Summary

In this conversation, Jothy Rosenberg interviews Mary Voss, an experienced HR professional, about the importance of human resources in startups. They discuss the factors that contribute to the success of early-stage companies, such as having the right talent, a cohesive leadership team, and a strong company culture. They also touch on the importance of behavioral interviewing and the value of experience in hiring decisions. Mary shares her philosophy of hiring no bozos and the significance of trust and efficiency in a small team. The conversation concludes with a discussion on the importance of dignity in the hiring and firing process.

Takeaways

• Early-stage companies need to focus on having the right talent, a cohesive leadership team, and a strong company culture to succeed.
• Behavioral interviewing is an effective way to assess a candidate's values, motivations, and fit within the organization.
• Experience is important in the early days of a startup as it allows individuals to make informed decisions and navigate the fast-paced environment.
• Hiring no bozos and fostering trust within the team leads to efficiency and productivity.
• Dignity is crucial in both the hiring and firing process, ensuring respect and a positive experience for all individuals involved.

Sound Bites

"Caring about the people that you're bringing into the organization and spending a whole lot of time on the cultural fit."

"You have to have fun, especially when you're working that hard."

"Looking at motivation and the ability to learn and just the softer skills and how they're going to fit in with the team."

Links

Mary’s company: https://www.trivium.com/

Please leave us a review: https://www.podchaser.com/AdventuresOnTheCanDo

Tech Startup Toolkit (book): https://www.manning.com/books/tech-startup-toolkit

Jothy’s website: https://jothyrosenberg.com

The Who Says I Can’t Foundation: https://whosaysicant.org

Jothy’s TEDx talk on disability: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNtOawXAx5A

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Background

02:24 HR Factors for Startup Success

07:08 The Importance of Having Fun

08:08 The Value of Behavioral Interviewing

14:04 Hiring No Bozos: Trust and Efficiency in Small Teams

32:38 Experience and Hiring Decisions

38:56 The Power of Grit and Optimism

41:25 Closing Remarks

And here's Mary Voss. Hi, Mary.

Hey Jothy, how you doing?

Good. It's great to see you. And it's hard for me to think of anybody I work with that I've known longer than you. We go back to 1989.

Okay, well thank you for bringing that up.

Well, you know, you were, you helped shape me from the very beginning.

Good.

I always like to ask people where they're from and where they live now.

Okay, so I grew up in the Bay Area in Palo Alto and I live in Napa. So I've moved from Palo Alto that changed a lot and got very congested and the real estate market there is ridiculous. And I'm now in Napa where we have good wine and a little bit more open space.

Yes, that is a nice place to live. So we're going to...

Jothi, can you cut this out? I need to tell my gardener to go away. I'm sorry, I have to tell my gardener to go away.

Yeah, sure.

Sorry, Jathi. The gardener was about to come up on the front porch and it's way too loud. I'm really sorry.

Okay, so when I do this, it allows me to see it and edit it out. So we're gonna be talking about human resources kinds of things because you've spent your entire career in that area. But we're also gonna do it in the context of startups. So maybe you could start by kind of stating your philosophy, your feeling about.

What are some of the HR factors that are the most important for an early stage company to succeed?

So I think that an early stage company needs to be aware of what they're, they have a vision, but they need to be aware of how they're going to get there. And it's not just making sure that you have the right talent, but it's also making sure that you're paying attention to the leadership team that you put in place. Are they playing well together? Is there somebody who is dominating?

others, are all the functions within your organization able to scale? And I mean, I could go on for a long time on what you need to be aware of in building a startup, but just caring about the people that you're bringing into the organization and spending a whole lot of time on the cultural fit, as well as making sure that the technical chops that you're bringing in are the right ones.

So we go back, as I said, we go back quite a ways. And it was my first startup. And I had been there just a short amount of time before you joined. You joined in the HR group. And they were going to be doing a bunch of hiring. So that was a good start for you as well.

