YouSaid · the spoken record

Jean-Denis Greze

lines on the record: 48
first: 2023-07-21
most recent: 2023-07-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Hope that people who've worked for me are on my teams or with me feel they did the best work of their life up to that point while they were working with me. If I could achieve that, that would make me very proud.”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This piece of advice, which I think is good advice that I give to people at larger companies, is like the best thing to work on is the thing that has impact for the business, but that leadership doesn't care about. You can unpack that piece of advice for a while. If you're a leader, you can unpack that piece of advice and ask yourself sometimes what are the best things for your business are happening where you're not looking and what does that say about you as a leader and i think for employees it tells them like the north star is having impact and having impact at any business is really hard because there's all these forces i get in the way like politics and internal incentives and whatnot but ultimately the impact is what matters you got to find a way to work on something that allows you to have it”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once upon a time, you could just say benchmark to that. But it's hard for me to say not Sequoia. You know, even like, you know, Brazil and stuff, it's like, oh, New Bank, of course Newbank is with Sequoia. Like while we were all doing other stuff, you know, they're out securing that stuff. So their records has been really strong.”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First round. I like those guys, and I think they really care about helping founders get to product market fit. They will sit and spend more time with the founders to help them get there than other funds that I know. So that's why I have a ton of respect for them.”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thing you should realize about all advice and the most important thing is does the fact pattern of the advice match up with the fact pattern of your situation? And often it doesn't. And so what you take from the advice is like the delta between the advice and where you're at.”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This too, it's Ruper Health and Atlas. I love the mission. The founders are awesome. They power through anything. And I don't do it for the money. I do it for like, I think they'll have successful outcomes, but I do it for how interesting the founder and the product is. And I think those two are doing very cool things.”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's really hard to predict at Angel Stage who's going to be successful. And I've been like renewed belief in humanity when I see founders that I'm like, ah, the idea is good, but I'm not sure this founder can do it. And then you see the founder change into like a unicorn of a human. I think inability to predict people's ability to grow has been like a real eye-opener.”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Product wise. I was at Dropbox, I was responsible internally for trying to build a Slack like product, basically a product that would allow communication on top of like the documents that are in Dropbox. We really, really didn't figure that out. Like that was like a big flop. I think we were too far from the customers. There's a ton of stuff in terms of like early product that I got way wrong on that one. I learned a ton from it.”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Software. But I think everyone's in this situation. And so we're in the early stages of it. And so it's okay not to know.”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, what is a great product or engineering leader or great business leader, right? You need clarity on what is possible and what is not possible. Like what can you build with software? What can you not build with software? So what's really interesting about Gen AI, it makes really cool demos, but I actually have a lot of trouble answering the question like, where can we build great products with it and where can't we? And I used to have a very, very good model of what you could do with software and to a certain extent hardware. You know, I understand what computers are good at doing, what they're bad at doing. Now suddenly with Gen AI, there's a bunch of stuff they used to not be able to do like deal with ambiguous human language or create new images based on words that they're really good at doing. I just don't know quite what really good is. Like I don't have a sense for what they can or can't do there. Look, that's my problem, right? And I need to develop that intuition because if I don't develop it, I'll be out of a job like pretty quickly. And I think that's true of a lot of people in tech. Like you really need to understand the bounds of technology so that you can know what business problems you can answer with.”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think the most of the VCs care. I love good friends. I love true friends, you know, like hanging out on the weekends, adventure firms. I love them. They're great. I make fun of them a little bit, but.”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But those are rare. There are a lot of successful companies that don't have like huge network effects. So there's a hierarchy to competitive advantage. And ideally, you start to develop it. But like at an angel with someone who has like a million in ARR, I don't know. If you disagree, tell me, I just haven't focused on it because then I think very few companies would pass the filter. Like I would make like three investments a year and not 20.”