The Art of Interviewing 10x Engineers with Dan Portillo and Wade Chambers | Greymatter

Welcome to Gray Matter, a series that shares entrepreneurial stories from company builders. This is the second part of a two part interview. Greylock talent partner Dan Portillo talks to Wade Chambers, the head of revenue engineering at Twitter. In this podcast, Dan and Wade discuss the recruiting and building of exceptional teams. Wade outlines the elements of a strong interview process and tells us what he looks for when evaluating new potential team members. For more news and podcasts, please visit news.greylock.com this is Dan Portillo at Greylock Partners. I'm here with Wade Chambers, former VP of engineering at telepart, now an engineering leader at Twitter. Wade, thanks for being with us today.

Excited to be here.

I want to talk a little bit about recruiting and interviewing. So what is your philosophy on recruiting?

I find that historically people look at talent along one axis and it's too narrow. People generally think of in terms of how exceptional is a person technically and so from, you know, the top 1% to the top 50%, et cetera. And you start to break people into bands and like there's an A player and there's a B player and a C player, et cetera. And the way that you go and find out whether somebody's qualified or technically competent or amazing is you ask them a series of questions that are intended to see how they think and what their experience levels are in certain subject matters, et cetera. All meaningful to do, but also woefully inadequate. And the problem is, is that I think that if you think about a different axis of how aligned are they with the company, you start to get a more three dimensional picture of how well a person is going to do at your company. And so if you think about it, some of the things that we were actively looking for at Teleport is I want to make sure that somebody has a growth mindset. I want to make sure that they're constantly learning and they're not afraid of new challenge and they believe it's within their ability to learn and apply that within a short period of time. I look for people who have applied intelligence. They have that ability to say, look, I'm not just going to do what somebody asked me to do. I want to make sure that I'm optimizing for the right answer for the company. I want to make sure that somebody's a cultural ad, they're going to come in and make the environment better. As a result, they're not going to consume from it, they're going to produce and give back to the environment. And there's things like intellectual curiosity there's engagement and how they're going to engage others. There's that sense of developing others that needs to be there. And last but definitely not least is I want to make sure that somebody's not an asshole. Right? They're not going to walk into the organization and it's going to be all about them and they're going to have the rough edges that are actually going to detract from, from the team. And so to that end, if you're going to look at one, whether somebody's technically qualified or not and then number two, are they aligned with the values and the purpose of the organization? You need to alter how you look for people and you need to alter the interviewing format in which you find out whether somebody is a good fit for the company. They could be great at another company and suck at yours, and they could suck at a different company, be amazing at yours. And I've seen both examples. So how do you adjust that? Right. And so I think that you start to have, you start to set up a process that allows you to investigate both areas. I also think that if you're going to find people who are aligned with the organization, they need to feel like they found their tribe as they come in an interview with you as well. So you want them walking in and walking through the entire process and at the end of the process going like, oh my God, I found my tribe. I need to work there because I'm going to be surrounded by people who are just like me or that I feel like I'm going to grow and learn from. And so I think that it's necessary to sort of help people see that as they walk through the interview process and so that it doesn't feel like a cold clinical evaluation. You're not there to get a physical. Right. You're deciding whether you want to join and have a relationship with a company.

I think a lot of companies forget that it's a two sided process, that you're making a decision and they are also making a decision throughout the same steps in the same conversations that you're having.

It's so true, and it really is. They're interviewing the company as well as the company interviewing them. And if you can come at it from that point of where first and foremost you're an advocate for the company, but second, you need to be an advocate for the potential employee. Right. So help them understand where their fit's going to be or whether the fit is going to be there or not. And so you need an interview process that helps facilitate that understanding. So we tried to structure it along those ways to try and help meet all of those those goals. And so at Teleport we would have an initial phone screen where it was clearly intended to find out whether somebody was technically competent or not, or whether you can do that from the first phone screen, but also do it in such a way that helped expose the company to the potential employee as well. As an example, during the first phone screen, we would actually ask questions of like, hey, how are you doing? All of the normal, sort of warm them up. And then as part of that warm up process, it would be, so what are you looking for in your next company? How are you going to evaluate that company? What's the criteria that you're going to use? And what we're looking for is does the person understand themselves and what they value? And therefore are they looking at a company through a principled lens of what's going to help me grow, what's that next wave of development that I need to go through and do they have an opportunity for me to do that, or are they running from something? They're looking at Google, Facebook, Twitter, and five startups that are on dramatically opposite ends of the spectrum with different types of experiences, with different type of learning that's going to come from them.

