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Peer Effect
Best way to scale? Your peers have the answers.
This is the podcast for scaleup founders looking for insightful, actionable wisdom from some of the best operators around. Each week we’ll explore one secret that other founders and experts are using right now and how to implement it.
It’s practical wisdom to build the company AND life you want. Hosted by renowned founder coach and advisor James Johnson.
You’ve survived to £1m, now let’s scale to £10m+.
Peer Effect
Scaling Tech: Four Founders Share Their Secrets to Success
In this special mashup episode of Peer Effect, we’ve gathered insights from four tech founders who have successfully scaled their companies.
From navigating the complexities of AI integration to finding balance between innovation and operations, these founders reveal the critical strategies that propelled their companies forward.
Links:
Follow Eric Daimler on LinkedIn!
Follow Richard White on LinkedIn!
Follow Chuck Rinker on LinkedIn
Follow Kirsten Lum on LinkedIn!
More from James:
Connect with James on LinkedIn or at peer-effect.com
more specificity would be a good thing for all leaders and founders to deploy. Anyway, I'm curious as to. So it feels like then you put AI in the mix and suddenly you can, even if you're a smaller business. It sounds like you're going to get some pretty significant payback in terms of speed and better outcome from deploying AI into your planning and kind of collaboration processes.
Speaker 3:That's right. That's where the tools are going and that's how it happens today. What these large companies do is they often will formalize not their specific outcomes, but they will actually specify a process. And what we discover with some of these larger companies is they actually forgot that the purpose of their company is to get from London to New York, and instead they just know in their head that what you first have to do is get down to the port, and then you have to load the ship, and then you need to make sure the crew is on board, and then you have to load the ship, and then you need to make sure the crew is on board, and then you need to move the ship, and so they don't have a transportation problem anymore.
Speaker 3:From London to New York, they have a ship problem. So even if you offer them an airplane, they just say well, I don't understand, I just need my crew to be on board, and you're like no, no, no, it's totally different. Ai is an airplane, so I don't have a ship from you. That's how calcified some of these large organizations can be. They survive because of the enormous benefits of scale and a common language for collaboration between people inside large organizations. But as this technology develops and people become more comfortable with being more specific in their own desires, then little sections of these large organizations will be able to break out and collaborate with all other sections of other large organizations and you can create these virtual networks that synthesize outcomes, and that's where the future is going. But it's enabled, but started by people.
Speaker 2:Being more specific, my favorite kind of personality testing is this thing called StrengthsFinders I think they renamed it.
Speaker 2:But one of my strengths is Achiever, which basically means I love checking things off the to list.
Speaker 2:And so there is kind of this unhealthy obsession you can get with like, well, let's check a lot of little things off the list and skip that one really big, chunky one that we don't really want to do Right, big chunky one that we don't really want to do Right. And so I think in some ways, yeah, I'm trying to give away the candy, give away the dopamine hits to other folks and let them, you know, check all this stuff off the list, because if I put on my list I'll be too tempted to do it Right. Or it's like, sometimes stuff is like urgent but not important sort of thing, right. And so, yeah, I I do miss some of these things because I just get like a bunch of little easy wins. But you know, I think you tend to find you quickly habituate whatever your new experience is. And now it's like, okay, I've got new things I can win at and they're probably a higher order of magnitude, uh, and impact because often, as a found, you've given it up either to your team, to your clients, to your investors.
Speaker 1:It's kind of like you've you've actually lost control of your time, lost control of your diary is responsive to other people's things. This feels like a really nice practical way of taking back control of your time by paradoxically giving away quite a lot of control yeah, 100.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think I think about this a lot of like where am I spending my time and what's? You know? What's there in 20 that I can like? What's the next 20 of my workload that I should delegate to someone else and what should it be? And is it? You know, it's often not stuff that it's like core to me, like product stuff I tend to. You know, we have we're 50 people with no pms, um, and I can do that because I'm continuing to lop off all these things and give them to other people.
