Lessons Learned from iPhone: Building An Optimal Team | iPhone Lead Engineer, Andy Grignon

So this week, we're actually— so we have 7 modules in our class. This week is about team building and ramping sort of your resources to get the job done.

Yep, yep.

I don't know if you have any personal experiences on that.

Holy crap, do I. You know what? Yeah. I think it goes back, I guess, to culture is one part. I would say an organization is made and broken on culture. You know, when I was, again, so I was running software at Palm, and we had failed with making webOS and Palm Pre a successful product. So we had to go, we were whoring ourselves out. We were just looking for a bidder, and we had a bunch of people coming through to buy us. HP came through with the highest offer, and we were gonna take it. So the big announcement was made, all this other shit. So I had an organization of 400 people, I guess, at the time. You know, my job went immediately from innovating and creating the new, like, next generation of the platform to retention. Because guess what? Not a lot of people want to work for HP. Well, that's not true. There's 330,000 people that apparently want to work for HP, but that's their problem. The ones that I cared about didn't want to work for HP. And so I had to get ahead of the attrition problem. And I had started to see kind of like the morale People had just all of a sudden just turned off just productivity. Even though we were being acquired, we still had stuff to do, right? This isn't just because you're being acquired means you just stop and kick your feet back and drink a bunch of beer. I mean, yeah, but no, you still have to do stuff. And so, I'd have these days of meetings where I'd go from product, kind of like the more strategic thinking, to very tactical, how do I keep you meetings. And my days, all of a sudden, 9 to 5, 30-minute one-on-ones. And every day, I would have these one-on-ones with— again, Palm was a meritocracy, right? HP was very hierarchical. Very much respect, for whatever reason, the person above you. You didn't jump ahead. But Palm, we just had this kind of like, it was the culture. It was like, I don't care if I'm 4 or 5 layers above, just come and talk to me. So I'd have these one-on-ones where I had this really cool office. Well, actually, no. Before then, I had this office. Just an office, right? It was an office. And I'd come in and people would sit down and they'd sit there with their arms crossed and they would just sit there like closed like this. And I'd spend the first 15 minutes or so trying to get each one of these people to open up to actually have the— why are we— why are you here? And they wouldn't want to tell me. Maybe they're intimidated. I don't know. But like— and so I was trying to figure out like, how am I going to get This team on board and engaged and all this other stuff.

And this is the same team that has been reporting to you.

Reporting to me. And all of a sudden, suddenly they all of a sudden flipped off. How do you have a thing where you went from productive to just off? Is it because of the acquisition?

I don't know.

So I tried something different. And, you know, again, I got really high one night and I had this really cool idea. I thought the way— by the way, it takes a lot of alcohol and a lot of weed to make really different products. But I had this idea of Well, what happens if I just completely changed the conversations that I was having? And how do you change the conversation? Well, you can ask different questions. You can approach it differently. I decided to change the approach. So I had facilities. My office happened to be right next door to the server room, which was really cold. And so I had them jumper the air conditioning from the server room into my office. So my office was really, really cold. 65 degrees cold. Fine for this. But when you know you're thin, you need a jack and all that shit. And then I had them paint it like this really nice dark media room brown. I had bought like— I had them get rid of my existing like whatever stupid furniture we had. And I had like this nice underlit glass desk. It was really cool looking. And then I went and I bought a 20-case wine rack with a tasting—

I was gonna say, this sounds like a bar.

It's a bar. I filled it with wine. I put 20 cases of wine in the back. And when it was all done, I started having my one-on-ones again. And I don't care if it's 9 in the morning, pick a bottle. Like, let's open it. And it was weird, and people were just like— I had some friendlies. I had probably about 85% of the people take me up on the offer, even at 9 in the morning. And as the day went on, of course, that number went higher.

So both mentally and physically, I'm sure it helped having some alcohol in your blood.

We're not getting fucked up. You're getting a little bit of wine. Unless you're a toddler, you're not going to— that's going to do nothing.

Or me, someone with no tolerance.

So, you know what happens though? The second you have a wine glass in your hand, you don't get to do this. That's awkward. You've forced them to open up.

Literally open up.

Literally physically open up. And the conversations changed literally overnight. The conversations, instead of me trying to pry out of you what the hell's wrong, people were It turns out, you know what was wrong? I'll just shortcut. What was wrong? They were worried about HP ruining the quirky culture of Palm. And I didn't know that, but what I had demonstrated was the fact that even though we were HP, we can still have an office with a wine cellar in it, and it's weird as fuck, and we're gonna drink at 9 in the morning. That showed them that no, HP is not going to ruin our corporate culture, right? We still get to be weird and quirky Palm.

Right.

We just have to kind of approach it differently. That's my problem. You guys still get to have, you know, the culture that you want. And so, I don't— I'm not advocating that you guys all set up wine cellars. I mean, it's pretty cool, but—

I might try that.

You're gonna be a wreck by like 11. You're just gonna be like—

Like 9:45.