No framework for a decision whatsoever.

They have no framework for a decision. Well, if we're going back to applied intelligence as being one of our core values. Right. They're not demonstrating that that early on now that that can be okay. Right. Because a lot of individual contributors going through college and other things haven't sort of been prepped for that. If they're more junior in their career, you're going to give them a little bit more leeway because you, you might have to help them understand that. You go from that to asking a technical question. And we have some people who are amazing at doing these sorts of things. But one of my favorite, asking somebody on the phone, what's your favorite programming language? Pick. Okay, on a scale of 1 to 10, where would you say you're at? Okay, so you're saying a seven? Well, I'm going to say I'm a seven. 2. What's the hardest question you can think of to ask me whether I actually know that programming language at the same level that you know it. So think about what you just did there. Right? It's like you now have put the person on the other end of the line into a position of power of where they get to operate from a level of expertise of where they're at, but you actually get to learn about where they're at based on the question that they ask. And so then if you can actually pass their test and then at the other end of it say, okay, and if I was to add this additional part to the question, if I was going to extend your question, want to do this, how would you answer that? Right now you've demonstrated your competence, which all of a sudden the person gets to see. If I'm the average of the five people I spend the most time with, this person who's asking me questions actually just answered my question is now upping it and passing it back to me. I'm going to be able to learn from this person. And so then if they can answer that, that should be an area where they're comfortable because they actually set up the base question in the beginning. So that's an example of where I think that you can find out technical competence, you can find out whether they're going to be a cultural ad, whether they have that ability to apply intelligence to the question after the fact, etc. So we'll ask a series of other questions along those lines, but it's going to be in that same vein of determine fit, determine where they're at, technically determine where they're at personally determine where they're at from a social aspect and are they feeling like they're aligned with the company, they're going to be a good fit.

Has that ever backfired? Has someone picked like latex or ocaml or some random language and the person wasn't able to do it?

Yeah, but I mean, so you adapt and say like, look, I'm not even going to say that I'm an expert in that language. What's your second favorite language?

Something people actually use.

Something that I may know.

Latin isn't a good one to use for this particular language. Let's pick something people actually are using to develop stuff with.

You have to find some common core there, but generally you can map it to some domain, some, some area, some language, etc. That there is some commonality the on site.

What does that look like? What's that experience?

