Building Amazing Teams with Keith Rabois

All right, thanks, everybody. I want to introduce and thank Keith Raboy for coming and joining us. And we spent three days talking about a bunch of specific things about CEOs and journeys and a lot about sales and marketing, which is what we do.

But.

And we've talked a lot, and we did it great with Kirsten Helvey from Cornerstone this morning about people, but I wanted to talk about teams, and Keith has an amazing background, as some of you know. First of all, I mean, we've got. I'm gonna miss some, but PayPal, which is one of the most iconic teams in the world, I wanna come back to it, right? We bookend that with COO Square, which is epic, and then a few other companies like LinkedIn and Yelp and others thrown in the middle, right? So. And you've made a handful of good investments, too, so clearly you know how to identify good teams, right? And now you founded a company or two that may become a decacorn. But let me step back. I don't want to talk through the whole PayPal mafia stuff, but I want to talk about one thing that's interesting, which is. And now you think about it as you work with more teams and invest in teams like up and comers and overachievers. And if I think about the PayPal team, obviously it's iconic, it's the greatest, but these are all up and comers, right? This is about the Ross team on the. This is IQ and horsepower and tenacity with, like, not a grain of experience. And it was a while ago, but, but. So let's fast forward today. Where do you come out on this continuum of experience versus natural athlete? And what's the learning for folks here?

So, yeah, generally I'm a fan of natural athlete. I think it does matter by vertical. I think on the consumer side is almost surely the right answer. More often than not, on enterprise, there are benefits of experience and maybe you mix the team together. So a good compliment might be like a founder who's very naive, very hungry, paired with somebody who's got a lot more experience, or vice versa. And so you get the benefit of both. Like, particularly if they're both co founders or one's a CEO, one is a coo, so there's ways to structure the entire team that maximizes the upside. But naiveness matters because when you go into a vertical too often, it's very easy to get cynical, start believing the rules, and therefore you missed some of the best opportunities. Like, for example, even in payments, I got somewhat cynical for my paypal experience pretty much avoided payments for about eight years.

You got sucked back in.

Yeah, I got sucked back in. And it wasn't a no brainer decision to join Square. It was very hard. And half of my friends, half of my PayPal friends thought I was crazy and I won't tell you which one was which. And then similarly, when I first met Stripe, actually I sort of declined to invest, which is a massive mistake. I had to fix that a couple years later and pay like a thousand X, a little bit more, 1000 X more. So like, you know, the benefits of experience definitely blind you to new ways of doing things. And you know, and also if you have to deal with suppliers. For example, when roloff invested in YouTube, I don't think he realized how difficult the content owners would be. And I'm not sure he would have invested had he had expertise in that space.

That's a fair point.

So I think that it's the danger of experience too.

Yeah, but, and what's the, there's there and what's the trade off as you get into industries that are more regulated. Right. Or where domain expertise feels more necessary. Right. Whether it, you know, it could be, it could be healthcare, it could be insurance, there's going to be other issues. And where does, where's the trade off there? Right. Because you come out of Y Comdy or wherever, there's just amazing companies being born in every industry.

Well, I think we had a good formula at PayPal, which is we had about two or three people in the entire company that had any experience in financial services. And so like the general counsel, for example, had a lot of experience. And it's a pretty useful role to have your general counsel know something about what you're doing. But we tried to minimize it. Same thing at Square, even if you included me. And I don't think of myself as a payments person. I think in the first 200 people in the company, there was three people who had any financial services experience. So you can get the benefits by having just one or two doses of experience. And then you highly leverage them and you ask them a lot of questions. And all the questions start with why? Why do we need to do it this way? Why? Why, why? Are you sure? Is there a way around this? And then that's where the leaders and the founders and executives who don't have the experience can just be relentless about are there better alternatives? Because they start from a perspective of a whiteboard, a fresh perspective, and then you can take advantage of the lessons of 20 years of experience.

Yeah. And boy, I should know the name. The startup that you co founded in addition to your 28 investments that's doing the real estate.

It's called the Open Door.

Open Door, Sorry. I just want to get it right. How many folks on Open Door have deep real estate industry experience?

Maybe one or two. So we have about 70 employees today. The CEO has some, like, more like personal experience. So he's bought and traded real estate personally. He also did one or two startups and more in the rental version of real estate. So he's the real estate guru. And everybody else in the company basically is not.

