Your company needs mitochondria | A conversation with Sarah Tavel

Hi, Sarah. Really great meeting you. I'm Cristina. I lead marketing here at Terraform and very, very, very big fan and supporter of your content. I've read it already.

I appreciate that.

I've referenced a lot of your articles in my writing as well and was very excited when John mentioned you. I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of things that you've written about that relate a lot to how we run things at PairForm and wanted to just ask you a bunch of questions and get your thoughts on a couple of topics. Maybe if you want to first, I don't think you need any introduction, but maybe give a brief introduction.

Sure. So I'm Sarah. I'm one of the general partners at Benchmark. We're an early stage venture capital firm very focused on being able to partner with the most ambitious founders of their generation as the first board member. I spent a bunch of time in venture capital before Benchmark and did a little over, I guess, 3.5 years of real work when I joined Pinterest pretty early on after the investing in the Series A there. It was just 4 people when we invested and I was doing everything I could to help the company be successful as it really started to inflect and just realized I really want to be on the inside, not the outside. And so I got very lucky that Ben, the CEO, felt the same way. And I got to join the company as this like utility player when it was probably 20 people or so. And that ended up evolving into a product role. I became the first PM at Pinterest and then over my time there ended up kind of leading product for all the discovery experiences on Pinterest and left when it was about 650 people. So I probably, uh, I'm at the risk of extrapolating too much from my n equals 1 experience at Pinterest, but I do think that there are a lot of things that we did right, a lot of things that we did wrong. And, and then I get to kind of see a lot of pattern matching across the companies that I've been lucky to work with, both at Benchmark and at Greylock before Benchmark. And of course, the conversations we have internally. And so I'm looking forward to the conversation and love that you guys are thinking about this type of stuff.

That's great. John, do you want to give a brief introduction as well and maybe a couple of words on Paraform?

Yeah, sure. Sarah, thanks so much for making the time. And yeah, I'm John. I'm one of the co-founders of Paraform. Paraform is a marketplace where on one side there are employers, companies that are growing fast, filling the most important and difficult roles in their company. And on the other side, there are recruiters who can fill those positions. These recruiters are recruiting agencies, independent recruiters, headhunters. Talent partners that really just know a lot of great people. And yeah, we connect them to basically solve their most important problem, in our opinion, building a company, which is a big part of today's topic. Yeah, my background, I'll keep it very brief. I was born in South Korea, but I moved a lot growing up between the age of 4 and 18. I think I moved every 2 to 3 years, different country, different city, schools. Wow. And yeah, I studied robotics and law actually in college. I started my first company in Australia. We sold it to a bigger startup, worked there in product for a bit, and started Paraform 2 years ago. So I'll keep it brief.

That's great.

Nice. All right, let's kick it off. I don't like to pick favorites, but I do have one favorite article story from you, Sarah, and it's the one about Mitochondria employees. I think for the longest time, it was really tough for me to put into words what the ideal, like, early-stage employee looks like and what they do. For anyone who's like not familiar with the term, basically it's, and I'm sure you can explain it much better than I do, but people you hire, they think like founders, not just workers. They take extreme ownership. They think in the company's best interest and not just like their own career. And their impact goes beyond their own performance, but they sort sort of multiply team performance and they don't scale linearly. They essentially power startups the way the mitochondria powers cells. I would love to hear your thoughts on how do you filter for those employees? I think a lot of hiring processes, they optimize for skills like hard skills. Do they, are they a good programmer? Do they know how to sell? And then culture fit, like, do they get along with everyone? Do they want to work hard? But those are very, like, very general. If you were to, like, design a process from scratch for a startup, how would you go about filtering for those types of people?

