YouSaid · the spoken record

Andrew Farah

lines on the record
19
first
2018-09-07
most recent
2018-09-07
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “Not entirely sure that that's true, but I think we might be able to eliminate tailgating. And when I say tailgating, I mean like two people go into a secure facility through a door and only one badges in. That's never been possible before. And I think that within the context of the spaces where cameras can't go, I think that that's where this really lovely spaces that we can play.”

    2018-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Mindset The Best Investors Assume When Assessing Opportunities, Why So Many Hardware Startups Fail Today & The Right Way To Think About Employee Retention with Andrew Farah, Founder & CEO @ Density · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I think that San Francisco gets designed slightly differently. I don't know the time horizon, but I think if we're right, then architects won't have to guess at what rooms to build, and interior designers won't have to argue about whether or not a particular asset got used, and trains won't run on time schedules. They'll run on actual predictable demand based on foot traffic. I mean, if you think about schedules, most like staffing schedules, like cleaning or trains or whatever else, those schedules and the frequency of those cars is essentially a proxy for people count. We have all these proxies for people count. Like, why do we clean rooms that haven't been used? Most buildings, their staff shows up and they clean whatever the rooms are within the office. What if you knew that half of them weren't used? You could essentially clean double the number of rooms. And so I just think that there's this really fundamental piece of data that's missing from, it's a really important ingredient and it's missing from all of these systems. Did you know like we can eliminate tailgating? I mean,”

    2018-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Mindset The Best Investors Assume When Assessing Opportunities, Why So Many Hardware Startups Fail Today & The Right Way To Think About Employee Retention with Andrew Farah, Founder & CEO @ Density · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I think I stole this one from Kevin Sistrom. Instead of thinking about all the work you have to do or how much time it's going to take or whatever, just do five minutes of it. And it's amazing how quickly you find yourself an hour and a half into whatever you are dreading. So I like to, I kind of like to use that one.”

    2018-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Mindset The Best Investors Assume When Assessing Opportunities, Why So Many Hardware Startups Fail Today & The Right Way To Think About Employee Retention with Andrew Farah, Founder & CEO @ Density · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Again, going to sound kind of redundant here, but like I believe it is hardest for people to hire those who are not similar to them. It takes work and it takes commitment and you have to be willing to really jump in and not be lazy in order to hire a diverse team. So it's not a particular position. I really think it's like a holistic understanding or appreciation for what it takes to hire a diverse team. And we are by no means perfect. Like we have a long way to go. But I think that that would definitely be the thing I'd focus on.”

    2018-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Mindset The Best Investors Assume When Assessing Opportunities, Why So Many Hardware Startups Fail Today & The Right Way To Think About Employee Retention with Andrew Farah, Founder & CEO @ Density · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Assuming the premise, you're always working with imperfect data, and so taking what data you have and sort of putting it in front of someone, the best venture capitalists I've ever spoken to assume your premise and then ask, okay, what could happen if you were right? And you spend 45 minutes talking about that portion of the idea and not 45 minutes justifying your existence, meaning like, oh, you couldn't do it this way, you couldn't do it that way. Assume I'm right for a second and let's talk about how big this could be because that is what everyone is trying to invest in. And all the smaller stuff, those are tactical details and that has much more to do with execution than it does with vision.”

    2018-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Mindset The Best Investors Assume When Assessing Opportunities, Why So Many Hardware Startups Fail Today & The Right Way To Think About Employee Retention with Andrew Farah, Founder & CEO @ Density · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “We're with their spouse or their significant other or their friend or their coworker. And then the 32nd time was with you. And so they just worked up the courage to tell you. And then you're going to kind of drag your feet because you think you have time.”

    2018-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Mindset The Best Investors Assume When Assessing Opportunities, Why So Many Hardware Startups Fail Today & The Right Way To Think About Employee Retention with Andrew Farah, Founder & CEO @ Density · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Well, nothing works seamlessly. I think I don't know that we have something that falls into that category. I can say, you know, we have 100% retention since our founding four years ago. We've never voluntarily lost anyone. You know, we've had to let some people go along the way based on work product. But I'm very proud of that. And our team is very proud of that. And it will change as we grow. I have no illusions to the fact that that will change as the company grows. But I think that that's a result of trying to stay ahead of people's needs. And I'll give you an example of this. When someone asks for a raise, I think oftentimes companies think, okay, well, this is the first time I've heard of it, so I can get to this, but it's not necessarily super urgent. Maybe I get to it at the next cycle. Maybe we do it. We've got feedback coming up in six months. We can do it then. I kind of push it off. What I think sometimes people fail to realize is that the first time that someone brings it up to you, the company, is probably the 32nd time that they've talked about it. And at times one through 31.”