But you kind of need to get it right because you're investing a lot of money.

Yeah.

This is the highest don't happen. If you misunderstand the industry, you could have tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of exposure. Right?

Yeah. This is an Elon company. Like if you got to get the satellite into orbit because it could crash in, it'd be really ugly. So.

And let's. But let's talk more about people. So you come into square. Your coo, what's the kind of Zen learning at Zenday? And COO can mean a million things in a million companies, that's for sure.

Right.

It can be the oddest term. But when should I get a wingman? Right. And what should that wingman do and what should they own and what's your advice? And I see people today, more and more of them want a COO earlier and earlier. Right. They want to just offload all this stuff and. And what are all the learnings and what should we do?

So I think there's different rules sort of to apply and principles to apply. And there's no right answer for all companies and all founders because partially what a COO does is become the complement to a founder. And every founder has different strengths and weaknesses and different things they like to do and things they hate to do. So that's one of the reasons. And then secondly, all of the COOs have different responsibilities. If you look at the org chart of box which you just had on stage versus the org chart at Facebook, versus the org chart at Yelp, versus versus the old org chart back in the day with Stephen Bill at Microsoft, they divided responsibilities very differently. So you have a lot of different choices. But the first question is when and how and why to get a coo. I don't think you should necessarily. When I was growing up in Silicon Valley, I had one of the wisest and most experienced people on a board with me, Pierre LeMond. And Pierre said, absolutely, technology companies should never have COO's. And that was the conventional wisdom. And there's a lot of good reasons behind that conventional wisdom. So you, you're violating the conventional wisdom every time you hire a coo. I think some of the best reasons to do it is if you look at your calendar on a Sunday night and you're the CEO going into your week and more than half your calendar is already booked, you probably need another senior leader. Now, whether that person gets a title of COO is a different question. But you need to have enough flexibility.

If half your time is in meetings.

Or something, if you're ready, like have no time to think, no time for discretionary interaction with people, you are way over consumed as CEO. The second thing is there's been a rise, and I think this correlates with the rise of COO's. Many, many CEOs today want to play two roles. They want to be VP of Product and CEO. They do, which is perfectly fine. There's a lot of great successes. Many of the best companies ever have that kind of formula. But if you're going to get a.

Lot of mythology around it too, if.

You'Re going to play both roles, you can't do every other role as well. So if you're CEO and VP of Product, then you might want a COO pretty soon. If you're CEO and you're just a normal CEO and then you've got like VPs and executives, you know, like in a standard org chart, you may not need a COO ever. But if you really want to be in control day to day of an operating function, or let's say you want to be CEO and VP of Marketing, or CEO and VP of Sales, then you probably do need a compliment sooner than normal to help because you can't do every role. And if you want that to be a permanent position, as opposed to I'm just temporarily playing VP of Product and I'm going to recruit, then you might hire a COO tomorrow. Yeah.

And so, and I don't want to spend too much time on co, but it's just I see folks trying to go earlier and earlier there. I know it's situational, but what should I look for? Should I look for a mentor? Should I look for someone with five or eight years more of experience? I mean, you can use your experience at Square or any of your companies, but how much additional experience should I be bringing onto the team?

