Live Workshop Wednesday: How to Do Company All-Hands Meetings Right with Guru

Buddy. Welcome to this week's workshop Wednesday. Come on in. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Just gonna let folks in, let folks get their Zooms situated. But we appreciate you being here. We're excited for this week's workshop Wednesday. All right, as everyone knows, we are here every Wednesday at 10:00am do we have our music right?

We do, we do.

I can't hear it. Is it me?

Oh, it's no, it's me.

Setting the mood for you all. As everyone knows, we're here every Wednesday at 10am Pacific week after week to year. Detailed, interactive and hands on workshops that we really expert. We've got some nice mood music to kick everybody off and it is in line with what we're going to be talking about today. So get your questions ready. We're excited to have Rick Nietzsche, the CEO at Guru, and he's going to be talking about company All Hands meetings. So something that we all do, something that we all are always trying to figure out how to optimize. Guru actually just hosted their 100th all hands meeting. So he's going to be sharing some insights and just some things that he's learned along his journey. As you know, we'll have plenty of time to ask questions and we want you to join the conversation. So be sure to drop questions in here in the chat as we go throughout the session and then Rick will save time at the end to go through them. So hopefully we can make this a fun interactive discussion. I'm sure some people have some tips and some lessons learned to share on this topic as well. Rick, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you. Should I go ahead and get us started? Are we ready?

Before we officially kick off, we of course have some questions for you just to get to know you a little bit better. So just tell us a little bit more about your role as CEO. What are you up to and what does your day to day currently look like?

Yeah, absolutely. I would say probably the three big things I tend to spend time on are products and making decisions around where we should be spending our time and investing more in our product and, you know, what sort of new, exciting, exploratory use cases should we be considering at Guru? Customer facing. And that could mean I just love spending time with customers in general. So meeting potential prospects, meeting existing customers, walking them through some things we're thinking about doing, getting their feedback, just love doing it. We recently did some in person customer meetups which we had not done for a while and boy, that was just a ton of fun. And then broadly, you know, a Lot of stuff we'll be talking about today. Work really closely with Jess, our people leader around, you know, trying to create a culture that employees can authentically connect with and feel engaged around.

That's great. Love the customer. We know Jason talks about that a lot, how important those in person interactions and meetings are. What project are you working on today that you're most excited about?

Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, it's the answer that probably many, many people are giving right now, which is around generative AI. But, but in my defense, I would say what, what we are really exciting, excited about is I think as all this kind of craziness is going on in, in the world of technology, I'm really excited about seeing what I would describe as like, real business problems where the technology can be appropriately applied. I think it's like every in, in the world of hype cycles, you know, how do you kind of, how do you kind of burst through the noise? And I think we've been making a lot of great progress around how AI can drastically improve how people, you know, find and access knowledge. And so that's like a project we're working on right now that I'm, yeah, would definitely be at the top of my list.

And in the last 12 months, what would you say is the hardest thing that you've worked on?

Oh, without a doubt. I mean, you know, I, I think, I think if we look back at 2023, you know, Guru has a lot of tech customers and, you know, in a scary way reminded me of a lot of the, the, the chaos going on during the pandemic where a lot of people are sort of dealing with, needing help with their, their rel, their, their relationship with Guru. Hey, you know, we've maybe reduced the size of the team or we felt some pain. How do we sort of maintain the health of the business while also partnering with these customers, recognizing that like, they're going through a, a somewhat unique and disruptive change internally in their business. Definitely, I'd say the hardest thing over the last 12 months.

Yeah, certainly a challenge. And then last question. Give a shout out to your current favorite SaaS tool or platform. What are you loving right now?

I, I have really been enjoying a product called Momentum. And what it does, or at least what it does for us, is just creates a very efficient way to stay up to date on customer conversations. Whatever you kind of want it to watch, but it'll, you know, it'll sort of gather up all your gong recordings and create very specific types of insights you want. So not just Sort of a summary, but like, oh, tell me how they found out about Guru or tell me how they're thinking about AI and it will sort of like intentionally summarize something specific like that. And I've just found it to be. It's sort of a daily reading habit for me now and I've just found it a great way to like, you know, scan through a whole bunch of customer conversations and kind of like flag the ones that are worth digging into.

Yeah, I mean, practical AI. That's great. All right, well drop in the chat where we are tuning in from because we love to see we always get some great stuff, cities and countries represented. So without further ado, I asked one.