Speaker 2:Um, you know, similarly, early on, when I did, it's like we hired some you know, data analysts really early on, cause that was a lot of the work I was doing as a product person. So I feel like I'm constantly just looking at the my own workload, introspecting it and saying which of these things feels like something that's easy to hand off or there's a basket of things I can hand off. And the thing I ran into recently that got to this team was like there wasn't one thing. There's a lot of little things, right. So it wasn't. Before. It was like, oh, hire an analyst, cause I spent three hours a day doing writing SQL queries. Okay, that's easy and obvious, but when it's like, oh, I spend like half my day doing just a million little things.
Speaker 2:Oh okay, let's go find someone who wants to. You know, knock off that checklist every day.
Speaker 1:I definitely see what like kind of Series A founders is that big first hire mistake. It's kind of you get to that stage and go right, I'm going to go make a spot, I'm going to go and hire this very expensive person to do this. Often sales. This very expensive person to do this often sales but and that often has a big name attached and comes with a big company and often doesn't work and has to be exited about six months later for a lot, of, a lot of money and wasted time but it feels like.
Speaker 1:This is a very different approach. Okay, rather than I'm going to keep the big stuff and actually all those small things that pop up, I'm going to going to outsource those, which kind of avoids the big sticker cost for a role that probably doesn't exist at that stage but also allows you to focus on the key stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm very much a fan of kind of like bottom-up hiring and really focusing on you need to have leaders in key places. But I also think sometimes people, especially you, get a bunch of money. You're just I'm gonna go hire these like you know big, expensive, you know executives, and they're going to solve all these problems for me.
Speaker 2:Like I look more at like let's go find people to like do the tactical stuff that needs to be done and then you know, give them enough leadership to support them, but not overlook the importance of just hiring really good, you know individual contributors if you are going to focus on just hiring really good individual contributors.
Speaker 1:If you are going to focus on hiring really good individual contributors, we're focused on the importance of belief in product their enthusiasm. What is your process that you would put people through to identify these people?
Speaker 2:It really depends on the functional area. We've been working with an amazing recruiter. We focus a lot on skills first assessment sort of thing. Right, a lot less of tell me about what happened at this last company and a lot more of like, great, let's figure out a way to kind of play, work through what you're actually going to be doing here. We're going to ask you on our roadmap, we're going to ask you to work on, and I think when you get down to being much more specific about you know, kind of paradoxically I said earlier, we don't plan a lot but yet we do, at a high level, kind of know roughly what we're going to do and we hire someone.
Speaker 2:We don't just hire someone to generically do sales or generically do engineering. We say, hey, you're going to do specifically this stuff, and then it allows us to kind of build a skills test around that as well. But we tend to find people really like it, because people always want to kind of know what exactly am I going to be doing here, what impact am I going to have? And I go back to like, how do you get people excited? You want someone to come in and be like oh, I'm super excited that I'm going to get to work on this right. Worst thing is you get someone who's kind of excited about your company and you bring them in and you're like we want you to work on CRM integrations. I hate CRM integrations. So I think that kind of enthusiasm and enlightenment is super important, but it requires you to be more thoughtful up front about what exactly you're hiring each individual person to do, not just a job title perspective.
Speaker 1:I feel like in big companies you have a few fixers and lots of operators, and you're very clearly one of the two. If you're a fixer, the idea idea of operating doing the same thing again and again would literally well you you wouldn't do it and you have operators who the idea of like their role changing every week is just awful, because they want that certainty.
Speaker 1:So it's quite interesting how you're almost building that blend in this team, from the beginning going okay, bring in a fixer, bring in an operator, bring another fixer, bring another operator. It's kind of scaled nicely.