And I want us to just kind of tell a little story, a fun story that happened back then. Yeah, so there was an attempt to, I guess, flip what normally happens, which of course would be a really bad HR event, and see if we could make it funny that it was going to be turned around and

and it was going to be guys having themselves be objectified. We all thought it was kind of funny, except what? Well, I know you would still, you would not do it now at all, but we can look back on it and we can say, all right, given that those times were different, it was a lot of fun. And I just want to set the stage because,

I did that then, but I wouldn't do it now.

we had a vice president who, it might've even been his idea. What he, what he wanted to do. I think he, he, he thought he had really nice legs. He wore shorts all the time and he thought, wouldn't it be funny if we had a legs contest where, it's only open to guys to participate and, the, the, the, the women of the organization, a few of them anyway.

were going to be sitting in an office judging. And they couldn't see from like, I don't know, mid -thigh or maybe it was even knees up. They couldn't see who it was. So they were judging strictly by one guy after another walked by and then you would judge. And what he did was he tried to promote a, you know, a

He became Proletarian.

bribe by he taped some dollars or something to his to his legs. And and so he then he then thought he would win. I, of course, was I was wearing shorts. And I, of course, was wearing my prosthetic leg. And and I thought, OK, well, I'm going to show him. And so I stapled the money to to my prosthetic leg.

Thanks for watching!

And of course, the staples go right in because back then it was made out of wood. And so I walked by and I did win. And it actually made him mad.

no. Well, the first time I met you and I was sitting in your office talking to you, you stapled a paper to your leg and I like freaked out. I was like, my God, are you okay? And, and you thought it was the funniest thing. And I was like, I had no idea. So I think it was, yeah, it was my first day there. Yeah.

Did I do it through my pants leg?

Your first day, that's really what I should wait for at least for a couple days, I think. So we had some fun. I mean, the point of that story is just that we, you know, you have to have fun, especially when you're working that hard and all that. And yeah, we didn't know some of the things that we now know, or we're just much more aware. And so you wouldn't do that now, but.

Thanks.

Absolutely not. Yeah.

It was fun. It was fun. So all right, getting back to the more serious stuff. So how do you determine who to hire in terms of the value they're going to bring or their values with respect to the organization? What kind of value they're going to bring?

So I think looking at people's technical background and what they bring value on that side is the easiest thing to ascertain because they either know what they need to know for the job or they don't. What you can't do is go back and be the person's parents who raised this person and imparted certain values into an individual. So looking at motivation and the ability to learn.

and just the softer skills and how they're going to fit in with the team that's already on board and really understanding where the company's going. So you have to know how fast the company is scaling. If they're scaling really fast and you need to have the skills that you're looking for 18 to two years ahead of where you are right now,

those skills, you know, looking at how somebody is going to scale over the next 18 to two years. And especially when you're talking about startups really ascertaining, can the individual sprint faster than the growth of the company so that they can one stay interested in what they're doing so that they don't get left behind, but to also to provide the, the.

leadership and the long -term history that's going to be important as you're hiring all these other people. When I started at Sun, every six months we had doubled the company. And pretty soon when you are turning, you know, somebody new is on board and they're turning to somebody else to get help with something that they don't know how a process works. And then they find out that everybody is new.

That's a hard thing to deal with when you're really growing quickly. So making sure that people can absorb the information. And there's a lot of ways to do that. People, companies, especially small companies don't really put together a really good recruiting strategy.

Really to say, okay, this is what we're looking for today, but this is the skills that we need to, to bring along with us over the next two years in this hire. And so what do you, here's your technical things that you're looking for, but what are the softer skills and really having different interviewers focus in on those areas so that it's an interesting interview for the person. But you can also.

you're getting new information in every single interview session, instead of having the person tell you about themselves over and over again, tell me about yourself. And, you know, it's like the same story. So how, you know, if somebody's the right person to hire, did they engage well with the people on your team? And the sooner you get that nailed down,

the better because now your team is a more cohesive team that's evaluating new talent coming in as opposed to having outliers who don't recognize the same cultural values as other people in the team. So it's, it's imperative that you get that nailed down in the first 10 hires that you make.