Last question before we go.

Rick, it's Jason.

I'm kidding.

Hello, Jason.

I don't want to interrupt.

I really.

This is a niche but a great topic. The all hands meet.

I want to hear about it.

But Boomi, so you founded your last company. It's probably gonna eventually IPO in the next year or two, right? I think they announced a couple.

I forget what the error they announced.

But Steve Lucas runs it, I think.

Right? Do I have that right? Correct. That's correct.

So what are the Zen learnings from all of that all these years in that your last baby is at that scale from selling to Dell from today. Any Zen learnings for founders and others out there over these long journeys?

Like besides selling it too soon, you mean?

Maybe, Maybe. I mean sometimes we immediately feel that way and then later we don't and then we yo, yo, back and forth.

No, look, it's, it's all good. And, and I always say Dell was a really great acquirer and a really great company to work with. And then as you noted, you know, eventually they' did sell it, sell it years later at quite a big return for them. But to answer your question, I mean the crazy thing is like, you know, and Jason, we used to talk when you were building Echos sign around that same time, like you had sort of this transformation of cloud happening and hype cycle. And there are things different but some things that feel similar now with AI and that hype cycle. And I would say like a good learning for Boomi that I've taken with me is how you balance innovation without being bleeding edge or being overly, you know, overly focused on innovation to the point that you're too far ahead of your customers and the problems they want to solve now. And I think if there was one thing that was going on with Boomi, we launched, you know, this cloud integration product at the end of 2007. I mean, think about where SaaS was back then, right? It was like people, yeah, we talk to customers and they'd be like, well, I have, you know, Salesforce, but that's like kind of it so far, you know, and we'd be like, okay, yeah, fair know the market wasn't quite, quite at that space yet. So I think, like, I think the learning I've taken through with me to Guru is to be more intentional around what I would call like the blocking, blocking and tackling core pragmatic use cases customers have today and need to solve today. And the new, what I will call leading edge but not bleeding edge things that in this case, then it was cloud, now it's AI can solve in a new and novel way. And I think striking that balance when we are in this kind of hype cycle is I would say like this learning that I am literally doing that context switching to your question between Boomi and Guru and what feels similar. All right, thanks.

Just something we all think about. All right, let's talk about all hand speedings.

Just as a reminder, this recording will be shared on our YouTube page and the slides will be up on our SlideShare. Thanks, Rick.

