Glen Evans and Evan Reiser | Building Your Best Team

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Hi everyone. Welcome to Grey Matter, the podcast from Greylock, where we share stories from company builders and business leaders. I'm Heather Mack, head of editorial at Greylock. Today we're going to be talking about recruiting and hiring strategies for startups. This is always a challenge for any company, but it's recently gotten even more difficult due to an extremely tight labor pool and fierce competition between companies. Talent is the top commodity in and employees have more leverage than ever. Joining me today are Glenn Evans, who heads Core talent recruiting for Greylock, and Evan Reiser, the CEO and co founder of Abnormal Security. Evan and Glenn have worked closely throughout Abnormal's existence and have plenty of insight into the world of startup recruiting today. You can read a transcript of this episode on our website greylock.com blog and you can find all Gray Matter episodes by subscribing on SoundCloud, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, Glenn and Evan, thanks so much for being here with me today. Let's hear a quick introduction first.

Well, I'm Glenn Evans. I'm a partner for Core Talent at Greylock. We support our companies with great talent advice and early introductions for key roles as they're looking to scale from the early days.

Hi, my name is Evan Reiser. I'm the CEO and co founder of Abnormal Security, which is a cloud native email security platform that protects enterprises from targeted email attacks, things like phishing, fraud and social engineering. We're a pretty young company, we've only been around for about three years. We're about 300 people today, growing to 600, and we currently protect about 5% of the Fortune 500.

And so I'd like to start off with a real high level overview of the overall hiring and recruiting landscape in today's environment. And Glenn, I thought that you could get us started.

I think the number one thing that we've all experienced since March 2020 is the unexpected pandemic, which I think shifted a lot of the dynamics with talent in hiring. Most things are now remote or remote friendly. So companies have had to change their approach and where they find talent, how they assess them, attract them, et cetera. And I think probably the number One thing most CEOs and companies I've been working with, what keeps them up at night is finding, hiring and retaining great people and then coupled with much larger funding rounds that are happening faster and earlier, I think that has created a lot of pressure for companies to scale and hire quickly. And all of this has now culminated to a very competitive hiring market.

And so you work directly with the companies in the Greylock portfolio, including Abnormal Security and Evan, you are firsthand experiencing this at your company. How would you say that's changed since you started the company four years ago? Three years ago?

COVID 19 the shift to remote work, I mean that's the biggest change. I think we've seen the talent market in probably the last 10 years. And I think that three years ago, right, if you were a high potential candidate, if you found a place that had good team, good culture, good compensation, good mission, that was pretty rare, right? If that, that company happened to be nearby you, it was like a, it was like a definite place to go work. And now like with the shift to remote work, every individual can candidate they have 10x more job opportunities. And so now like those kind of fundamental requirements are not good enough, right? It's like, well, how good is the team, how good is the culture? What is different from this company versus the thousand other people are trying to recruit me? Especially for technical roles or sales roles are in very high demand. So I think there's been a huge shift for everyone in the world in the last couple years. You know, any company thinks that what they're doing, you know, what they used to do two years ago is going to work in this new, you know, the new kind of talent market I think is probably gravely mistaken.

Now, Glenn, you've led recruiting at some of the biggest tech companies that are around today at Facebook, Google, Slack. And so you've helped companies scale their teams from small to thousands. And now you're also working with startups who are starting with maybe a handful of people, then a couple dozen, and then starting to get into the hundreds. So I want to hear from both of you what it's like to have a system in place that can scale with the company.

Yeah, that's a good point. So one of the things I've learned pretty early in my career is if you have a clearly defined process early, it can take you to great places from a hiring standpoint. So for example, I know Facebook in the very early days had very clearly defined interviewer roles, questions to ask, what good answers are, what poor answers are, and they kept it very organized and structured. And what that led to was, you know, in the early days created a kind of a viral culture of recruiting. It's everyone's job, it was organized, it created a good experience for candidates. And then over time, as you add more people, that's harder to maintain. So, you know, having documentation, having interview training, all of those things helped it scale to a Place where, you know, they kept the bar very high and brought in a lot of great talent. That's one of the key things I would recommend to any company starting out early. And I know Evan and Sanjay and the abnormal team did that very, very well in the beginning and maybe you can touch on that, Evan.