It's a great question. So, there are a few things that come to mind for me when I think about that. It's a big question. So, there's, I'm going to try to be structured in how I answer it. The first is, you know, I think the best way to evaluate the potential of a person's future is honestly just to look at their past and the jobs they've chosen and the decisions they've made along the way, both as they navigated whatever company they were a part of And also as they made a decision to leave a company and join the next company. And so, I, you know, there are things that I look for, the, you know, why, like the intentionality of the jobs that they take in a company, like where, you know, how did they navigate different situations that they end up becoming this resource internally that took on more tasks over time, more types of roles, did they— I think personally in mitochondria, they tend to describe the company in a way that is more mission-aligned, more kind of values-aligned. And that actually is kind of the second thing, which is I think you really have to have clarity on what the values are of your company. And what the mission is. And then you are looking for people who are not just consistent with that, but actually you could see them being culture carriers for those values. And I find that mitochondria more than any other, you know, again, it's kind of like that spectrum where you have the people who act like founders and the people who act like mercenaries. And, and everybody is on a spectrum there. When you think about, and mitochondria act most like founders without being, having that affliction of being a founder. And so, when you think about like, what, what are the qualities in a founder? Like, they're going to work on things that they believe in with all their, their heart. And, and, you know, I always used to joke that I bled Pinterest red, like when, when, when you almost fuse your identity with the company that you're working in. That's what a founder does. And I think the people who act like mitochondria end up, as much as possible, really having their identity fused. Like, really, they believe in the mission, and the values that the company has are very kind of connected to them. And then, the third thing is that I just find that the best people then to really evaluate whether somebody else is going to be that type of mitochondria are your mitochondria. And having somebody who is that bar that, you know, at some point in your process, usually in the beginning days of a company, it's the founders themselves. But obviously, as the company scales, the founders can't be the final interview for everybody. And so, just making sure that you have one of those people who is the bar raiser, who is very much the culture carrier in their own way, that is a mitochondrion in the assessment of the company, doing an interview and building some kind of relativity there, I think, can be quite valuable. There's one more thing that I'll say, which is that I, I do think this is a DNA, and I kind of wrote this in the— my blog was like, mitochondria have different DNA than the rest of the cell. And I do think this is a different DNA of person. And typically this person is going to have some track record of responsibility-seeking entrepreneurship themselves, becoming a leader, starting something the, the first jobs that they'll have out of school will be more entrepreneurial in nature. The person who is more on the other side— and I don't mean to say mercenary, but more like on the employee side— they will join a big company. They will be at a Google or at a Meta or at, you know, whatever the company is. And then in a way, that first job, that first like real tour of duty you have post-college, I think is very imprinting on someone's DNA and how they think about kind of the way they're supposed to operate in a company. There's this great blog post by the founder of Waze that I highly recommend where he talks about like when Waze was acquired, he thought he was going to be able to keep the kind of Waze culture in his company despite being part of this bigger company. And of course, and it's kind of classic founder belief. And then you're met with the machine of Alphabet. And what he just realized is that when you're in an early-stage startup, your effort actually has a pretty causal relationship with the price per share of your company, because it's small enough. But when you're at a giant company, there's actually no causal relationship that you can discern on your effort and the price per share of the company. And so the only way for you to make more money, to, to be rewarded for your impact, is to be promoted. And that means managing up, that means getting more people who report to you, that means like within the narrow scope of your job excelling. And so if that's the culture that's imprinted on you in your first tour of duty, I think it's very hard to kind of change that orientation versus if your first tour of duty is joining a startup, starting your own thing, having a more entrepreneurial job, there's a very high propensity that that person is wired in a way of responsibility-seeking. Doesn't matter what the job is, it just matters what the company needs. That I count on.

The whole process is so interesting because you were mentioning how you were working with Ben in those early days of Pinterest. I highly doubt founders, when they start the company, they think about it in the same way, in the same sort of concept. Oh, I need to hire mitochondria. And I think it's a very, like, it's a two-way street. You have to have a certain type of founder who can inspire to get those types of employees. What do you think is on the founder? Like, what can founders do to sort of set the pace, set the example so that they can actually get to hire mitochondria people?

