as startups, to be able to utilize that a lot of larger companies may not have due to their rigid infrastructure. Last, try and buy. This is incredibly important, and I've taken advantage of this as a team builder for several years, is the opportunity to hire people as contractors. One of the things that I know really, really well is that despite your best of intentions, sometimes you will hire the wrong person. And by the time you do all of the training and the interviews, and then you do the selection, and then you get them set up, you're doing the payroll taxes, and 2 months in you're like, this is not the right person, I've got to break ways. That's really a lot of time invested. So what we've actually started doing is hiring most everyone on a short-term contract, about 3 months. And we say, hey, for these 3 months, we're going to pay you X amount of dollars per month as a contractor, as a 1099. And our goal is a couple of things. Number one, I want to know if we like working with you. I want to know if your demeanor fits our team, if you're able to fit into this culture we've been creating and make it even better. But next, I want to make sure that we are the type of company you want to work for. Like, do you find us interesting? Do you find our work habits and tendencies to be useful and resourceful? Third, I want to make sure I'm setting the objectives of those 3 months to where it's something I can measure. I'm not sure how many of you have this experience, but sometimes we may try to hire preemptively or try and be ahead of the curve, and you find that that person doesn't actually have as much to do. And so by doing this try and buy and doing this contractor-type relationship for 3 months is what I say is a standard, it gives you the opportunity to get to know that person, their work habits, see how your team members work with them, as well as set a couple of pretty clear bars that you would like them to accomplish during their initial time with you. And from there, we've done things as saying, hey, we want to do 3 months plus an opportunity to extend for another 3 months. And then from there, see if we want to make a full-time position hire or part ways. And so you may find that this person who's perfect to just be a contractor for your organization, or you may find, as we have, yes, this person needs to be part of our team. We want them working with us full-time. Let's make them a full offer. We've learned a lot about them and the team has been able to include them as we've grown. So when I think about team building tactics across the board for any stage that we're in, there's a couple of things I want to make sure to emphasize. Number 1, constantly court top talent. As I talked about a little bit earlier, when you try and juggle this idea of, do I hire the rock star that is really, really farther than our company really is ready for, do I hire them now, I kind of encourage people to say, let's just constantly court them. Let's make sure we keep them on our monthly updates. If you have an investor or maybe a friends of the program type update so that they're able to know how the company's growing. Make sure you're checking in with them, seeing how their career is progressing on LinkedIn, see if they have opportunities to where you can amplify their work and give them praise. Because I think at that point, that's when you're able to build real relationships with people who then look at you and say, this is the type of person I wanna work with and type of company I'd like to work for. And so constantly courting your top talent, we treat that like a relationship here. That's really important to us to make sure we're working with people and trying to bring in people we want to work with. Setting clear expectations. I think that this one falls more on us as business leaders than anything else, is understanding that sometimes we do make the wrong hire, but oftentimes that's because we didn't set proper and clear expectations. When it comes to hiring, it is important not only for you to set the compensation, the equity, and all these different things, but also to set what the objectives are. What are the resources that are going to be available to them? What's the timeline that they're going to be measured on? And really what the overall company's goal is going to be and how their role impacts that goal. And so being able to set those clear expectations allows you to minimize challenges that you may have with the organization bringing on the wrong person. Next, we'll talk about hiring slowly and firing quickly. We talked about this constant courtship part of it, But the firing quickly is the one that I'm really, really a big fan of because it's a couple of things that happen. When we send our offer letters and our offer letters are accepted by the applicant, I have a conversation and say, "Hey guys, here's a couple of things. If this goes well, we'll both, you know, ride off into the sunset, either making a bunch of money or you'll leave at some point when your career is advanced and I want to be the best referral for you ever." So that's what happens if things work really, really