What Being a Founder Taught Me About Leadership - Lessons from GitHub’s COO

Thank you so much for being here. As with the other speakers, I so wish we could be together in person in trying to find the silver lining in all of this though, I love seeing the innovation in how we run online events and finding ways for folks to still connect, share learnings and ideas and come together, even if from a distance, to solve problems. I also love that so many more people can participate in these events once we're no longer limited by physical proximity. Once again, thank you all for joining me to talk about what I've learned in this most interesting year as I've transitioned from being a founder of a 75 person startup to being the chief operating officer of GitHub, among many other things. What's been interesting is seeing how many of the leadership principles I embraced at Bitnami have carried through to my work at GitHub and how they've evolved to support our scale, and that's what I'm going to discuss with you today. First, to give you a little bit of context on where I'm coming from, here's a bit of background. I was the co founder and COO of a company called Bitnami, which we took through Y Combinator and mostly bootstrapped to 75 employees. We sold the company to VMware just over a year ago where the business and team are thriving. As you can see from this map, the team was globally distributed and that's still the case today. When Bitnami was acquired, I was incredibly honored to be able to take on the role of COO at GitHub, a company I've long admired in a space I've been deeply passionate about for over a decade, to help lead us on our continuing journey to provide the best possible home for all developers. It was, and still is my dream job and I count my lucky stars to get to work with such amazing people on such an inspiring mission every day. It's also been quite a whirlwind as on top of everything that we've had happening in the world in 2020, we've also doubled in size since I joined to over 2,300 employees spread all over the world. You can see the difference in scale as we add the purple dots to this map. We've also significantly expanded our platform and business, so lots of change. It was an interesting adjustments from the Bitnami days and we'll talk more about that as we dig in. Before I move on, I'll quickly note that I'm also on the Board of Directors of the Linux foundation and an investor with X Factor Ventures, a seed fund that invests in the next generation of companies pursuing billion dollar opportunities founded by women. The learnings I covered today were not only gained through my experiences with Bitnami and GitHub, but also through these organizations. So as you can imagine, a lot of folks have asked, what is it like going from building and overseeing Bitnami to being the COO of GitHub? People expect that different skill sets are required to found and build a startup versus running a larger company. And while that's true in some aspects, I found that a lot of what I learned in smaller organizations has served me extremely well as we've gone through such incredible growth at GitHub. Today, I'm going to share six key principles that I believe are essential at any stage, so let's dive in. First, build a support staff early Most founders are frugal and we want to lead by example. Every dollar counts and we typically want to make all of our investments in product development and spend as little as possible on everything else. That was certainly the case for me, and I've seen this with so many other founders I've worked with over the years. But thinking that we should do everything ourselves can harm our ability to execute. I'm sure you're all aware of the often cited it takes 23 minutes to refocus after being distracted. While the data point and associated study has a lot of nuance when applied to the real world, we can still use this as a baseline for time costs. There's a common misconception that 23 minutes is the time it takes just to refocus, but it's actually inclusive of completing the interrupt task and refocusing. This means that every task you're doing that's not actively building your business is distracting you from the work that truly adds to reaching your goals. Over time, you're getting further and further away from the work that matters. Many founders have guilt around delegating the tasks that they can do themselves to others or getting themselves support such as be an office manager or executive assistant. In the early days. It can feel indulgent and self important, but time is our most precious commodity and we need to use it wisely. This is amplified in a larger organization. The single most important thing you can do is build and empower a great team to take more off your plate so you can continue to refocus on higher value activities like around your strategy and vision so the rest of the business keeps going while you focus on those. So as a founder, how do you do that? I encourage you to start by Hiring an Office Manager or EA Virtually every founder I know spends way too much time on operational items such as scheduling, finding and maintaining office space, setting up payroll and other things that are necessary, but not what really adds value to the business. The thought of it might seem self indulgent, I know, especially when you have so little to spend, but while developing my company and career, I've learned to be a lot more productive. I can be a lot more productive by building out a support staff to the benefit of our