Yeah, I feel like over the course of a startup journey, right. Like there's some things that change and some things that stay the same. What stays the same, right, is you know, you always need to be really actively looking for a good mutual fit. It's not good enough for a candidate to be good for you. You, the company also have to be great for the candidate for it to work. Right. You're always going to have to have real high clarity in what the job is to help make sure you're being doing thoughtful assessments. Right. And also thoughtful matching of that mutual fit. Then, you know, third, right. You really have to, you know, differentiate the company. Why is this really a better place to work than other places? So I think those stay the same in the startup journey. I think early on, right, you have to, you know, you can make a lot of recruiting progress. You're trying to hire one or two people a quarter by using just a lot of time, energy, passion, right. To kind of recruit people to that early stage startup. But then we start growing to 100, 200, 300 people and now you start hiring 50, 60 people a quarter. It's no longer good enough to just like, you know, work super hard and be passionate. You have to think about how do you build a recruiting engine across the company and that requires everyone to be aligned on the importance of recruiting and requires the company to invest in, you know, compensation in actually making the company a great place to work. Right. Whether it's the culture, the systems or the programs. And you need to like as Glenn mentioned, you need to start formalizing that recruiting process so you can provide a, A plus candidate experience but also make sure that you're fully assessing candidates to make sure that they are a good fit for the company as well.

Yeah. And I would actually just add one other thing. I think it's critical that you don't settle for a hire. I mean, the process will help define the bar, but you know, a mis hire can set a company, a team back for a long time. It's very painful to unwind a bad hire. And so I'd recommend to anyone to really keep that standard high and do not settle for talent. Even though it's hard to find certain types and certain people, you should never settle.

That's totally right. And sometimes it's very easy to imagine what the cost is of not hiring someone, but it's hard to imagine what is the cost of really finding someone that's not a great fit for the company. And I've personally made this mistake a couple times. In a lot of the cases, the candidates were really qualified for the work we had to go do, but we weren't actually qualified for what they really wanted to get out of the job, what they aspired to do. And that's kind of a very dangerous situation because it can kind of work in the short term, but it won't work in the long term. And then you end up taking maybe six months or 12 months of debt, and now you're kind of a year down the road back to zero because you didn't find really the right person for the role where you could really kind of live up to their aspirations and motivations. So it's extremely costly to have the wrong person in the role versus just not having someone in the role at all.

And so getting that right really starts with the very beginning of finding the right people in the first place, even before you start the interview process. So I'd like to hear for both of you how you start the sourcing and the searching for new candidates. Glenn, maybe you can start because you've done it at so many different levels.

You know, it starts with really understanding what you're looking for. Right. And I think a lot of people just kind of rush to start sourcing, but, you know, really understanding the skills required where these people might be working, you know, what domain they're from, et cetera. And then you can start mapping out where they are. Right. The best people are working. Right. And so that's why it's also such a competitive market, is people are getting hit up left and right for job opportunities. So you have to map where they are, come up with a strategy and come up with compelling messaging ways to attract them to at least have a conversation. And once you get them into a meeting or a call, then you can dive in further.

Yeah, Evan, maybe you could walk us through what sourcing and finding some of those early hires were like.

When you're a 10 person startup, you really want generalists that can deal with ambiguity, and then as you grow, you want more specialists that can scale as the company gets better. So I really agree with what Glenn said. You have to be really intentional and thoughtful about what's the job you really need. Otherwise you kind of will be fishing in the wrong ponds. I think the common pattern we've seen is that we try to look for people that are smart, humble and hungry. And that combination has kind of worked out really well for us so far. The tactics in terms of how to source changes over time. Early on, when you're a no name startup that no one cares about, it's really important to leverage your personal network, right in the investor network. I know we work really closely with the Greylock recruiting team and you know, they probably introduced us to a hundred different people along the way and we ended up hiring maybe, you know, 20 of those folks. That was really important for us. When, you know, again, no one cared about who we were. We had zero credibility, especially as a new company in cybersecurity, in the middle zone, you're kind of grabbing the low hanging fruit, right? You don't need to hire maybe a couple people. So it kind of works. And then in like this, you know, once you get above maybe, you know, 100 people or so, all the kind of easy stuff is done. You have to think about how do you find people that's never heard of you, right? And how do you really communicate why you're different and how do you build this kind of high scale recruiting engine that's not just a couple LinkedIn mails, but it's, you know, retargeted ads and dedicated career sites and dedicated sourcing staff. And that's a, you know, that's an engine you have to build up over time, right? Inappropriate day one, but really appropriate, right. Once you're kind of post product market fit and you just start hiring 50.

To 100 people per quarter based on how competitive the market is, you probably want to think about opening roles earlier than you normally would, right? Maybe even a couple quarters ahead of time. Just because it takes even longer to hire. Whether you're hiring a recruiter, a salesperson, an engineer, especially as it gets more specialized, you'll want to open these roles sooner if you can.

