CEOs of Walkme, Zapier, Dialpad and Workable: How to Build Your First Management Team

Please welcome CEO of workable nikos moritakis to the stage.

Good evening. I'll introduce my co panelists. This is dan, CEO of walkme and wade, CEO of zapier and malon, chief business officer of rpx, and craig from dialpad. Thank you for joining us. Today's topic is dear to me. Obviously, I can't imagine a chief executive having lost some sleep over building a management team. I'm guessing it's probably the hardest problem to solve, hiring in general, let alone at this level. I'd like to have an open discussion so we won't go one by one, but I already have a few good insights from the chat we had backstage. The way I understand this problem briefly, just to set up a framework is there's a lot of interesting questions around it. One thing is the timing. When. What makes you feel that you need to level up your management, set up your first management team, however you want to call it. And is it a time, is it a size of company that does it? Is it a particular event that triggers it? So I'd like to hear some personal stories about that. The second thing is like, what you're looking for. Why are you doing this? Why are you trying to bring it to the company? And the third, and perhaps the most interesting is like, how it fits with the dynamics, the existing dynamics and the the company with the existing people inside the company. The question of nurture versus outside hire. And, you know, how do people change, deal with this transition, which is a company transition, not just a personal transition. So, Mallon, you're probably the most experienced of all of us here.

I don't know about that.

And.

You'Ve been telling me backstage and I find this fascinating, this thing about athletes versus experts and what you expect to find when you hire executives. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Sure. I think one of the challenges is trying to determine when you're at a certain size of company, whether you continue to hire what are natural athletes. And I think when you first start a company, generally you're hiring people who have whatever background. I mean, like everyone here, I think, actually has a different background that they bring to the table, whether it's a programmer, whether it's in finance, whether it's in law. Do you know he used to be a lawyer? So did I, actually. And then so the core man, I feel like the core team is generally a bunch of natural athletes. Right? You come together because you have a common goal and a common vision. And then from there, obviously you need to expand so one of the examples I'll give you is what RPX does, because you probably have not heard of rpx. RPX reduces and insures against patent risk. And what that means is, as part of the business, we actually had to start an insurance company. An insurance company is, as you may know, a highly regulated business. So when we started the insurance business and we thought about developing the insurance business, we had a bunch of natural athletes, right? People who were super, super smart, who could research anything, but none of us knew anything at all about insurance. And so we learned it from the ground up. And so we were able to do things. We were even able to build your basic actuarial model with just some smart quant people who came from McKinsey, who were part of my team. But at a certain level, what we realized is, especially in a highly regulated industry, you do need to bring in some adult supervision. And it's not to necessarily manage the entire team, but we needed someone who had experience in actually building an insurance business, who understood the regulations, who understood how we could do this thoughtfully, who had the relationships with things like the reinsurers. So I would say it depends on the stage of the company. But when you are starting to build out something, I think the natural athlete, I'll go with the natural athlete every single time. But there comes a stage, and you have to determine what is the right stage where you need to bring someone who's actually a subject matter expert, who has experience in the stage. And I know everyone has lots of thoughts about hiring that person too early and how do you bring that person into the organization without making the original team feel like they've been topped?

Craig, you're 170 people now.

What's that?

170 people?

Yeah, 170 people now.

When was the time for you?

Yeah, well, the way putting the management team together was really around stages of the company. So at the beginning, my vice presidents were engineering and product and a designer. And so making sure we have product market fit was effectively number one. So build the product, get it into the market, start getting some feedback. And then kind of as the evolution of the company, as we started moving up markets, started selling to enterprises, it was okay. Now we have to hire VP Marketing who has enterprise experience. We got this great guy from Zuora and then needed to hire a sales guy who had experience selling to the enterprise. So we got the guy who ran enterprise sales at Rackspace. Then we had to hire a CFO to start counting the money and making sure that everything Made sense. And the margins made sense. We brought in a CFO from mblox. But at each one of those stages, it really was okay. Now we gotta go to the next level. Now we gotta go to the next. I'd say if there's any, you know. So now it's been five years since we started. I would have hired the CFO a year earlier. Like, I'd never. This is my third startup. I've never had a CFO before. I always resisted it. They always seemed expensive to me and having a great cfo. And Mark Anderson was on our board and he was telling us, you know, you need a cfo, you need a cfo. I resisted. I finally got one about six months ago, and it has made my life so much better. Like, he deals with everything. That was very, very difficult. So if anything, I'd say do that a little sooner than you think.