Hey, buddy, how you doing? Andy, you've only had like 2 glasses.

If you think I'm late to this meeting, I might not even show up.

But, yeah, but I go back to like that to me, again, I didn't set out to teach myself a lesson. I was solving a problem.

Yeah.

And I learned something really powerful, and that was just corporate culture is everything to a lot of people. And what you also realize is certain people, I don't know if you guys, are you guys all CEOs or like a mix or?

CEOs in training.

CEOs in training, there you go. So what you learn is what motivates people varies just dramatically. I remember when we did After we shipped webOS 1, yeah, I remember I had this guy that worked for me. He was like 22, 23, and he was my rock star guy, right? And, you know, look, I'm 42. Back at the time, I don't even know what age I was, but, you know, I was older than him. And, you know, it was bonus time, so I sat this guy down. He's my rock star guy, and I gave him a $75,000 bonus in cash.

What year was this? That's a lot of money.

Well, you'd think, but he just kind of sat there and was like, eh. Thanks. It was a whole lot of meh. And I was just, I was like, do you realize there's a lot of zeros there? Like, that's a lot of—

Did you count this?

That's a lot of money. He's like, meh. What I learned from him and from a lot of people is that, you know, not everyone's motivated by money. What his actual thing was, he was motivated by influence. He wanted to be viewed, you know, he's like, the money's nice. I wanna be up on stage more. He wanted to be the guy giving demos, like, on the stage. Like, I used to give the all-hands demos at Palm. And we had about— after we got acquired by HP, I used to— the demo was to 2,000 people. And so, it was like a very visible kind of a thing, and he wanted to be the guy on stage, 'cause he was the guy who wrote the code.

Right.

He kinda wanted the credit for it. And I was kinda dense. I was tone-deaf to really, uh, to pick up on the fact that this guy really just wanted credit. and influence. He wanted people to be— you want to be seen as a leader.

Yeah.

And the money was nice. Yeah, sure.

I'll go.

I hope it didn't go up his nose, but whatever. Like, it's his cash. But, you know, he was not turned on by money. He was turned on by influence.

Yeah.

And so, you start to kind of, you know, you as CEOs, I would— and it goes back to corporate culture— I would say it requires a lot of nuanced reading of people, you know, seeing when you have people, your engineers, your designers, or your writers, or QA, If they stay up all night, why are they doing it? Right? Is are they doing it because they like you? Maybe actually, like maybe there are some people that are just you know charismatic, or are they doing it because they need a paycheck? Probably not at a startup because certainly not a good one. Is it because they want to be rich because the payoff of your options are you're going to get acquired or whatever? Like are they doing it because of that? Fine, then reward those people with cash. But the people who want to be you know. Speaking at conferences or going to South by because, you know, they just like to be, you know, influencers, like whatever it is, right? I think you have to read your people in a— and that takes time.

And is there, in your mind or your management style building a company, is there right or wrong? Is it okay to have talented people who just want influence, or— Absolutely.

You can't change somebody else's, you know, motivator, right? Like you have to work with their motivation if you want to extract the most amount of Kind of productivity, right?

Right.

Today is the business, right? So we're trying to all create products that matter for people, and making money sure might be your motivator, but the business is there to make money and make you know ostensibly buy product. I don't think you have to because somebody is only motivated by cash when you hire the person. Don't be turned off by the person that says, you know, if you were to say, do you want more cash? You know, more you know salary or more RSUs? The correct answer is both, please. But, you know, if, uh, but if they were like, I don't really care about your stock, um, I just want cash, I don't necessarily— there are a lot of people that say don't hire those people, uh, because they're not in it for the long term, they're not into whatever. I'm not of that opinion. Um, I will, however, place more emphasis on figuring out if this person's really worth it, right? Are they clearly— they're in it for the cash But you have to look at, do I have any history? Do I have any people in common? Why are they motivated by only the cash? Are they having a hard time financially right now? So that's what matters right now, right? Or are they just, you know, straight up, maybe they don't believe in your product and they're just, they're a hired gun. So I think that's kind of a tricky thing to figure out.

Right.

I don't out of hand discount people like that.

Right. Maybe one last question on team and then we'll open up. So, Steve Jobs often talks about this, start with A players because A players attract A players. Have you seen examples of that in companies that either become really successful or fail because of that core team and scale?

Yes, absolutely. In fact, that was at Palm, that was something that, it was a saying that just, he's a B player. She's a B player, whatever. Like, it's, it's a— and that started at Apple, uh, but that doesn't mean everybody has to be A players, you know. But you can't have managers who are non-A players, right? And I wouldn't ever promote somebody who wasn't an A player. However, sometimes you just need to get your documentation written or your graphics banged out, right? You don't need an A player. You can't afford an A player, all A players. Maybe you can, but you know what, pragmatic just says, you know, you should hire a B player to do a leaf node thing. I would never put a position of a person who is Less than an A in a position of power by any stretch.