employees and investors and also my family. And there are a lot of great virtual assistant services available now to help you balance cost with getting help. My husband runs a consulting practice and has a virtual EA through a service called Time Etc that's worked extremely well for him and his assistant. As the scope and intensity of my role has grown over time, I've continued to build out my support network both at work and in my personal life. I think it's important that we speak openly about the help that some of us have rather than pretending that we do it all as it helps set healthier examples for others, and we'll talk more about health and well being later. For each of these lessons, I've collected a set of actionable taken aways to highlight the key points we've covered. In this case, hiring an EA or office manager is a great place to start, but your support staff is more than that and you should continue building out one both at work and in your personal lives as your responsibilities grow. Also as you grow, closely evaluate how you spend your time. What activities are taking up the bulk of your time that you could find someone else to support? Is it administrative work? Personal errands or ordering supplies? Considering how growing your support staff can help you prioritize the tasks where you can add the most value and speak openly about the support you're getting. You're successful because of your support staff and it's valuable to let others around you see that. Let's support each other in setting realistic expectations by being honest that we don't necessarily do it all ourselves. Building a supporting team allowed me to invest myself in building Bitnami and now in leading GitHub effectively. And these three takeaways lead to my next point, which is that focus leads to deep thinking. Now that you've established your support staff, how do you invest the time you freed up to focus on building your business? Whether you're in an early stage startup or a much larger company, there will always be an incredible number of competing demands for your time and attention at a startup. It might be a few things like this. As the company grows in size and complexity, this increases. To be an effective executive, you need to build and empower a team of folks that are better than you in most of these areas and that complement your own areas of expertise. We'll talk more about that later. The key here is that you need to continually find entire chunks of work to pass off so that you can free up your own time and focus for whatever you can do to add the most value to your business. This is typically long term strategy work, but recruiting the best possible team you can, ensuring that your teams are doing all the right work to achieve your short and long term goals. And as with many other things, this can be easier said than done I'm going to take a moment to share an experience I had a couple of years ago. I was on a panel where a participant was asked to share the best piece of advice she had ever received and she said never say no to anything. Honestly, it's terrible advice. Thank you. Saying no to most of what comes your way is key to maintaining control over your time and focus. I literally say no constantly, far more than I say yes, probably at least 90% of the time, and it's probably still not enough. You really need to get into the habit of asking what the highest leverage use of your time is and say no to virtually everything else. Mental and physical health counts here too, and we'll talk more about that later. But suffice it to say that you can't do your best work if you're not taking care of yourself mentally and physically. I'll also note that it's key that you make time for yourself to think deeply about the most important aspects of your business. I was in a chat with some founders recently and someone mentioned feeling guilty when they weren't producing something. This is super common and I'd say it's in the DNA of founders and lots of others as well. In other words, folks feel guilty for reading up on things like leadership or industry news or stepping away to think through a problem, you need to get over this. It's tough to really spend time on the right strategy or identify existential threats to your business. If you're scheduled constantly or if you feel like you can't find time for your mind to breathe. This is just part of focus. You need to make time for the hard problems and the key areas where you can add the most value to the business, such as making key hiring decisions, putting the right organizational structures in place, and building a growth environment for your team. So to summarize the key takeaways on this topic, say no more often. Practice this and practice it again. When you learn to say no, it will become clear which things you really need to say yes to. As your company grows and trust your team to take on things you can't. As you start to focus on where you can have the most impact, let your team take on the other things that you've said no to. That conference isn't that great use of a time. Your time could be great exposure for somebody else. Invite someone to go in your place. The pitch deck that needs to be updated. Maybe someone else can do that work and it's a great opportunity for them to learn and grow as well. And also schedule time for focused work. This goes back to having a support staff who can help protect your time and remove the day to day distractions that keep you from focusing. Schedule focus time into your day and don't let