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think I'm a very good angel investor because I like the founders and the ideas more than I do it for financial optimization of the gain in the early phases that I think if you're too focused on competition initially you usually just don't build the right thing or you don't figure out the wedge that gets you to win and go to market. At any scale like at Plaid scale, when you get to 50, 100 million in ARR, you're living in a world of competition. If you're making a lot of money at high margins, like people will come after you. Then I think it starts to become important to have things that are difficult for other students to do. You know, we were talking about product and product differentiation. The saying is always like distribution is your product. Your ability to get new customers and to sell more to existing customers, I think often at like a certain scale is what ends up allowing a lot of companies to, you know, to grow more and more and more and more. Like that's like a high confidence way to grow. Reputation, network effects, like if you can have brand or much better network effects, those are incredible.”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I knew the future, I would bet everything on the moonshots. I really fundamentally think that's the hard part of the job. The thing for me that's always clarifying, and I'm not nearly as good a product leader on this as I wish I were, we're building businesses. Long term, what matters is competitive advantage. It's a thing that you can do that is hard for someone to copy or expensive for someone to copy or who lasts a certain amount of time. When you're a company like Claude, where you already are better across the board than most of your competitors, I think the one rule for us is what can we do to extend the window of our competitive advantage, even if we're giving up short-term opportunities to short-term increase the competitive advantage. It's hard to say no to the obvious short-term wins. And I wish I were able to do it more and to convince more people that we needed to look more at the things that over two to three years really win because we have that luxury. We're ahead enough that we can invest in the two to three year thing.”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. Yeah. And this year we have a conversion goal and we hit our annual goal on conversion in six months. And we did it mostly through incremental work because people were smarter about looking for opportunities. And it's a huge win for the business. But we still have a home run on that. And the home run matters more over anytime it's conversion that's very difficult for competitors to get.”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has more guaranteed payoff? And how much are we willing to invest in things that could be real multipliers to the product goal? But like you're not going to know for a bit if it's successful. And sometimes you won't know for a while and it's going to feel like it's failing. And what happens is your PM is at the airport and he's been waiting for his flight that's delayed and suddenly he gets his text message from the boss and the boss says, okay, just take the train. And that's stupid because he goes and take the train and then the airport, the airplane's ready to go and you miss the airplane. And that's what happens, right? You like start the project. It's ambitious. You work on it for nine months. The metrics aren't moving. You have revenue pressure and you're like, ah, we're not going to do it. I think the metrics are amazing. You need some way to judge whether you're making progress or you need leading indicators. You need North Star, then you need a leading indicators of your North Star, but you need judgment and gut. You can't abdicate the judgment and the gut to a metric. You need someone to go and limb and say, I believe that this will work. I'll put my promotion and my career on the go.”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With a destination, they go slowly and then they stop there, and then they go really fast. And then you have another person that's taking the airport. So they're like going in the wrong direction. Then they stop for a whole while and you don't understand what's going on. And suddenly they zoom over to Milan. Now clearly the best mode of transportation, the fastest mode of transport street consistently is the airplane. And we know the airplane is better because we've like done the work and I know they exist and they go. But a lot of product work actually at most companies on a metric will incentivize the walking kind of behavior because it's measurable. It's clear that it's going to get you in the right direction and every day you see progress. The best work is the work where you're like building an airport and inventing airplanes and then a few years later you can hop over from one place or another not in 27 hours but in one hour so whatever metric you set and you should have a metric and counter metrics to make sure people don't abuse it and don't game the system. You should do all that correctly, I think the really hard decision always is like, hey, do you do incremental work?”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think now compared to five years ago, I'm more wary of the one metric to rule them all. I've seen what I would say, the difficult part of product not be solved by setting the right metric. It certainly helps, but it doesn't answer all the questions. So we have a metric around conversion. And it's the metric that matters to most of our customers, meaning when someone tries to connect their bank account, are they able to connect the right bank account for that use case? And we do a ton to track conversion. But if you think about the work that we do on conversion, let's say you're trying to go from Paris to Milan. One way to go from one to the other is to walk. So say your metric is like a mount traveled. Like percentage of distance between Paris and Milan traveled. So you go walking. So that one's awesome because every day it goes down and you can predict very clearly when the person will get to Milan. And then there's another person that decides to take a train. So what that person looks like is walking kind of in the right direction because the way train stations work in Europe, they're journeying the right direction.”