I would think that it is a culture of autonomy and impact and trust. You know, a, a culture that is more process-oriented or more micromanaging, of course, you know, and I don't blame founders for micromanaging. I think at some points you need to. But, but if there is a culture where it is like, stay in your lane, that's going to be very difficult. I will say that I, I, it's very hard proactively to recruit for this. It depends on the company, of course, and the stage of the company. But I find that actually the way I've seen companies as they scale be successful here is by making talent acquisitions. You, when you think about talent acquisition, you really are finding leaders that are this entrepreneurial mitochondria type DNA and bringing them in and empowering them. And they will not stay in their lane. They will not respect the process necessarily that you have established. And, and I think great founders embrace that. And there's a truth telling that happens with these people too, that is incredibly valuable for a founder to have. When I was at Pinterest, I made a few talent acquisitions and I arranged a quarterly dinner of all the founders that we acquired with Ben, the CEO. And I would sit in on those dinners and I just felt like it was almost like Ben, you know, when you're a CEO, you're just, things get bubble up to you that it's very hard to actually get the truth of what's happening. You get surrounded by people who want to make you feel good and want to be liked. And then founders don't care about that, I think. And so, you would have this dinner and it was like this truth moment of like, just tell it to me like it is. And he would get so much feedback. And so, I think like kind of back to your question, there is something about, you know, people need to feel seen and appreciated. And if you have a culture where you really recognize that there are this, like, small number of people who come in and can have a very outsized impact, and that you want that and you want to empower that, uh, I think that's a very special combination. Parker Conrad at Rippling is doing this in, in an incredible way right now, as an example.

Do you think it's essentially duplicating the founder into like multiple founders within the company?

Huh. I, it depends on the company. Of course, you can never duplicate the founder. Yeah. But you can, you know, what Parker has done so well, and he's talked about this in a few podcasts, is that they have this like unbelievable pace of product execution and being able to deliver new products to the customer, uh, and cross-sell, which gives their go-to-market really incredible leverage. And so the way Parker does it is like he is the PM for the 0 to 1, but then he puts a founder, like literally a founder they've acquired or someone who's a former founder, in charge of that that new SKU as a GM. And they have a number they're accountable for. And they're empowered to be aggressive internally and to do whatever they need to do. It's a very decentralized organization in that way. But it's a great— it's an example where obviously he hasn't made himself redundant, but he has figured out how to leverage that type of DNA in a way that's very effective in the organization.

Yep. Do you think mitochondria can, like, can it be manufactured? Can you get a mercenary to become a mitochondria?

I, I, I would say, like, I've been talking about founders. It's the easiest shortcut to a mitochondria, but without question, like, I experienced this at Pinterest. I would like to count myself as a mitochondria. Like, I was not a former founder. And I think that the best cultures, what I've seen, well, certainly in the early days, it's the easiest because when you're in a company and you're lucky enough to be growing quickly, there is, in a way, almost everybody has to be in mitochondria because there's just so many things that need to get done that if you are somebody who just needs to stay in your lane and be managed well, I just don't think you really survive. But what happens is, as a company grows, is that I think you really have to emphasize the importance of the company's values over time, because that is a way where you show up more in the— I think that people who like really channel a company's values have the potential to be nonlinear in the value that they provide to the company. You know, because if you think about values, values for a company are in a way how decisions can get made in the company that is as if the founder was in the room helping make those decisions. And the people who are culture carriers, that is like an infectious thing that is incredibly important in a company as you scale. And orienting people towards those values and how you show up that way. And of course, the mission of the company and rewarding people when they do things that are beyond the job description, especially for the people who are more junior in their careers. They just don't really know how they can show up or how they should show up. And oftentimes, they come in with some bad habits. And so, just reinforcing the behavior that you want through even to the performance cycle, I think, can help orient people or nudge them a little bit more in the direction you want them to be.

Yeah, I want to shift the conversation. That's a good segue. I want to shift the conversation more towards the retention side of things. We talked about like acquiring those type of employees and people in a company. You talk obviously about marketplaces and I think there's one blog post from you that talks about happy GMV. And for those who are not familiar, it's basically the quality of transaction in a marketplace. It's the transactions that lead to retention and then long-term success. For instance, for Uber, that could be the happy GMV transaction. It could be a rider gets picked up quickly, they have a smooth ride, they rate it highly, and then they come back for a second ride. I'm curious to hear about your thoughts on happy hires. If we, like, if we apply the happy GMV sort of notion to hiring, what do you think a happy hire looks like? How should companies measure whether a hire truly contributes to like the long-term success of the company, but beyond just being there for 6 months, a year, a year and a half?