It does depend upon your skill set. So. Right. Every market is different. Like what makes you successful in a Tesla market is very different than would make you different standard enterprise software versus a consumer photo sharing app. And so you have to have the right DNA in your company, on your team for the market you're attacking. And then whatever the founder and the founding team has, you subtract that and then what distills is what you need. And so the title is kind of a way of recruiting someone almost like a founder that you can't easily get into your company. So I think it's a good opportunity to recruit somebody who fills that big gap, gap, whatever that gap is from your current team in the market you're attacking. And so then the title is just one form of compensation in some ways, like there's equity, cash and title. And if you can find someone who's highly motivated, who has the perfect complement and some experience in a critical gap, then absolutely, I might give them a title of COO or president or whatever it takes to get them on board. But then you have to divide responsibilities so that you get a max, the team's performance is maximized, which may mean that this COO doesn't touch product ever. This CEO maybe want to be involved in product because he or she may have skills in product. Yeah, this COO may have, you know, half the org report to them. And some CEOs may have 20%, some CEOs may have 100% of the org and just report to the CEO, which is a little bit more like box. So you're designing. You have a lot of flexibility in designing a formula that works, but it's designing for your company and your team and your skills. Different CEOs also don't want to do certain things. Everybody wakes up in the morning and says, I'm looking forward to doing X and I really hate doing Y. Usually the stuff I really hate doing Y is a good thing to take off the CEO's plate and allow them to spend more of their time doing what they like and what they think they're great at. So if a CEO hates doing employment reviews, get a COO who's excellent at employment reviews and loves to do it, doesn't hate to do it, loves to do it. You know, famously at Apple in maybe the last 10 years, but at least for a sustained period of time. Steve Jobs didn't do anybody's reviews. The CFO actually did him. Peter Oppenheimer actually did all the reviews because Steve just didn't like doing it for obvious reasons. He probably felt like he was giving feedback in every meeting. So it's again designed around how do you get most leverage out of your most valuable people. It's the same principle as you scale your organization, every leader in the organization, you want to get the highest possible leverage at what they're awesome at and remove the things that they're not great at and give it to somebody who's awesome at that. And it's the same thing applied to how'd you do.

And then I want to talk some other people talk about how did you figure it out at Square? I mean, because let's step back. I mean the growth at Square was just epic, right? I mean, I mean you've been at some good companies, but that's the fastest growing of all, isn't it?

I think so. I mean, I used to have a chart in our financing decks and stuff that would compare Square to most companies.

But it's even the fastest growing.

It's pretty fast.

Pretty good.

Cohort other than Priceline grew really fast back in the 90s. And you know, Groupon had its moments. I don't like to do the comparison to Groupon so much, but Priceline's not.

It had its moment. It had a good run.

It definitely did. So we actually did something different. We generally did most meetings together. So like a product meeting or a strategy meeting or a finance meeting. Both, I'd say 70% of all like reviews both of us would do at the same time. Got it. Which is not standard.

Although there are a little bit two in the box. Yeah.

Other companies it allowed a little bit of getting feedback, stereo surround to the team, which is probably good. It also allowed. It also ensured there was no disconnect. Like we would debate actually publicly in front of other people. If we had opinions, that was totally fine. And again, different cultures have different views on that. PayPal, for example, we were very open. Like people would debate very violently and aggressively by email and in person. So if you build a culture with transparency and where it's okay to disagree with your boss, I think that's a very healthy structure. And then there'd be some things that I wouldn't be as interested in or have any competence in. Like I might not join an engineering review. I can't add a lot of value. Occasionally there might be some big trade off decision that I'd want to be aware of of how the decision was being made and you know what the pluses and minuses were. Some once a year or so I might join an engineering review similarly, like a risk and fraud review, which is sort of in my DNA and less interesting to Jack, unless it wasn't going well, he would barely ever attend.

And it's interesting. So when you have that two in the box kind of scenario, and Josh Stein this morning, who just helped me open because it's day three, kind of, he brought up a downside of that scenario, which is sometimes employees don't know exactly who they work for. Right. And having two bosses can be very stressful, especially for very motivated employees.

So I agree with that.

Did you have that issue? Did it not matter? Did you just roll with it? What's the learning?

It did occasionally pop up. I mean, I think clarity, you know, generally accountability and clarity in an org chart is really valuable. That said, there's trade offs, so you sacrifice a little bit of that for more. Both minds tackling a problem simultaneously. So I could hear, for example, what Jack was saying in terms of feedback and that might affect my opinion or vice versa. And so it was a more thoughtful, iterative process of giving people feedback that said, definitely you suffer some clarity and you have to hire, I think at some point, executives who are comfortable if you're going to go with this model, which is there are some executives who are used to saying, this is my sort of kingdom and fiefdom and as long as I deliver my metrics and my goals, don't ask me a lot of questions. And those executives get furious if you're like doing these kind of reviews because they totally don't understand it. And then there's some people who've grown up and like, oh, everybody works together. We're on one team. It's collaborative. That's great. I don't, you know, I like when people ask me questions about what I'm doing. It makes me happy. And so I think you have to hire someone somewhat in the vein of the organization you're building or make it clear in the interview process at a minimum that this is how the organization runs and that you're opting into this. So we had some executives who are quite, quite talented actually, who would thrive in many places and had thrived in many places who didn't work all that well because they were used to having more ownership of their box. And as long as they delivered, they expected that. And we just didn't use that approach.