well. Or things could work out poorly in two ways. One, we cannot be the company that you— we said we would be, and therefore we fail to meet your expectations and we come up short. Or you don't meet the expectations that you set forth in this interview, or maybe misrepresent yourself, and we'll have to fire you. And so you want to try and make sure you're getting through that loop as quickly as possible in the, uh, in the situation or scenario that you may have to let that person go. Because that's a tough conversation for everyone. Be creative with the benefits. I think that's really important as we look at, especially during a pandemic, cash was one thing, but, you know, some of these really fancy offices that had the barista and the coffee maker and the ping pong table, those aren't really as useful while people are working from home. So try and think through ways to help make being at home for those long periods of time more beneficial and more calming. For my team, we ended up giving them cash bonuses where one person bought a punching bag, another person bought— because they couldn't go to the gym anymore— another person bought a hammock so they could relax outside. We've been able to do virtual cooking classes. We've been able to do different things to connect them while distributed. And I think about during a pandemic especially how we can be creative to support our team members. I think about mental health and the awareness. We think about mental health and emotional health is one of the— are two of the things that we talk about in my organization. And so you want to be creative with your benefits and the resources you provide to help support your team. Lastly, and this one may seem kind of obvious, but be transparent with your compensation. As we look at the gender pay gaps and the racial pay gaps, our organization finds it important to make sure everyone in the organization knows how much everyone makes, that the roles were very clearly defined at the hiring stages, and say, okay, at this tier you make this much money. And so it's important for us to make sure that that's never masked because I think that that transparency makes sure that we're eliminating some of those gender gaps and race gaps that exist in the workplace in various companies and across different industries. So my top takeaways are to really think about the process that you're creating and stick to it. You don't want to have, oh, we're going to make a random exception for this person, or I know this person from college, so we should just bring them in. Create a process. If your process is normally that one of your team members does the initial screen and then two team members do a phone call and then the entire team does a video call, make sure that that process is held throughout with every candidate. Because if it's skipped or changed or augmented for some preferential treatment, it really hurts the candidate for being able to fit in and be as sticky and included into that company culture. So try and make sure you create a process and stick to it. Lastly, I— or secondly, I talked about the compensation plans. Being flexible with your dollars as well as your equity is incredibly important. If you are limited in resources, specifically cash in the short term, one of the things that we've done in the beginning was doing a deferred compensation plan where we couldn't afford to pay our developer. And I said, listen, if you can help us get to beta with this product, I will give you X amount of dollars. And if I raise this much money off of this, I will give you 1.5x of those dollars or 2x those dollars. And being able to know that their impact of their product and their work ties directly to the monetary and, you know, business performance of the company was really, really rewarding. And it served as an educational piece for them and it was able to help us with buy-in. So big, big fan of that. And lastly, to not forget the ABCs, always be courting. You never know who would be willing to work with you. Our newest team member who's joining as our COO, Next month, was at StubHub working North American business development for the entire, for the entire, or all of North America. Then she joined Facebook for their general counsel office, has a JD and an incredible pedigree. 3 years ago, I remember asking a friend to introduce me to her, and I knew that we were not going to be in the state at that time, 3 years ago, for where it made sense for her to join us. But now here we are, 3 years later, and she is joining our team as COO. And I think that is a complete testament to the idea of constantly courting and making sure that if you find a person that you really think would be valuable to your company and creating great culture with, that you make sure you stay connected with them and build the company that they would like to be a part of at some point as well. So that is all I have for my presentation. And yep, right on time, 12 minutes left for— Q&A and some conversation. And so I'm going to turn off my screen share. I would love to turn it back over to Taylor to set us up on how we navigate the rest of it.