You know, it's funny because it's, it's both from the perspective of the employee and then from the perspective of the company. From the perspective of the employee. I am a big believer that the employee should come to the company and there be no, not no negative surprises, but like, you know, there is, you don't want to, it's so easy when you're trying to close somebody to tell them, you know, oh, you've actually, Uber does this sometimes now, even yesterday. It said 6 minutes for me, and then I clicked, and then it was like, you know, nobody's available. Like, you know, expectation setting is so important. And so I think that for the employee, both in terms of where the company is in that moment organizationally, product-market fit-wise, like whatever it is, who their manager will be and what their responsibilities will be and how that will evolve over time. You know, you want to obviously sell somebody, but as much as possible, almost having an anti-sell as part of the process, I think is helpful and valuable. And having, you know, some kind of vulnerable conversation, especially with executives of, you know, here's, what are your fears? Here are my fears about your ability to be successful. Let's have an open conversation about it, can be very vulnerable and trust-building and set somebody up for real success in the company. And then from the company's perspective, look, like the reality is, is we all make mistakes. And, you know, one of my partners, Eric Visria, talks about how great companies make new mistakes. It's not that you're trying to avoid mistakes. And so, I would just invite all companies, you know, any founders listening to this, that you, you know, you, um, the, sometimes you will make wrong hires and, um, and just having the courage to address it quickly is better for everybody. Um, and I'll tell you that I, the, one of the biggest mistakes I've seen is that a bad hire left in a seat too long. It just, those mistakes compound and they get bigger over time. And you have to nip things in the bud. Like I call it the net present value of pain. Like it's a hard conversation today, but the amount of pain that you'll have organizationally, if you kick it down the road a little bit further, is going to be way higher. And so you just have to trust your gut if somebody's not working. To do something about it. But then in terms of how you set them up for success, then there is always just like, you know, expectation setting on your side too. And, you know, what their role and responsibility will be. And I think one important thing, and it just depends on the growth of the company, is are they going to be in the biggest job they've ever had? Very quickly? Or is this something where you actually think they're kind of one or two steps ahead of where the company is right now? And so they'll be able to kind of pull the company up with them instead of just being pushed up by the company. You want some, some mix of those people. But I found that when a company has too many people that are in the biggest job they've ever had, you just aren't setting any of those people up for success.

Yeah, that resonates a lot. What about your experience at Pinterest? I'm curious, how has that sort of like happy hire metric, if there was one, how has that changed? Did that change between being 4 people and being a couple hundred?

You know, I have to say Pinterest was quite good. At very quickly recognizing somebody wasn't working and making the change. And sometimes it was a little disorienting. At one point, I think we had a company all-hands and somebody asked about the desaparecidos, you know, the people who disappeared, because people would just, you know, one day you'd like look over to talk to somebody, ask them a question, they were gone. But, but it was a very healthy thing to do and probably happened in waves in a way. Like there were, you know, what my experience is that for most companies, there will be a few moments over the arc of that company where they have just a giant window that opens up where they can recruit incredible people way ahead of where the company is. Usually it's a big financing with a fancy investor. It's, you know, you get pulled into whatever the hype cycle is. There's some moment in time where you're perceived as a leader. And then in those moments, you have a real opportunity to hire some incredible, incredible talent. And you have to jump through that window aggressively. And that might mean making some mistakes and that's okay. And again, it's new mistakes and then doing, realizing it and taking care of it quickly.

I see a lot of, I think there's like a, we actually wrote something somewhat recently about a company where I think they're at like a couple hundred, maybe a thousand employees and the founders are still involved in hiring and like vetting most people that come on board. I know John and I, we talked about this at length and I know he has some questions about the founder's role in hiring.

Yeah.

Yeah. Thanks, Cristina. Yeah, Sarah, no, I've been like listening and it's been so incredible. I think like, you know, it'll be a great like podcast when Christina and I immediately after this are going to just discuss at length how this affects our company. And I already, I'm messaging her in the background. This is awesome. Yeah, no, I wanted to quickly ask a little bit more about the founder's role in hiring. Obviously, I think at many points, probably post-PMF as well, more so that the founder becomes like the founding recruiter and continues to be that. A beacon for recruiting talent. I wanted to, I'm curious from a more practical standpoint, like how much time should a founder spend on hiring? I think this is a topic that comes up a lot and usually people say, you know, whatever you think you're spending, you should double, triple that.