Awesome. Thank you. Well, excited. This is one of my favorite topics which is broadly around, you know, internal comms and company culture. And yeah, we, we recently did our 100th of these, we call them town halls, all hand meetings and was like, hey, what are the things that like have worked well for us and the things that maybe, maybe haven't. So you heard a bit of context there in Jason's question. But yeah, I, I am the co, founder and CEO of Guru. Before that had started a company called Boomi, which we were just talking about. What Guru does is provide AI driven search for companies. So think of it as one. One place employees can go to ask questions, search, find the knowledge they need to do their jobs, regardless of where that knowledge or data might live across all the different places where they work. And, and the company is about 10 years old. So that gives you a sense of. I'll talk more about sort of when we started doing our town halls, but you know, pretty early in our life we started doing them to get, get up to get up to the hundred we're at now. But yeah, fast forward to today. We've raised a few rounds of venture capital. We have just over 3,000 customers using Guru across all different, all different verticals. So quick, quick Guru at a glance. But to give a bit of context, but but yeah, let's kind of. Let's kind of jump in. So. So why do town halls? I mean, the first thing I would say, we started doing town halls when we were about 14 or 15 employees. Extremely informal. I remember it's like our first office. We just sort of like, sat around on the couch and kind of talked about some things going on. But even back then, I think these were the three threads we were going for around, around why we felt like town halls were important and mattered. I would. I do spend, you know, a fair amount of time on it. I think it does. I feel like it matters to sort of be able to connect directly with every employee in an authentic way. So, see, if I were to sort of bucket it down to three things. I mean, alignment is. I would describe this as like, strategic things or goals that matter at the company that span multiple departments. If we're just talking about something our product org or our sales team's doing, that's going to manifest in the team meeting there. But when it's something that is like, hey, this is like a thing that has dot connects across multiple teams. That's the kind of alignment I'm talking about here. And as I'll talk about in a minute. You know, reinforcement, I think, is a huge part of. Of alignment. And town halls is like one of the techniques we used to do that. Culture. I think the. One of the core ways that a culture sort of manifests in a company is you def. You write down and define your core values that effectively are sort of the personality or the behavior of the organization that you want. What are the characteristics and traits that you want in all of your employees. And the only way that that works is if you find systemic rituals to reinforce and kind of celebrate those people l. Those core values. I'll talk about how we do that, but we think town hall is a great way to do that. And then transparency, I. I mean, at least for us, this is a really big one. I think that it's something we learned at boomi. I think, like, the way we always talk about this is like, you can give people the good news and the bad news. You can give people changes in strategy as long as you provide the context and the transparency better. Better for people to go on the roller coaster with you, then wonder what. What is even going on, right? It's like if you. If you don't give the team the narrative, they'll write their own narrative and you might not like what. What gets written. Right? So I'd much rather use opportunities like this to frame something that's going well. Frame something that's not going well. And so, so those are, those are sort of. I'd say our three, our three whys. Then if we look at the what, so what what do we actually do? We do monthly. I will, I will say 90 minutes reads as shockingly long. They rarely go 90 minutes. They often go half that time. We do block that amount of time to give space if something really important is happening or going long or we're getting a whole bunch of questions and want to facilitate that kind of space. But I would say they generally run under 45 minutes. We do not, I'd say this was an early learning. Like we don't, we don't sort of like oh, it's 90 minutes. So let's make sure we have 90 minutes of content. It's like quality over quantity. We, we. It's totally fine if we have a 20 minute worth of content in a, in a town hall, right? We do record them. So we do enable people to be able to watch them if they miss the live format and then kind of the process. And so our, our VP of people kind of dris the kind of organization of the town hall. We typically start one to two weeks in advance. We typically start laying out a skeleton agenda in a private Slack channel. We are also pulling in speakers and presenters. The agenda is you know, a mix of, of recurring and one time segments and I, I'll get into what, what some of those are. I tend to host them. I personally again as you can kind of tell really like doing that. I like to be able to talk directly to the, to, to the whole team and, and, and be as accessible as I, as I can be. But I've also learned to not hog the mic because I have no problem doing that by the way. But you know, like, like, like bring other speakers in like we do want to. Maybe it's other functional leaders, maybe it's individual contributors working on something cool or exciting. And then employees will post live questions and comments in an open Slack channel. And we, we encourage people to use that channel for questions all the time. We also share all of the resources and things we talked about in that channel on the fly as we're kind of like presenting so people have, have access to that stuff. So what a typical agenda looks like. So you can think of it as like kind of two buckets. There are recurring segments or kind of the more ritual things we do. Announcements, very straightforward. New hires and promotions, very straightforward. This is, this is sort of if There's a lot of people. It's like flash up a screen if it's a small number of people. We spotlight everyone on zoom the values in action which I will go deeper into. But every town hall we sort of like celebrate employees living a core value voice of the customer. I'll talk more about but playing actual real customer conversations live in every town hall. Huge fan of that. And then anonymous questions and we I'd say I'll talk more about anonymous questions and the format but I would say very net positive. Glad we do anonymous. That was sort of the thing I think we, we went back and forth a lot on some examples of one time segments. We will do a, A you know, roadmap dedicated town hall probably once a quarter what's coming. We will do look back retrospective things. You know a core value for us is seek and share knowledge and really what we're trying to do with a look back is like don't show up and just celebrate all the great things you did. Show up and be like here are things that went well and didn't go well. It's like modeling the behavior of.

Of.