Yeah, it's interesting. So I want to talk about, about a related topic that I'm confident you're passionate about. And I know it's abstract, but you work with a lot of startups, right? You've worked with some of the best. This is Silicon Valley. And everyone wants to hire the best people. I know it's a high level, but when do I let the bar down? Like, I haven't made the hire. Like, you're on my board, it's stuck.

Up all the time.

I haven't made the VPN's hire, and it's breaking because I have 20 engineers and my CTO, who I love to death, has only managed two people in his life. And it's been a quarter. Now it's okay. Now it's two quarters. And boy, I mean, Keith, you're tough. I mean, everyone's at the PayPal standard or better. And I know it's abstract, but what do I do?

What do you do? What do I do? This is a real problem. I mean, obviously, as the market has been hot in technology and as capital's been available and cheap, more and more people start companies. So there's a diffusion of talent, and it's very difficult to create a critical density of talent. One of the reasons why we're able to do that at pitbull is between 2000 and 2002, there were no other jobs available. So we had like a 90 some odd jobs. Like you could go to ebay, maybe you could go to Google if you had a PhD, maybe, and you could go to Netflix if you were willing to go down to Los Gatos, which most.

Wherever. Wherever that is.

Yeah, wherever the hell that is. You might as well go to Florida. So what we did at PayPal was in some ways easy. We just had to select wisely because everybody gave a job offer to accept it. There's like 95% conversion rate on offers, which nobody has for the last three years. However, what Peter taught me, the first day, actually the first week I worked at PayPal, we went for a jog around the Stanford campus and he explained to me his hiring philosophy, which has stuck with me for like 16 years, which is you cannot go after proven people when you're a startup. Just can't do it because everybody's going once someone's obviously proven. Like, if you look at my profile, let's say everybody in the world can assess it roughly equally. Does it doesn't mean it's good. But they all come to the same conclusion because there's a lot of data points, there's a lot of reference checks. There's no unique asset for a startup in evaluating me. So they're going to lose more often than not in competing with someone who has more money, more traction, more sex appeal somewhere. So I think you have to go after people that are less proven and you have to get really good at evaluating those kind of people. And that's a special skill. That's what Peter basically taught me, is you just have to get focused on learning how to evaluate people with less data on their resume. Because once they have enough data on their resume, Facebook's going to steal them or Google's going to bribe them, or someone else will. And the only way to do that is just practice. You've got to figure out how to assess people and give them the opportunity to succeed. And that requires mentoring and a culture. And there's a different org structure around having a lot of those people. So for example, everybody says they want the classic vpe. Every board meeting, everyone, here's the specs. I actually hate specs in some ways. Even though everybody requires you to drop them because they always say, I want 10 years of experience, proven ability to do this. And you're like, it's like baseball saying, I want a third baseman who bats 300 hits, 40 home runs, 100 RBIs and wins a Gold Glove. There's exactly two of those. Yeah, there literally are two in the world. And like, what are you going to, you know, so writing a spec that says you want one and two in the world just isn't constructed. So I'd rather have somebody who has upside potential and you're taking a bat. So for example, a vpe, let's be specific, there's two kinds of things that you want in a vp. One is, let's say, proven ability to manage. And one is a lot of like technical ability. Like, so there's manage, technical ability, recruiting a bunch, a little bit strategy, strategic thinking, at least being competent in understanding it. I would take a bet that they don't have one of those things. Like if they had an A plus experience in one. They're just like cutting edge technologists and you know that they have a network of people that really respect them. So they're probably going to recruit well. But they haven't proven they can manage a team of 50 people. They've only managed a team of seven. I might take that bet. Or conversely, someone who's managed a team of 100 and isn't a world class technologist, but the rest of the team is including, let's say me as the founder. I. Let's say I was a world class technologist. I might live with a VP who's not, but just a proven extraordinary manager. So again, it's like a compliment. But you're gonna have to take a bet somewhere and take some risk. And then how do you complement that risk? Or how do you measure the person's progress against that risk? But you can't get central cast. No one can hire central casting. Central casting, unless you hit massive escape velocity. So if you're the one, Uber, one, Facebook, you know, one company or two companies of, you know, a year, you can, you can attract people that are central casting. Central casting, central casting. But if you're not that, you have to pick and choose.