anything else absorb that time and last. Take time out of your element to allow for deeper thinking. It's really, really hard to take time off when you're building and growing a company, and I'll tell you that if you believe you'll have time someday when the company is larger and more established and has more employees, you're wrong. It's never the case. It's still hard to take time off and tune out. But I've learned, especially over the past six months as we've been encouraging GitHub employees to take the time off they need for their health and well being, that it's equally important for me as a leader to do the same. I've actually taken several vacations during COVID We can't really go anywhere, of course, but just interrupting my routine and investing in rest and redirection has given me the space and freedom to look at work from a different perspective. Some great ideas have occurred to me during these periods of rest simply because I've disrupted my daily routine and I'm in a different headspace. It's hard to give yourself that time off when you're trying to build a company, but trust me, it's so worth it. This leads me to lesson number two Push decision making down. Just like you need to rely on your team to take work on that you don't have time for, you also have to learn to rely on them to make decisions. In an early stage startup, everyone is so close to the decision making that this is less important. As the founder of a growth company, you'll likely be the person with the most context on the business, and as a result, you'll tend to be involved in almost all decisions. But when you're larger, you can no longer know everything that's being shipped. So you need to shift from knowing everything to enabling others to make decisions. I'll admit that this has been an interesting adjustment for me. In the Bitnami days, I knew virtually everything that was happening across the business. At GitHub, we have so much going on at such high velocity that no one person can really stay on top of it. Given that the most senior executives aren't always in the best place to recommend the best course of action on certain topics for the business. So what do you do? Teach yourself to delegate. Not only work, but decision making. The people closest to the problem typically have the best information and perspective. Your 40,000 foot view is important to connect all the dots across the company. In fact, having this context across the various parts of your business is one of the most important roles of the CEO and coo. The trick is to effectively push that context down so others can make informed, intelligent decisions that are right for your business. You need to start this early if you want to avoid becoming a bottleneck when you grow, which will severely limit your company's ability to execute. And you need to do it in a consistent manner. At the outset of COVID 19, things were evolving very quickly on a global scale. And like most companies, we had to make a series of critical decisions for our business and our employees. We have offices and coworking spaces worldwide that had to close eight active real estate projects to put on hold and redesign over 2,000 employees working remotely. Vendors who are important to our culture but could no longer come to our offices, customers who wanted assurance we'd continue to support them through the recession, and over 50 million developers collaborating on our platform who are dealing with crises of their own. If I had made every single one of the decisions on how to respond across every aspect of our business, it would have taken far too long to execute and our customers and employees would have been left wondering where we were and what we were doing. We could have been behind in the curve and scrambling to catch up. Instead, our leadership team made one important decision. First, to activate our enterprise Crisis management team for the first time. This is a group of senior leaders across each function that would make recommendations and often decisions on how to best respond across our business. This freed me up to focus on the strategic work that keeps our company operating, while a dedicated group of folks made sure we acted quickly and decisively on behalf of our community and our teams. This team is still operating today and they report back to the senior leadership team with updates and recommendations on key items where executive approval is necessary and make key decisions on tactical items whenever possible. So let's review a few of the key takeaways from this section. First, communicate your vision and expectations. Once your team has context from your 40,000 foot view, they'll be able to act and make the best decisions for the business. Empower your team to make decisions, build a culture of trust and explicitly let members in your team know decisions you expect them to make on behalf of the company and create clear expectations and which ones should be escalated to senior leadership for approval. Second, facilitate cross functional collaboration, avoid dysfunctional silos where all decisions that span two or more functions get elevated to you for making these decisions and and instead ensure folks have the right information to make these decisions and continue on other work and focus on thoughtful communication to make sure that everybody's on the same page. And that brings me to our next topic. The way you communicate changes a lot as you scale at the earlier stages. Relationships are close enough that this is easy, but this