Yeah, so we try and set this up of where it hopefully feels very different than other companies that you might interview with in that we want to differentiate from the cold interview factories that you might feel. So you feel like you've got a chance to know what it would be like to work at this company. And so we'll set this up of where, you know, there's basically three rounds of interviews in a single day. We try and make sure that it's two on one and so that there's the interviewee and then we'll have two interviewers in the room at the same time. That's not to try and flood the interviewer or I'm sorry, the interviewee. The real purpose is to make sure that we understand it. And if you're asking the questions and trying to like stay in front of the candidate, you actually have somebody there who's listening and being able to watch and help facilitate at the same time as well as we can give feedback to the other interviewers after you come out of the room as well. We've had oftentimes where somebody will come out of the room and go like, oh my God, that was a great candidate. And the other person is like, well, you fed him or led him to the answers all of the time. And so as a result of having two people in the room, you have that ability to sort of correct and have a more honest assessment of where if people are coming out with the exact same view of things, that's probably more concrete. If like one's exceptionally strong, one's like a no, then you can try and figure out where the disconnect is there. So we try and set everything up to be two on one. We actually have three rounds. In the first round we try and go wide, the second round we try and go deep. And in the third area we do something called top grading. And I'll get into that more in a second. In the first round, obviously I think it's better if you can give a candidate something that feels representative of work that we do on an ongoing day to day basis. The problem is I feel like it's, it's hard to always get somebody to go implement something where it's going to take four to six to eight hours of time. And so another thing that we found that that can be very representative is to actually give somebody a bunch of code and actually get them to come in and do a code review of that code. It means that they actually have had to understand the system and you get to evaluate at what level they critique. Are they talking about syntax, are they finding bugs, are they talking about design, are they talking about overall architecture? At what level does their thinking stop and can they go all the way through it? And so we have a program that we've written in most common languages that are used today and it's purposely bad. The whole point is to give them plenty of food for conversation. And so we'll get them to go through that and see how they pull that apart and then we'll engage with them on like how we could improve this and so what are the things that we would want to do and it's sort of a collective brainstorming session of how we actually might fix that and what we might want to do moving forward. From there we'll extend into other areas that are domain specific. I mean if somebody's coming in for machine learning, it's going to feel very different than if somebody's coming in to be a front end engineer versus a back end infrastructure engineer, etc. And so it'll vary some the types of questions that we ask in based on what type of role that you're coming in to interview for. Coming out of that interview, those two people will compare notes and not necessarily to pass that on to the next person or poison the well, but if you get to a a confident no, there is no reason to waste the interviewee's time anymore. Right. You need to go back in and give the details of why we're not moving forward heart first, like figure out a way to try and give that feedback. And it's probably largely that their experience or that their capabilities don't match the need that exists inside of the organization. But shortcut it, don't waste people's time, other interviewers as well as the interviewees time. If you've got to a hard no. If you found evidence that there's strength in the candidate, like there's something there that we believe is valuable to the company and that we should continue to evaluate, then we want to let that move forward. That first interviewing team needs to sync with the second interviewing team. Not to poison the well or tell them exactly what they think, but to pass on. We were in this area, we didn't have a chance to complete it or we had some follow on questions that we wish we had gotten a chance to. If you get a chance to talk about this, please focus in these few areas. So based on that then the DEEP team would go in and there's a set of questions or different coding examples that we try and get into to help solve a problem where algorithmically you need to come up with a good answer for and generally we'll try and pick things that have multiple levels to it. So the question is could you get to the base level or could you go to, you know, a more optimal answer or could you get all the way to the best answer?

Is that theoretical? Is that More a problem that you've actually had to deal with that tell apart.

We try and make it as connected to real problems as possible. What we try not to do though is make it so domain specific that no one's going to have a chance of being able to come and solve it.

Yeah, it's seldom the people understand your business better than you do.

Right. But one thing that we do is to make sure that everyone who's going to ask the question has had to answer the question before as well. So everyone's had a chance to go through and think about like how they thought about it, how they were challenged, was it fairly presented, etc. And so then they have a basis for being able to understand how the candidate's going to feel at that point in time and where they can provide more hints and help them move through it. The whole point is not to stump the candidate. Like I try and emphasize that over and over. Your job is not to break the candidate. Your job is to try and correctly assess where their strengths are. Are there strengths that we can leverage? And it may be that they don't represent themselves in the most positive way. Like there's lots of introverts out there who aren't necessarily going to engage well with an extrovert that they feel like they're, they're being overpowered with. So you may have to try different interviewing styles to be able to find the right way. Maybe they don't answer your question. Does that mean you stop the interview? No, it means you switch your style. Go talk to them about something that they've done that's deep. Go talk to them about their most recent project. What was the part that they had responsibility for? Oh, that's interesting. Tell me more. Why'd you decide that? Oh, what was the problem that you had? Keep diving until you get to understand that understanding of just how deep they had to go in their implementation. Ask lots of questions, make sure that you understand just how much they had responsibility for.

So when you go into work history, is that part of the depth side of things?