I agree. That's actually probably one of the mistakes we've made is, you know, when you're kind of growing very quickly, right? And we're growing by about 4x per year. The future comes way faster than your intuitions think it would be. And there's probably many roles where as soon as we had the person in the building, we're like, oh my God, we wish we had this person six months ago. One pattern I think me and the entire company has felt susceptible to, right, is just like, think like three months too late. Where I Think that when you're really growing, if you're in a great market, right. That has high product market fit, and customers love your product, you should be three months ahead, not three months behind. Worst case scenario is you have someone that's getting ready and kind of planning out their work versus being behind and catching up and just paying down the debt. So totally agree with you, Glenn.

Once you've identified some candidates and you're able to start bringing them in and making some connections, what is the best system to have in place to make sure that all the right questions are asked to make sure that they have a full picture of the role, the full picture of the company and the culture?

Yeah, I mean, back to having it defined and documented, I think that's a great starting point. But, you know, even more important, making sure the people involved in the interviews, you know, the interviewers are on the same page. So it's probably very helpful to have a meeting ahead of like the first couple interviews for that role that you just opened to get on the same page. Make sure everyone's aligned on what you're looking for, the purpose of the hire, you know, once they're in the door, everyone's roles in the process, et cetera. And then when you get into actually meeting the person, making sure the interviewers are prepared as well, because that also ties to the experience you're creating for the candidate. And then, you know, post interview, it's, you know, not uncommon to have a meeting to discuss the candidate. That's a great way to calibrate further, especially when you're starting off, you know, hiring for something for the first couple times to get everyone. And then the interviews get better and they're all on the same page. And then hiring decisions can be made more quickly, which helps create a great experience for people.

Yeah. Evan, I'm curious. Once you've got some people on the phone for the first time, you know, they responded to you for a reason. Like, what's that first phone call? Like, what are you really trying to establish with them? What are you really trying to get across about abnormal?

We're trying to hire the best of the best people. And so you have to recognize, like, the best people can work wherever they want. I think the best people are, you know, it's a privilege to get to talk to them. Right. So we try to really focus on understanding their motivations and aspirations. You know, what do they care about, what do they want to do in their job after abnormal security, you know, how do they want to learn and grow over the next couple of years, you know, how would they differentiate the best company from the second best company? So we try to learn that really early on in the process because it helps us understand, you know, if we can be a great fit for them and if we've done a good job, you know, targeting and sourcing and profiling, you know, the right candidates, then we kind of know they're in some sort of zone. So we really want to make sure we're aligned on that. You know, early in the process, you know, kind of second what Glenn said, really important to have clarity on, like, what the job requirements are. Right. It's not just important for the interview team and the evaluation team. Right. As the company gets bigger, just gets more and more confusing, but it's also really important to communicate that back to the candidate and say, hey, here's what your job's going to be. Right. And here's what your personal roadmap looks like, and here's what you're going to grow and learn and do.

Right.

I think the best people, they want to have a lot of clarity on, hey, what am I going to be doing, how we interact with the team, what leadership opportunities do I have, how will I be contributing to the company? And. And so if, you know, internally, you're not clear about that, it's very hard to communicate that to the best candidates. And then it's very hard to kind of, you know, go back to them and explain to them, hey, why is this role uniquely different for you? And why can't you have a bigger impact and learn more at this company? Right. Versus some other place?

Yeah, And I would add to that, you know, definitely agree, strong agree on understanding people's motivations and their goals. Actually, that's probably the first question, you know. You know, I always recommend my team ask people, like, hey, you know, before I jump into what I reached out to you about, you know, what's important to you, if you were going to change jobs or, like, what's your dream job, your dream company, et cetera, et cetera. And that's going to be you're going to have a wide array of answers that you can file away, and those are things you can use to tailor the process to help close them later. It might be team, it might be work life, it might be mission, it might be finance. I mean, all of these things can help you, like, close along the way. So I'd say I'd add that. And then in addition, you know, to Evan's point on being able to pitch the role and the company and have a compelling story there to get candidates excited. You know, making sure that that role that you're hiring for maps to the impact on the product, the mission, the company, and then that maps to the candidate and their goals and where they want to get to in their career. And startups are in a unique place to offer so much growth for somebody. You know, if you go to a big tech company, you're going to have stability, you're going to have cash, you know, in the beginning, but you're going to grow a lot slower in my opinion, than if you go to a startup and you have all this, you know, opportunity, you're wearing multiple hats, you know, you're going to probably grow as a individual and as a leader faster than if you joined a larger place. So if that's, you know, an option for somebody to take a little bit of a risk on an early stage company, I think that could be a great opportunity for their growth.