changes as your company grows. People have different perspectives from their different experiences and areas of the business. They have different priorities and different moments in time. They digest and understand information in dramatically different ways. Someone once told me, if you want folks to remember something, you have to tell them five times in five different ways. And I think that's a great way to think about it. In a larger company, communication may not be as straightforward, but the underlying principles of how to communicate remains the same. As a leader, you have to be thoughtful about what and when you communicate and the implication of those decisions. Everyone likes to talk about transparency, and transparency is important, but one of the things that folks talk about less is the timing of that transparency and how communications are rolled out. One thing I've definitely learned is that what it means to be transparent changes as you scale. As you grow, you need to be more thoughtful about how information cascades throughout your org. This helps equip your leadership chains to respond appropriately themselves and be prepared to answer any key questions that come up. If managers have questions or concerns, it gives you time to make sure they're well informed and bought into whatever you're rolling out. I think effective transparency has four key characteristics. First, your communication should be timely. You might have the right message, but if your timing is off and you share important information with your team too late, you can come across as reactive. On the flip side, if you start talking about early exploratory conversations you had about an acquisition too early, you can cause a huge amount of disruption, uncertainty and speculation in your org, and that distracts the team from keeping the business moving forward. Second, your communication should be strategic. Always focus on the why. Explain why you're making this change, how it supports your strategy, and how it will help you and your team achieve your mission. Build out a communications plan to help build buy in over time rather than doing one off communications every time where the points you're trying to make often get lost in the shuffle. For example, at GitHub, we're making some changes to our IT systems. At the start of this project, we shared with the company why we're making these changes and set expectations that there are things coming. We then have a series of updates coming out across multiple channels to help keep people posted in advance of the changes being rolled out and with clear instructions on where to go with questions. And this brings me to the third point. Your communication should be shareable. What I mean by this is that the messaging should be clear and easy to follow without room for misinterpretation or guesswork. It should also be as concise as possible. As your team grows, consider communicating using different channels. Remember the Rule 5 I mentioned earlier and leverage your management structure to cascade information. For us at GitHub, this means making use of our internal content sharing platform as well as slack, and highlighting important messages and weekly news updates as well as covering them in our all hands. We also make sure that people know where to go with questions or for help. In the case of our IT changes, we're using our discussions feature so others can see Q and A coming in, which may answer questions for other folks in the company. Fourth and finally, your communication should be actionable. If you're expecting your team to react in a certain way or follow a specific set of actions, make sure that it's abundantly clear. If there's a way for them to contribute, make sure that's clear as well. Let your team know how the information you share with them will impact them, what asks you have of them, and how they can contribute. This could be keeping an eye out for further information, setting time aside in their calendars for training, or providing feedback on an important topic. I'll share one example of where this concept of cascading timely and strategic communications became especially important, and it was when Bitnami was being acquired by VMware. When you're a founder going through an acquisition, you're often thrilled and can't wait to share the news with Everyone your team trusts you and you've always been honest and forthcoming with information, so it feels wrong to hold something like this back. But you need to step back and think about what's truly best for the business and the team. There's a lot that can derail an acquisition and a ton of uncertainty at first. How will folks jobs evolve, for example? So it's best to keep the discussion within the smallest group of folks possible so you don't disrupt the business and create unnecessary stress and uncertainty for your team while you're working through the details. Responsible transparency is sharing the information at the right time with the right strategy, a clear, shareable message, and a thoughtful action plan. And now that I've been on both sides, I've learned that this is as important when you're acquiring company as when you're being acquired. Since I joined GitHub a year ago, the company has nearly doubled in size. As we scale, there are changes we need to make to support our larger team and larger user base. And when we make those changes, whether it's to our benefits package, our international expansion strategy, our org structure, we follow these same principles. Be transparent