YouSaid · the spoken record

Daniel Kan

lines on the record
23
first
2019-08-16
most recent
2019-08-16
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. “One of our other values is stay focused. So we're really focused on getting the launch, putting our AVs out there, and making it available for people to ride in. And then from there, we'll see. That's not thinking much past that right now.”

    2019-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cruise's Daniel Kan on Lessons From Scaling The Team From 40 To 1,500 People, How Daniel Thinks About Continuous Learning & Self-Development and Why CEOs Hiring Themselves Out Of Roles Is Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I think probably when I was between jobs and I decided that I wanted to live a life with as little drama as possible. I was a pretty big one”

    2019-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cruise's Daniel Kan on Lessons From Scaling The Team From 40 To 1,500 People, How Daniel Thinks About Continuous Learning & Self-Development and Why CEOs Hiring Themselves Out Of Roles Is Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Oh man, I'll probably get skewered for this one, but entitlement culture. I'm pretty grateful for what I get to work on and the product and the great people. And I think that most people outside the valley don't get to do this. And I don't want to take it for granted.”

    2019-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cruise's Daniel Kan on Lessons From Scaling The Team From 40 To 1,500 People, How Daniel Thinks About Continuous Learning & Self-Development and Why CEOs Hiring Themselves Out Of Roles Is Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I guess it varies depending on which roles I'm interviewing for, but one that I always ask, this might not seem like a crazy wild question, but I always ask people to summarize their work experience. I obviously have their resume in front of me, but what they highlight, how much detail they go into reveals a lot of the type of person they are and if they are good at clear communication. And that's really what I used that time for in the beginning of the interview, then I dive into more specific questions around the various roles. But that's one question that I ask every single person.”

    2019-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cruise's Daniel Kan on Lessons From Scaling The Team From 40 To 1,500 People, How Daniel Thinks About Continuous Learning & Self-Development and Why CEOs Hiring Themselves Out Of Roles Is Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Rule something I'd try and do a lot. But what I try and do first is to really understand what I'm looking for because that way I'll be able to set better criteria during the hiring process, understand what candidates should come and represent. And then ultimately, I'm going to pass that off when the time is right.”

    2019-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cruise's Daniel Kan on Lessons From Scaling The Team From 40 To 1,500 People, How Daniel Thinks About Continuous Learning & Self-Development and Why CEOs Hiring Themselves Out Of Roles Is Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Well, ultimately, you want to hire people who can help you solve your problems, but I think hiring people to solve a problem that you don't know how to solve yourself is a little bit of a red herring. I think it is wishful thinking that you will be able to find the right person if you don't know what you're looking for. And for example, a lot of founders out there will say, I need to find someone who can build my app because I don't know how to code. Well, if you don't know how to code, how do you know if that code or that person will be good at coding? How do you know that code will handle the right edge cases? How do you know if it will scale? How do you know if they're even writing it in the right languages, right? And so we did this a lot early at exec. We tried to hire someone who knew more about growth and customer acquisition, which ultimately we needed. But we should have spent more time, in my opinion, learning what we needed, figuring out how to make it work, then finding the right person who could take it to the next level. So I don't think it's necessarily wrong to say, hey, I need to hire out of my”

    2019-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cruise's Daniel Kan on Lessons From Scaling The Team From 40 To 1,500 People, How Daniel Thinks About Continuous Learning & Self-Development and Why CEOs Hiring Themselves Out Of Roles Is Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I think for me, it's really been making sure that everyone understands what the culture is and how we act and how we behave. We actually at Cruise, we have six values or behaviors that we focus on, that you get from day one. I mentioned one of them, Be Humble, and making sure that everyone acts in that way because it's not just what we build, but it's how we do it as well. And I think that that is taking 1500-ish people and getting them all to row in the same direction has been one of the biggest challenges, I think, of my career, not the biggest”

    2019-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cruise's Daniel Kan on Lessons From Scaling The Team From 40 To 1,500 People, How Daniel Thinks About Continuous Learning & Self-Development and Why CEOs Hiring Themselves Out Of Roles Is Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Our on voter importing programs, too, we have equally all hands and consistent emails sent out by the leaders of the company around their product areas or their areas. And a lot of transparency actually. So I think the biggest learning is you can't say the same things enough because every week we're adding 10, 20 people. And those are people who don't have the same context as the last 10 or 20.”