And in your case, I understand your company also shifted slightly on the market, like from SMB to bigger customers. Does not bring. You need. I mean, do you need to get different people for something like that?

Yeah, yeah. So our company, we do basically unified communications in the cloud. Dialpad is effectively integrates with Google Apps or Office 365 to kind of give a cohesive product. And we also do Uber Conference. But Uber Conference started as this freemium kind of like funnel builder for later sales product. And so we didn't really have any enterprise DNA of how to support them, how to do POCs, how to implement, how to train, how to do change management. And so once we started getting enterprise customers, like Motorola was our first dial pad customer, we realized that we were lacking enterprise skills of how to do those various things, which is why we. We went and got this more mature staff. But getting them to have the right DNA and fit the culture of a company that had been around for three or four years was really important too.

Done. 400 people in five years in a relatively flat organization. How do you do that and how does this fit into the.

Yeah, so we started like in 2012. 400 people, different offices around the world. We don't have a CFO yet. And the organization is very flat. And to what you ask, I think that. I don't think there is right time to hire a vp. There is no formula. I think that how we see it in WalkMe is first we like that people will grow within the organization, as you said. Yeah, people take it hard. If suddenly you say, hey, this is your new evp, you gonna do what he or she said, that's It So when we do it, I look at it as build versus run. As the company grow, you need to build processes that only you know how it works in your company. There is no magician that comes from the outside and build it for you. Of course they can help you build it, but at the end it's on you.

At this growth speed though, do you always have the time to nurture an individual? Weren't there cases where you actually needed to bring experience from outside and how did that work?

So I can't say that we didn't try actually we had bad hires in the top levels that really hurt the company. I think it's the worst thing that can happen to a company to bring someone that high and then it's not working out because it's not just the damage that happens, it takes a long time to fix it.

So Dan, can I ask a question? So it's very painful when a very expensive senior hire doesn't work out. So why didn't that senior hire work out?

Yeah, I think that a lot of senior hires, you bring them from a big company, Salesforce or Oracle or whatever company that you hire from a lot of time in their mindset they want to do copy paste from what they did in the previous company that worked for me at company X is going to work like that in Walkme? No, Walk me is completely different. You need to understand the basic of walk me, the culture of walk me, how we do things in walk me and only then I think that you can build or run it in a very sufficient way. And if someone is trying to force it, it's just not working and it's exploding in our face at the end.

I'm curious and I know you're the moderator but I'm curious how can you tell there are certain individuals who can come from a large company and go to a small company. Some of the people up here came from large companies and succeeded in small companies. I'd be curious including what our moderator thinks about how do you spot when that will work and be successful and when it will be someone who basically will just copy and paste. Because I'm sure you did a lot of diligence in trying to figure out whether that person would succeed.

I think setting the expectation with any high up management it's key. We have a very clear KPIs that we know how we want to, what we want to achieve, what we want to see. And if they're not meeting those KPIs they're not doing their job well. That's the only way for me to know if someone is doing their job, if they want to do something. And by the way, I strongly believe that if I'm bringing a manager to the management or even not to the management, they need to teach me what to do. I don't need to tell them what to do and if. And the only thing that I can manage them is the KPI so they get full freedom to do whatever they want. Right. They can do it their own style. But there is a KPI X amount of revenue, X amount of churn, X amount of growth in marketing, et cetera. That's it.

And I don't think that copy paste, it's always a bad thing. Sometimes it's exactly what you want, but you have to be very deliberate. The way I think about it, there's cases where you actually want someone with experience who's done something before and they're going to copy paste it in the good sense, like go and build the kind of organization and process that made them successful in the past. But you need to hire that kind of person when you're willing to make a big investment and a big change in that area. If you bring the person just to manage whatever you had in a little budget, you're just not getting any value. They're not going to bring you your best people, they're not going to do the things that you expect them to transform your organization. There's cases where you don't want the copy based guy, you want the builder, but there's no room for that.

