Amr Awadallah, CTO of Cloudera, discusses his biggest mistake: keeping people who didn't fit the culture too long. He stresses early team composition matters most, and when you do fire someone, do it respectfully with severance and accelerated vesting, but don't delay.
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Tell us about one mistake that you made along the way as an entrepreneur setting up Cloudera that provided you with perhaps a very painful but very helpful lesson.
So without naming individuals, I mean, one of the— and this is actually, I have a bunch of advice that I brought for like building out the company, and I gave a couple already as we were speaking right now. But one of the key things you need to watch out for when you're building your company is the team. And the team is everything. It's not just your co-founders, it's the other early employees that you're going to hire to be part of that company. You want to be very, very careful with that because that is the seed, it's the foundation that will set the culture, will set the operating mode, will set the dynamics of the whole company for many, many years to come. So you want to be very careful with that.
Absolutely.
And so one of the mistakes that we did, again, without mentioning names, is taking too long to fire somebody that should not be part of that team, right? Because loyalty always comes in, like I recruited the person to join us, I actually convinced them to join us and now I'm going to go tell them, sorry, you can't be with us on this boat anymore. And you don't want to do it right away obviously, but you don't want to take too long before you do it. So in our case we took too long before we did it and sometimes that can set you back.
Yeah.
Can set you back by months if not years. In terms of how to recover from that mistake. So I'm not saying fire people right away. You want to be loyal and you want to give them the chance and you want to try to make them rectify their behavior and be honest and talk with them. But at some point if it's a cultural mismatch, it's a cultural mismatch and you just have to pull the trigger. And do it in a respectable way, give them good severance package, give them maybe some acceleration on their stock vesting. Treat them well, but do it because there is no time to waste on trying to rectify things like that if it's not working out. So that would be my main lesson. We learned that lesson the very hard way at Cloudbear.
Do you guys know who Max Levchin is? He's one of the PayPal Mafia, as they call him. He has a— he now runs Affirm and Glow, and he's spoken about this, how he had kind of had a reputation of being Pretty tough, and he kind of took the reins on letting people go early on in PayPal, and he still has some— not regret, but it still hurts him a little bit because it was really hard to do, as you mentioned. But that's one of the reasons PayPal was so successful is because of that sort of judiciousness early on.
There is a number of traits that we really value. Obviously one of the key traits I personally value, which is not always valued by many companies in the Valley here, but being a team worker, being somebody who is very collaborative and somebody who doesn't think that this company is going to make it or break it because of me, because I'm awesome, because I'm the greatest product creator in the world, but this company is going to make it or break it because of us all working together and helping each other build a stronger foundation. So I look for that. If I see somebody who during the interview process shows signs of being a disruptive cowboy, that's how we refer to somebody who thinks I am everything, then that is very quickly something that we will eliminate, not try to include in the company. So that's another— that's one of the key things we look for.