Well, you mentioned the interview experience. And I think probably most people, the majority of people these days, have heard of behavioral interviewing. And most people know it's important. But I still find that a lot of people don't actually know how to do it. Do you want to say a little bit about how you that

Yeah.

think about behavioral interviewing.

Sure. So one of the things that you're trying to do is find out based on past history or the way somebody thinks, what will be important to you in the job that somebody's coming into. For instance, when I want to know what somebody values in the environment that they work in or the people that they work with, I will ask them,

you know, to think of a company that they worked for before where there's somebody that they admire, admire their work style and have them describe that person to me. And from that, I can tell what they value in the people that they work with instead of saying, what do you value in the people they work with? And then they're stumped and they're going, well, I, I value people that are trustworthy. And, but if you ask them, you know,

What's, you know, somebody that you admire, what's, you know, describe their work style, they'll really go into a lot of detail because they're thinking of somebody and you really get some insight into how they think and what they care about and what they value. That's just an example. So there's a million ways to go at different things that you're trying to ascertain in the process.

Well, here's one, because I end up interviewing a lot of engineers. I'll ask them, tell me about one of your favorite pieces of code you've ever written and why. And then tell me about a program or a feature you were working on that was really bad. It was a disaster. And why was that? Because what?

Ha!

The way I think about it is the whole process of interviewing is completely fake. What I mean is it's nothing like the job that they're going to do. And so.

With a first state.

I'm sorry.

It's like a first date.

Exactly. It's not really how married life is going to feel, is it? Right. So the idea is, okay, so in a perfect world, we would still be doing apprenticeships and you would have somebody that would come in and be an apprentice and then they would learn and you would see how they were. And you might say, well, after six months, that's over, you didn't work out or they did, but you can't do that.

or not in most jobs. So you need to get them telling stories about what their work is like. And the other thing is that behavioral interviewing gets you, and this is why I thought of this, is that it gets you out of A, you're not asking questions off the resume. You've already got the resume. And unless they've been fraudulent,

There's nothing more you need to do, but it does give you a chance to say, hey, at this company, what was the most fun thing you did outside of the normal function of your jobs? You get a chance to see what they like. And the other thing is, of course, the thing you were saying about, don't everybody ask the same thing?

you have roles you have you agree on who's going to do what and then anybody can use the resume as well, how did whatever it is that they're supposed to ask? How did that play out at that particular, you know, company?

Yeah, a resume is a tool. It's a tool to get people in or out of the interview process. And then from there, it's a launching tool to say, what's important on here that I want to dive into?

I had it, I had an interesting experience. I was actually looking for, an opportunity for where I could take, Dover before I knew, you know, we could incubate it at Draper. And I, so, but the only way I could explore Amazon being a place for that was to go interview there and,

And so I show up in Seattle for the interview and they show me into this tiny conference room that could hold four people if you squeeze. And they plunked me down and I was going to spend the next six hours not leaving that room except to go to the bathroom. And then somebody would come in, they would open their laptop and frequently they would open it up such that I couldn't see them and they couldn't see me. And they were looking at questions.

And they were asking them, and they were typing my answers. And then they'd go on to the next one. I mean, I think they talk about their processes and whatnot as if they're really proud of them. But boy, that's the worst I've ever seen.

That's very distracting to have somebody typing and they're still typing your last answer, but they've asked you something else and you know that they're not really listening. So, and you're trying to help them and you slow down your process of, of talking to them. Yeah, that that's it's, it's, they're not making a connection. They don't know. They're not looking you in the eye. They aren't looking at your body language. Body language says a lot in an interview process.

Yeah. So you've done hiring for all kinds of companies. And there's many cases where you've basically built the heart and soul of that company. Maybe talk about a few of the companies that you've done that for.

gosh. Okay. So I mean, so I had a company Fox hunt staffing for 17 years. I ran the company and we had a lot of startups and we had a lot of larger companies too. But, I mean, synopsis is one where a lot of the leadership team back in the day, I was responsible for, helping bring in,

There's been a ton of them. So right now I'm, I work for a company called Trivium Corporate Solutions and I have a handful of clients. And so I have a pharma client that I am working with and that was a new technology for me to learn. And I'm still learning and they're based in Massachusetts and it's called I2O Bio and.