I do want to say that I don't think that it can't work. Of course it can, 100% it didn't work for us. Doesn't mean that it doesn't work. I do think that and from the insurance part there is a risk that now as a growing company and we're growing like very, very fast, not just revenue headcount too. We are at the point that we can take that risk right now. Maybe later on we can take that risk and then it will make sense when, when things will be, the processes will be in place and then like yeah, that's the time to bring more grown up to run the things. And this is the difference between build versus run. Now we're building a lot of stuff and then when we feel that it's working, it's a machine we can bring.

Yeah. And actually we had some grownups in the company, but we started the company in 2008 and then took it public in 2011 and actually a lot of those grownups were hired at that point where we were about to go public or public. So back to your question before is, I actually generally go with the natural athlete versus the subject matter expert. Except when you're at the stage where you need it. I don't know.

We.

Yeah, I think the best folks are able to bring that experience to the table, but they are also able to mold themselves to the culture of the company as well. Right. So when you're looking and hiring, you know, you talk to them and have those honest discussions about this is, you know, what we believe as a company, this is how we operate. Can you, like, does that fit with how you as an expert in this field can operate too? So they can come in and maybe copy paste a little bit, but they can do it in a way that fits within your organization and then help you scale it and bring some of that expertise to the table.

We talked backstage, and I think it weighed. Didn't introduce the company, but they don't have an office. How do you do it?

Yeah, so we're 70 people without an office, 100% remote. And for us, it was pretty natural because we started as a side project. And so the three founders were working at zapier coffee shops at home, whenever we could find the time. And then when we started hiring, we'd already built this set of organization and how we work and things like that that were well documented. And we knew to work through things like chat or the project management tool and stuff like that. And the people we knew to hire at the time were folks that didn't live in the same city as us. So we hired a colleague of mine from college who was in Chicago. I was in the Bay Area, another founder was in Missouri. And so by de facto, we just became a remote company and started building that way. But because we had that organization there in place, it wasn't like we were needed to be right next to my each other to figure a lot of these things out.

I'm really curious about the remote organization in the sense that typically when you bring the adult and experienced people, I imagine that they would be the least accustomed or confident that they can operate in an environment. Have you felt this resistance? Have you had people adapt to that?

Yeah, certainly. About a year ago, we started looking for a CFO as well. And I echo Craig's sentiment that CFO is like one of the most valuable things I've done in the last year. And we started our search, and we didn't restrict it to geography. I didn't necessarily need someone who was in the Bay Area, which is where we were at, and started the search. And we found someone in Atlanta, the former CFO at mailchimp. And you know, first she was like, I don't know. You know, she's. Mailchimp has a weird and quirky culture. So she's like, gets that Zapier is weird and quirky. Quirky too. Not so sure about the remote thing. And so we just started collaborating a little bit on the side so she could kind of get a feel for it. And then she's like, this is actually pretty effective. She found that she likes working, you know, having her own office that she can set up at home. You know, she's able to concentrate a little bit better with not a lot of distractions going on. And remote enabled that for her. And so for her it was like, actually this is pretty good, right? Just having a chance to give it a try. And so I think that's a lot of it is you want to find folks. If folks are totally against it, then they're clearly not going to work out. But folks that are like, I think this could work, it's probably going to work pretty well for them.

I want to go into the tough topic, which is hiring executives means changing the organization of the hiring above people or topping people, maybe blocking their career path. Or at least they can perceive it like that. How do you deal with that? And who wants to share some war scouts on this?

I don't know if it's necessarily war sorts, but it's. You know, we had never. Everyone in our company effectively was. This is our. Again, our third startup. So our first 30 or some odd people had all worked together before, so had this understanding of how we worked. So when we started bringing in, we weren't until we were about 100 people when we had a first headhunter and brought in a VP of sales and a VP of marketing. But I think, I mean, and again, just as I had never had a CFO before, I had never used a headhunter before. I always thought they were ridiculously expensive and I can find great talent through my investors, but these guys were great. And the slate of folks that you were able to see and the quality in their background and doing the reference checks and really just spending time with them before they got there, never really had any of that jealousy or kind of broken glass of bringing a guy in. And there's going to be this big transition. It's always worked pretty well. And I think that has to do with any of These companies that have a strong culture to begin with, it's hard to come in even if you're a VP level, even if you're a CFO and, and just be a jerk and everyone's gonna let you get away with it. Like, it's just not gonna happen. So it's like, although the headhunters are relatively expensive, it's definitely. I find that a lesson well worth it. And it's been really nice fit.