    2019-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cruise's Daniel Kan on Lessons From Scaling The Team From 40 To 1,500 People, How Daniel Thinks About Continuous Learning & Self-Development and Why CEOs Hiring Themselves Out Of Roles Is Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “The biggest learnings, I think the thing that I've learned the most is that as you grow, I think as a leader, your role is basically to provide clear communication to the team. You know, when we were four people, it used to be about execution. And don't get me wrong, that's still important. But the things that I do today are mostly trying to get everyone aligned around a common goal, how we're going to do it, and then to send them off on their way to go and do those things. You know, I'm not going to make or break the company by writing a product requirement doc, but I can help everyone become more successful by providing the information that I've gathered over the last five years to help people make better decisions and to make decisions faster and to have greater ownership over their own areas. And so for us and kind of what I've learned is that you cannot overcommunicate. You have to have a constant stream of clear, consistent communication. And that starts from the moment you walk in the door.”

    2019-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cruise's Daniel Kan on Lessons From Scaling The Team From 40 To 1,500 People, How Daniel Thinks About Continuous Learning & Self-Development and Why CEOs Hiring Themselves Out Of Roles Is Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “We made the announcement everyone had a glass of champagne, and then we said, Hey, we're going to celebrate later tonight. And everyone just kind of went back to work. And it was just another day. And I think that was a nice balance of, hey, we're not done because we've been acquired. We still have a long ways to go and we want to do this right. And we will take the time to celebrate as a team when the time is right. And that was later that night.”

    2019-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cruise's Daniel Kan on Lessons From Scaling The Team From 40 To 1,500 People, How Daniel Thinks About Continuous Learning & Self-Development and Why CEOs Hiring Themselves Out Of Roles Is Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Well, it's always a balance, and I probably erred on the side of not celebrating enough, but ultimately humans are humans. They want to be praised for the things that they do well. I self-included, and we want to know where we can improve. And so you do have to balance that, I think. You want to take time to congratulate people, call people out on the job that they've been doing, and celebrate as a team on the wins. But then one of the things I think we've done particularly well at Cruz is we've gotten back to work. I always think about the time when we announced that we were being acquired by General Motors, which by all means is a great feat for such a small company at the time. And Sam Altman came into our office to celebrate, and he brought a bottle of whiskey, and it was probably an hour or two after all the media came out. And he comes in and everyone's just sitting at their desk working. And he was like, what happened at the celebration? And what happened was, you know, we got up.”

    2019-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cruise's Daniel Kan on Lessons From Scaling The Team From 40 To 1,500 People, How Daniel Thinks About Continuous Learning & Self-Development and Why CEOs Hiring Themselves Out Of Roles Is Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Kind of what you really need to do. It's not to say that you shouldn't think about the problem so that you don't repeat it, but there's a time and place for retros and kind of understanding, okay, this is what we need to do better in the future. And I think that is really what has promoted a culture of learning and adapting at cruise, and I think is the right mindset to go into a startup because ultimately no one has all the answers. And it's about understanding where you fall short and where you can grow.”