It's not. It's not. It's just that if you're presenting them with a problem that they can't solve, it may be the way that you're presenting it as opposed to their ability. And so I try and emphasize like, look for strength in multiple different ways. And one way is to get them to answer your question. Another way is to actually leverage their experience to go find out things. So if you're have strong interviewing abilities, you should be Able to dive into their experience and try and understand the depth there and then switch it around. Like, oh, well, if you had had to do X, how would you have implemented that? Look for strength in whatever way that you can find it. Ideally, 90 to 95% of it is being able to engage in a problem that's presented and work working through it. If you have to go and actually engage in their past, they'd better be exceptionally strong because otherwise there's going to be. I mean, you can't always map into their view of things when presenting. Here's what we need to do in the next version of a project. So once we get out of the depth portion of the interview, then we have a sync where we bring those two interviewing teams back together. And first thing you do, you walk into the room. Everybody shut their eyes. Thumbs up, thumbs down. Everybody hands in front of you. No bias. Actually talk about whether you're strongly supportive of it or whether you're a no on this. Everybody open your eyes. Okay, now let's actually talk about this. Is everybody's thumbs up? Then the real question is just how strongly they are thumbs up. If there's a mixed panel and that we've got people going thumbs down and some thumbs up, then we try and look for the strengths and where the weaknesses are at. Do we feel like that's actually something that we would say no to because it's going to prevent them from being successful here at the company. So we always start with what's the strength? Try and find that out. And it can be technical, it can be interpersonal, it can be social. I mean, there has to be a technical, technical competence bar that that's maintained. But I'm looking for strengths because you need different personalities. You need different types of people on each and every team. And I'm constantly looking for, if I've got a team that doesn't have that outgoing, questioning mindset in it, like, how can I introduce that person into the team knowing that they're technically competent, but they're going to bring a different dimension to the team and I look for that. So we're constantly looking for strengths based on the two rounds. And they're, you know, probably an hour and 15 minutes to an hour and a half, so they're not shortened. It's like take it through to its logical conclusion. Make sure that while you're in the room, you are somebody that that person would want to work with. You're a magnet for the, the organization. Those people feel like they know what it's going to be like to work with you. And they're excited by that. So then coming out of all of that we have that sync, we discuss the candidate and then it's the responsibility of the hiring manager. And generally I'll go into the room a lot. I care about the quality of people that's coming into my organization. So this is a chance for me to demonstrate that to every candidate that's coming in if they've made it to that level. Like the engineering team is largely thumbs up. We've got four people that have given feedback on their technically deep, good problem solving wide in the right way. It feels like they would want to work with this person on a go forward basis. And so now it's up to the hiring manager and myself or some other person that go in and do a top grading. And top grading is really trying to figure out the pattern of this person. Why do they choose their roles? What are they looking for? What are they trying, where are they trying to take their career? What is the pattern of their work experience and is it aligned with what they're saying or does it suggest something very different? Examples then there's no way that you should say no to somebody like this. But somebody that is at a job 18 to 24 months and then is constantly on to the next thing, well that may be good, that may be bad, but one thing it says is they probably haven't had to live with their decisions long term. Their ability to create strong connections with team and with the organization that's not actually demonstrated in that sort of work cycle. So there's patterns that are there both hidden as well as exposed. And it's your job to understand like the person and, and what motivates them and why this would be a good fit. The way that that works is that you go through, let's say the last five years worth of experience, maybe seven years worth of experience. And for each role that they had, why did they pick that role? What was the challenge that they had in entering into that team or that project? What was the high point of that project? What was the low point of that project? Who did they work with? Who did they respect the most inside of that team? What was their name? How do you spell it? And you want to get to the point where like you feel you're getting an honest assessment of their self assessment of how they did and you're asking them questions along lines of when I talk to that person, how are they going to describe you to me? What were they going to say? Was like the accomplishment, what were they going to say is like the strengths that you have that helped you achieve that, if they were going to say what your growth areas were, what would they highlight? I think this gives you the ability to see, is there a pattern there? And are they saying going from one place to the next is that they're a consistent pattern of that strength and.

You'Re testing for self awareness as well?

Absolutely.

Do they understand their gaps and how people, like, what is the difference between how they view themselves and how other people view them?