I think that's right, Glenn, because again, the best people in the world that can work wherever they want. So why would they come join your crappy company like Abnormal Security? No one's ever heard of it. What you say is the reason why people join early stage startups. They want to learn and grow and have a bigger impact. They could at a later stage company or a public company. So I think that's really important for companies and startups to really kind of explicitly explain, hey, here's how you're going to do that, here's how the role connects back to our product and our mission. Right? Here's what your LinkedIn resume could look like based on the impact you have over the next year or so. The more you can evidence how the company can really be a great opportunity for them. Here's our mentorship program. Here's eight videos of the last investors and executives we had come in to speak to the team about leadership development. The more you can evidence that to candidates will help you really deliver on this claim that it's a great place to learn, great place to work, and you can have a bigger impact. You can't just say it though. You have to kind of back that up and show that.

Yep. And I'd say understanding all of that will drop the I'm talking to a recruiter vibe. When you get somebody in a meeting or on a phone, they'll feel like, hey, this person cares and they're trying to connect with me. And I think part of getting people to say yes is building that trust. And if you can do that from the very first meeting. I think that can lead to some really good results.

I argue you have to do that. They don't feel like, you know, you're invested in them. They don't feel like the company's being authentic and they don't feel like you're really trying to, you know, identify mutual fit and explore this partnership. They can just go talk to some other company that's doing that. Right. And just people have so many options these days to work at. You know, there's a lot of good companies out there. They're trying to find the best of the best. So I think without some of those things you mentioned, it's very difficult for you to stand out from the noise.

So over the years, as the market for talent has gotten so competitive, there's been more tools, there's been more talk of processes and systems in place to help people with recruiting. And I've heard a lot of people borrowing some of the tactics and concepts from sales and marketing, and it seems, seems like that could be very helpful with helping people put a process in place. But it can also be a little bit not quite applicable because at the end of the day, it's not sales. So I'm wondering what you have learned from those kind of comparisons.

I'd say the biggest thing, and you want to prevent anything from becoming too transactional, especially as you're trying to recruit top talent. You're going to want to create very tailored messaging that aligns to somebody's background and experience and, you know, it shows that you, like, actually read about them and what they've accomplished so far in their career. And if you tailor your approach to individuals, you're going to probably have a higher hit rate and higher response rate versus I'm going to mass email 500 people and hope that somebody replies. And then, you know, from the marketing side, I'd say I think there are some great ways companies can do more to promote their employment brand and, you know, their career at the company and where those kind of things will also help attract talent. You can write blogs and do different things like that to talk about the interesting challenges or the mission that the company's on. And I think that will certainly help attract candidates as well.

What does that look like throughout the interview process, especially since you've gotten so much bigger over the years? Are you still conducting the first interviews? How does that look?

Yeah, so it's changed. One of our core values is ownership, right. So we really have the hiring manager take point on everything, right? We have a recruiting team. Their job is to support the hiring manager. But the hiring manager ultimately needs to decide what is the job. You know, how do, you know, how we really make it unique and differentiate for the candidate and how do we decide who the right person is? So I think about kind of my job as a CEO is to also play a support role. And that is, you know, sometimes I talk to candidates early on in the process to help understand their motivations, to kind of share the vision around abnormal security. Sometimes I talk to people in the middle where I'm actually assisting, right. With the evaluation in some debate, some dimension as kind of guided by the hiring manager, sometimes talking about the end of the process. Right. They're deciding between two great opportunities, right. Sometimes a sister company at Greylock. Right. And I'm trying to be a thought partner, helping them think through the framework and ultimately, you know, pick the career and kind of opportunity that's, that's right for them. Way early on, I was cold calling people, I was interviewing people, I was hiring people. So it changes over time. That's what it looks like today.

And I'd say that's why, you know, you've been so successful at hiring. Not only did you have a clearly defined process early, but you were very, very involved. I remember meeting you and Sanjay on Bryant Street a few years ago, and it was obvious to me that I didn't have to worry too much about you from caring about it, being passionate about it, and understanding that you need to do it well and spend time on it. The best founders do that, and their hiring reflects it.

We're still learning about how to do a great job, but we've never struggled with why is it important. You know, for both Sanjay and I, when we started the company, really, the goal was to build, you know, the best place to attract the world's best team, the best place to work. And a lot of everything else we did was kind of derivative from that, including, you know, really, you know, building a great business and a great business model. So we've always been very passionate about talent and it's always been super clear to, to me and all of my staff and all of our managers. I think if you're taking a long term view on the company, it's kind of obvious that, like, you're your future. You know, the opportunity for any company is just going to be a function of the team you have together. And so if you're not prioritizing investing and building that team, right, it just, it makes it way harder for you to accomplish your longer term business goals.