I can say about Wokme. We just acquired a couple of companies and the idea is that we really believe that small groups work best, better, and the CEOs of the acquired company become manager of a unit and suddenly someone from the outside comes and manage all the people that were with us for years. So I do think that it's not easy. There need to be a lot of communication with the employees. We like to solve a lot of things by just going out and have some drinks. And currently it's going very well. I can update you next year if the integration was smoothly. But I think they respect other entrepreneurs that build a company and were successful themselves coming with that drive and now suddenly leading that unit. And they're looking at them and they're like, yeah, it makes sense, at least at our situation.

What about functions? I mean, I know you mentioned the cfo. I can agree with that. It was the first senior, truly senior hire that we made and should have done it earlier. But usually when you start growing and you think you need to deck out a management team, what are the key roles that you want to go with first? In a software company like ours, in a SaaS company, where do you start? Where would you start if you did it again?

We started with sales as a B2B enterprise company. Sales was our first key. I'm saying sales because I was the first developer in the company, so we got the development side covered. But if I wasn't at a programming background, probably CTO was a good idea. But for us was sales. Definitely. Sales and marketing the same for everyone.

Yeah. I think you need to get what complements yourself too. Right. So for us, like my founder is way more technical. Makes sense that that would be like the role that comes in as the cto. And you know, you look at where you're weak and that's where you need to hire first. I think it's pretty simple.

What was your first cfo basically was the one thing I was totally clueless about.

How early did you hire a CFO?

Not fairly. At 50 people. Yeah, I don't know if that's early.

Or not, I was about the same as us.

What your CFO does, like, what is responsibility? It's just finance. Or it's more strategic, like how you price, how you.

A good CFO just quickly solves the finance problem, but then starts owning some strategic thinking about the business model of the company and what is efficient and how we should grow and how you should budget and how it works with.

The VP of sales, for example, how it's working together.

They usually work together on comp plans and modifying whether it's efficient performance. They work with the CEO to figure out the financing strategy. When you grow, there comes a point where your financing cannot be, oh, it's a series A, now it's a circle, series B. Just raise some more equity. There's more ways to think about the cash flow and the financing of the company. Somebody who knows how to do this opens up your eyes, at least mine, because I was clueless for this.

For me, it made it a lot easier to more confidently spend money. So she can go to the various VPs we have and say, hey, this is a problem you're having. Here's how you can spend money to solve these problems. Whereas before it was, you know, it's like, well, do we have the money for that, or am I spending too much money here? Like, there's just some uncertainty there and a great CFO will come in and just renew all.

I know, Dan, you said you have a VP of finance. You don't have a cfo. Everyone else has a CFO or a public company. We have a cfo. I'm curious what the difference is between a VP of finance in your mind and you didn't have a CFO in your other companies versus a cfo?

Yeah, we had VP Finance, basically to make sure the books and the finance were rock solid. Audit went well, money was well spent. The plan made sense. CFO in our case really was like operational cadence. You know, what are our enterprise deal reviews? What are the reports we're generating? What is rep productivity rather than prior to having a cfo? We had a lot of just best efforts. Tons of athletes, like, go out and kick ass as much as we can. And then to have a CFO really come in and drive metrics around that and say, okay, hey, here's where we are. Here's our effective ramp period for an effective sales rep. If we raise and hire this many more, what's the amount of leads? Is it gonna be enough to feed these guys and they'll be productive at this stage and then it's gonna be like this. And having really, that discipline to me was really the difference and just the credibility of having done it before and gone through and seen this motion of how do you scale an organization from 20 to $200 million? That's a really nice experience that frankly, a lot of people don't have.

For me, the VP finance makes sure you don't go to jail, you don't run out of money. The CFO makes sure you invest your money cleverly. It's a slightly different level of financial management. They could as well, actually. Yeah. The CFO's role is also to make sure that they control the CEO. It's a very important function.