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Salesforce to me feels like it's increasingly a database, a store, and not where the UX happens. But because everyone still has to store the data in Salesforce, it's still like the base thing that everyone buys. But people are going after them. There's too much money to be made there that I think someone's going to figure them out. I would say I embarrass on Salesforce ability to stay number one over the next decade.”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a perfect example. I think you have to ask yourself who lives in Salesforce versus lives in Gong and a handful of other tools. I think security tooling is the same way.”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Transit. A lot of competition has happened in UX, and I'm not seeing UX ideas that are 10x to where we are today. Number one, and number two, you can copy UX. And this is really important. And there's a couple companies that are doing this right now. I think the most famous would be Rippling, where like Rippling's building like the next workday, they've taken like, oh, this company does AR Analytics. We'll like copy 90% of their good features and we'll make an integrated version that works with your employee directory. You want to do like global billing? Like we'll do a 90% as good version of global billing, but we'll make it even easier because we'll deal with all the inter-country thing on our own. They do that and they're building a suite that basically takes all the vertical products that I've won for verticals, integrate them into a combined experience and they don't have to innovate on pure UX for any vertical they just copy the best. They're selling a suite, right? And that's where the value will come from. I think the value won't come from out of this world UX. I think it will come from like a suite of.”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, good point. Workday also sucks, right? But workday is much better than People Soft. It's just night and day. And actually, Bill.com versus like a non-internet billing system is incredible. It is like earth shattering. Here's a couple of thought experiments. Imagine pre-Stripe to Stripe. You want to process credit cards? It's like a hundred thousand dollar down payment. It's going to take you six months to do through the contractual. You're going to get this shitty form. Compare that to Stripe. Stripe, it's like you sign up on the website. You can use the EPI immediately. Once you have this amount of traffic, they do a little more KYB on you blah, blah, blah, you scale. The delta in that in value is like going from one value to 90 units of value out of 100. If you go to the Stripe website now and you look at what they've launched on the developer experience, it's awesome, but it's the difference between like 90 and 93. I think over the last decade on a lot of product experience, there's been a lot of competition on UX. But I think given the current technology,”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great products have won for the last 15 years. We see that in consumer for sure, but we see that in B2B SaaS. Companies of the 90s and 2000s like Peoplesoft and like Oracle, the UX is not good. But it solves business problems.”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're like, oh, the athlete's career is so short. They should work as hard as they can for that period. Man, life is short. Life is short for all of us. You think, you know, your professional career of 40 years is like much longer than the professional basketball player is 15 years. It's not that much longer, dude. Our life is short. Our time on earth is short. So you choose how you want to spend the time on earth. And if what you care about the most is like having a great life, the work is not what gives you fulfillment and not the thing that you care the most about. I think tech is awesome because we allow you to do that and still degree work and be creative and work with awesome people. But I think if you really, really want to have like the outsized impact, I do think the incremental hour works, the incremental focus, the caring more, the thinking about it in the shower at night before you go to sleep, writing the extra email, talking to an extra founder, caring about the market a little bit more. It all matters.”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I know a few truly great people who have the right viewpoint and are really good at motivating and delegating. They create the structure for success, like the North Star, the product roadmap. They're able to motivate other people to go in that direction. That person can do it. And that person could be a great CEO. It's possible. But as a whole, no, you need to do great things. There's a great sacrifice. You'll find exceptions like one-offs, but I think on average it doesn't play out. And the analogy that I would say is to like a professional athlete, a LeBron James or whatnot, there's plenty of people who are professional athletes who from a pure physical understanding of the game, they're there and who just don't put in the work. And there's people who put in the work. With athletes, we're totally okay to make fun of the ones that don't put in the work. The sports writers like make fun of them all the time. They're like, ah, it's a 15-year career. You get one shot at this. Like, you get your big payday and then you stop trying as hard. But like, what's the difference?”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You mentioned earlier that you've made a lot of investments in France, right? I'm going to say some things that people are going to like probably on the podcast, but maybe my team won't like at Platt. I don't think my team is this way. But France is interesting, right? Because as a country, there's kind of this ethos. It's not cool to talk about work and you don't want to work too hard. You work to live. That's like the Frenchness. And the result of that is if you are a person willing to work 80 hours a week in France, if you try to work for a big company, you get hammered down. They like won't let you work that hard. Like, you know, people are like, you're making us look bad. Like, you know, they're like, won't let you use your workstation off hours. It'll be.”