I'm curious, when the company is really early and you do need to start building those core people, but you're still working on the product or, you know, you're not even, you're not even out of stealth yet. And like, how do you start assessing who you need on your team and go about working with the talent partner? Like with working like with Greylock, there's.

A couple different dimensions. I think one kind of broader comment is that, you know, the bottleneck in growing companies 10 years ago was capital, right? And, you know, there was fewer great opportunities, there's a lot more talent. You know, it's kind of easier to recruit people, but it's really hard to get, you know, capital. Now it's flipped, right? Where there's 1,000 venture capitalists, right? A thousand, you know, millions, billions of dollars to invest in companies. And therefore, you know, and really, talent is the bottleneck. Certainly true for our company, right? The number one bottleneck to all of our growth comes down to the team we build. And that also increases like, just the upside and the opportunity for us to have impact on our customers in the world. So really early on, we were very fortunate to work with the Greylock talent team. And early on it was kind of multidimensional. One was just trying to figure out, hey, what are some of the gaps that we have, right, in our skillset, right? To help us identify what are the right roles that we should be hiring. We also got advice about, you know, how we think about developing the organization. You know, what are the new functions we should be building, you know, when, when is it too soon to hire a sales team or a marketing team, right? So there's some just like strategic guidance. And the other side of the spectrum, we also got a lot of like, very, very tactical help. So some people on Glenn's team and even some of our board members, they personally, you know, reached out to, you know, probably dozens or hundreds of candidates. And when you're just an unknown company no one's ever heard of, that's, you know, having the kind of credibility of a name like Greylock, you know, it doesn't, doesn't win you a candidate, but it will get you a meeting, right? And people at least kind of put their hesitations aside and kind of at least like, you know, try to listen and learn. And for us, that was really important because our company is kind of magical on the inside, but hard to see from the outside. So just getting people to come to the table and kind of Understand the quality of the team. Right. The importance of our mission. The like, just intellectual, you know, stimulation of like building a really high technology AI machine learning product that's very hard to see from the outside. So, you know, Greylock was extremely helpful, just, you know, bringing people to the table and giving us a chance to share. And so it was really kind of hands on, you know, in the short term. We were a young company. As we got bigger, right. You know, Greylock still helps a lot today, but it's a little bit more in a strategic world, helping us kind of, you know, develop our organizational chart, sometimes talking to more senior candidates, executives to give the investor perspective and also just the kind of the view of what does the talent market look like and how does abnormal really stand out, differentiate versus other companies from a business or team or culture perspective. When we started building our sales team, we wanted to hire our first business development representative. And this is a role I was very unfamiliar with. But we knew we wanted to find someone that was just the best of the best. And so I went onto LinkedIn and I just searched for the text number one, BDR. And my idea was like, hey, the best people in the world probably gonna brag about it. It's gonna be in their LinkedIn profile. And I found 10 people, right, in San Francisco that all this is back in the days before we hired more globally. I found 10 people that were all kind of very clearly extremely good at this job. And that was important. Cause we wanted to hire someone that could just not just do the work, but help kind of set up the best practices and systems today. And I reached out to LinkedIn to all 10 of these people. No one responded. Right. And I asked actually as sahm, one of our board members, to send a note, right, to each of these folks. And you know, I think I ended up meeting with three of them due to kind of, you know, sahm's, you know, email notes. And one of the guys we hired in the first year, right, you know, he helped us find probably like 30% of all of our kind of customer meetings. And then he got promoted to sales. And he's one of our top sales reps today. And so it's been a bit of a journey, right? And that's, I think that's a really successful outcome given just like I was so clueless about the role, I had to get feedback from Grelock about what to look for, you know, help finding the person, right? And then the person not just came in, like in finding a great person didn't just help us solve that, you know, solve that problem. This guy helped us set up all of our systems, our process. Right. He was our part time salesforce admin because he was so, you know, talented, motivated, then over time became one of our top sales reps. And so, you know, finding the right person and getting the right guidance about how to identify and attract that person, that can have unexpectedly high dividends over time. I mean, I think one of the challenges we have is that there's a hundred other companies that all say they're a machine learning cloud security company. And so when we talk to candidates, right. It's very hard for them to differentiate us for some other machine learning startup from the outside. So one area where the Greylock recruiting team and talent team has been really helpful is just kind of giving candidates like the inside view. Right. Hey, here's really what this company's up to. Right. And here's how they contrast to other companies. And oh, by the way, did you know that Abnormal Security is the fastest growing cybersecurity company and one of the leading machine learning companies. Right. In our entire portfolio. Right. Like that type of additional kind of input. Right. And kind of helping people benchmark. Where does this opportunity stand relative to the rest of the job market? There's kind of like some inside view there that only an investor can really share. It's harder for us to claim credibly via on our website or on a pitch.