    2019-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cruise's Daniel Kan on Lessons From Scaling The Team From 40 To 1,500 People, How Daniel Thinks About Continuous Learning & Self-Development and Why CEOs Hiring Themselves Out Of Roles Is Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Honestly, I think it's really adopting the right attitude, I think, and this goes back to culture, and I know that's something you've talked a lot about on the show with other founders. At Cruz, one of our core values is be humble. And humility for us is that there's always something to learn out of every experience, whether you succeed or fail. There's always a way to execute better. And so whenever we think about how we got into a situation to promote this culture, we always ask ourselves, how are we going to get out of this, not necessarily dwelling on, okay, how do we get into the situation and what's the problem? And Kyle is actually really good at this. And I think that's one of the things that separates him and other founders is that he's really always focused on what do we need to do to get to the next step, not necessarily what problems or whose fault it was that we were in this situation to begin with. And it's understanding that dwelling in the past, you are not really thinking about the product or the future.”

    2019-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cruise's Daniel Kan on Lessons From Scaling The Team From 40 To 1,500 People, How Daniel Thinks About Continuous Learning & Self-Development and Why CEOs Hiring Themselves Out Of Roles Is Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Yeah, for sure. Maybe dying is a little harsh For me, if you're not growing, you're missing out on an opportunity because no one in the world is perfect, right? No company is perfect. And if you're not improving yourself or the company, then you're losing out on this opportunity to be better. So I think that that's really kind of maybe not dying is the right term, but I think you are given all these opportunities to be better, to make your company better, to make your employees better. And if you're not taking advantage of those, you know, someone else is and you are probably at a competitive disadvantage.”

    2019-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cruise's Daniel Kan on Lessons From Scaling The Team From 40 To 1,500 People, How Daniel Thinks About Continuous Learning & Self-Development and Why CEOs Hiring Themselves Out Of Roles Is Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “I always, you know, I love to give people the benefit of the doubt and to give them the opportunity because I think that being at a startup, it's an opportunity to grow yourself as well. And if you hire someone who's already done the job, then they're not necessarily growing in the role. You're not fulfilling their personal goals of learning or becoming a better manager or otherwise. And so for me, micromanagement is really a sign that you're not happy with how things are going. And there's kind of two ways that I think about how to fix that. One is to provide them better guidance and clear instruction on what you expect. And the other is kind of what you're alluding to is that maybe they're not able or capable to do that role, in which case you need to either scope it back to a scope that they can manage or get them the proper training to do so.”

    2019-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cruise's Daniel Kan on Lessons From Scaling The Team From 40 To 1,500 People, How Daniel Thinks About Continuous Learning & Self-Development and Why CEOs Hiring Themselves Out Of Roles Is Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “People you hire will fail or they will succeed, but hopefully, they will learn from that failure and then will not fail in that task again. So I think micromanagement is really a sign that you have not necessarily set clear expectations or potentially that they don't necessarily know how to do the work, but you can offer guidance. But if you tell them exactly what to do, in a lot of cases, they'll just be pissed and you'll be miserable as well.”

    2019-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cruise's Daniel Kan on Lessons From Scaling The Team From 40 To 1,500 People, How Daniel Thinks About Continuous Learning & Self-Development and Why CEOs Hiring Themselves Out Of Roles Is Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Well, I think micromanagement is the easiest way to make everyone miserable. And I've done it before, right? And actually, Justin gave me the feedback. We were at exec, like, hey, you are doing this and this is a problem. And it was with someone who I've actually developed a lot of trust with now and actually works with me today. But started with me at exec. At the time, I didn't like what he was doing. I can't remember what it was. I thought he was going about it wrong. And I was like kind of telling him, hey, you should do this. You should do this. You should do this. And Justin told me I should either do the work or let him do the work. But what I'm doing right now is making us both super pissed. And maybe he does it right. Maybe he doesn't. But ultimately, you have to give him the chance because you trust him to do it or you take over that role and he should do something else. And I take that to heart and I think about that every day whenever I'm having a conversation with someone and I don't necessarily like what's going on. And I think that has really changed my view on how to manage people because ultimately”

    2019-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cruise's Daniel Kan on Lessons From Scaling The Team From 40 To 1,500 People, How Daniel Thinks About Continuous Learning & Self-Development and Why CEOs Hiring Themselves Out Of Roles Is Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “A great question. I think the way that we've thought about it here is we've done a lot of KPI setting us, we're constantly adapting. There's no real silver bullet for motivation, right? KPIs are just a way to hold yourself accountable and keep the team motivated to do the work that they need to do. And if you set the goals too easy, people will take it easy.”