Speaker 2:I almost think about being like almost a pyramid. We're going to have a foundation of a lot of operators and above that we're going to have fixers that are going in and building some of these processes. I was thinking builders or maintainers on the engineering side. So, I think, very common archetype and both are super important. Sometimes it's easy to overlook the maintainers or the operators, as you put it, but you need both. Like they are very different mindsets. Both of them are super important.
Speaker 5:Way too often in my mind I have focused on what it means to be the physical human. What do they look like, how do they act? And they really get down to the nitty gritty of the detail and it comes across almost creepy.
Speaker 5:And you're really not trying to replicate humans, You're trying to do it gamers and you'll learn a lot about me as we move forward that probably a good portion of my career even when I was doing military and all was all centered around gaming and how we engage with gaming characters, how we engage in a virtual gaming world and trying to get people's focus away from human replication and get them really to think about human communication.
Speaker 1:Just dive into that a bit more. What do you think of the core difference between, say, human replication versus human communication?
Speaker 5:Human replication is where a lot of companies focus on exactly what you look like. You're trying to make a character look as natural as possible. So you're going down this path of what we call the uncanny valley and even beyond, as far as the physical and even within the voice synthesis, they're trying to make the voices perfect. They're trying to make the humans perfect. They're trying to make them look exactly like us and a lot of them, quite honestly, are trying to make them indistinguishable. I won't mention the one competitor because we don't share the same philosophy, but he literally stood up in front of his shareholders and his employees at the big conference and said my goal is to make it so within five years. I don't want you to know whether you're talking to a human or not, and I'm going wait. That scares even me. That's not what we're trying to do. I'll reference back to one of my idols in life, and that's Walt Disney and Hayao Miyazaki and how they, in their own rights, in their own cultures, have created an entire culture. I mean Disney, as we all know, is probably one of the most beloved brands in the world and has the most loyal fans and all, and they do it by creating brand intimacy. They do it by creating an emotional bond and emotional awareness. I mean, they do it with an animated deer with a bear to cry over, with this concept of a personality that is not rooted in the physical personality. And that's where I think a lot of people miss. If you look at the evolution of interfacing and I'm an old fellow so I'm going to show my age here you know, when I first started engaging with computers, we literally had ticker tapes that were little strips of tape with punch holes in them and you'd run them through, and then you had punch cards. And then we got into these teletype machines that were manual typewriters with paper. Then they evolved to CRTs and then we got to the old mouse that we all know and love, and then voice first, communication, which is where we're at now.
Speaker 5:But what's missing from all of those pieces is that element you just mentioned, that human connection. You go from looking at this as an inanimate object to creating a loyalty and emotion and what we call an approachable empathy, a trusting relationship, and trust is something big, big, big in our vocabulary and what we strive for, that we want you to feel safe. We want you to feel safe, we want you to feel represented. We want you to feel that you can trust the technology you're working with, and that requires us as humans, just like you, learn and learn my trust. We have to create that within the characters we create, so there's as much on the left side of the brain as there is the right side of the brain and our technology and how those characters really create a personal connection with the users.
Speaker 5:I think we really have to not get too caught up in I call it the Hollywood hype of, you know, ai becoming sentient and taking over and finding the human race irrelevant and things like that. It really boils down to nobody has a problem whatsoever implementing a better way of scanning for cancer or a faster laptop so your programmers get their work faster done faster, or even automated telephone systems right now, which not everybody loves. But the point here is that when you start looking at it as not saying I'm trying to create a hybrid workforce, you're really creating a productivity tool for your staff. If I'm able to work with a founder and the use cases and the markets we're going in healthcare being a good one for us.
Speaker 5:We have a passion for the healthcare space and you say, wait, I'm not trying to replace your employees, but if I could take your high value human collateral, businesses have a lot of time, money, resource and, quite honestly, emotion bound into their employees and the obligations they have to their employees. And instead of thinking about it as, oh, I'm going to replace my employees, you'd think of it as well. I've just given them the fastest laptop that now has the ability to remove the training requirements, to let them converse as humans converse and to use that productivity tool to give them 15 to 20% of their work week back to them. So then you take employee XYZ and say, okay, well, do you want to give directions to where you can get a cup of coffee, or do you want to do what the high value employees do, what no machine can do right now, and that's service for customers directly? So you really look at it as returning a certain amount of work week and a certain amount of productivity back to the staff that you've invested so heavily into.