about the changes in a way that's timely, strategic, shareable and actionable. This usually means cascading information outward to our extended leadership team and our people managers, and then downward throughout the organization, relying on those folks to share that information with their teams. By having some clear principles for what, how and when to communicate, and acknowledging that as you grow you rely on others to communicate, you can create a culture of thoughtful and diligent communication that will help minimize disruption and stress in the business and keep folks focused on the right things. While plans are still being ironed out, here are our key takeaways from this have principles for what, how and when to communicate. Remember that transparency is only helpful if it's done responsibly. Adapt how you communicate as you scale. You'll likely need to share the same message multiple times across multiple channels as your company gets larger and more distributed. I spend a significant amount of my time on internal communications as it's such an important part of change management as we scale the business. Communicate in partnership with your managers. Provide leaders throughout your company with the information they need to communicate to their teams on behalf of the business. Talking about leaders Another important lesson learned, and this was really impressed upon me when we went through Y Combinator with Bitnami, is to know what great looks like. When you need to scale, you need to hire the right people, and in order to do that, you need to know what great looks like. What do I mean by that? What I mean is, as a founder, you may not have ever worked with or hired a VP of Sales or a COO or a head of IT or a VP of Marketing. If you've never hired or worked directly with someone in one of these roles, it can be really tricky to figure out what you should look like for in a new hire for one of those roles. These are incredibly high stakes hires too. The right person can really make your business and the wrong person might break it. So how do you go about finding the right folks if you don't really know what you're looking for? I got this advice from a woman named Giacinto at Y Combinator and it's absolutely stuck with me. Go and meet as many exceptional folks for whatever role you're trying to fill as possible. Find the folks that are really at the top of their game, even if there's no way you'll be able to hire them and ask them about their roles and what it takes for someone to be successful in that role, what to look for, and even show them the job description and get their feedback on it. I've learned a lot about how I'm even thinking about the responsibilities for a particular role in going through this process. I lean into my network a ton for these introductions. I ask people who they think is the best person at X role and I ask for an introduction and then I'm really transparent about that person, about what I'm hoping to get out of the conversation. Over the course of a series of these discussions, I start to develop an archetype of what I'm looking for in a role. What skills are important? What type of person will be successful at the current stage of my business? For example, someone coming out of a very large company might not be right for leading sales at a very small one, where you need to develop a whole new playbook or build a funnel from zero. You need different types of skills at different times in your company's growth. So you need to really hone in on what your company needs from the hire you're making over the next two years or so, and make sure you're seeking out candidates that fit that right profile. This goes for leaders as well as any other key hires, whether engineers or HR leaders, to help you scale. So as a reminder, be proactive and find out what great looks like as the first step in your hiring process before you start interviewing candidates. Sometimes these early conversations can even result in one of those folks joining your company. If the opportunity is especially interesting to them to meet those folks. Leverage your network to learn from great leaders. Find out what makes them great so you know what to look for when you're hiring. Build archetypes specific for your company. The person that you need for your company for a certain role may not be the same person that GitHub needs for a similar role or that a public company needs okay, so now we've talked about hiring great folks. Let's move on to my sixth and final point, and that's how you build an environment where these people can grow and flourish. I have to admit, this talk was originally only five lessons when I was scheduled to give it back in March. But when I went back to refresh it for today, I had to add a six point because while this is something that's always been important to me and important in leadership, the last six months have made it very clear that it's something that needs to be talked about more. Once you've hired great people, you need to prioritize supporting their greatness by creating an environment where they see clearly how their work contributes to the company's success, where everyone feels like they belong, and where people can continue to grow and develop their skills. People who don't feel supported or valued or burned out, who don't feel a sense of belonging or are working in conditions that are not good for their mental or physical health cannot do the best work for your company, and they're more likely to leave. Worse than that, they may