And I think most founders that are driven in first time, they're pretty good at assessing whether someone is better than them, right? And they can do that intuitive part. And with a little bit of help like you got from Peter Thiel, they can get really good at it. With a little bit of coaching, they're not as great if they've never been a manager of assessing the management skills of these people. And so the natural athlete that's done a few things is great advice until you need real, you know, maybe up to 50 employees. 60. But then you then if you've never been a manager, the best way to get from 50 to 200 IS managers, not managers of managers of managers. So what's your advice? Is it just get better mentors, get a good board. But how do you add? How do you help make sure the founder doesn't screw that one up?

So one thing a good investor, good board member can do is help assess, interview. And it can be early in the funnel or later in the funnel. That definitely one thing to look for in investors is when you're adding to your team, can they help you recruit, source, close and evaluate? Second thing is, I think one thing I learned from actually Brian Chesky had a great idea about this is go meet the five best people at something. So if you're gonna hire a cfo, for example, almost no new founder has ever met a cfo.

You always got to at least interview five. You have to interview, not even interview.

Just. Just go have coffee, have coffee with like the five best people.

That's better than.

Because then you can do a little pattern recognition. Okay, well, what's in common? Why does everybody think these are the five best? What do I see in talking to them? So at least then when you're interviewing people, you can kind of evaluate them against some benchmark. You can find mentors to help you like. So, for example, when I was earlier in my career, I had no clue how to hire a vp. Like really? Like, no, like clueless.

You hadn't Done it well it's just.

Also I didn't even know like the right questions to of kind of really ask. So I borrowed and begged. I had my friend Max interview some for me. Literally two candidates I was seriously thinking about. I was like can you meet them and give me feedback? Because I just didn't know how to do it. So I took advantage of my network and at least got some directional guidance and that was really helpful. So you have to kind of use your network and that may be like angel. You might have angel investors on your cap table who have extraordinary ability in a particular vertical. Ask them to go meet this person and give you feedback. You know, use, use your angels. Most people don't actually.

They don't. Yeah. I love that my hack. Your hack is much better. Is for any position you haven't hired before. Interview so many people until you don't learn anything. Like you've met so many people that are. At least there's no new answer. And then you'll start to figure out what the bar is. And I still believe that's true. But meeting as many people for coffee outside of that, then you've got this magic card combination of at least you know what the bar is.

There's one other thing you can do is I think you can get good pretty early in your career at reference checking because it does span different verticals. So in your core area you get good at reference checking. Let's say you're a great product person. You learn how to do that for PMs and directors of product. Similar kind of questions that you'd ask in engineering, reference checks and similar in marketing. So once you get good at the process, process of reference checking, really being good at it, if you are good at it, that can help. It certainly can help you avoid mistakes and occasionally help you find a gem. Yeah, it's more downside than upside, but it can definitely help.

It's a good hack. And let's talk about something. We briefly tweeted about this but to me you've always worked in hyper growth companies. To me I'm in a new world. I built two startups that grew at a decent pace and had decent exits. And now the companies I work with, my jaw just drops. But I think the faster the company goes, the more the playbook changes. Right. You can take, not only can you take your time, but the way you hire do and how should I, if I'm lucky enough to hit a million in revenue growing 20% a month instead of 10, how should I rethink sequencing my hiring.

So I actually think these companies are the most fun. They're super chaotic and stressful.

Super chaotic. But the faster they grow, the more chaotic it is.