Of candor and vulnerability so that, so that people understand that like it's okay to make mistakes or make the wrong decision. At Guru that is like completely okay. Only make new mistakes maybe is a better way to say it right. And, and then a new feature deep dive. We may go deeper into a product theme if it's something new we're working on or something important to the company and may be an opportunity to excite, you know, kind of excite the team we are this, this guidepost I'd say is, is a learning along the way. When I say general approach. 40% remind reinforce 60 new content. So we very deliberately from town hall to town hall will repeat and reinforce things we said in a prior town hall because we find that that is very much necessary and important and intentional redundancy. Right. And then and, and almost 40% of the town hall will land like that. It won't be verbat, you know, verbatim repeated exactly how it was last time. But we will try to dot connect over and over and over again. Things, themes, strategies, goals and why they matter what we're doing. And then 60% will be kind of new content. So general what why, how so kind of seven lessons I'll kind of spend, spend some time on and you know why we do these. So first setting the mood and when we were joking earlier about playing music. Am definitely a big fan of music generally and this is my opportunity to allow no one to collaborate with me on exactly what music I want to play in front of the whole team and force upon them all of my musical interests and tastes. You can imagine this is met with mixed. Mixed results. I think generally, you know, I am trying to set a vibe of energy and excitement and positivity, and, you know, I, you know, keep it clean and don't sort of, you know, invite, like, something that's just gonna get Jess, our people leader, to pull me aside and be like, knock it off. Stop doing that. So try to set the vibe. Because we really are. Look, we really are energizing the team. The goal. You walk out of a town hall, people should look forward to a town hall walk out of it. In our opinion, you walk out of a town hall and you feel energized. And that's. That's what we want to strive. That's where we want to go for. So starts with music. We do actually collect everything we've ever played in this. In this town hall playlist. I might be a little behind the other vibe setting, and this all manifested through the pandemic learnings, but we do a intentionally remote design town hall experience. And that means that I'm sitting in this room right here, like I'm doing right now, talking to all of you, presenting the town hall. And this is a intentional decision that our. Our people team made that I thought was just very inclusive, which is give everyone the same experience, because the majority of our team is distributed remote, kind of working all over the place. And we do. I work in our Philadelphia office here and. And there. There are many Philadelphia teammates who do gather in person and kind of sit in a room and a watch. And I have to sit in here by myself alone and listen to their energy and excitement. And I can't even be in the same room with them. But that's my running bit with our people leader. But in reality, that is actually by design. It's okay. Yes, I'd love to be out there with the team, but it's much better, I think, to just sit in the room, sit in here and be talking to everyone in the exact same way. And I think the little things like that, if you've ever been in a team meeting and everyone was sitting in a meeting room and you were zooming in, it can feel weird, right? It can feel a little alienating. And we didn't want that experience to happen in the town hall experience. So that's what we mean by setting the vibe. Next, one of Our redundant things we do around setting the context. This is the first slide we show at every town hall and these are various operational things that we do throughout the year. And so you see that star there and that blue dot at the end. And so that's telling you this is where we are today. This is a reminder of what FY25 means because if you don't work in, in, in, in a finance related world, you might be like, what the heck's an fy? And you know, it's just a good reminder where are we in the year? Where are we in the quarter? What's going on? Right. And so, you know, if there is a town hall shortly after a board meeting or an off site strategy session, then that town hall is likely going to include a recap or learnings from, from that. So it gives people a bit of a pace.

Right.

