YouSaid · the spoken record

Matt Straz

lines on the record: 28
first: 2017-12-15
most recent: 2017-12-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Well, I think there's a lot of different ways to answer that. We can answer it in terms of revenue, of course. We can answer it in terms of potentially being a public company. But ultimately, I think it's about creating a company at scale with high levels of internal employee satisfaction, which then leads to high levels of client or customer satisfaction on a global basis. So those are the really the two things that I'm focused on. If we create a great culture at scale, which is a lot different than creating a great culture as a smaller startup, if we can do that, then that will lead to a lot of great things down the road. So I think building a great company culture with what will by then surely be thousands of employees, that's the number one goal that I have over the next five years. And everything else will flow from that. If we get employee satisfaction and get to a great place with culture as a scaled business, then there's nothing that stops us from.”
2017-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Upscale Management Teams Effectively, When Should The CEO Play The Role of "Lifeguard" & What Role Does The Board Play In The Team Upscaling with Matt Straz, Founder & CEO @ Namely · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our hardest role to hire for was the CTO position without a doubt. We're an enterprise software company based in Lower Manhattan of all places. There's not a lot of people who have built a multibillion dollar enterprise software company and virtually all of them who have done it are on the West Coast or somewhere else. So by far, that was the hardest hire that we've had to make. Fortunately, we found somebody fantastic this year who then built out an incredible leadership team within the course of 90 to 100 days, which was incredible.”
2017-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Upscale Management Teams Effectively, When Should The CEO Play The Role of "Lifeguard" & What Role Does The Board Play In The Team Upscaling with Matt Straz, Founder & CEO @ Namely · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say that there's a lot of advice that says just go do one thing and do it really well. And I found that not to be true, at least in the kind of business that we're building, just focus on your product and just do one thing well. And while I understand that single mindedness, often it leads to a dead end, especially in SAS, that it's actually in fact the additional products and especially services that you layer on top of those products that actually builds a valuable business that solely focusing on product oftentimes is a dead end because there's lots and lots and lots of products out there and the differentiation really comes in building a complete product and all of the services that you need layered on top of that. And that's actually drove our success.”
2017-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Upscale Management Teams Effectively, When Should The CEO Play The Role of "Lifeguard" & What Role Does The Board Play In The Team Upscaling with Matt Straz, Founder & CEO @ Namely · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's always lots of good advice, but I think that this realization, particularly over the last year or so, that the leadership that you have today will need to evolve and change. And I remember when it happened, it was last year at this time. We have a board dinner that usually follows our board meeting, and we talk a lot about the talent that we have and the talent that we need. And I remember coming out of that dinner thinking, wow, like we have a lot of work to do in terms of the leadership that we need. And I think just being open to that kind of feedback and then acting upon it is really, really important. So that was feedback that came from the board that really opened my eyes to what it was going to take to create the size and the scale of the company that we're hoping to create. And so that was probably one of the most important pieces of feedback that I've received about scaling over the last six years since I started the company.”
2017-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Upscale Management Teams Effectively, When Should The CEO Play The Role of "Lifeguard" & What Role Does The Board Play In The Team Upscaling with Matt Straz, Founder & CEO @ Namely · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the answer is David Skock. No, so I do leverage the board like crazy. Sometimes they tell me things I want to hear, sometimes they tell me things I don't want to hear, but they're always honest. So I have leveraged them like crazy over the last few years. So that's been important. I've also got now something that I fought for a long time for some reason was having mentors and advisors. So I now have people like Mike Derrison at LinkedIn who I speak to on a monthly basis. I've got John Kinzer. We have a new board member Deal, who's the former CEO at Jive Software. We've got Karen Peacock, who's a COO who's very, very helpful on product. So I have created, instead of going at it alone like I used to and putting it all on my shoulders, I've really opened up a lot more over the last couple years and been much more open to seeking out advice from some great people like that.”
2017-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Upscale Management Teams Effectively, When Should The CEO Play The Role of "Lifeguard" & What Role Does The Board Play In The Team Upscaling with Matt Straz, Founder & CEO @ Namely · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's so funny you said that. I'm reading a book called Endurian Spice Scott Kelly, who is an astronaut who was on the space station for over a year, but I have not read the other book that you mentioned.”
2017-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Upscale Management Teams Effectively, When Should The CEO Play The Role of "Lifeguard" & What Role Does The Board Play In The Team Upscaling with Matt Straz, Founder & CEO @ Namely · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So obviously, there's lots of books out there, lots of business books out there, and I've got a bunch that I love, but I've recently read a book called 438 Days by Jonathan Franklin. And it's about a fisherman that gets lost off the coast of South America and is at sea in the Pacific for 438 days all alone and manages to traverse the entire South Pacific Ocean and manage to live through it and tell the story. And for me, I just love survival stories. And to me, they're also sometimes even more instructive than business books about being a CEO and founder. So I love stories like that. Right now, that's one of my favorite books.”