I've only brought in, helped bring in a couple of people there. Another one, but they're a tiny company. So a couple of people makes a difference. There's a, there's a handful of companies. I hate to go into all of them. I mean, Cisco back in the day, we brought in, we opened up Latin America for them. I mean, the.

just a whole lot of and market built their marketing team. And so the EDA industry, the networking industry, I mean, even Google back in the early days. So.

You could probably drive down 101 and just constantly be pointing out companies that you helped build.

I did that recently. I was down in the bay for something and I was driving on like first street and I was like, yeah, these guys, these guys, these guys, these guys, all these people that I had worked with in the past and helped them build their companies. So.

So I've had recruiters and various staffing help over the years. And we keep coming back together on various companies. There's a process that you do, which I've observed many times. And it's very different from what anyone else does. You could probably.

Patented if you just described it to the patent office. It's so here's here's what I see you'll you'll sit down with the hiring manager and You're trying to get a real sense and with as much depth as possible of what they what they want and then and you're gonna you're gonna have to correct me What I got wrong, but then you go start doing some some outreach to all your

super secret sources. And then you'll come back with a list of names. You do a process where you filter them based on, you look at information you can get on them, resumes and whatnot. And then you'll come back with a short list and you'll go through this with a hiring manager who never gets, I mean, it's almost impossible as the hiring manager.

to write a job spec and have it be stand up in the face of real interactions. And so then they'll say, no, I didn't mean that. And I forgot to say this. So there's some tuning going on. And then there's another part where you are actually doing the screening. And you'll eliminate people, or you'll come back with more questions. And so by the time you've got a list of like,

five, you'll say, OK, hiring manager, you do a phone screen on these five. And are we giving away too much information to your competitors?

No, no, no, no, no, no, no,

if they were my child, because, and I put, because, you know, you don't want to bring a jerk into the company. And so I ended up with that filter on top of it. Cause there's some people that are really good at their job, at the, the, the actual technical piece of their job that nobody wants to work with that are, that are just impossible. So you have a star that is now.

negated five other people on your team. And that's not somebody you want in your own company. So, you know, back when I had my company, there was, you know, I've met some leaders that I could not in good with a clean heart, actually recruit people for that in the meeting when I'm first meeting them, whether we're gonna work together or not.

I know I'm not going to work with them because I'm not going to convince somebody to leave the job and tell them this is a better job when I think that the leader is somebody that I absolutely wouldn't want to work with. And I found myself in one of the meetings, actually, I stood up and took my keys out of my purse ready to go before I realized that I had like, I had terminated the meeting without even thinking about it. It was just like, no way is anybody going to work with this CEO. No way. So.

Anyway, so I care about people.

So I think one of the things that's, if you're the hiring manager working with you, you make it, well, it's not an easy, it's never an easy task, but you make it really as, I guess, as easy as possible because there's this iterative thing that's going on and you keep using the interactions with the hiring manager and the sort of group of people you've initially found to,

to keep improving your filter. And by the time you're kind of honing in on a list of people to actually be interviewed, you've really narrowed the field down to just a good group of people. In fact, sometimes it's hard then for the hiring manager to choose because they just suddenly, now they're looking at three highly qualified people.

Well, sometimes people aren't ready to make a hire when you, so I, I, I did realize there was a cadence to some people that I was, some hiring managers that I've worked with that they wouldn't hire the first person you sent in, even if the first person was dead on perfect. And so I would hold the third, the, that person to be the third person going in or whatever. And I remember when I was talking to the, the team at packet here and, and this is a company then.

that was, has been acquired through a couple of other companies. And I remember asking the CEO, if I give you this VP of engineering, if I give you the best candidate first, are you going to hire them? And it was like, yeah, absolutely. And, but it took four candidates, but I still think that the first candidate was the best one. So, because we replaced that, that guy two years later.