    2018-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Mindset The Best Investors Assume When Assessing Opportunities, Why So Many Hardware Startups Fail Today & The Right Way To Think About Employee Retention with Andrew Farah, Founder & CEO @ Density · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “What that product looks like. And I think it doesn't take a lot, but a small shift in how much time you spend thinking about how people collaborate and how they communicate with one another, how they resolve conflict, how they give feedback to one another, how they comp one another, and some of the cultural work that goes into that. I think early on can pay dividends. Internal processes and operations”

    2018-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Mindset The Best Investors Assume When Assessing Opportunities, Why So Many Hardware Startups Fail Today & The Right Way To Think About Employee Retention with Andrew Farah, Founder & CEO @ Density · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “First off, I want to say, I am making it up as I go along. So, a lot of this is other people's ideas applied to our model, but I heard something a long time ago on a podcast by Jason Calicanis, who's one of our investors and is on our board, and it was one of his earliest interviews. And I remember the person who he was talking to said, founders often are so focused on designing and shipping their first product that they forget to look up at the broader organization. And when the organization eventually evolves away from that first product, the founder looks up and doesn't recognize the organization they're within. And it's not that the company doesn't get designed, it gets designed, it just gets designed by other people. And I think that taking a minute to realize that the products you ship are a result of the dynamic of the team and its abilities is a very important thing to realize. And when you're super small, it's very hard to notice that they're almost indistinguishable from one another. You know, that the team is the product, the product is the team. But eventually the team dictates.”

    2018-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Mindset The Best Investors Assume When Assessing Opportunities, Why So Many Hardware Startups Fail Today & The Right Way To Think About Employee Retention with Andrew Farah, Founder & CEO @ Density · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Like, I think it's a marketing problem. Spending the time and dollars it takes to go into communities that you have no personal connection with and trying to get the message in front of them, whether it's Finity Groups or it's groups on LinkedIn or it's networks that you're just simply not a part of, I think that it's a great way to improve your candidate pool. It has absolutely nothing to do with lowering standards. It has absolutely nothing to do with just trying to be nice to everybody. I think that it is very much a functional and enormous opportunity to invest in that when people typically pay lip service to it.”

    2018-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Mindset The Best Investors Assume When Assessing Opportunities, Why So Many Hardware Startups Fail Today & The Right Way To Think About Employee Retention with Andrew Farah, Founder & CEO @ Density · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “First off, I just want to say I don't think there's a silver bullet. One and two, I don't think it's like a simple problem. I think it's mostly a cultural problem. If the leadership in an organization doesn't buy in, and by leadership I mean CEO down. If the leadership or its board doesn't buy into the value of investing in good marketing or inclusive language or the potential added time it takes to make sure that you have a diverse candidate pool in the process, then it'll never happen. You'll end up with a homogenous group no matter what, pretty much nine days at a ten. I think that the biggest thing that people underinvest in is that they do the easy thing first, which is they call their friends. And calling your friends is a great way to get a bunch of people together quickly, but it's also a really great way to cement a particular type of perspective on the world. And so taking a step back, pausing and saying as much as I would love to hire my friend from Stanford or whatever it might be, I'm going to like take a second to write out exactly what I'm looking for and meaningfully try to market to networks and communities I'm not a part of. And I mean that in a very straightforward way.”

    2018-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Mindset The Best Investors Assume When Assessing Opportunities, Why So Many Hardware Startups Fail Today & The Right Way To Think About Employee Retention with Andrew Farah, Founder & CEO @ Density · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Of an employee's questions and staying ahead of an employee's needs is the best way to retain exceptional talent. I also think doing your absolute level best to fill a team with diverse candidates is not only hard, it is probably the single best thing you can do as an early stage startup because when you have people from different backgrounds early on call it in the first 50 employees or heads, their networks will become your recruitment mechanism. And so if you just hire the people you know or who are in your network, you're going to be surrounded by a lot of people who look very similar to you and have sort of a context on the world that's very similar, which means their problem solving abilities is also similar. And I just don't believe that that's the best way to build product.”

    2018-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Mindset The Best Investors Assume When Assessing Opportunities, Why So Many Hardware Startups Fail Today & The Right Way To Think About Employee Retention with Andrew Farah, Founder & CEO @ Density · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I've always wanted to do a study of companies engraft them based on their retention rates and then sort of their relative success. But I'm not exactly sure how to find the data or the time. I'm really curious if high levels of churn or high levels of retention correlate with the company's broader success. My hunch is that it does, largely because the cost of finding really exceptional talent and having to find a replacement in the event that they churn is really high. It's high in terms of dollars and it's high in terms of time. And when you look at sort of industry averages of how much time it takes to go from a job description to first day, US averages, I believe 90 days. The tech industry's averages is 75 days. I think we average about 45 days and maybe a bit too tactical, but like everything from when you begin the process and how transparent you are in the hiring process and your selection criteria and who they're going to be interviewing with all the way through to how you and when you give raises, staying ahead.”

    2018-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Mindset The Best Investors Assume When Assessing Opportunities, Why So Many Hardware Startups Fail Today & The Right Way To Think About Employee Retention with Andrew Farah, Founder & CEO @ Density · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Maybe a little bit of a broken record, but I think the truth of your business, the facts of your business, those things are critical. But just as important are the surrounding stories around what's happening within the business. We had a circumstance where we handbilt product to deploy into customer locations, and that process was, it was rigorous, it was incredibly challenging, and it was taxing on the team, and it was imperfect. There were not these like beautiful finished devices. They were like barely their pizza boxes. And those initial people counters, those initial prototypes came alive with photographs of the process and video of the process and then stories of the actual deployment in some of our customer locations. And I think that an investor update sounds like sort of this transactional thing, but I think it's a real opportunity to tell the company story.”