The first town hall, you know, this one right here that we're going to do in green coming up here in a couple weeks in May is going to be a recap and learnings around Q1, what did we learn? What are we planning to do about that as we go into Q2? So sort of a way to plot yourself along, along the path of where, where you are in the year and kind of ground people in that. And I think, I think people tend, tend to kind of appreciate that. All right, so I talked about culture and, and how we, how we reinforce it at Guru and this is one of the rituals we have done by the way. So much of the things that I'm telling you are like really smart, talented guru employees that had these ideas brought them up. This is, this is an amalgamation of really smart people who care about culture, giving us a bunch of ideas to iteratively make these better and better. And this is one of them. And this is just a really, really great one. We call this values in action. And so every town hall we flash up our core values and we remind the team relentlessly every single time. We have five core values. Here in Guru, we have slack emojis representing each of our core values. In Guru, when you see a teammate living a core value, use that slack emoji that has a workflow that routes to our people team. There's other ways you can do that, but it is a peer driven way to manifest employees who are living a particular value. And again, it's quality, not quantity. So we're not, you know, we're not, you know, giving metals out for being normal. Right? It's like, it's like they, they they did this thing and it was a really great manifestation of that. If it's create advocates, it's an exceptional thing that we did for a customer that really got them to, you know, if you use the MPS Lexicon, right. Got them to the 9 or the 10 if it's. She can share know I'm always looking for these. It's when someone shares in a public channel or something like, hey, I made a mistake and did something wrong, that's going to go right into town hall. Because frankly, it is not always comfortable or safe for people to feel like they can share failures. And I think to be able to celebrate those and be like, nope, that's actually good. You know, it helps kind of model the, the behavior we want anyway. You get the idea. I think don't take yourselves too seriously. The way I always summarize this core value of Guru is we want people who debate to get to the right answer versus debating to be right. And I think when we find someone who has a, a story or a lived experience around, you know, conflict, disagreement, you know, we're not a consensus culture, right. It's, it's. We have dris, we have disagreeing commit mindsets. Right? So, so, so someone who went through that, we want to kind of celebrate that. So. So I'd say around 10 minutes of every town hall is a slide template that looks like this brand that spotlights the value, a picture of the person and specifically what they did. So storytelling the thing they did, you'll see the rest of the employees really rally up and applaud or light them up in the zoom chat. And I think it's just a really, a really great thing. Voice of the customer. So here's an example of a template we use. But in the world that we now live in, where every customer conversation is recorded, it's a really wonderful way to identify themes that we want to be talking about in our town hall. So. So if it's a new feature release, then we will likely find customers that are talking to us about that capability, good and bad. It's, again, it's not just meant to be a cheerleading session. Of course we want to energize people, but we do want it to be somewhat balanced. But we will spotlight the company. We'll talk about what do they use Guru for. We'll pull out the quotes like you see in this example. How are they using Guru? And then what is the thing they're talking about? And so we'll, we'll identify a theme. I gave you an example A new feature, a theme around. It might be a theme around a new type of Persona that we're seeing start to buy or adopt guru. So we might find examples of that Persona and how they talk about the problem. And then we actually will play the clips. Like we will actually play the gong clips. We'll, we'll sort of organize them in a way. We'll kind of flash the, the video on the screen and actually play the, the clips end to end. And, and this is about five minutes usually. But we love to have two or three stories and every single town hall we are doing some something around voice of customer, customer stor, all harvested from gong clips. Twice a year we do live voc. I would say that's not a town hall, so I won't get too into it, but effectively think of that. But you know, a 45 minute version of that with the customer joining via Zoom where all the employees can ask them questions live. And that's really great too. But this is sort of our, every month we do this kind of thing. Okay, so the next one. Avoiding heavy financials. We used to go into a good amount of depth on, on our company financials. We're still pretty transparent. I mean we just share, we share our, our, our financial results, you know, like, like very similar to what we're sharing with the board. But I think what we've learned is like we don't need to go into like the detailed operating model of the business. I'm kidding. We never did that much. But like we did get a little bit too heavy and I think people tend to glaze over. But more importantly, I think it's more about the context. Right. And so what we've kind of landed on is our CFO does. This is a, a screenshot of our kind of guru card where every month he posts video updates, 15 minute video updates. That is a dedicated session where he walks through. I think employees appreciate this. I've heard many say that, you know, they, they care about this. They want to see what's going on, how is the business doing and they'll go back and watch it a few times because again, it's, it's a little more dense. Right? So to try to stick that in a live town hall format, really hard. So if anything in a town hall we'll spotlight. Here's how we ended in Q1, here's the context, here's what it means. You're talking about, you know, three or four numbers, right? New business expansion, churn, stuff like that, new customers. But, but, but Then we pull out and do Async, this kind of monthly cadence. And again, the why behind this is transparency. We, we don't. We, we. We just think personally at Guru, it is very important to share that transparency in its, in its goodness and things that aren't so good. And we think it goes a long way in establishing trust with the employees. And again, I said before, if we aren't giving them the story, they will write their own nar give. And it may be not what's actually going on.

Right.