And one of the things that everyone touched upon. Right. Was the right timing for hiring a management team or a senior hire. So one thing that I've had before is like many of us, we meet with a lot of companies, we meet with a lot of founders. And what's interesting is how do you hire that first senior hire? Because I've met with people where I know them sort of casually and suddenly will say, the person will say, well, do you want to come work here? And I have to say that kind of is a little off putting. And I actually think that there's a cadence to how do you bring in these super senior hires where the timing has to be right on both sides. Right. It's not just about suddenly you're having coffee and says you want to work here. It's sort of awkward, I have to say. And I don't really see that person much anymore. But good CFOs are hard to find, good VP's of sales are hard to find. And I would actually love to hear your thoughts on that.

So it's kind of a dating period. So it's not immediately our EVP of sales, which is amazing. He actually started as a consultant. He come and helped us and like, that you can do better, that you can do better. And we build a relationship and only few months later we're like, okay, come work here. And all the reps already knew him and everybody already knew him. And it was like, makes sense. That was our first hire. It was like, so makes sense. Took us almost seven months to complete that hire and we have the results. So it's great.

But it seems like when you hire that way, it's less jarring of an issue of the issue of topping. Right. Because the team's worked with that person already. Because it's a really serious issue. Right. When you hire Someone who's coming in on top of the team, who has been working really hard. And what I find is a lot of those natural athletes are so good at so many things that they do think that they can do everything right. But some of those natural athletes aren't great at managing and it's hard for them to hear that they aren't great at managing. So doing it that way is always a little easier. I don't know.

Yeah, that's been our approach too. You know, we brought in our cfo. I sent a ton of emails just to learn from different people. Right. I just, hey, I want to learn more about how you think about this role, how it works for your company. So I could start to form my own opinions and some of those started to develop into deeper relationships. And then with Jenny, our cfo, we actually ended up starting to work on a little things here and there. And it's like over some time, it's like, this is going pretty well. Would you consider doing this full time with us? And you know, that's how it worked out. So it wasn't just like, oh my God, you're the first CFO I've met. You know, come work at me.

You're great. Can you come work?

I need you.

So.

And by the way, you won't get an office. You have to work from home.

Yeah.

One of the things that I found that was really helpful because hiring an enterprise VP Sales or an enterprise marketing person, or even a CFO if you haven't done it before, I really did had no idea what to look for, what are the traits? And that was one of the better things that our VCs helped us with. They're like, hey, don't hire any of these guys because they're in other portfolio companies. But we're going to set you up for lunches or meetings with, with three great CFOs guys that we think are fantastic, or three great marketing guys, or three great sales guys. And after you spend time with them, at least you have a better understanding of what their commonalities are, what you're looking for in your actual candidate. Which was entirely different from how I always used to hire. And it's much more effective that way. So meeting or talking to as many people who are great at it before you go out in hiring, I thought was.

How did you end up finding yours?

A couple headhunters?

Yeah. Actually that has always been my biggest problem, is that for the functions you need the most, you don't know what crate looks like. And actually that brings me to another point. I know one of the things I always have a bias for is I usually try to turn to my own network and the closed network, the people I work with. Very often I'm tempted to hire someone who's not done this function before. But I have worked with before. I know their star. How many of you have hired people like that?

No for sure.

And is it a good thing or a bad thing? I just want to know for myself.

I can say that. And there is probably some walk me folks in the audience, a lot of my friends working in the company, people that were with me, I'm from Israel, that were with me in the army. We hire from the same unit. We know exactly what we want. People that we know for years. And it's amazing. Even if we bring someone, isn't there.

A risk there to create a monoculture, to bring the people that were successful with you in your previous company and build your previous company? Essentially or part of it, isn't it? When I've hired people I never knew before and came from a different culture, for me it was great because they did some things I would never have imagined to ask for. I know you have something there.

I'd go the opposite on that. Being able to have a level of familiarity and comfort and knowing that you guys have shared values and shared missions and you don't have to worry about someone doing the wrong thing. It really helps you just execute more quickly. And yeah, I know what to expect from them, but they've been awesome. So I know to expect awesomeness. But it's a real comfort to have Again, your first 20 to 30 employees that have all spent at least three or four or five years together working at other jobs. And then your next kind of like next 20 hires are usually like one degree of separation from this kind of core group that really kind of gives you this unfair advantage of starting this startup that is a very tense, nervous, uncertain time with a group that feels very comfortable together. And I think that's been awesome. I mean that's kind of a secret to the success.