stay and impact the morale and performance of the rest of the team. At many companies, Covid highlighted problems that already existed. We're living through a period of extremely high levels of stress and trauma and lower levels of productivity and mental health. With 88% of employees experiencing moderate to extreme stress since the pandemic started. According to Gartner, first and foremost, taking care of your team is the right thing to do. But in addition to that, it's also in the best business interest of your company to ensure that teams feel valued, supported and cared for. Even when we're not in a pandemic. You don't have to just take my word for it. According to a study by McKinsey, supporting the physical and mental health of employees can result in a 45% increase in engagement and a 21% improvement in work effectiveness. So how do we create the best conditions for growth for our employees and in turn for our companies? Once you've made all these great hiring decisions, no matter what stage, you need to create an environment where People can thrive at GitHub, we talk about building an environment where people can do the best work of their lives. There's so much to this, but I'll highlight a few key areas. First, purpose. Everyone wants to feel like their work matters. People need to be able to trace a line from the work they're doing to the company's success, regardless of company size. This means it's critically important to make sure that everybody understands the company's mission and goals and that the company level goals are supported by those in each function. At GitHub, we use the OKR model for this and we have company functional and team level okrs that are all designed to fit together. This also helps leaders at all companies draw a line from the work from each person is doing to the company's progress. It's incredibly important that you build discipline around this and that folks are regularly looking at the OKRs and seeing and measuring their progress towards them and then connecting that back to the work that the company is doing. This also helps set clear expectations with employees around what they're expected to achieve and makes it easier to give clear and actionable feedback when folks aren't hitting the mark. A clear set of measurable goals that help everyone understand how their work will move the business forward, helps create the right environment for professional growth and also ensures everyone is doing the most important work for the business at any particular point in time. The second piece is belonging. Now more than ever, it's critical that people feel a sense of belonging both on their teams and at your company. Ensuring folks feel connected to the company's mission is a piece of this, but it of course goes well beyond that. Building a sense of belonging requires building a truly inclusive culture where all people are welcome, supported and treated equally. At GitHub, we seek to ensure that a range of diverse voices and viewpoints are heard, represented and incorporated into our work. We invest in supporting our communities of belonging or affinity and ergs as well as create and nurture a range of ways employees can connect with one another. This might be through our extremely active cooking and personal finance channels. And oh my gosh, there are Some people at GitHub who can cook to providing opportunities for people to come together remotely to enjoy musical performances, participate in trivia games, or even play on a Minecraft server together. The most successful products are built by companies that create environments where diverse perspectives, personalities and interests can flourish and where everyone feels like they belong. Building this foundation of belonging creates an environment where folks are set up for success both for themselves and for your business. The third area I'll highlight is wellness. Both physical and mental wellness has deteriorated across the world, and particularly in the US in 2020 in light of COVID and so many other tragic events. According to a recent Qualtrics survey, over 44% of employees working from home have reported reported stress during the pandemic. While we can't solve all these problems for employees, stepping up in this area is not only the right thing to do, but it's good for business as well. As I mentioned previously, so what are some of the things we can do to support physical and mental wellness? Of course, there are a number of benefits you can provide, from gym stipends to thorough insurance coverage for mental and physical health. But beyond these Offering flexible work arrangements such as supporting remote work or allowing people to work part time or reduce schedules Building a culture around asynchronous work funding home office setups, scheduling no meeting days There are a lot of things you can do to bring flexibility to folks. This is especially helpful these days as so many people are juggling child or other care responsibilities on top of work, and it helps you recruit exceptional folks that might not otherwise be able to take on jobs and where they don't have enough flexibility. And this can lead to a huge competitive advantage in building an amazing team. Each of these, combined with great leadership coaching, stretch opportunities, and everything else that full books have been built about, are critical to building an environment where employees can really grow and thrive. I know I've covered a lot of ground above, but that's because this is such an incredibly important