And so, and so I think we just have landed on, hey, we'd much rather just, just do this monthly ritual so that people can contextualize what's happening and understand what's going on in the business. Okay, last two. So anonymous questions, I would say, Net, this is a huge positive for the company. We spent a lot of time debating this, not in a dramatic way, but it's like, hey, you know, we're trying to have these core values around seek and shared knowledge and radical candor and all this stuff. And then we're saying, oh, but to ask the hard questions. You can hide behind this anonymous form, right? But the reality is there are a lot of reasons why someone's question might want to be anonymous. And it could be things that if asked out loud, could be weird in their mind for their boss to hear them asking, who knows, right? We just were like, look, there's enough of that that would I rather get the question or would I rather not get the question? I'd rather get the question. I'd rather hear the hard thing that's on the mind of the person. And we've gotten plenty of really hard ones and give people the space to do it. There is literally no way we can possibly see who is asking these questions when they ask them. So there, there is no back door or no way that we can go in. And you know, that question really bothered us. So we're gonna get, you know, there's just no way to know. And so people submit these. They. They are processed asynchronously. Is. Is the other thing I will say. So we are not, we are not fielding anonymous questions live. And I wouldn't field anonymous questions live only because a number of reasons some of them are, can be answered are they don't need the microphone of the town hall. They can be answered in our newsletter. And some of them, frankly, I want to think about them. I want to, I want to be able to give them a bit more thought. And, and usually the questions that come in through this form are, you know, deeper. And so there's a, there's a field that you're not seeing here that's like a bigger text area. People will fill that up and they'll, they'll ask deeper questions around, well, why are we doing this? And this feels like this wrong or that. And I don't really understand this. And like, that's what I want. I want to hear the things that people like, don't like or confused about or, or things like that going on at the company. Because that tells me like, okay, there's a future town hall topic or future newsletter topic. So, so the way we do it is we reinforce and remind people fairly consistently. This is where you go to ask anonymous questions. We gather them all up as part of our prep for town hall. We identify which ones we're going to answer live and which ones we're going to answer async through our newsletter. And then at the end we have a section that just sort of addresses the anonymous question and we repeat it. There's no name attached to it. And then we talk through it. And I will usually, depending on the question, I might answer it. I might tag in people that are sort of the subject matter expert on the topic and have them come off mic or come off mute and answer it themselves. And, and, and that's kind of the way, the way we roll that. And, and again, I think, I think it's, it's been in that positive because I think we've just gotten out of this process some things that, you know, some deep thoughts and fears that we might not have gotten out of people if we didn't, if we didn't have this. And then finally, don't sugarcoat it. You've heard me talk about this a few times, but, you know, we really lean into this. I'm sure seen this framework before, but if you haven't, it's called the radical Cander framework. And it is the idea that the best way to collaborate with your team internally is to both challenge directly and care personally about the person you're, you're. You're talking to. If you're only challenging directly, well, that's obnoxious aggression and you just show up like a jerk. And we've probably all worked with people that have fit into that bucket. If you're only caring personally, but you're not actually challenging directly, well, that's called ruinous empathy. And you're not actually helping the person, you're actually doing them real harm because you're letting them think that everything's fine when in reality you're just not giving them the hard, the hard, the hard stuff. Right. And, and I've definitely gone on a journey as a founder and how to get better about that. It's, it's not something that necessarily comes naturally to me. When I make mistakes, I'll skew into the ruinous empathy quadrant. Everyone I've talked to about this, they all, they all have their, their, their place where they want to move up into the right. Oh, I tend to be down here and, and I want to move up and there's different, different, you know, things you might do based on where you land and the, in the grid to move yourself in the right, the right direction. The point is, like, you're not a bad human in any of these as long as you go not good. And I should be aspiring to kind of improve. And so I say this because this, if we care about this and we do two trainings a year at Guru to really help the team practice speaking and collaborating with Radical Candor, but if we're really serious about this, well, well, we have to model it. And one of the opportunities to model is in town hall. And so when you hear me talking about things like celebrating when people make mistakes, when you hear me say things like we want to share not so good news In Town Hall 2, it's not just a cheer cheerleading session. That's what I mean by that because I think if we don't, and I have in the past strayed too far into what I might call a, you know, paranoid desire to be optimistic, overly optimistic. And you know, I tend to believe that the humans that work at our companies are, are intelligent people and they see through that and they just want to know the real, the real thing, right? The real, the real deal. What's going on? So look, long term optimism, yeah, of course that's critical. Why are we all here? But totally okay to say, yeah, some shit's hard right now and here's, here's the reality of this or that and that all I think connects to this, this desire to not sugarcoat it and, and speak, speak with radical candor and have that manifest in, in our town hall as well. So there it is. Those are, I'd say, seven things that we have either, you know, I've been really inspired by teammates who have given us great ideas or things. We have just tried and iterated and found work really well over the years. But yeah, happy to take any questions on any of that.

Great, thank you, Rick. Yeah, questions in the chat and of course, keep them coming. A lot of great people asking for the recording and the slides. I think you've got some great examples and templates, so thanks so much for sharing.

Can I ask, can I skip to the head of the line? Then I'll shut up. I'm just gonna ask Juan.

This is the one, this is the.

One I'm struggling with. Rick, what's changed the last 12 to 18 months? How have you changed? I just feel like people are different. The world is so much different from 2021. Everything's just different. And in most cases it's harder. Maybe it's not harder at Guru than it was 24 months ago. It's certainly not harder at OpenAI.