You're suggesting that familiarity. I think it also has to do with trust. I mean, right, you're going to cede control over big parts of your business. How about that? What advice do you have for this?

Yeah, trust is probably the most important piece, right. If you can't trust your management team, then you're always going to be second guessing them, right. You're always going to be double checking everything that they do and it's just going to drive you nuts. So you have to be able to build that trust with them and have that trust with them. And if you don't, it's just not going to work out.

How do you do that?

Well, I mean, you get to know them, right? Like, how do you build trust with anyone, right? Like you spend time with them, you get to see how they work. If they do things, things well, then you're going to build trust with them. If you take care of them well, they're going to trust you.

So for us, even today, and again, we're at a different stage of company than some of you. As I'm sitting here, and I hadn't thought about it before, not a single one of our senior management came from a headhunter or someone we didn't know. I just brought in two SVPs in the company and I've been working, recruiting them, talking to them for three years. But the timing had to be right on both sides because I agree that especially in the early days, you have to be so lockstep in your mission and going forward. But it becomes you also want to make sure that you bring in people who have experienced things different than what was in your original company or else you're just going to do things the same way over and over again. That being said, we actually haven't brought people in that we don't know, but the folks on the management team have different enough networks that we've all brought in people. Like, I come from a big company background and others have never been in a big company. And so I think that that has actually been a key to why it's successful. And so even though we haven't gone the headhunter route, you're not bringing in a bunch of homogenous individuals who are leading a company because I think especially as you get a little bit more mature, that can be dangerous.

How do you onboard and integrate an executive that's coming in?

I think, and I will continue your point, it's all about KPIs and when someone new join and it's about trust as well. We need to know what the KPIs and I think this is why this conference is awesome. It wasn't been there 10 years ago. What is SaaS metrics, what is good ASP, how you do it. I think now it's more clear and there are benchmarks. So when someone new comes, you know what to expect from them and then it's easier to integrate them because okay, this is what I'm expecting in the first six months that's the KPI. That's where we want to be. And when that is clear, I think it's very easy to work with a new hire because sometimes they have their own ideas or their own way. But as long as we agreeing on the same KPI and that that KPI needs to be achieved, then at least my work with my management team, super easy.

I understand that in some cases it works. Some cases it's very simple because you know really what you want to achieve or you have an established structure inside the company, so you know the goals and basically hand someone the keys and, and tell them to bring me that goal. But it's not always like that. For example, in my experience when I hired the cfo, I'm not sure I really knew what success looked like or the things that I had in my mind, the things that I hadn't planned and I asked for were a fraction of what we ended up having to do over there. Always my personal struggle is like, you know, how much do you ask them to make the plan and define success? And in fact, I tend to think that the really successful executives are the ones who can actually do that part.

To exceed what you expect, not just.

To exceed, to actually define what success in this function should be like for the particular company. And it's really difficult for someone who doesn't know the company, even if you've been courting them for years.

For me, it will be extremely difficult to bring someone if I don't know what their KPI is like. I would just not make the hire, at least for me.

Any thoughts on that?

Yeah, I mean, I'd say in a lot of these senior execs that you bring in later on, obviously they're coming in because they're filling the gap that you don't have. And so it's. Had I not gone through the experience of getting to know what I was looking for beforehand or getting to know what a good set of outputs from any of these hires would be, you'd be a little bit lost and you'd be a little bit dependent on hoping you got a lucky hire or a good hire, but you wouldn't know until later. So really kind of understanding what success looks like, what those KPIs would be, and then checking references like crazy and then dropping the guy in and giving the freedom to do it. And I think that's the way to run.

I see that we're nearly done. Anyone want to have any final comments before the time runs out?

I do want to say at least for the people here that building their companies as someone that got burned. The title here is how to build or how to hire your management team. You need to know how to fire as well. The minute it's not working, just cut it. Believe in yourself and just, you know what the best for your company. No one else does.

And on that cheerful note, thank you very much. Thank you for attending. Thank you all.