Yeah.

But I don't know, from, from your perspective, do you have like a time allocation sort of framework?

I don't. Yeah. It's so context dependent. What I— yeah, it's just so context dependent based on where the company is in scaling. And yeah, I wish I had an answer. The reality is that I think that would have been my advice, which is not, I don't know, double or triple it, but almost always, you know, founder, you get pulled into the urgent. And I say that the, in some ways, one of the biggest things that I do as a board member is try to surface the important over the urgent. And the crucial thing is that recruiting and adding somebody to your team is often like a big upfront time investment that takes time away for you on getting something done that you really want to get done. The product roadmap, shipping something, collaborating with somebody, raising money, whatever it is. Like recruiting is, you know, you, there's so many things in your life as a founder where making progress is so concrete. And, and so you just know that like, if I work hard for an hour, I'm going to unblock something. I'm going to get this done. And then recruiting is in a way more like venture capital, like being a VC, which is that you spend so much time and then 2 weeks later you're just like, I was working really hard and I feel like I have nothing to show for it. And so you have this, like, there's like a negative feedback cycle almost on your desire to invest time in recruiting. And then the second thing is that more often than not, and in the recruiting that I spent time, on the most with founders is at the executive level. And almost always there's somebody who's kind of doing the job and recruiting for that role. You just— there's again a natural bias that you have subconsciously to procrastinate the difficult conversation that you have to have with that person, that they're not, you know, doing the job at the level you need them to do it. You know, starting to kind of create, like, lay the groundwork for finding somebody to, to be their boss or to replace them. And that's also like, you know, any uncomfortable conversation is a conversation that we always put off. And, you know, my job as a board member is often to just hold up the mirror and start to kind of pull forward those conversations a little bit earlier. And, and so point being that there are many reasons why a founder will naturally not want to invest as much time as necessary in recruiting. And it is at the same time, everybody knows, I know, I know it's important. We have to hire for this role. And, and, and so it's just something that it's a, there's something relentless about it, especially as a company is really scaling. I found, because I remember with Chainalysis at some point, We hired, you know, a head of product and then it was like, great. Oh, you can't rest. Now it's time to kick off this search. And then it was time to kick off another search and then time to kick off another search. And it was absolutely relentless. But the only way to set the company up, not just to scale this quarter, but to be in a position to be scaling with velocity 4 quarters from now is to prioritize and allocate that time.

Yeah, no, that makes sense. Yeah, I knew there wasn't really a framework. I think it's one of those things where it's just, yeah, you have to just relentlessly keep doing it. It's never enough. And usually the most high ROI, right? So it makes sense.

And I would say, I mean, you guys do this for a living, but like, I'll be so impressed when these CEOs that have multi-hundred million dollar businesses are cold, are like emailing me and being like, hey, we're looking to hire a CFO. I'm like, wow, I haven't heard from this guy in like 2 years. He's like, the company is so successful and this is what it takes. It's somebody who just knows that the most important job he has right now is to find the CFO and they're going to recruit for that. That job and do whatever it takes to find the best candidates.

Yeah, no, totally. And I also had— you mentioned how it's sort of similar to investing in venture and hiring. I know I wanted to maybe speak a little bit about the power law and ask you about that in hiring. So in venture, it follows sort of the power law distribution. There's only a few big winners that drive the returns. The rest don't. Do you think in some ways the talent market and hiring works the same way? And of course, you should never try to make too many trade-offs, but should companies optimize for hiring that one game changer instead of making many good hires and take bets? And that could also affect the speed in which the hiring happens. Curious how you apply that power law in hiring.