So another question that I've been dying to ask you is, well, I wrote something in my book about why I think experience is so important in the early days of a startup. But I'd love to ask you why you think experience is so important and that you really, in the earliest days, it's

my experience, and I think you feel the same way, but I'm not sure, that you really don't want people that have no experience.

Yeah, for the most part, it depends on the job that you're hiring them into. There are some people that are perfect as far like a new grad that is very smart and is perfect as far as a fit goes. And you can see that you'd be silly not to hire them because somebody else is going to get a gem, but those are like one in 500. I mean, that doesn't happen very often. Experience people.

have seen enough to make good decisions moving forward. You don't want people to always say, Hey, we did it like this at my last company, because your last company isn't this company, but you want them to be able to take all those factors and figure out what the best decision is for the path moving forward. And time is so critical.

in a startup. I mean, market share and running after it and making sure that you're the company that gets out there first and saturates the marketplace. That's going to happen with people who are experienced.

Yeah. What I find is, so I have this adage or philosophy that I try to follow, and that is hire no strangers in the first 25 people.

Mmm.

And, and the way I do it is I'm trying to hire people that I know. And then I'm leaning on, and they're not a stranger. If somebody I really trust tells me like, for example, one of our favorite people, both of yours and mine is, is, is Marco who was the VP of engineering at Dover. Marco, was somebody I really trusted said,

Mm -hmm.

you're going to love this guy. You need to hire this guy. And we met and I did. And he was phenomenal. He was a superstar. And then from then on, everyone that he knows really well and wants to bring in is not a stranger. And we did. By the time we ended up getting to 18 people, we had not, we had, I think, maybe

Two people out of that whole batch did not follow the rule.

It's good to tap your network and rely on other people that you trust, but there's a lot of good talent out there too that you bring in and then that person becomes part of your network.

Yeah, well, we got there eventually, but and maybe it's not 25, maybe it's, but it's thinking about it that way because it's related to the experience thing. What you want is you want a very, very efficient group of people. And the way for there to be efficiency is trust. If people trust each other, then, okay, this person's...

good at their job, they're going to do their job, I trust them. And then when they make a decision, great. You don't have to second guess it. Everybody can just move on based on them sort of having this area that they own. And they've made a decision. And it's so important for there to be this kind of efficiency. And a friend of mine who's a CEO says, she

values the power of saying yes. That she wants to say yes to people. And because she trusts them, she says yes. And then they're like, wow, that's wonderful. It made me feel great to have the CEO say yes to my ideas, to my new suggested thing.

Yeah, I think for the most part, well, trust is absolutely essential, but sometimes you have to hire outside of your network and take the leap of faith and get to the point of trusting somebody sooner than later. Even if it backfires and it's kind of fast to fail, it's trust, I believe that, but I also don't think that...

Unless you know what the market looks like, what the pool looks like, and the people that you're bringing in, that that trust is more important than something else, that, you know, a technical set or something that somebody's done, the experience that they've had, that's taken somebody, a company very quickly through something else. I mean, it's a balance. It's, it's, it's, that's a hiring decision that leaders make.

Did I ever tell you my philosophy of the bozo bit? I think I've talked to you about the bozo.

Well, yes. And so that's what I was thinking of that earlier when I was talking about something that we don't yet because I Apple that was Apple this like higher no bozos. Yeah.

Well, so we had to actually exercise this philosophy once recently. And so the idea of the bozo bit is if someone doesn't work out, because hiring is so hard, interviewing is so hard, that you will make mistakes no matter how many times you've done it in your career. And so there was someone that

had made it through all the filters we could have possibly had and they came through. And then they weren't working out. And so what I espouse is that small company, we're gonna make decisions quickly and we operate, and I know you've said this before too, hire slowly and fire quickly. And the bozo bit is hiring, I mean, sorry, excuse me.

is firing really quickly. So the team, one or two people on the team come to me and say, so -and -so is just not working out. I say, what's going on? And they'll explain it. And these are people I trust. OK, so they're not going to do this on a whim. And I'll do a little bit of digging, but not much. Just making sure that this is like.

something that needs to happen quickly. And then I will not leave it to anyone else. I will not delegate it. I will go to the person and say, listen, I need to talk to you. And I'll talk to them and say, so it's not working out. I'm going to have you leave now. And they automatically get whatever is reasonable, two or three weeks severance. And what happens is the

The whole team is energized by the fact that they were listened to, that they are trusted, and that this person was actually slowing things down because they were all obsessing over. By the time they come to you, it's been a while. They don't do this on one day or one week of issues. It's like been a month or two months of steady decline in everyone's productivity.