Yeah, thanks so much, Harold. And like you said, right on time. So everyone would love to have you join the conversation. So if you have questions for Harold, feel free to go ahead and take yourself off mute. You could use the chat or raise your hand and we'll be happy to call on you. So feel free, anyone can just jump right in.

Thank you so much.

Harold, while we're waiting for questions to come through, I had a question about the way you set up for offering folks on a contract. How do you compete with other places, you know, people that may have competing offers that aren't contract positions? How do you message that?

Yeah, and I don't think that we've ever been in a situation where I hired someone for a contract while they had a full-time offer. I think that kind of plays to my constant courting process. So if it's a matter of, I really like this person, but we're not ready, we're not ready, we're not ready. And it's like, we could be ready, would you be interested? And that contract offer allows us to say, look, these are flexible hours. I'm more so interested in you hitting these objectives. And then, you know, join in a couple of these meetings, you know, we want to fit your hours in this way. That allows them to make additional income on top of their, you know, standard 9 to 5 or wherever their current career is. And then from there, based on how we're feeling, and hopefully we've seen some development from their progress, then we could say, look, you have to be a part of this team. This is our competitive offer. And oh, by the way, there are variables to it that you can scale up or scale down based on your individual needs. And so that's kind of like the entire process is how I would look at that.

Got it. That makes a lot of sense.

Thanks.

Anyone else? Any questions for Harold?

I haven't looked at the chat. Any questions? Anyone dealing with any hiring or navigating team growth during a pandemic? Zephrin?

Yeah, hey Eric. In general, how have you seen things evolve from the beginning of the pandemic to now? Like, are you seeing increased burnout? I know with my team, we're really early, we're pre-launch, you know, there's anxiety and momentum in the beginning and now everyone's like kind of trying to get to the finish line.

Yeah, no, definitely.

So there's two things we noticed. One, we actually were fortunate, we were able to hire two people during the pandemic. The number of job applications that we received for those people were way more than what we got for the same positions a year ago. Right. So obviously that's the job market. So very competitive market. And there's definitely opportunity for companies like ours to get technical talent and other team members probably at a premium. Right. And so that's definitely one thing to look at, but exactly what you said. So my team was working in the office. We'd actually just signed a multi-year lease in February, which is obviously perfect timing. And so in mid-March, when we sent everyone home, I was dealing— the challenge we were dealing with was honestly people's schedules got off. I don't know how many of you have had to work from home due to this as well, but it's different when you see people get up who are next to you in your peripheral around 11 or 12 to go eat lunch. And sometimes now I'll look around and be like, oh my God, it's 3 o'clock. I haven't eaten anything today. And so being able to simple things like that, the time got off. And so my team had challenges with sleep. So some people were oversleeping, some people weren't going to sleep on time. So they were super tired in the morning. And so they needed to skip a morning meeting. And so we ended up moving our standup that used to be at 9:30 to 11:00 AM. And then we added a second standup to, uh, or like an afternoon recap at like 3:00. So our goal essentially at the time was we created a workday that said, we want you online from 11 to 3. And if you have to get more of your work done after 3 or more of your work before 3 or mix it in, maybe take a nap, sleep in, that is fine. And that is really how we measured it. The burnout thing was definitely important. We, one of the things we also had to do was I had to encourage people to take vacation time. A couple of our folks had careers in corporate America where they had, you know, the standard 10-day vacation policy. And if they don't see other people taking vacation, it's hard to like set that bell off. And so I would send someone a message on Slack saying, hey, how are you?

Good.

I noticed you've been doing some really great work. I'd love for you to take 2 days off in the next 3 weeks. And that question was like, well, what? And it's like, I would really need— I really need you to take 2 days off, do a staycation, do whatever you'd like, but we want you to make sure that you're here for the long haul. You delivered some great stuff. And so being able to be proactive with giving that kind of guidance, I think has helped. As a team leader, I've tried to do it as well, not as well, but I do try to do it, and the team is going to be off the 22nd through the end of the year, going into like January 4th. So that's kind of how we approach the time off for the holidays this year. Thanks for the question, though.