I love, um, there are a few things that come to the fore for me there. Um, the first thing that came to my mind is that in most of the companies that I work with, I know who the people are who are driving the most value. It is a small number of people. And I even remember when I was at Pinterest that, um, there were a lot of employees, but most people, you could lose them. And there would be some cost to the organization in terms of ramping up somebody new. But there were some people that if you lost them, it would be a huge setback for the company. And so I do think, and that's part of the idea with this kind of mitochondria is like there are some people who create more value in a company. And I personally, when one of my companies is recruiting and we find one of those people, I lose any, uh, discipline when it comes to the compensation negotiation because I just feel like these people, when you find them, are so valuable to have in the company. That you, you bring them in. The other, you know, you talked about slowing, slowing, you know, just pace of hiring. The Duolingo CEO shared something that I thought was super interesting where he talked about how what happens when, you know, if you have somebody on your team like Christina, you're hiring a head of something for your marketing team. What happens is like you, you interview a bunch of people, you're spending so much time on it. And as you go through that motion, you're, you get fatigued and your bar kind of goes down. And like you start off by like really wanting to find someone great. You meet like 15 people, you haven't found someone great. And then, and then subconsciously you're like, I'm going to, you know, oh, this person is good. Let's hire them. And what the Duolingo team has as part of their recruiting and hiring process is that they have somebody in the loop who is not fatigued by the process itself, but, and, but it's still enough part of it that they have some context. And because they're not fatigued by it, they are able to keep the bar high. And I, I had just, I literally just had this situation with one of my companies where they've been recruiting for a head of recruiting, head of talent for a while. And it's just been a slog to find this person. They're based in New York City. And they found somebody and they were talking about the person. And I was like, man, it just sounds like you guys are settling because you're tired of doing the recruiting. And, and I would, you know, I would as much as possible not settle. One of my partners, Eric, talks, I mentioned him already, he talks about sevens killing companies. And it's just this idea that when you recruit and you guys are doing the feedback cycle, the feedback and everybody's like, I'm an 8, I'm a 6, I'm a 7. It's just like the problem is that sevens, everybody kind of feels lukewarm. They're fine. They're like fine. They take a seat. So there's an opportunity cost. They have these moments where like, oh, I see the potential. So they're not a 6. Like the 6 and down, those people are easy to just be like, oh, this isn't working. Let's churn them out. But the 7s are hard because they have a lot of moments of 6 or below, but then every once in a while they'll have a 9, you know, this moment where like, so you keep them. But that is a, it's a tax on the organization and an opportunity cost. And so how do you make sure as much as possible? And of course, it's a lot easier said than done. And it's way easier and more important in the early stages of the company than the later stages to, to orient yourself and keep the bar high on every single hire you make.

I generally think settling is probably one of the biggest mistakes that companies make in hiring. I think we see it on a daily basis at Paraform, and I think we sort of took on the role whenever we, like, with all the companies that we help hire, we took on the role of pushing them towards not settling. I know Noah talks about it, one of our founding team members, he talks about it all the time. He's always telling me what I do on any meetings I have with any companies who are looking to hire through Paraform is I push them not to settle. I help them raise the bar even higher because he knows we're capable of delivering those types of candidates to the companies.

I love that.

I think you mentioned head of recruiting for one of your companies and head of talent. Maybe the last question on the sort of founder's role in hiring is, you know, And perhaps it's not something you ever delegate, but at some point you do bring on the people who do the first round screenings are no longer you. The people who do the final round are no longer you. And I think I felt this the most when we do work trials at Paraform. Everyone who joined worked with us for a bit and then joined. And now there's a certain point where I'm not running those myself. And I'm just curious, like, you've seen so many founders start delegate things and perhaps talent is the last thing you delegate, but how would a founder go about empowering the rest of the team and almost delegating that sort of maybe final frontier or maybe they should.

Yeah.

No, I absolutely, I mean, I think this is part of the success of any executive that you have on your leadership team is ultimately the team that they build themselves. And holding them accountable and, you know, letting them make their own mistakes and see how well they stand up on their own is a point at which, you know, is a point every company, every founder has to get to. And I think You know, in the beginning, what I would imagine is that you just have to be very connected to the team. You know, when you have a new executive and you don't know what their track record or their biases are with hiring, just like, how do you make sure that you keep some connection to the quality of the talent that they're hiring? The mistake I have seen is that a founder hires for a role and is so happy to not have to do those interviews anymore that they completely delegate it and they lose connection to what happens to the quality of the people on that team, especially when you're going through hypergrowth and especially when that's, and therefore that team is doing a lot of hiring. And so, you know, if there is, you know, you kind of decrease the ratio, you know, instead of going from 100% of people you meet to 20%, whatever, you know, through the interview process, whatever it is, some kind of calibration I think is, is still pretty valuable and important for, for a founder. Awesome.