Yeah, and that's something that brings us in nicely to this big part of landing a candidate, which is compensation. So if you've gotten far enough that you're going to start giving offers or making offers, there's a ton of money out there and not just from other startups, but from the big tech companies. So compensation's at an all time high. But, but I'm curious, like, what's that like to talk about compensation and like, has that changed over years?

The past, you know, four or five years? I think there's been some new laws passed in California and other states where you're not even allowed to ask for their compensation history. You know, there's a lot of good reasons behind that. It certainly has made recruiting a little harder. However, you know, you can find out a little bit more about what their expectations might be. Some people will be very transparent, some people will say make the best offer. So I think it's super important to then leverage whatever compensation data you can get your hands on. There's a lot of common sources out there for startups and then as you scale you'll probably bring in a comp consultant or a total rewards person to really help you define that, to make sure you are at market and obviously considering fairness and internal equity as well. You want to lead with a great offer. I don't think you want to screw around and have somebody feel slighted or insulted, you know, especially if they're, they're top talent and if they come back and negotiate, you know, they're only asking for a little bit more, a couple thousand shares or whatever it might be, you know, is it worth having that person walk versus getting them to a point to say yes? There's one example of a seed company that was in stealth mode a couple of years ago that we had submitted a candidate to. That candidate was also involved with another one of our companies. The second company played games with the offer and didn't meet the candidate where the candidate request the negotiation came back and the company didn't want to meet them at that ask. And then the stealth startup made them a great offer, got them in the door and a week later that candidate was dubbed as a game changer for the company just a week after starting there. So my advice is to lead with a good foot forward and be flexible for, for the best people.

I think when it comes to compensation, right, there's or even just generally motivations to join a company, there's a bunch of different dimensions and I'll say the majority of people that are looking to join a high impact, mission focused startup, compensation's not their number one thing, but it's certainly a thing. And I think that ultimately if you really want to find the best people in the world, you have to pay up. The best people in the world can make a ton of money any place. And so if you really want to be competitive, yeah, I think you have to really invest there, especially in this, you know, in this new talent market right post Covid, where everyone has 10x more job opportunities than a year ago. And there's just a, you know, you got to really, you know you're competing in a bigger market now. I think it's also really important that you have some sort of very clear and documented comp philosophy and framework to make sure you're being fair to candidates and to the company as well, especially as you scale. And the challenge is like everyone has different expectations, right. Some people want to be paid twice as much or half as much. Right. And any of those extremes unfair to the candidate and unfair to the company. So I think in the spirit of partnership, we talked about recruiting not being a sales process, but being this kind of mutual partnership exploration. Right. You want to get something that is fair for both. You know, nine times out of 10, right. That does exist. But I think without that kind of structure and framework, it's very easy to be a little bit too ad hoc. Cash compensation, stock compensation, those are must haves, right? So it's also really important for companies, when they think about compensation, to think about these other dimensions, right? Yes, you have to have good compensation, but that's not good enough anymore, right? You all start to score high to the dimensions, right? Mission, career opportunity, learning opportunity, and also have a fun place to work. Right. People don't just want to join a company and fill out, you know, JIRA tickets all day. They want to learn and grow and feel like they're contributing to, like I'm mission in the world. As Glenn said, you gotta, you know, you have to play it straight and really think about this as a, you know, a partnership rather than a sales process.

Right. How many people are at abnormal?

We have 300 people today and growing to 600 next year.

Wow. So you're getting ready to experience some major growth internally. And so something that will help you get there is having what Glenn has always said to me of like having a culture of recruiting. It's something that you're always thinking about your employees, employee obsessed. You really want to have an ongoing evolving system that can scale and breeds an environment where people are always progressing.

