Minted founder Mariam Naficy on growing talent into leadership roles

Things is if you're just around long enough, you can, you start to realize that you can grow people within the company, but you need years and years to do that, to grow people into leaders. And then you realize, wow, wasn't I what you think? It feels like it was a smart strategy, but all you had to do is like be around long enough. Because essentially if you can look for people's unique talents and then and grow people from within, those people will become, I think, I believe now the strongest leaders you have. Some of them will, we have tried to combine, have a portfolio strategy. So we take disciplines where we are not experts, like finance, hr, where people do things better than we do and we hire those people from outside. The things that we do that are differentiated and where our secret sauce lies, for example, crowdsourcing instead of traditional merchandising. We grow people from the inside because it's very hard to take, let's say a merchant from let's say Gap and say we want you to unlearn everything you've learned for the past 25 years and not believe in it anymore. We're going to completely break you down and build you back up again. So that is a lot harder than to take a person, let's say a very smart person, build them up inside the company and build them into a leader. So we've done that with our GM of art, our GM of stationery are both general managers are both grown within the company and we've hired the chief people officer and the VP of finance from outside the company, for example.

And what are the ways that you try to help them scale as executives? What are the techniques for that? Because that's actually part of the whole scale up challenge. When you're doing that particular approach, it.

Is really hard if you have no. In the beginning, one of the worst parts was that capital affects culture in that with very little capital you end up having no, like basically no bench. So if you have no bench, you can't hold people accountable and you can't. You basically, it's hard to let people fail when your bottom line is you're so close to the bottom line. So essentially if you have very little capital and you can't make any mistakes, it's very hard to let people fail and grow on their own with more capital. You can actually let some of those mistakes happen and your cash won't go to zero, basically. But we were for seven years, were on this verge constantly of running out of cash for like for seven years. And that was a very tough place to be to let people make mistakes. So I thought was that three more gray? Definitely. So I mean I thought of it as a time where we were doing too much micromanagement and not enough, you know, open sort of like let people make mistakes, let people grow, etc. Now what we can do is let people grow, make mistakes. We do make, let them. That's much more possible. Now we also hire advisors from the outside using usually equity to bring in some experienced people to help advise said grown from within, not executives. So we do have somebody who's very senior from retail right now who's in advising the two GMs. Providing another alternate opinion to mine.

Yep. That's a classic actually pattern for the Silicon Valley scale up because it's like okay, how do we use the network to identify the key people to help grow the people within the team in order to get to that.

Yep.

Because classically if you're doing a disruptive business the go recruit someone who is an expert in retail doesn't actually. Well they're not expert this, they're an expert at that game. This game is the whole reason this game's working is it's a new game. It's a different game.

Exactly.

Different success metrics.

Yeah.

So how do you get the advice in order how to learn the skills that are critical and building up afresh. That's a canonical pattern. That's actually very good.

I'm glad we're doing the right thing. Trying to think of other ways we've helped people scale. We tried to do peer feedback. So we have gone through coaching to allow each other basically encourage people to hold each other accountable. So I don't know if you guys have read the Five Dysfunctions of the Five Dysfunctions book by Lencioni, but we've all read that together. We went to a coaching session together and we've tried to like basically have peers hold peers accountable which is one of the hardest things to do in an environment where everyone's very collaborative and they all want to maintain very good relationships with each other.

When did you start that?

We just started that last. Well no actually the beginning of this year and we hit. So we're about 150 people at the beginning of this year. And we had finally hired the executive team after many years and went on hired a coach.

So this is all part of the scale up plan.

This is definitely trying to get people to bond, have a. Create the sense of a first team meeting. First team principles is your. Is your peer group at the executive level and then being able to hold people accountable, each other. So the CEO should not no longer be really the only one delivering all the bad news. And instead of holding people accountable, the idea is that the team can help manage each other. Right. So that's other things.

Well, that's kind of classic scale plan. It's also part of the key thing that I think all scale ups need to do, which is culture. Right? Which is how do you establish a culture that will actually preserve as you're going is actually, in fact, really key. And so it's like, okay, let's do that as well.