topic. Here are the key takeaways. Build and communicate a clear vision and mission early and often use OKRs or other planning processes to help people see how their work supports the company's success. Cultivate a sense of belonging in every employee by building an inclusive environment and providing ample opportunities for people to connect with others, whether in person or virtually. This builds connective tissue in your company and sets you up to get a diverse range of perspectives and input as you shape your business and your strategy. And four Invest in mental and physical health and wellness. This goes beyond benefits to include supporting work arrangements that offer flexibility and allow people to balance their work and personal lives. Okay, so that wraps up my sixth and final point for this particular talk, though there's clearly so much more to cover. As I mentioned, this was mostly written six months ago, but in revisiting it to make updates for today, I realized that these simple leadership lessons have been extremely helpful in adapting to my new role as CEO of GitHub and helping to lead the company through the most tumultuous year most of us have ever experienced. There are obviously a lot of top lessons list out there and there's a lot to be learned from them. I tried to pick a few of many that have been particularly helpful to me and that I think apply in earlier stage startups as well as much larger very high growth companies like GitHub. While much or all of it might have been obvious, I've always found it helpful to hear what stands out to others as it helps reinforce, shape or evolve my own thinking. I hope this has been the case for you and I'll leave you with this. An amazing team in an environment that helps build out the best in folks where they have the right information at the right time and are empowered to make decisions when they're closest to the work frees you up to focus your own time on the greatest opportunities for your business. While this is certainly easier said than done, it's what separates the good from the great and sets you up to move successfully onwards and upwards. Okay, so thanks to all of you who have submitted questions. I'm excited that we get to do this following the talk, which is not always typical, so I'm going to take a few of them now. The first one is when do you know when to sell your startup? I will say this is an incredibly, I think, personal question and there's really so much that goes into this. In the case of Bitnami, we were at a point where we were going to launch an enterprise product and we had been bootstrapping for a long time and now we're going to need to raise funding or basically sell the company. And we went out to do the funding round in fact, and were approached by a number of our partners who were interested in having Bitnami join their companies to help accelerate the business. So for us it really became a question of how can we really take everything we built and make it as successful as possible. And so for us, VMware was the clear right home and the next step for supporting Vietnamese growth. But there are a lot of reasons folks sell companies. It may be to accelerate the business in the case of Bitnami. Other times maybe you just don't want to take that next step. Maybe you need new resources into the company or new expertise. A lot of times there's opportunities to take care of existing sales channels that a company that's much bigger might have in place. So you know, it's a tough question and it really depends. I mean, hopefully you have a freedom of choice. Some companies are running out of money, I think, and forced to sell. But oftentimes it's really about, like, what's best for your vision and achieving that, and where can you do that work the best? So thanks for the question. I think I could probably do a whole other talk on that topic, and many have, but hopefully that was helpful. It tends to be a really personal decision and also really tied to, you know, where your business is at that point in time. Okay, next question. Is it possible to be too capital efficient as a founder? I think so, and I think that's a little bit about what I touched on. You know, when I reflect on Vietnamese, we tried to do way too much too early. In the early days, I was literally doing everything. You hear this a lot like, you know, founders take out the trash. I definitely did that. I did everything. I even cooked for the team a bunch. I love to cook, so that was convenient. But in the very early days, I would cook for us. We didn't want to spend money. We didn't want to waste time going out. So, yeah, I think that honestly, it slowed us down a lot. And so I think you always need to be very strategic when you think about how you spend your time and also how you invest the capital that you have available to you to make sure that you're moving the business forward as quickly as possible. So again, I think great question and one that we could talk about for a long time, but yes, invest in freeing up your time to do the work that gives you the highest leverage for the business. And hopefully some of my talking points from earlier were helpful about that too. Or helpful with that too. Excuse me. Okay, next question. When is a B2B or B2D company ready for a COO? And how do you decide who owns what? Great question. And, you know, it really depends. The role of a COO is an interesting one because it morphs in different companies. And there's a great Harvard Business Review article that I encourage you to read. And