Like nothing else in the world. Like it's like soft. A learning experience. I remember when we were going through this at Square, I said to some of my colleagues, I was like, you don't know how lucky you are because LinkedIn is a great company. LinkedIn grew linearly always. And I was like, this is like you might never do this again in 20 years. Get to go through this kind of rocket ride. It's very chaotic because you have to change all the rules very fast. And it's a rough metric is the numerator and denominator on your hiring. So your denominator is the number of current employees and let's say your numerator is the number of new employees you're going to add in a month or quarter. As that percentage gets high, it actually means that the inbound people, the incoming people, are probably going to impart more on the organization than you can stamp on them. And so you have to be really good at cultural assimilation and have very strong principles and onboarding to try to preserve the parts of the your culture that are unique and you really want to preserve because otherwise the people are going to bring with them because they're a bigger mass. So like let's say you're adding two people a month and you have 100 people. The new people aren't going to change. They learn your culture. Yeah, but imagine you have 100 people and you're going to add 50 in a quarter, which actually does happen in hyper growth companies. That culture is changing for better or for worse. And you know, if you're not directional about it, it's definitely going to be worse. It's not going to be like the brew you want. Every culture of a successful company is a custom brew. So make sure that you're guiding the parts and keeping the parts and preserving the parts. The other thing is it's a great opportunity to hire talented people though because it's a non zero sum environment. There's always new challenges, opportunities and problems and you can't hire fast enough to fix them. So you have to kind of grab people who are talented, who've never done X before. So like you have a marketing problem. By the time I can interview close and get someone started to do marketing, it's like weeks to months and that's if I'm really good. Amazing.

Your whole job specs change by the time you close the hire.

So I'm going to go run after someone in the company who may be an intern even and say, if we have this marketing problem, please go fix this. And that person might turn out to be amazing at it. And that might be the person's trajectory for 10 years, and it might be their career. And those kind of opportunities are awesome for young, talented people.

People.

So I would go hire a lot of those people because you can just throw them at problems left and right, and they're not going to find that. You know, once a company gets a little bit more static or has a little bit more linear growth, everything has silos to it and boxes and it's, you know, this, this person's responsible, this person's accountable to you. Don't get those opportunities like, you know, early in your career and how and growth.

Another related question is, I mean, ideally, even if you have natural athletes, you want people that can scale. So you need to hire someone that can not only do the job today, but at least can do the job ideally 18 months from now. That'd be a lot better. That's a lot better than 12.

Yeah.

How do you. When you're in this hyper growth environment, sometimes the problem I see, you go out, you spend three months to hire the VP of sales, and it's too late.

It's already too late.

You hired the right guy at 2, you turn around, it's 10, and you make that hire. And I'm like, you know, Linda's great, but it's too late for Linda. So how far out should I look in scale to the puck on hockey.

Or whatever our metaphor is, it depends a little bit on how much visibility and confidence you have about the growth continuing. Because it does vary. You know, not every company that's growing like this today really is going to grow like that in six months or 12 months. Some are fair enough. So it depends on how you know what the data points look like and what that slope looks like and how much it's likely to continue. Because what's fueling that? How scalable is that? How sustainable is it? If it's really sustainable, you have two choices. One is you hire someone and you have to be honest with them in the recruiting process that you may have the opportunity to have this job forever. But reality is that if we continue this growth for two more years, I'm not sure I'm gonna be able to give you this job. It happens a lot with CFO candidates.

A lot with cfo.

So you hire a VP of finance. They wanna be a cfo. They may have time to learn to be cfo. But let's say you're like one of these explosive companies that's just one of a kind. They may not have the time to learn to be cfo. And you just may have to have that honest conversation up front. It's better to have that conversation up front.

Yeah, I think a lot of us struggle with that. We were talking with Kirsten Helley from Cornerstone this morning and you know, do you want to tell them you may not make it in a year? Right. You may be chopped or it's maybe tricky.

I'd rather have at least some part of that conversation up front and say it's your opportunity to prove me wrong. Because the people will prove you wrong, like a certain segment. And then also what you're looking for if you really want them to prove you wrong is you can usually tell where there's some upside. Doesn't mean they're gonna be able to prove the upside. But there's two hires, let's say, and this is one of the hardest things to teach your team is usually you have two choices. One's a pretty safe bet, competent, clearly proven, will do the job fine. The other one a little bit riskier, but with more upside of being potentially awesome in a high growth company. I might error much, much more to this because you're just going to need some of those to continue to propel. And so I'd rather take more risk here. It's like product features. You can do linear, iterative product features, but you've got to take some value proposition. Enhancing 10x feature shots in a high growth company. I take a lot of bets on 10x people.

I think so. And the challenge is sometimes when you have other advisors or board members or investors that have any experience, they're going to totally go the other way. They want the safest hire in the world that's comfortable today. And that beta, that odd risk seems it's controversial.