Culture just comes down to behaviors and values, right? So I think at its most core, you actually have to really value building a great team and you have to value talent and you have to prioritize that through your behaviors. That needs to be visible. So I mean, I can, as CEO, I can say recruiting and talent's important. If I'm not spending 10 hours a week talking to candidates and trying to figure out how to make us a better place to work or a better place for people to learn and grow, then like, does it really matter? So I think that, you know, humans are really good at picking up on these signals, right? These behavioral cues and clues. And so I think it's really important that you actually have to care about it, right? And invest in it. And that's kind of like the most foundational thing. And I think also you have to like explicitly tell people that it's important, but also the why behind it. Why is it so important for us, right, as a machine learning AI company, for us to hire, you know, the best people in AI, Right. You know, I think giving the context behind. Well, actually we're in an adversarial market where attackers always trying to outsmart us. And so we have to be one step ahead. Right. And from a technology perspective, every single day. And to do that right, we need to bring in the best minds from around the world, from different industries for us to be competitive. And actually, if we don't do that, we cannot be a business because as soon as we fall behind attackers start winning, our product starts being crappy, all our business goes away.

Right. And Glenn, maybe you can talk about this a little bit. Having that system and that culture in place is also critical when you're making sure that you're hiring an employee population that is representative of the communities we actually live in. Can you talk a little bit about what that looked like at some of your previous jobs, like at Slack?

You know, I think what Slack did really well, even before I got there, diversity and inclusion was talked about all the time, like in channels, in all hands. It was talked about in team meetings. I mean, it was everywhere. And so I think that created buy in and it was part of this, like everyone was on board to focus on it and do a good job to attract, you know, underrepresented talent from non traditional backgrounds to the company. So putting that in practice from a recruiting standpoint is not always. There's no silver bullet here. But I think what we did really well was we set up a recruiting team focused on going outbound to underrepresented talent, being very deliberate about who we were sourcing. That was one, two. You know, we did a lot of events and programs, partnered with organizations like Code 2040, et cetera. We built our university program to be focused solely on underrepresented talent to make sure we were bringing in some, some newer, fresher talent to convert after their internships. And then generally, you know, I mentioned this a little bit earlier around just the competitive market, but you know, opening roles earlier and being opportunistic with great talent and not overlooking great people and the abilities they can bring for particular roles. And even if you don't have a role open, you know, maybe you can open one as well.

Right. So giving yourself the time to be patient, to find the best people who you're looking for, but also once you find them, being able to move fast.

Yep.

Yeah. So today a lot of companies are actually doing great. Everyone's raising money, everyone's getting customers, everyone's really putting their best face forward and candidates have a lot of choice. But when they're really going to figure out like, okay, who's the ideal company for me to work with? Like, how do you really differentiate yourself to make someone really like want to learn more and think this is the company I want to work with? These are the people I want to get to know. These are the people I'm least interested in meeting out of all these other people who are reaching out to me.

Yeah, I get asked a lot by candidates what to be thinking about as they're exploring startups and I always kind of give them a list of key criteria that I would be following if I was in their shoes. And you know, one, who, who the founders are, what's their background track record? You know, have they been founders in the past or you know, had successful careers to date? Who are the investors and what are the investors? Track records. Right. I think that goes a long way, you know, versus the ones that have lots of investments and maybe not as many, you know, positive outcomes. And then, you know, looking at the team, the product, the impact they can have, fast forwarding a few years down the line, where do they think they can grow there? And is the team and the, and the founders, are they going to be able to, you know, support that growth and you know, be solid people to be partnered with and then at the end of the day advising on, you know, what risk can you take? Right. Like you got to consider your family, you got to consider what you're optimizing for and what motivates you and what makes you happy. And I think that at the end of the day is what I'd like to advise people on is to do what makes them happy at the end of the day. But don't overlook all of the great opportunities to grow their career and grow their finances going to startups.

Yeah. And Evan, have you heard from candidates or people who maybe became abnormal employees, what was it that stood out about the company? What's really resonating with people for context?