    2019-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cruise's Daniel Kan on Lessons From Scaling The Team From 40 To 1,500 People, How Daniel Thinks About Continuous Learning & Self-Development and Why CEOs Hiring Themselves Out Of Roles Is Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Think there's two ways to look at that, right? If you're optimistic, you think of it as glass half full and people lose trust over time. If you're not, you think of it as kind of glass half empty and you have to fill that glass. And for me, I try and rely on the fact that we have clear hiring practices, clear criteria for bringing people on and giving people as much responsibility as I think they can take on and seeing how they do. And over time, you adjust, you either give them more or give them less, you give them better direction and queer direction. But I think that it is something that is built over time. But if you inherently believe that you in yourself and your hiring practices, you should be willing to give people a lot of trust in beginning.”

    2019-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cruise's Daniel Kan on Lessons From Scaling The Team From 40 To 1,500 People, How Daniel Thinks About Continuous Learning & Self-Development and Why CEOs Hiring Themselves Out Of Roles Is Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “I think it's really because as a leader it's about scaling yourself. You have to scale yourself. You have to be able to do more things. And the only way to do that is to trust other people to do those things. There's only 24 hours in a day. You cannot work all 24 hours of those. And so you have to be able to hire people who you can delegate and give them direction to say, hey, this is how we work. This is how you should do things here. And then you have to trust them to do so. And that's the only way you can grow a company beyond a lifestyle business or a small business that gets run by one or two three people.”

    2019-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cruise's Daniel Kan on Lessons From Scaling The Team From 40 To 1,500 People, How Daniel Thinks About Continuous Learning & Self-Development and Why CEOs Hiring Themselves Out Of Roles Is Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “I think the biggest thing is we have a lot of trust in each other and we delegate different aspects of the company to the other person and we trust that that person is going to make the right decisions to get things done. And I think that's worked really, really well for us. Kyle, the brain's behind all of the technology. I've been on the operations side doing everything from HR, hiring, recruiting to finance to now product.”

    2019-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cruise's Daniel Kan on Lessons From Scaling The Team From 40 To 1,500 People, How Daniel Thinks About Continuous Learning & Self-Development and Why CEOs Hiring Themselves Out Of Roles Is Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Now, and I was wrapping up my last startup, and it seemed like a great idea, or at the very least, a really interesting story. And it turns out it was.”

    2019-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cruise's Daniel Kan on Lessons From Scaling The Team From 40 To 1,500 People, How Daniel Thinks About Continuous Learning & Self-Development and Why CEOs Hiring Themselves Out Of Roles Is Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Yeah, that's a great question. You know what's funny is I actually never intended to be in startups, really. I go all the way back to when I was graduating from college. I applied to like 30 banking jobs, but it was in 2009. And so I didn't get any jobs. I got, I think, two jobs. One was at a startup in San Francisco. And the other was to teach English in Korea. I decided that I would join the startup because I didn't really want to go on the job hunt again in a year. And that brought me to the valley and into startups and kind of into this world. And my brother actually has told this story as he advises people on how to get into startups. But he says, you're the product of your closest friends. And so when I saw other people doing this, I decided over time that I should try this out. I should try and start a company. It doesn't seem that crazy. And ultimately dove into startups a couple years after moving to the bay and started a company there and started exec. When it comes to cruise, this was all my co-founder Kyle's idea. He's a CTT.”

    2019-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cruise's Daniel Kan on Lessons From Scaling The Team From 40 To 1,500 People, How Daniel Thinks About Continuous Learning & Self-Development and Why CEOs Hiring Themselves Out Of Roles Is Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source