Christina, back to you.

And by the way, I'm sure some great founders will have a much better answer there on what they do. But that's my— I can tell you what the failure is that I've seen, which is that complete delegation and autonomy. And then you wake up 6 months later and you just don't feel like the team that a new executive has hired is at all consistent with the values you have or the quality bar you have. And so, you just, as much as you want to give full autonomy, In the beginning, you have to figure out some way of staying connected and calibrated.

And how, like, how often do you think that happens? Uh, going back to John's question about, uh, the power law, like dynamics that are in, in VC as well. Founders take a couple of months. If they're lucky, they take a couple of days and they, they raise a round. Uh, should that be done the same way with hiring? Do you batch? The way you hire, or do you think they should consistently be hiring?

I think you need to be consistent. And part of that is that I just think it's difficult when a company does, like, you know, is hiring a lot to absorb everybody at the same time. And And when you have kind of, when you do batch, you also, you know, you're making a lot of hiring decisions and you don't get any benefit of a feedback cycle on your hiring process, your, you know, your evaluation of talent if you do it all at once. But if you have kind of a flow, then you get that feedback cycle and then you're also going to be more attuned to what the company needs are that time. So, you know, I have an example of a company I think about where they just hired— they were so desperate for engineers on the team that they did a lot of hiring very quickly. And then because they were looking for doers, you know, they had all these things that they needed to get done. Uh, and then you end up with the engineering leader having 16 reports. And so, as if you can have a little bit more of a, not a trickle, but like some pacing, it lets you start to be a little bit more, have more perspective on the people you've hired, what's working, what's not, and what the organization needs at that moment.

Cool. I just had a question that I randomly also thought about, you know, do you have any favorite interview questions that you'd like to ask people that perhaps is generally applicable to a lot of your interviews?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I do have so many like context-dependent questions, but the question I just always ask to start, and it is me feeling out this mitochondria thing. Oh, and I have one other thought there for you, but that just came up to me. But it's just like understanding the decision-making someone makes of, you know, through their job, the intentionality of every switch. Like what makes, you know, I hate when someone, I say, I'd love to hear your journey. Can you tell me, you know, how you, you know, What brought you here? Like, how did you end up finding finance as an example and kind of the decisions along the way? And I hate when somebody says, oh, I did this job and then I did this job and then I did this job. Like, there's no value in that answer. It is, why did you do that? Why did you choose this company? Why did you move into this role? Why did this happen? Why did you make a decision to leave? What were you— what was attractive about that next step? And, and getting into their minds a little bit on what their own motivation is, like what drives them to make these decisions, helps you get a little bit attenuated to their value system and how that maps to what you're looking for. The thing I was going to say just on the, um, very first question is that I— if you ask me what the red flag is for me, it is someone doing a year and a half here, a year there, 2 years here, a year and a half there. Like, I see those profiles all the time, and that is often a big red flag for somebody who's just a mercenary. And two, like, you just don't really— like, you might have 8 years of experience, but unless you've had like a true tour of duty, and I mean 3 years minimum at a company, I don't feel like you really get better at what you do. Like, when you, when you start somewhere new, you're spending the first 6 months, and then there's like the low-hanging fruit that, you know, just spend the first 6 months getting used to the organization. And then there's like the low-hanging fruit that's already obvious. And, and then you start to get into the more important work. But if you're only somewhere for a year and a half, you never really get to work on something that's hard enough and, and see it through to get better. And so I, I think it's very, very important to have somebody who has had a real tour of duty and doesn't have a track record of jumping from one job to the next.