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I was in Europe for a trip like a few months ago, and I think what was really fascinating to me is how much of the culture of how you build a company and scale a company is now internationalized. Ten years ago, there was this knowledge about like, what does your first PMM do and like what's growth hacking or PLG and how does it? Now kind of everyone knows that stuff, it's pretty impressive. I think there's still more people who've seen through it here who've done it like four times. But there are a lot of other places in the world that have proven that they can export the company, the startup building, and the culture of Silicon Valley. The AI stuff you can feel right now that the Zeitgeist is an SF. But I think it's still an advantage to be here.”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I agree with you on the culture side. There's hybrid models where you come in two to three days a week and you make the office awesome for those days where you can get a lot of the benefits that you're talking about. I disagree on the productivity front. We've had a lot of success there, but you look at all the early stage companies, like a lot of them are going back to in-person. It is happening right now. There's an exodus from New York to SF that's happening. And from, I'm not going to say Miami, but from other places where people went. And it's around AI because the zeitgeist is here. All the AI folks are like getting together in the evenings or going to the same place as like all the gen AI stuff. It's sucking a lot of people back at you.”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More effectively. It's easier to get everyone on the same page. You can go talk to customers by like, you know, taking a car, walking over. And so if you have a lot of work like that at your company or you have teams that look like that, I think getting those teams to operate in person is beneficial. However, at scale, incremental improvements to existing products where you care about efficiency of the team and you have clarity of roadmap personally, I think almost in remote we're more effective. I think the only thing in remote that's hurting me is pulse score in terms of belonging and how much fun people are having on the work. Like I think that has gone down from before. But I think in terms of quality of the work and the productivity, it's the same.”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One opinion I have is we've talked too much about it. When I say it doesn't matter, I think there are plenty of really successful companies before the pandemic that were really going hard after fully remote first. It worked for them because they had the people who went to work, they were people who want remote first. What happened in the pandemic is we forced people into working models that maybe they didn't like. So on my team, I have people who like remote first and I have people who want to be in the office because I didn't pre-elect in my hiring criteria like a specific persona. Now you kind of make a decision. I'm not saying it doesn't matter, but again, I don't think it's the difference between success and failure. You make a decision, you make sure you're hiring and your culture matches the decisions. There's a few areas where I think you should be careful. So I'll give you an example. Highly creative, fast moving work where you're not sure what their requirements are and where your customers are local, meaning where you can go and talk to your customers by like walking over to their office. I think in person is better because I think you collect.”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The most important thing it's shots on goal, right? You execute faster, you get more shots on goal against your competition. You want to be the fastest person.”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very rarely. My overarching thesis is that a lot of people things, how you level, how you title, how you comp, how you organize your org, like your manager to IC ratio, remote hybrid, pick a thing, pick one of the three options on the menu for each of those. And just like move forward with your life, I just don't think it's the difference between a good and a great business. Bad strategy, bad product plan, going to the wrong market, the efficiency gain or loss is like 100% or zero percent. You know, you build the wrong product. You're slightly better at leveling people. Like, I just don't think that fundamentally matters.”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The industry hasn't done right by you. And when you achieve this thing that is truly meaningful, you want to celebrate it. So I think at scale, at our size right now, like we're a thousand people total, I think you want to go with the grain of the industry, not against it, because it's just too much fighting to go against it in some places. So you have to be picky around where going against the grain really accelerates the business versus the places where you should just like be more default. I think when you're very small, it is a red flag. People should care about impact. Everything's going to be fluid.”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certainly, most of the environments I've worked in, we try to be kind of low ego, low title. We want the best ideas to win, not just the most seniority. So even at Platt amongst ICs, for example, there are no titles. Even in managers outside of the person who leads like a giant area, we don't have directors and things like that. So I've been very much in the like, it's not a red flag, but it's a little bit of a yellow flag when people really care about those things. The flip side of it, which I think is it matters in the industry and you can never fully divorce yourself from the industry, especially when you get to a certain size. When you get to like a thousand people, 2,000 people, you're going to recruit people who have titles. You're going to recruit people from whom titles matter. So like a thing for you is there's bias and unfairness in the industry. And so there's some underrepresented groups for which being a staff engineer on LinkedIn is truly meaningful career-wise. It's not about ego, right? It's about this feeling.”