I've got a topic. This is Philip. Yeah, thanks for sharing, Harold. Good stuff. I think we're all struggling with this for sure. I'm wondering about the— you touched a bit on like what are ways that we can inject basically some humanity back into the days and having structured game time or things that have nothing to do with work. Like that's sort of one way to do it. Another way to do it is, inside of certain kinds of meetings, or potentially all meetings, like have some time either at the beginning or the middle, the end, where you're asking about people's days, checking in, seeing how people are. But then there's— I found that the former ends up being— there was some interest early on that really fell off because people just spent too much time in meetings. So it's like, OK, here's another meeting. Even though it's for fun, it's not really helping me, so I'm not going to show up. And then, and then not every— if every meeting ends up with 5, 10 minutes of, hey, how's everybody doing, then that gets contrived, non-productive. People feel the same way. And I'm just curious what you and, you know, if other folks have cracked this one, it'd be great to hear what, what what the right balance is. What I've ended up doing that works pretty well is I've got almost daily meetings with just my own leadership team. And the first meeting per week that we have is 1 hour and the rest are 30 minutes. And in that one, I do like the humanity check, how's everyone doing? And then after that, every meeting just starts on the nose, we get straight to business and people appreciate that.

Yeah.

But that, that's, that's just one team and looking across a broader org.

For sure.

Yeah.

So, so we're a hybrid team now.

So my team ended up going back into the office on July 13th and my, as my technical team. So our 4 software engineers are all in the office and then the rest of our team is distributed, which is another 3 people. And what's been important there for us is that the technical team sees each other all day long. And that's important for us from a mindshare standpoint, from a trust, being able to quickly navigate and work through those things. And so the way our week looks is that Monday morning, we've got at 10:00 AM, we do a weekly sprint planning call where it's the technical team and the business team. And the technical team says, hey, these are the things that were still in the icebox, things we're working on in progress. So-and-so, you're going to work on this, or you're going to work on this. And then they turn to the business team and say, does that meet the objectives that y'all have for us? And I say, yeah, or actually I'd like to reprioritize this. And that's great. We say, okay, great. But before, at the beginning of that meeting, we all talk about our weekend and chat a little bit. It's a little more clunky, transparently, because the people in the office have already kind of probably done that before they dial into the video meeting. And so it's normally me and the other remote people talking about our weekend to the team. So that's how we start there. But then at the end of the week, we do the sprint review, which is show and tell. If you didn't build it, if you can't show it, you didn't build it. Every day, our technical, our CTO does a 10-minute standup, literally they actually make sure to stand up to make sure it's not long. And one thing that they, my team does, and I don't know how many organizations do it, they do this thing called Final Friday, which I want to say at the end of every month they take like a half day off where it's not like off to just like go on vacation, but they take it to do a mindshare where one of them teaches the other one something else. So our senior software engineer may do it to teach about, um, UX and UI design, or one of the backend engineers may use it to teach about testing and the importance of it, or CTO may talk about cryptography and some of the things we're using on data packets. And so it's been really cool because we order lunch in for everybody. Someone gets to become the professor. You're treat— you're teaching people personal and professional development skills to help them see what it's like to run a meeting, how it is to do that. And they're gaining more trust because I think that one of the best things you can do to improve the way we each engage in that humanity is respecting that person and knowing a little bit more about their interests and their passions and stuff. And so I think that those are some of the things that we've done to make sure that we're growing together as a team. But then, you know, lastly, Slack is our number one thing. We have a random channel, and me as a non-technical team leader, I'm the one who constantly derails the conversations. And so I'll say, have y'all seen The Queen's Gambit? Like, this is insane, or whatever the thing is. And so that was always my contribution to the team, was that I would add that bit of levity, or I would add that bit of context and color and really invite people into the conversation. And I think as a team leader, it's probably one of the most important skill sets to have, especially during this challenging time. Cool.

Thanks.

Thanks. Anyone have anything else for the last minute and a half that we have here, or a tip you'd like to share to complement what we went over.

Um, Harold, shame on me that I missed most of this. Is there any chance that you'd be able to summarize in a way that would be helpful for people to kind of rehear, like a minute and a half of—

Yeah, so first thing is that the conversation will be recorded, right, and available, Taylor. Um, so Taylor can give details on that. But in short, the biggest things I think through— the 3 things are— is that there is