So to me it's a ratio question. It's almost never 100% or 0%. I don't think you want 0% not proven before or do you want 100% internal promotions and it's a ratio? I think in a really healthy, amazing company with lots of mentoring and learning, you might be able to get to about 70% internal promotions. I remember actually having a square board meeting when I wanted 70 and I had a whole plan about how we were going to do this and Vinod's like, you're Growing too fast. If you do 50 50, it'd be amazing.

Yeah, it's an interesting ratio.

And 50, 50 is good because then it actually is legitimate, like plausible. Like if you do your job well and you really demonstrate a high rate of learning, half of you are going to get promoted. But we're going to have to compensate that rate.

At Square, you're promoting people every six months. Yeah, I mean, I'm backing it.

I could be wrong, but the jobs can get still interesting. I mean, that's part of the art too, too is if you're growing this fast, even if you don't promote somebody, the job they used to do is going to be very different and more challenging than it was last month. So it's not like keep doing what you're doing if you're growing 10% a month, realistically, if you don't get promoted, you are doing what you did last week. But if you're growing 20%, 30% a month, that job's changing every six months. And so just holding on is actually a challenge. You want people to be challenged. And end of the day, people stay in jobs they're challenged, people grow in jobs they're challenged. So it's good for them emotionally, it's good for them professionally. So the faster you're growing as a company, the more challenges there are. Sort of by definition. Yeah.

So last question. This time blew by. But I want to do one line of what is good stuff, right? But I want to hit because the mistake I see again and again. Let's talk about that. Because the last one, the comfortable candidate. Right, the one you talked. I forget the ratio. When a founder is struggling, it's been four months to make the hire, five months. We've been there. And I have the comfortable candidate. Right. Checks the boxes. But I know I don't have the beta, I don't have the craziness. What should I do? Should I make the hire? The other investors that haven't been in hyper growth like it, I don't know, about a year. Right. Should I just make the hire?

I think it depends on the function. So how critical is the function? Because there's a difference between having an incomplete team and a mediocre team. So it's fine to have to some extent all often an incomplete team. Most companies that we fund especially are series A investor are by definition incomplete teams. Even series B is usually an incomplete team. So that's better than a mediocre team. So I'd rather hold that position open now if it's the core DNA, it's like the core leverage. Like every company competes on one dimension. If it's a company, if it's the dimension you're competing on, it's really hard to keep that open.

Yeah. Like, it's very stressful.

It's extremely stressful on everybody. So it depends how many things are breaking. In some ways it's like, how many things are breaking? Like, what are the signs of things breaking? Like, what signals are people quitting? You know, are your highest value people quitting and frustrated because they don't have any manager, you know, and they need a manager. They need feedback. You got to fix that right away because it's corrosive. Are you losing market share because, like your sales and marketing, you know, just aren't? Yeah, that's not real issue. Then I'd take a B plus person, like just to stabilize.

Get it in now.

So I don't know there's a right answer, but I think partially when you're interviewing also investors, this is the kind of conversation. Cause what you ideally want is a board that's mostly aligned. It's good to have different views on a board. But structurally, from a first principles perspective, you kind of want board members giving you generally directionally similar feedback.

That would be nice.

So you can have an active copy conversation and dialogue and get like, extract, like real feedback. Okay. Can we take a chance in waiting six more months, or are we going to break so many things that our ship is actually going to start sinking and I'd rather pull the trigger now to prevent that and then we'll build on top of that later. But it depends on the function and how acute. Like, so in finance, sometimes you can defer it because mostly finance is a 10% feature. So if you do $100 million in revenue and I expect the VP of Finance to add $10 million of value, but if you're doing a million in revenue, do you really need a VP of Finance? Well, they're going to add $100,000 of value. You're going to pay them a lot more than that. So just defer the finance problem until you get your perfect finance candidate. So you're doing a billion dollars of revenue. You need a finance candidate because that's $100 million. Even if they're only 10%, you don't want to waste $100 million.

That's cool.

All right.

I wish we had more time, but Keith, this is great. We might be supposed to sit. Let's see, are we supposed to still sit or get up I think we're.

Supposed to get out.

Are we supposed to get up? Oh, get out. All right. Thank you, Keith. This was epic. Really appreciate it.

Thanks.

Thanks, man.