Yeah, I think that a lot of our, you know, best customers often put that as like a red flag. I think I just also realized that they put in like the interview questions that we should be asking. So maybe we'll publish that, like, you know, oh, cool questions that are commonly very good. Yeah, I think like maybe this brings us to sort of like the final, I think, thing we want to talk about. I think hiring as a marketplace challenge, of course, both Benchmark and yourself talk a lot about marketplace dynamics. We're a marketplace, so I think maybe talking a little bit more about that topic. What do you think is the biggest inefficiency in hiring marketplaces today? I think marketplaces have optimized liquidity for like a lot of consumer transactions, but I think hiring still remains deeply inefficient. You know, so what do you think are the main bottlenecks? You know, is it matching? Is it evaluation or something else? And maybe, you know, what do you think about, you know, Paraform's model as well?

You know, I'm, I, I wish I, I will on Paraform. I got to you guys too late and I, I will, I will regret that for a very long time. So I can't, I can't answer the question that you have there, although certainly it sounds like you guys are doing something really right. Um, when I think about hiring marketplaces that I've seen in the past, there have been often a few challenges. And to be honest, I haven't, you know, I'm on the board of a labor marketplace called Medley, which is a little bit different than hiring. I think there has just been this bias that people have had for hiring marketplaces, which has been either selection bias, a negative selection bias on people who get surfaced through something like that. And companies like hire.com and others have tried to kind of have a different angle of attack towards that. And then a little bit of a matching inefficiency where a, you know, it's very easy when you are a recruiter to just throw a lot of things against the wall and hope something sticks. But especially if you're putting meetings on somebody's calendar, you're not going to get very far with a customer if you do that. And so how do you get to a place where when I know I get an, a, a potential candidate from Paraform or any other product, that it is worth my time is something that has been elusive, I think, in this space. And I do believe with LLMs, I know you guys play here, that the ability for a marketplace to match well is completely new ground. And I think that's the opportunity you guys have.

Awesome. Yeah. And I think, you know, as we have maybe a little bit more time, I wanted to also ask maybe a more personal question to you. Like, what are you recently spending a lot of time doing? What are you thinking about a lot? Maybe just like, yeah, what's on Sarah's mind, I suppose.

Yeah, I know, of course, I'm captivated by everything happening with in AI. And I find that the best way for me to really be connected to where the puck is going, as they say, or what the opportunities are right now, is just to be a user of these products. And so, as an example, over the weekend, I spent too much time, way too much time, trying to build an app for myself that kind of pulls in data and does some analysis. But man, it was just fascinating to see how Sonnet 3.7, like where, you know, just to give you an example, I was trying to pull data from an API and the, I kept on having challenges with the authentication and what Sonnet would do, Sonnet 3.7, was it would try to authenticate and then it would say, oh, we can't do that. So instead I'll build all this like failover code so that if we can't authenticate, I can create mock data for you in your database. And it's just like, you know, it's so funny to kind of use these products and experience, especially as someone who's not technical myself. I was a philosophy undergrad. To really experience where things are and like have gone to do it. I did it with Replit, you know, 6 months ago, seeing it now. This was another product that I won't name, is for me, super fulfilling and illuminating. And so I, you know, and all the consumer stuff, like, I am just, that's where I can't help but be most excited given my background from Pinterest. And so I love using these tools. We are at a time of tremendous change and tremendous uncertainty, but that's where some incredible founders emerge to build the future. And so that's where I'm spending my time. Awesome.

Well, Christina, back to you. Anything last, anything you wanted to conclude with?

I will.

If you, if you do more tinkering around with apps, I would love I would love to see a blog post about that. That would be a good analysis on everything you try, your thoughts on it, where they fall short and all of that. No, this was so, so good. I really enjoyed our conversation. I think, I think about it and I know at least, at least 20 founders will watch this and will be taking notes. I think every, everything we talked about is so applicable, although something that I, I tell a lot of people and founders is don't take most advice very seriously because it's not going to apply to your company. Uh, it's really, it, it really is just about first.

Christina, it's such an important point because as much as possible, I try to generalize and abstract, but like every company is, has such unique circumstances and unique trade-offs. These things are all about trade-offs. There's no right answer, and every strength has a corresponding weakness and vice versa. So, it is very context-dependent, but sometimes there's some things that resonate and can create an idea. So, I hope we did that today.

Absolutely.

Awesome.

Well, Sarah, thanks so much.

Thank you. Good to see both of you.

Bye.

Bye, guys. Bye.