it's called something like the Misunderstood Role of the CEO. And it talks about kind of these different archetypes of COOs. Some are often brought in to complement, like a very product focused, very deeply technical CEO in tech. That was the case for me and Daniel, my co founder. We started the company together, but I'm not an engineer, and he is, and he really had the product and the strategic vision for the company. And I was the person that could come in and kind of be a true partner to him to help get everything else in the business taken for moving forward. And that's really what I did. So I think when you're thinking about building out your executive team, you really need to look at the unique skills of the folks that you already have on board and where you and those folks can add the most value and then think about what gaps you need to fill. It might be ahead of marketing if you don't have a great knack for marketing. It might be ahead of sales if you don't have experience there. In the case of a CEO, in my case, it's often kind of a divide and conquer approach. I can take a lot of work off of a CEO's plate so that they can focus on things like product strategy, existential threats to the business, really moving things forward. And I can make sure that I'm maturing the way that we operate and that the different needs of the business are being met, as well as that our OKRs are really supportive of our strategic vision and where we want to take the company. So we have everyone working on the right things. These are all great questions, so thank you so much. All right, next one. What are the signs a VP you've hired who is great on paper or even somewhere else? Maybe they mean referrals or something isn't going to make it. And how can you improve the odds that your leadership team is successful? So, great question. And I'll be honest with you, there are a lot of folks on paper that look great that might not be a great fit for your business. And this is kind of what I was touching on before too, and, you know, understanding what great really looks like. Right. So the first thing I'll say, and this is obvious, but it's still true, is trust your gut. You usually know pretty early if something's not going to work out. And I think if you ask most experienced business leaders, they'll tell you that they always take too long to part ways with somebody. I even heard another founder saying that on a call just the other day. Like, those are usually the biggest regrets that folks have. So I think when you're not able to really align on vision, when you can't align on expectations, those are certainly usually red flags. Others might be if you see that folks aren't really, truly deeply engaged in the work. Another red flag. I think you really need to look at your gut and set clear expectations and meet regularly to see how an executive or the business is progressing towards those expectations. But the reality is you'll probably know if it's not working out and then you should act very, very quickly. You really don't have time to give a lot of time to executives to kind of get up to speed or level up. Unfortunately, that's just not what you need, an executive leader as you're scaling a company, and it's just time you can't afford to take. So, I mean, in terms of the second part of that question, like, how can you improve the odds that your leadership team is successful? I think one of them is, like I said previously, really understand what great looks like and take a long time in your hiring processes. It's much better to be slow to hire than to hire fast. Right. And then honestly, as crass as it may be, you have to be fast to fire. If things aren't working, you need to part ways very quickly. I think those are the best things you can do to make your leadership team successful, other than, I think, the very basic blocking and tackling, which is again, making sure you're all really aligned on your vision and that you communicate and have clear lines of who owns what to the question that was asked earlier. Right. Making sure that nothing is falling through the cracks. Again, another great question and one I can probably spin into a whole talk. I think we have time for one more question, so I'll go ahead and take that and then we'll wrap up. And that's how much is the right amount to obsess about competition? That's a tough one. I don't know if I can really measure that in percentages. I mean, obviously you shouldn't do your work in a vacuum and ignore everything that's going on. But I think if you have to err on one side, err on focusing on your business. Especially when you're a startup, usually there's enough market to go around. Right. And you really need to focus on building the right team, building the right mission and vision, creating the right environment for growth, and really just focusing on execution. Beyond that, I think it's easy to get kind of tied up and too worried about what your competitors are doing and obsessing about them. And most of the times it will just hold you back. But that doesn't mean you don't pay attention at all and try and kind of play out the chessboard and where folks might end up in a few years and what decisions that you might want to make for your business as a result of that. So I hope that was helpful. Really fun to take these great questions. Just want to thank you all for coming and being here. I hope we get a chance to meet in person next year. And until then, best of luck with your business, whatever stage you're in. Take care, everyone.