We are a very high paced company. Right. We quadrupled revenue this year. We tripled it last year, we'll triple it again next year. So that attracts, you know, that's a uncomfortable environment. Right. It's not like a, in some ways it's not a fun job. Right. It's like challenging, stressful. So we've seen the people that have kind of been drawn toward us and you know, in, and the people that have been most successful, they're really craving kind of like that uncomfort because their primary motivation is to learn and grow. Our team tripled this year. So when the people that I think have been really attracted to abnormal security so far, people that are looking for almost like more responsibility than they deserve, right? Like, the company is growing so quickly. They're like, hey, let me come in. And I want to take on more leadership and I want to be in an environment and culture that's both going to give me those opportunities, but also will kind of train, educate me. Right? And I want to work with great people that can help me really up my game. I think those are the people that just kind of naturally attracted to the kind of growth rate of the company. And I think it's aligned with our general recruiting strategy. We try to find people that are smart, humble, hungry. We want to find, you know, we require, right. As just our, you know, because of our business model and our market, we require people with like high ownership and high accountability. People that are very, very customer focused. And people have ambition for always optimizing, improving to make sure we're always getting better 1% a day. That's the perfect profile across all our different roles. So that's our recruiting strategy now for us to be successful recruiting those folks, because those are people that are in high demand, right? There's thousands of companies that love to hire those folks. We have to be very intentional about how do we differentiate ourselves from the other hundred companies or 1000 companies that look just like us, Right? They're also the fastest growing company in their submarket. I'm a product manager, so I use the product management analogy. I think a lot of companies just focus on the talent marketing and say, hey, like, what's our pitch to like, candidates? Right? But I think that you also need to have this product development component we have to think about for the people that you're trying to attract. How do you actually make your company a better place to work, a better place, you know, for us, making it a better place to learn and grow. So we've tried to invest in many of these programs, right? One is something we call abnormal business school, where you bring in kind of almost like guest lecturers that are entrepreneurs, executives, investors, right? To go kind of teach and train the next generation of leaders. Hey, here's what you can be doing to best take advantage of opportunity to set you up for future entrepreneurship, right? So those are things we're doing on the, on the talent or the product development side to make us a better place to learn and grow. And then once you have that core, right, Then you can then market that and say, hey, here's why. Abnormal is unique, right? Unlike Other startups that are only 300 people, we invest in all these programs to make sure that you're going to get more responsibility, more ownership. Right. You're going to have faster career trajectory. And, and we can evidence that by showing them, you know, all these programs we have inside the company. So that is like a great, you know, talent strategy for the people we want to hire. It may be totally inappropriate for other companies, right. That don't want to give that level of ownership responsibility to their team. So I think just having alignment between the recruiting strategy, the kind of talent product development where you're really building the best careers for people, or the career opportunities, and then kind of lining that to your talent marketing and recruiting process, when those things are sync in sync, where I think you can execute a hiring plan very effectively, and if you.

Can get everyone to be speaking that same language, from the recruiters to the hiring managers to the interviewers, then I think that story will come across to the candidates and help more people be attracted to the company. For sure.

Yeah. And candidates should be asking when they talk to companies, hey, why is this a better place for me to work than any other place? And if the company can't answer that, let alone create, show evidence of like, hey, here's examples of how we can deliver on that claim. Right. Then are they really differentiating the market? Probably not. They're just one of the one in the pack.

Very cool. And piggybacks a lot on what Kevin Wang, who's your VP of engineering, Evan, who was on the podcast a few months ago, he was saying, we make it very clear in the beginning, everyone ships code on their first day, and it's a little intimidating. And it's also exciting for the right candidate. And it's like, okay, like you said, that responsibility, that ownership and that, like, okay, I'm going to hit the ground running. And maybe I don't have to make a product that's going to be sold the first day, but I'm definitely going to start working right away. So that's really cool.

And I think those type of questions are really good because they're qualifying, right? The best people kind of qualify themselves in. They're like, that sounds awesome, right? Because I know if you're doing that, you're probably going to make a bunch of mistakes along the way. So you must be okay with that as a culture, right? And there's some people that say, hey, that is not for me. I cannot do that. And maybe it's not the right place to work, but I think Anything you can do upfront in that recruiting process, really the mutual fit discovery process to really kind of have both the candidate and the company qualify themselves in or out. Right. That's good for everyone to really understand what is the environment that we're going into. Because ultimately, for anyone to be successful, it's got to be a great mutual fit.

Quality and fit are probably the number one things good hiring managers and recruiters can do. And if you can filter people out early, if things aren't aligned, that saves everyone time. And, you know, you might be able to convince people, but, you know, you don't want to, you know, waste a lot of time trying to do that and then have them say no at the end after hours of everyone's time.

Was spent or say no three months into the job. Right? Like, hey, actually, like, you know, I didn't really like, this is not the culture that's for me, you know, maybe, hey, I don't care about customer. I don't care about customer impact. So just the wrong place for me. Right? Like, you want to figure that out early on for everyone's sake. Granite for the company. Our job is to help every candidate we talk to get to the right job for them. Sometimes with us, sometimes with some other company. And the more we can be servicing that talent market, that's again, good thing for everyone.

Great. Evan Glenn, thank you so much for joining me today. I learned a ton and I know our audience will as well. So thank you for being on Gray Matter. I really appreciate your time.

Thanks, Heather. Thanks, Evan. It's great to be here.

Thanks, Heather. Super excited to chat.

That concludes this episode of Gray Matter. If you liked what you hear, Please subscribe at SoundCloud, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. To find all of our content, check out our website@greylock.com and follow us on Twitter reylockvc. I'm Heather Mack and thanks for listening.