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Setting him up to succeed, having an objective data point pretty early on, you gotta have like a reminder in your calendar three months in, four months in, five months in, or whatever, that where you objectively sit down and you're like, ask them to do these things, or these things done. I thought this would change the trajectory of this function. It's the trajectory changed. And if you can't answer yes to the question,”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To talk about how they can have they worked teams through difficult execution challenges. Hey, like GTM person, like I really care about can they work with PMMs on pulling out data requirements for data products? Like make it make the interviews really specific. And then number three, you have to have interviewed enough people that you know what grade looks like. If you have the perfect candidate be your first hire, like the first person you interview, it's really hard to pull the trigger. People don't have any comparison points. But if people have, if that panel has seen seven or eight candidates before and they'll have a feel for what good is and what greed is. And so this sounds unfair again, but you kind of need to put the interview process through rounds. And so what you do is if you have your first grade candidate and they come really early, at that point in time, you got to interview three or four other people. You got to find three other four people to interview because you want your panel to feel confidence that someone truly is great. Otherwise, it's hard to pull the trigger. And then everything else is on the recognizing if they're successful.”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first one is not being crisp about what we need in the role, you know, it's the difference between I need someone to run data science. Our major data science initiatives are around risk and fraud. I'm really going to value somebody who's done that in industry for a bit, but I want an out-of-the-box thinker because at PLAD, we're not doing fraud and risk like every other bank. That second thesis calls the space significantly. It's like, okay, they've got to have work at a traditional institution, but then I've got to have seen them work in a really creative environment. It's frauded risk, so I'm not going to hire a data science person who's not had any of that experience. You really got to get the requirements really crisp. First, second is your interview panel needs to be aligned on what you're looking for. I've seen too often, especially with senior hires, all the interviewers are like, you know, heads of things, and they're all asking the generic question, like, oh, tell me a great success in your career. Tell me about a time you failed. You don't get real signal from that. Like you need to be like, hey, head of HR, I need you.”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, before. It shouldn't come out of left field. The person should know that their performance is not quite meeting the bar that you have anymore a couple of months before. Say in your head, you're just like, ah, it's not working out, it's not working out, it's not working out. And then you show up in one-on-ones and you're like, high five, let's go watch like a soccer game. You're the best. You know, then when you deliver the news, that's just not, that's not going to feel good at all. Yeah, in the moment, no, you've made the decision. There's no argument, right? You've made the decision, they try to argue with, you know, like, look, listen, like, I'm doing what I think is right for the business. This is my role to do what's right for the business. I've thought about it. This is what we're doing. I'd like to work with you on a transition plan that works.”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like having a breakup. I don't think you truly get good at it. And I don't think you ever have a playbook where both sides come out of it like super happy humans. That's just reality. So the first thing you got to realize that when I say good at, I actually don't mean the conversation with the other person. I mean, identifying at the right point in your company that the odds of success of that individual and the role is no longer right for the business. If you can look at someone in the eye and you're convinced yourself that it just doesn't make sense for the business, you've given a shot for them to improve and prove themselves and they haven't, you're just doing what's right for the business and they will understand that and they will respect you for it even if they don't like you in the moment and they don't feel like it's fair. I just think that's how you have to treat it, right? There's a human level, you know, how you deliver it, how open you're in communication that those things matter. But at the end of the day, it's about what's doing right for the business. Probably the biggest mistake is not giving feedback.”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On ramps, next thing you know, you've wasted 18 months of potential momentum at your company. And that's dangerous. And I think this is like not a super podcast, like happy, happy, makes me look great kind of statement, but there's great hiring and there's great firing. One of the things you realize about founders is first time founders, they don't realize they have to be great at firing. They just think they have to be great at hiring. But you have to be great at realizing when your talent's not working out and identifying that and working with them and moving on. And initially founders don't do it early enough and then they learn their lesson a few times and then get really good at it.”