Absolutely. And then you dig in too, into those areas. Right. Like, one of the things that I pretty strongly believe is there's kind of a Venn diagram that exists between product engineering and design. And if any one of those circles is much, much larger than the other two, very lopsided things happen. And so there has to be tension, some tension between each one of those circles. And so engineering needs to be pushing back on product and understanding why something is happening. Is this the right thing? And product needs to be pushing back on engineering and saying, like, are you building an ivory tower or is this the right thing to be doing at this point in time? Same thing with design in each one of those areas. If there's not an example of some tension between the various teams of where, like, it got personal, it felt somewhat heated, and it just didn't feel like the right thing was happening. You know, are they pushing enough? And so I constantly dig in for like, where was that? What was the example? And most of the time, people who are passionate about what they do, there's. There's actually examples of that, but there's also examples of them working through that and solving it in a meaningful way. My goal in all of this is to try and understand them, their strengths and what they bring to the table, as well as understand the company, the role that we have, and whether there's a fit between the two. I think if I can understand that, I can help articulate that to the candidate that's inside and why it's valuable for them to be at our company and how it's aligned with their growth that's in front of them and help them sort of self select in or out inside of that and be an advocate for both the company and for them. As a result of going through this top grading exercise, I've been able to determine what the pattern is or largely. And at the end of it, I have something that I do which is to tell them exactly what I've learned about them. So very specifically you know, I will set it up to say, hey, based on the interview feedback that I got from the team as well as these conversations here, I'd love to tell you how I see you or what I've heard, and I'd love for you to give me some feedback on where I put too much emphasis or not enough emphasis. Right. So this gives them the ability to sort of correct. And then I can dig into any area where I wasn't correctly assessing and we can figure out whether there's patterns or examples of things that help balance that out. But I will get into very specifically, you know, here's your skills, here's your strengths. This seems to be a pattern. This feels like you've demonstrated this over and over. Here's your growth area. It feels like the next role that you take on, if that's an area you want to develop, should have these characteristics associated with that. You would probably look to be surrounded by a team that has a lot of these skills or a good mentor in this area, etc. And walk completely through it and spend as much as 5, 10 minutes trying to make sure that it feels accurate and that the person on the other side of it is like, no, that is incredibly insightful and very much who I am and what I'm looking for. That achieves two purposes for me is, one is I want to make sure that I correctly understand and therefore can match the them up with the right role and set them up for success. And number two is if I'm on the other side of the table feeling understood and feeling like I believe the person on the other side of the table can actually help get me where I want to be is going to be an attractant for that person who's interviewing there. So if there's been a whole system set up where I feel like I know what it would be like to work with each one of these people, I. I feel like they're all as strong as I am or stronger. I feel like there was no overlap. It was very buttoned up, it was very coordinated. I feel like in three rounds of interviews I've been exercised more than the six or seven rounds at other companies with individuals who largely came in and asked me the exact same question in a slightly different format. And sometimes the exact same question in the exact same format. Right? Like, this is a team that feels different. This is a team that I want to be associated with. I'm going to learn more here. This is going to accelerate my career as a result of being here. When it gets to the other end of it. Right. The I want them to join for intrinsic reasons, not extrinsic reasons. I don't ever want somebody to have to damage their family by, you know, dramatically reduced salary. I'll be competitive, but I want people to be with the company, with the team for the right reasons because I am going to have a much better organization with people who hold each other mutually accountable for the results and are able to accomplish much, much more than a working group out there. This will be a team. We'll often give an offer the same day and so as they're driving home from the interview, we've had a chance to huddle. We know how the candidate is going to add value to the team and we can give them a call and say, look, it feels like you are a great team member. This feels like a good tribe for you to be a part of on a go forward basis. As a result, we want to make you an offer and we think that you're going to be excited about this. We've also tried to make sure that we've put together the 30 day plan for you and it starts with day one, you fixing something and pushing it out into production. We've already found the person that's going to help you through that the first week. We want to make sure that you have to take on something larger and you're going to work with these very different teams and largely these are going to be connected to both your strengths and your growth areas. And inside of the first month, we've already identified your first project and we're actually starting to think about, you know, who should mentor and help coach through that as well. So we're already starting to think about like how to set you up for success and how to start your, your development here. We're hoping that you were excited about the actual process and you got a chance to see the team and you understand how it would be to work here. So we will make you a competitive offer and we look forward to you joining. Oftentimes we'll set it up to have a 24 hour turnaround and we get to see whether the candidate has actually worked through enough interviews to understand that this place is different, these people are different. We've created a system that creates excellence inside of products and teams and if they recognize that there's nothing that's going to keep them from joining that team.