Speaker 4:That's one of the best things about being like a founder and a self-taught person is like you don't know what you don't know. You don't know how hard it is to do those things. No one's told you how hard it is, so you just try. Like you try these things that like in hindsight, like that was nuts. Like that was nuts to try and do that.
Speaker 4:But, now like I'm so glad that I didn't know what cliff I was leaping off of, and that cliff for me there was learning Python. I was, I was working on this process there as an analyst, was all in Excel and I mean, I'm sure everyone's had that experience of like horrible Excel spreadsheets that you're just like wrangling constantly. It's just a nightmare. And I was so tired of this process. One of my mentors was like that sounds like something that should be a Python script. I was like sure, sounds good. So on nights and weekends I like turned it into a Python script. It went from taking 30 hours a week, three people, 10 hours a week to do to eight seconds and I was like that was where I was hooked. That was where I was like okay, this is like the tool that can change so much and so, but even still, I think about like all those experiences.
Speaker 4:And then after that I went to Amazon and that's where my real data science journey began with like learning, machine learning, that same concept of like not in a in the best way possible, not knowing what you don't know, not being too risk averse, really taking those risks and building the skills where you're seeing you're doubling down on the things that you're seeing bear fruit, like and I was just seeing it every time I would go into a new organization. It's like if I can help them with data, they will give me more work than I can do every time. And that's what job security is. You know, like where there's, you can see there's way more work than you can ever do and your skills are in high demand. Like just double down, double down, double down. And that's how I got into ML and AI. And but even still, I think about, like my English degree.
Speaker 4:One of the main things that I ended up doing when I was in in these roles with AI is explaining to people what these machine learning algorithms were doing.
Speaker 4:And all of that was just my communication skills being able to write well I mean, think about it, amazon I'm writing six page papers all the time.
Speaker 4:Being able to write well, being able to speak well, being able to reason well, put together an argument to describe why something is true that's all stuff that I learned in my English degree and I really think was part of the reason why I would take on a responsibility and immediately get the next responsibility to, as I doubled down on this on this path so that, not underestimating how past experiences can make you, it's not additive, it's multiplicative. When you have past experiences that very few people in your industry do, it can be multiplicative in your ability to serve. You know, for me, being able to serve small businesses because I have the communication skills to, you know, speak to them in a way that they understand, not the way that the math PhDs were speaking to them, which frankly, was, you know, a lot of times out of reach for them to understand. So that's a big one. Don't discount all your, all your past experiences as being assets for you as you move into various parts of your growth with your organization.
Speaker 1:So, to summarize this, what you're saying, kirsten, is that your historic skills are actually really important, but we should also be very deliberate about the new skills that we pick up, based on where the real area of need is that we see in the businesses or the environments that we're in exactly, and it can be a source of creativity in your organization that maybe is untapped.
Speaker 4:I think about people who started out in biology and ended up learning engineering and then suddenly combine those two things to make a product that no one has ever seen, or I see this a lot with people with engineering skills but also a lot of historical job experience in like education like who better to build products that teachers will actually use than a former teacher? And that kind of thing is where I see real breakthrough products. I see those happening where people have this unique combination of experience that almost no one else has the skill, experience, whatever that is a personal.
Speaker 4:You know people who have been homeless or have gone through immigration and understand how hard it is. Those are the people that can really understand how to solve a problem and a need for a very large group of people. So I use that as inspiration all the time for how I, you know, go through my work in my organization. Serving people in my organization is using those skills, those experiences and actually using them as an asset.