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, how unfrench can I be on the podcast? Look, it's capitalism and your responsibility is to shareholders, right? You can do right by people and the transitions. But, you know, sometimes you get someone who realizes that they need a better leader, that they're going to learn from a better leader above them, and they're ready for it. And sometimes for everybody, it makes sense for them to just go find another gig where they've grown at your company and they can now do another stage. It's not the stage that you have. And it's okay. I think as adults, you can have these conversations. I think where you get in rough waters is when you don't give the person a chance. I call that like putting the person in a box where you have this image of them from when they joined and the company hits some kind of rough patch and you don't give them some chance at like seeing if they can go out of it. I think the human thing to do is to give them the chance, but you're a founder and you've hired all these other people. And if one of you function leads isn't scaling, yeah, you might give them three months, but pretty quickly, you got to realize, hey, it's not working because next thing you know, you might have, you know, if you wait like 12 months and then you make a new hire and that person.”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've changed my mind on that. I think for ICs, very early on, like first like 15 people, you want to hire for the here and the now. You want people who are hungry who Solve the problems you have right now because you're trying to get an The amount of product market fed that you have and the amount of product momentum at most companies, the advice that I give is somewhere between 15 and 30 people, things will break on the management side”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are they the right person for my business? Not are they a great person, right? And I think there's a big delta here. Like I always give this advice to startups. They all, you know, startups, they're like, oh, I want the best engineers. And I'm like, you're building a CRUD app. What is the best engineer for a crud Best engineer might be the person who's like greeted React or greeted Rails or whatever. They don't have to know distributed systems. They don't have to know all that complex technology. So let's look for someone who's got an amazing track record of the kind of front end work that you have or the kind of full stack work that you have. And when you do that, it's no longer like agreed resumes. Like your things you're looking for and you're asked yourself. The experience on this resume seems to match what I'm looking for”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A really tough question, and I think already in an interview process, you're trying to recap someone's talent in four to five hours. For me, there's a ton of red flags staying too long in level, like not having a good trajectory, jumping around from company to company. You can jump around once or twice. If you do it over and over again and you never find a place where you're able to like really hit that velocity, that really bothers me. I look at online things that you've built. Frankly, like your GitHub, the projects that you've shipped, maybe even your blog. I think that stuff can get me excited. But what I want quickly is interaction with, you know, the interviewing team. What I want is time in a room with you. The resume screen for me is fairly limited. You have to always ask the question with.”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I was in my early 30s. I don't think I'd had a great success. And I knew a friend at Dropbox. And so he got me in the pipeline to apply. And I applied there. I knew because they told me after the fact, I actually didn't do that well in the interviews. I did well on half of the interviews and I didn't do well on the other half of the interviews, especially on some of the people skills. And I think I came across as a little too smug and sure of myself. And there's two people at Dropbox that saw something in me during the interview process. And they were like, look, no, listen, like we should hire this guy. He's got some spikes. Like he's weird, but that's what we need at the company. Dropbox is very good, not just at getting the standard talent, but at looking at people that weren't quite conventional that they thought could really accelerate the business. People don't realize now maybe with Dropbox, like 2010 to 2017 on your resume, that really just opened all the doors.”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A good question. The answer would have to be joining PLAD to lead engineering. I joined when the company had 40-ish people and less than 10 million in ARR. We've had crazy trajectory. And it means like in terms of my career and my ability to be successful long term, I have a lot of options now that I never would have had if I hadn't joined PLAD. Joining Plaid is not what I consider the lucky break that I had. That would be joining Dropbox, which is my first job like truly in Silicon Valley. So before Dropbox, I kind of had a weird career. I'd worked in tech for a bit. Then I'd been a lawyer for a bit. Then I'd helped a friend kind of grow a company, like a fintech company in New York, but more on the hedge fund side of things. And I hadn't had like what you would call like a AAA employer on my resume. I was smart but weird outsider with a little bit of an attitude. I realized at some point that if you want to be an engineer and you want to do great engineering work, at the time at least I felt like you had to move to Silicon Valley.”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you, Ariel. I'm super excited to be here. I feel like I'm getting the benefit of being on here more than you're getting the benefit of having me on the show, but I'm excited to do my best to impress.”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The relationship of many tech employees to their tech employer is the Like a To Government somewhere between 50%. Things will break on the management side First time founders, they don't realize they have to.”
2023-07-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source