Do you ask them if they're ready for the offer or if there's any outstanding questions before you deliver it or do you assume the process has already answered all those.

No. So in the later rounds of, like, the top grading, one of the conversations that or one of the pieces of conversation that I have is, if I was to extend you an offer right now, would you accept it? And the whole point is not to try and pressure them into accepting. The whole point is, is like, what piece of information don't you have that. That I can help create clarity now around or go get the information that you need that helps you get to a point where you can say no or yes. So as a result, I have a large hint at sort of where they're leaning with all of these things. And if there's, you know, if we were the first company that they interviewed with and they're, you know, nervous because they don't know how to evaluate companies, like, I'll try and help coach them through that, and I'll do that in a largely unbiased way, right. Based on where they're at, what they need to learn. Here are the things that I found to be true in my career. Here's the things that I think that you should be focusing at at this point in your career. Here's how I think that we measure up against that. But, like, here's a criteria by which you could evaluate other companies as well. So I think that a large part of that is understood. And I probably wouldn't extend an offer until I knew that they were ready to make a decision. But I'm also not going to wait. Right. If somebody needs to interview with five different companies, I don't think that they truly understand what they're looking for or they're trying to go figure out who's going to make them the best offer. That's not the person that I want inside of my team. I want the person who is actually aligned and motivated by what we're doing.

And what's the role of references in the interview process?

Huge, right? And I think it's both. It's twofold. Number one is I'm constantly looking for the pieces of information that are going to help me set somebody up for success. Walk me. And in each one of the reference checks, I often find that I'm 50 minutes an hour into the conversation and can keep going. The point is, like, make sure that you understand from somebody else's point of view how to set somebody up for success. What are their strengths? What are their growth areas, what have been patterns of how this person has overachieved in the past, what was the environment like? What can I do To. To help set that up here as well. What sort of mentoring helped? What sort of coaching? How does he respond to feedback? How does she take on new challenges? Right. Like try and find examples of that. And I want to get past the shiny veneer. Right. I want to get to the point where it feels like we're actually having an honest conversation about someone, and initially everybody's going to say nice things, and you have to get into what are the examples. Top grading helps with that. Right. And so if you've been able to use somebody as a reference that you were talking about during the interview, you can actually say, hey, when I was talking to Jill, you know, she said that you might have said this was going to be a growth area for her when we talked, you know, can you help me understand that a little bit more? So the fact that Jill said it up front and that I was able to leverage, that gives license to the other person to actually be able to talk about that to some degree. I want to try and get to an honest assessment, not to knock somebody down, but to figure out how to set them up for success. The other thing that I think is that oftentimes people will overstate, sometimes understate their contributions in the past. And this helps create trust right up front. Right. If you can get to an honest assessment during the interview and then confirm that with other people after the fact, I think that early interactions are going to be based on that level of trust that was created during this. What they said and what other people were clearly able to give feedback on feels like it was one and the same. So I believe that the hiring manager should do the reference check. You shouldn't be outsourced. There's. The recruiter is not a good proxy for the hiring manager. The hiring manager needs to do it so that they can properly understand the new team member and make sure that they can leverage that past experience to help them grow inside of the role.

Have you been able to bring the things you did at Teleport to Twitter?

Yes, absolutely. Twitter, I mean, is a company that has made a lot of acquisitions in other spaces. And so there's other teams that we're doing interviewing very similar to Telepart. I think that Twitter is one of those companies that actually embraces a growth mindset. And so they're looking for where inside of the company is somebody doing something exceptional. And then how do we make this broadly available to the entire company to. To be able to leverage? And so I've seen a very active engagement from other teams to Learn from not only telepart, but from other parts of the business. And so that the best idea wins, the best system, the best process wins. And so I can say as an example, I know of five other teams directly inside of Twitter that have embraced that style of interviewing and are having success with. With it as well.

I mean, do you document everything? And has it been able to scale now that you go from a relatively small team at Telepar to a much larger organization?