    2018-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Mindset The Best Investors Assume When Assessing Opportunities, Why So Many Hardware Startups Fail Today & The Right Way To Think About Employee Retention with Andrew Farah, Founder & CEO @ Density · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Weeks ago with a really interesting circumstance with a customer. And those kinds of things have tended to result in a lot of engagement and responses from the people who've invested in us. And it's easier for them to carry on that story with other people as they talk about the business. We anonymously count people inside of large corporate campuses to help companies better understand how their employees use space so they can design that space better. That's the rather simple concept, but it really comes alive with, I think, good storytelling. Yeah, no, I can agree with you more in terms of that importance of storytelling. You said there about investor updates and having kind of done the three different rounds of funding that you have. I have a lot of founders ask me, Harry, how should I structure investor updates? What are the big learnings for you? Having done this over three rounds, how do you think about the ride investor updating really providing that cohesive and kind of comprehensive report with also”

    2018-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Mindset The Best Investors Assume When Assessing Opportunities, Why So Many Hardware Startups Fail Today & The Right Way To Think About Employee Retention with Andrew Farah, Founder & CEO @ Density · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “And it's a very small community. It's amazing how quickly you can get to different people. But Jonathan Trieste has single-handedly done every introduction to our lead. And that wasn't by design. He's a remarkable advocate. And I think to some degree we owe a portion of our careers to him. And to that team, I should say, Brett and Blake. Yeah, no, I'm a big fan of what they're building at Lovely. I do have to ask it, it's a very challenging element in terms of kind of building that relationship and network of connectors. How do you ensure those continuous and frequent touch points with these individuals? Well, most of the people who are in Venture are incredibly bright, very logical people, but they get excited by really good stories. They get very excited by what the world could be, and that's usually wrapped in a really compelling and truthful story. And we try to do that through writing. So in a lot of our investor updates, they're not just like here are the bullet points of what you need to know for your investment. It's not just sort of this transactional relationship. Let me tell you the story about what happened three years ago.”

    2018-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Mindset The Best Investors Assume When Assessing Opportunities, Why So Many Hardware Startups Fail Today & The Right Way To Think About Employee Retention with Andrew Farah, Founder & CEO @ Density · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “For what we do and who's enthusiasm for our team. I mean, it's contagious. And when they do introductions, they don't hedge. They tell that person that you absolutely have to talk to this person or you have to talk to them about what they're working on. And in some ways, it's almost a reason to continue working on the thing. And there are a handful of people that I have tremendous respect for who have been that for us. And frankly, we owe a lot of our expanded network to just a very small group of people who've been willing to make those introductions over and over and over again. Can I ask a very pointed but also unfair question when you review the connectors and the intros is there an anecdote that maybe stands out of a time where a super connector has moved the needle for you and the learning from that? So do you know Jonathan Triest at Ludlow Ventures? I do indeed. I had him on the show. So Jonathan is a close friend and someone he's one of our earliest investors and he has introduced us to the lead of every round we've done and we've done three. We've got a lot of introductions over the years.”

    2018-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Mindset The Best Investors Assume When Assessing Opportunities, Why So Many Hardware Startups Fail Today & The Right Way To Think About Employee Retention with Andrew Farah, Founder & CEO @ Density · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “With those ideas You run with. The ones that seem to be really fundamental problems that people really care about, for whatever reason people tend to be more creative with them than you could be. So we had a number of people who would suggest things that you could do once you understood how people use space or occupancy that we just hadn't thought of. And there were so many of them. We just couldn't believe it didn't exist. Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more. And I also find that when you have kind of such a strong and fundamental mission, it's easier to hire. But I do want to get started today, Andrew, with a topic that is a personal passion of mine being connectors and more importantly super connectors. So tell me, Andrew, in the world of raw computing, IQ centricity that we live in, often superconnectors can almost be denigrated today. So how do you view the role of superconnectors today? I think when I think of the people who fall into that category within my own network, they tend to be incredibly generous and they tend to be remarkable advocates. You know, there are a handful of people whose enthusiasm”

    2018-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Mindset The Best Investors Assume When Assessing Opportunities, Why So Many Hardware Startups Fail Today & The Right Way To Think About Employee Retention with Andrew Farah, Founder & CEO @ Density · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Started with five co founders. I started a small consultancy. We built web applications and mobile apps right out of grad school. Anytime we had excess profits or additional cash, we would put it into side projects, and density was the seventh. So over about three years, we invested in And density has some legs, so we spun it off as And then ever since then, for the That company together Can I ask?”

    2018-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Mindset The Best Investors Assume When Assessing Opportunities, Why So Many Hardware Startups Fail Today & The Right Way To Think About Employee Retention with Andrew Farah, Founder & CEO @ Density · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source