Right.

Or a few other places. But we're different people. Have you changed the playbook recently in any fundamental way to adjust to people, or is it the same one?

Most. It's a great question. I wouldn't say we've changed the playbook. I'd say we have definitely changed the tone and the candor stuff I was talking about before. So when you said it's different and it's harder. Yeah, it's definitely harder. It's harder for Guru. Harder than it is for us, than it is for OpenAI. Absolutely. And I'd say an example of how we manifest that is for example, we, we literally talk about the, the interest rate in town halls because, because people read about this and they're like, what, what does this mean? What, what is the zero interest rate? Ph. What, what does it mean? That venture capital was free flowing and it's hard now. And like we, we go through, and in the beginning, in, in, in some level of painstaking detail like this is what it means because you're reading about it, you're seeing it everywhere in TechCrunch in places. And like, let's get ahead of it and be real about this and say that like, yeah, it is different. The cost of capital is fundamentally different. The, the need for growth at all costs is dead. What does that actually mean? Things like rule of 40, our North Star metrics that, that, that people shelved in early stage companies for a long time now actually matter. Right. And well, what does rule of 40 mean and what does it mean for Guru to get to rule of 40? So I think, I think it's just where we have, it's been a really great opportunity for us to be like, that's hard and everything's going to feel harder and we're not going to, you know, be hiring because of a growth plan we've put out and forecasted over 12 months. We're going to be hiring based on real pain that we're feeling within a team, and that's going to feel different and uncomfortable. And our CFO has this great slide, and it's like, I should pull it up, but it's like. It's like, here. Here's the reality, right? Like. Like, if you imagine two vessels on the sea, right? There's like, the cruise ship where you're getting drinks and sitting back in a lounge chair, and there's racing boats where you're wearing helmets and life vests. We're on the racing boats now. And. And that's, you know, that's just the reality. And. And. And not saying that in a. In a threatening way or. Or a negative way to the team, but in a very genuine, like, you might actually not want to be on that kind of boat. And, like, that is, like, totally okay, but we need to sort of set reality for you. So. So that's. I'd say that's how we've changed our. Our tone with the team, and I think. Think it's been positively received because I think it's tied to this theme of transparency we're trying to do.

Any other questions? Jason, we answered yours on transparency. All right, Kyle, I'm going to bring you up to ask your question to strong growth. Kyle, do you want to ask and come off mute or. I'm happy to ask for you.

All right. You hear me?

Sorry.

Okay.

I'm feeling. I'm a little bit sick today.

And then, like.

Yeah, so I was debating whether to come up, but happy to. Happy to ask. Yeah. Rick, appreciate all the context and. And the story you told today. I'm curious just in our. I'm kind of in a position where we started really small. We're growing. So I'm kind of thinking about these rituals a little more, and I'd be curious for you to speak to, like, as you guys grew, you said your first one was very much, like, informal. Probably just had a conversation on a couch. It's very much where we were. And now we're, you know, 50 people, different teams. I wanted to make everything very relevant, you know, have enough time to prep. Good stuff. We're doing weekly, you know, Monday morning, all hands. Can you speak to, like, a little bit of the evolution about, like, the one. The material of, like, what you guys would cover? And then, you know, did you go from weekly to bi weekly to monthly to be like, let's just do quarterly bring everyone together? Yeah, I would love to hear your experience.

Totally. Yeah. We went from bi weekly, twice a month to once a month, month. And it really was the content and the prep and the quality over quantity. I think the thing we saw was like not a never a desire to get overly polished, but I'd say if I make a mistake in town halls, it's maybe I over index on that a bit too much. And so I'm like, oh, I wanna, you know, I wanna show up with something that good that will kind of matter to the team and feel a bit of that pressure prepping for each, for each town hall. And so we kind of settled into monthly because we felt it was the right balance of like, like there will be a meaningful thing to talk about and it's worthy of talking about live because again, when we think about, hey, something we want to communicate out to the team, is it department specific? That's team meeting. Is it, you know, a more normal type of thing that can go in our newsletter? Is it a no. We got to rally people around this. This is important that that's worthy of town hall. So that's part of also how we're making that decision and why my monthly feels good because it's like frequent enough is our feeling that people sort of go, oh, town hall day is coming up. Cool. You know, I'm looking forward to that. But not so frequent where we're kind of feeling like we're constantly prepping one prep after the next. So. So that was how we. I think we'll stick with monthly at this point. We've been doing monthly now for four years.