So part of the challenges of this interviewing style is it's a little bit more complex to set up and to sort of facilitate as you go through because of the syncs and everything along those lines, there's a little bit more of an onus that's put on the interviewers to be responsible for looking for these things and providing feedback. Every team that I've engaged with actually gets excited by that. They don't run from it. There's the initial part of, oh, this feels like attacks. And then when they understand, like, what you're actually trying to do, they see it as growth. They see it as an opportunity to learn something new. And so they actively want to embrace it. I found that there's no limitation to how the scales outside of the ability to teach people how to do it. That's a problem in that it's not just the process, right? It's not just a here's a set of steps that you can go through. It's the shadowing somebody to see how it feels in person, to see where it's. No, you have to engage people. You have to draw it out of people. You have to find the best version of that person. You have to figure out what their strengths are. It's more than just, can they answer your question. And once you've seen that a couple of times, then it clicks, the light bulb goes on and you're able to actually start embracing it. That part doesn't scale well because you actually have to do the whole shadowing and then having somebody shadow you. And so it takes four, five, six interviews before you really get into the system of it. But I find that, like, regular interviewing processes as well, have a lot of those same characteristics. The problem is how many people do you have that can teach it? And it's rapidly growing.

I think companies use culture fit as a crutch to disqualify people in ways that are very not productive. And so you've talked a little bit about this, but you haven't been very specific. And you've never used the word culture fit. But I've seen it explained throughout. The way you engage with people and the mindset you're looking for. Would you just go into a little bit of detail of what does that mean? And if someone says, well, I don't think they're a culture fit, do you push on them for that?

So I want to understand. So I agree with you. Culture fit is a crutch.

Yeah. It's used in a very vague way.

It is, and unfortunately it's. Anything that is hard to describe kind of fits into that bucket a lot. I think that largely what I'm looking for are people who have that growth mindset and have the ability to work with others well to accomplish things, but they have that inherent drive. They want to achieve, they want to grow, they want to learn and teach others. It's a sense of putting the we over the me. Right. And when I look for that in people, generally very positive things come out the other side. I don't think that there's one perfect person that you can just, I want clones of that. It takes a variety of people to come together to create a high performance team. And so for Cultural Fit, I look for people who have similar values as the organization. They value learning, they value growing, they value the struggle, they value the lessons learned that come from that. They value being able to lift where they stand and drive things forward. They're persistent, they're diligent, they, they don't back away from challenge. It's the, the person that, if I knew they were working on Saturday, I would just come in to keep them company. I want the person that, if I call them at 4 in the morning, which I've had to do regularly, I know that they're, how do I help? And so I want that mindset. And I, I think that culture doesn't encompass all of those things. Right. I think that it's much more speaks to the quality of the person that I'm looking for.

Diversity has been a topic that's been discussed pretty regularly in Silicon Valley. What is your approach and how have you thought about addressing issues around diversity and unintended bias?

I think diversity is important. One of the things that I mean, so there's been a lot of focus about diversity and bias and unintentional bias. And early on, like, you know, I had to wrap my head around that and make sure that if there were any unintentional bias wrapped in like I was seeing that, the, the last thing I want to do is chase anyone or exclude anyone that can help me win and increase my capacity to win inside of the organization. One of the things that helped drive that home for me was when interviewing women, if they saw things in a job description like were overly emphasized, aggressive or winning, or things along those lines that were masculine in nature, right? Like they were just on to the next thing, it felt like that wasn't going to be the place where they were going to win. I'd never even thought about that before. And once you can understand that there are things that can get injected into how you describe a role, how you interview for people, it's not like you're trying to exclude people, but the unintended results of some of the things that you might introduce into your language or your description or into your search criteria actually excludes or chases away certain parts of the population. How can you afford to have that inside of your process? And so it's really required us to go through and look for those types of language, look for those process, make sure that we're trying to take bias out of the selection, screening, interviewing criteria so that we're throwing as broad a net and finding the best people that we can possibly find.

Wade, thank you very much. It's been a great conversation. I've learned a lot and I really appreciate your time.

It's been great to be here. Thanks.