I'm part of this on a regular basis with all of my client companies and have been part of this through my career. But what I, you know, it's never easy to let somebody go. However, if that individual is causing other people to throw more work on their back or has such a negative impact.

on the team that they're working in, you're actually doing the, not just the company, but individuals on the team of favor to move somebody out who is not the right fit. If somebody's not the right fit, technically for a job, but people really like them and there's another place for them, that's great. But a lot of times, like you say, it takes a little bit of time to work.

people before people actually complain about an individual and that, and sometimes it, you see it yourself. It's not even people complaining. It's somebody that's not performing and doesn't really have any interest in performing. So going through a performance improvement plan, you'll see people sometimes, you know, get through the plan and do well. And then a couple of weeks later, you're hitting that again. So, it,

It's the right thing sometimes for that individual who's being exited out of the company also. It gives them a chance to find a place that is the right fit for them.

You've worked at some big, big companies, like you worked at EMC for a long time, and you've worked at the tiniest startups. Which do you like better?

with this.

I like the tiny startups better. Or not just tiny. I like the smaller to midsize companies because you have more impact in a short period of time. And being able to move things forward is fun for me. I like to be able to see how to create a path and bring people along on that path. And in a larger company, you have to think about which 45 people am I going to?

influence to get this done and then work it through. But EMC was an enjoyable company to work for because I worked on the West Coast and so it was with different organizations. So it was like multiple companies anyway. Each organization was a company that they either acquired and all of those companies were acquiring other companies. So it was almost like multiple.

smaller companies within the larger organization.

So you have been through a lot in your career and in your life. And where do you think, and I think of you as having a fair amount of grit. You're tough. Where would you say it comes from?

probably growing up with not a lot of money and knowing that I had to survive. And luckily I got some good DNA and putting that DNA together with the motivation to make people's lives good. I want my own life. I want every moment of my life to be fun and good. And I want that to be the same for others. And...

if I can help a company be successful, that's fun for me. It's just, it's, I, I've always been independent and having that mindset. Please don't bother me when somebody, even when somebody has something personal to say to me that is a negative, I try to either learn for it or I discount it if I don't.

if it doesn't fit in with the way I think and keep going forward.

The world that swirls around you, it can be full of all kinds of issues and problems. And you just are like this quiet in the storm, this source of stability. I mean, I've seen it for your family, for where you work. It's just.

And you're always upbeat no matter what. It's pretty amazing.

Well, I appreciate that. I think I got a really good dose of serotonin somehow in my physical being. I don't know. I just really believe that life is short and make the best of it.

Well, that's a wonderful note to sort of close on. That's a very nice closing point. I really want to thank you. I've been looking forward to having this episode with you just because I'm with you that hiring, HR, and even the negative side, the firing and doing that right are all really, really important, especially to these.

early stage companies, you know, where every hire is a big deal.

Yeah. Well, to add one last thing, I think dignity is important. Dignity coming into a company and being accepted with open arms into a company and dignity when you're being exited out of a company is important too. It's important to everybody. The people who are still in the company, the people that, you know, respect. And I've really enjoyed working with you over the years. I know that we've worked together in a couple of different capacities and you know,

it'll go on and I'm going to watch you swim again sometime and for the sparks and.

Well, just so you know, next year, 2025 will be my 30th time doing the Alcatraz swim. And we're going to have everybody from my family will be there. So we should do it then. Come down then.

Next up, okay? Sounds good. Thank you. Okay.

Okay, thanks so much.