Yeah, makes sense. And quick follow up question. Are the topics, you know, whether it's, you know, like what to focus on, is that more of a leadership decision of like that you guys collaborate on or do you ever crowdsource potential topics from people through like a forms to capture like the voice of your employee of like what matters to them? What do they want to talk about? How did you go about making those decisions?

Yeah, that, that, that's a really great question. The ones that come top down from the team or if like I'm seeing something that's a dot connect strategy thing across multiple teams, I'll say like I want to make sure the team understands why we're doing this thing. A lot of it gets crowdsourced and a lot of it gets crowdsourced through those anonymous questions. When, when, when a certain anonymous question comes in and someone's asking about like it seems like we're doing this, but it doesn't seem like we have a good plan to do this. And you know, there it's sort of like ripe with like, you know, failure predictions. I'm usually like, okay, we might actually fail at the thing. But for sure what we have to do is like give some dedicated time because if that person's asking that, that probably several others are wondering some variant of that thing. And so we do a lot of. I'd say half of the themes we're talking about in Town hall are kind of bottoms up. And then the other buckets were those recurring rituals I was talking about before. Values and actions, important announcements, going through the anonymous questions directly that, that sort of thing. I'd say those three things kind of determine how we do the agenda.

Caitlin, can I ask one more quick follow up about the form?

Yeah.

Okay, the forms, I don't know if you got into it, but do you keep those open like live throughout the quarter? Are they just opened like before a town hall to capture that? Because sometimes you might want to voice something to have covered a month before. How does that work? And then I'm done.

No, no, no. It's, it's a, it's a great one. They are open. They are open at all times. We send a newsletter out every two weeks that has great readership. We reinforce and remind people to ask questions. Every single newsletter I plug the form every single town hall and they will come in throughout a month. And that's what I want. You know, to me the best thing is like when you have the thought get it in there and then it'll either manifest in a future town hall or it'll manifest in a, in a newsletter. Newsletter.

Yeah, that was going to be a question we had from social is just you have monthly update on that first kind of planning slide that you showed. Is that the newsletter or the newsletter you said is every two weeks. What goes into the newsletter content? Just town hall recaps or anything else.

It will be complimentary to Town hall, but it will be. We actually have a template we can actually share as a follow up to this of what's everything that's in our newsletter. But I'll just give you some examples. Reminder of announcements so redundant reinforce of any important announcements, benefits, enrollments. Our performance reviews are coming up in a few weeks. Product updates. So everything that has gone out to production to customers since the last newsletter, we methodically put in that newsletter in other channels too. But like again reinforce and repeat and any team accomplishments, highlights or, or celebrations, something going on with a particular team that we want to highlight. But I would. It is, it is intended to be a kind of like high signal, low noise newsletter. So that's why we're only doing it, you know, every other week. And it complements but is a, you know, an async version of things we're saying live in town hall.

Yep. That's a way to kind of extend and only do the town hall monthly. That makes sense. And how many employees are you at now?

Just about 100. Okay.

Yeah, if you can share that template that would be great. We can include it in the write up that we do when we post the script and when we go live. Any other questions that we have. Here's one more question coming in from our social channel, LinkedIn. Who's in the Slack channel? You mentioned a lot. We, we collect this, we produce this. I know you run the meetings, but is it just executives? Can you share a little bit more besides you and the person who runs your people and your talent?

Yes, yes. Jess, our VP of people is in there. Myself, I have the whole leadership team in there for, for, for many it'll just be informational for them but and Jess's people team are all in there as well. And so it is basically the group that is organizing the outline and or presenting on a given topic is going to be who is in that channel. And we're sharing the deck template out in advance and we are delegating you as the owner of your session. And so please pre, please have it ready, you know, 48 hours before the town hall, that, that kind of thing. Awesome.

Anyone else have any other questions they want to come up and ask? Rick, this is great. Would love that template. Thanks everyone again for joining. A couple last reminders, I'm going to drop in a discount code to Saster Europa. So if you want to come join us in London, it is just a few weeks around the corner on June 4th and 5th. Come join us at Tobacco Docs. It's going to be fun and we've got some great speakers and content lined and jam packed over those two days. So discount code for our workshop Wednesday listeners if you want to attend. If not, we hope to see you on next week's workshop Wednesday. Rick, thanks so much again.