2017-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Upscale Management Teams Effectively, When Should The CEO Play The Role of "Lifeguard" & What Role Does The Board Play In The Team Upscaling with Matt Straz, Founder & CEO @ Namely · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we've used hackathons to pretty good effect. We've done them once or twice a year over the last couple of years. We've actually included our clients in one of them. So I think it's a nice”
2017-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Upscale Management Teams Effectively, When Should The CEO Play The Role of "Lifeguard" & What Role Does The Board Play In The Team Upscaling with Matt Straz, Founder & CEO @ Namely · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, one of the things that I found, especially as we've scaled, is that you can actually become not innovative. You can get so focused on up-leveling your leadership team and getting process in place and building a roadmap through using data based on customer requests that you can actually sometimes de-emphasize what got you there in the first place. And so at scale, you need to actually find ways similar to building out a defined mission vision values that everyone can get around actually building out teams or opportunities to be innovative again. And I think it's just like everything else, you have to define it and you have to articulate that it's important and then you have to put some resources against it. It's not going to just happen by itself like it did in the early days. I think that's been a big learning for us over the last year or so is that if we want to be innovative, we've got to be really thoughtful about it and put resources against it.”
2017-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Upscale Management Teams Effectively, When Should The CEO Play The Role of "Lifeguard" & What Role Does The Board Play In The Team Upscaling with Matt Straz, Founder & CEO @ Namely · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a company will change and adapt over time. So we put a lot of effort into that. And rather than kind of me decreeing what all of those things were, we actually worked with our teams and had a very diverse representative team to help develop our values. And that was incredibly helpful. And I think the reason for that at the end of the day is that because you have to communicate broadly and across the org and you have to be really thoughtful about what your mission vision values are.”
2017-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Upscale Management Teams Effectively, When Should The CEO Play The Role of "Lifeguard" & What Role Does The Board Play In The Team Upscaling with Matt Straz, Founder & CEO @ Namely · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we did something this year which I thought, I'll be completely honest, I thought was going to be a waste of time. And that was to take another look at our mission vision values. And I thought when our head of people ops, Nick Sanchez kicked that process off. I said, oh, this is nice, but like, shouldn't we be focused on our product or our business? Why do we have to do this? Everyone knows what we do. You know, our mission is to help mid-sized companies create a great workplace. Like, it should be obvious. But it turned out that that's not the case. that we've grown to more than 400 employees. Most people, because we've done a lot of hiring recently, have been here just over a year or so. They weren't here in the early days. They didn't go through all of that. And the vast amount of people aren't in touch with that. And so it is, it turns out it's actually really important to reiterate your mission. And it turns out that every few years the vision of the company is going to change somewhat. So it's important to really codify that.”
2017-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Upscale Management Teams Effectively, When Should The CEO Play The Role of "Lifeguard" & What Role Does The Board Play In The Team Upscaling with Matt Straz, Founder & CEO @ Namely · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Having to deal with as a founder and a CEO. So whether it's risk mitigation or difficult conversations, especially if your turnover is spiking through that phase, there are very important legal and just human things that you need to be aware of during those transitional periods. And I find that a strong People Ops team is crucial to that.”
2017-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Upscale Management Teams Effectively, When Should The CEO Play The Role of "Lifeguard" & What Role Does The Board Play In The Team Upscaling with Matt Straz, Founder & CEO @ Namely · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that what worked as a founder and a CEO early on, which is being able to interact with almost your entire team on a daily basis, that's no longer possible. You need to find ways as a founder and CEO to scale yourself. And I've found that PeopleOps can be extremely helpful in that regard and in many ways. So whether it's saying goodbye to somebody, whether it's internal communications, whether it's getting your next level of leadership, a lot of that's going to emanate from people ops team. So I found that to be incredibly helpful. I also think having strong people ops, once you start to get to scale and you have more than 100 people, you're going to end up with a pretty broad representation of the overall general population. And you're going to get a lot of different kinds of people. And there's going to be a point where you're just going to need experienced people ops to deal with things that you might have never imagined.”
2017-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Upscale Management Teams Effectively, When Should The CEO Play The Role of "Lifeguard" & What Role Does The Board Play In The Team Upscaling with Matt Straz, Founder & CEO @ Namely · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More experienced and more mature as a founder and CEO, you just realize that there's a certain level of it. Now, I will go out of my way. If I see somebody leaving that just doesn't make any sense to me, maybe they're just burned out, or maybe they enjoyed getting an offer from another company, and that made them feel good as a person. There's a certain amount of that, and we all need to kind of once in a while figure out what our market worth is. But if I see somebody that really shouldn't be leaving, like built a whole practice, I will go to them and say, what are you doing? You've done all this work. Why should I, I'm just going to hire somebody who's going to take credit for all the work that you've done over the last four years. So I think in those cases, it's worth making the extra effort to try to be that lifeguard and run down the beach and save those people.”
2017-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Upscale Management Teams Effectively, When Should The CEO Play The Role of "Lifeguard" & What Role Does The Board Play In The Team Upscaling with Matt Straz, Founder & CEO @ Namely · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think early on I tried to swim and save everyone. And I think there's something about this dynamic in an early startup that everything is somewhere for some reason overly personalized, that if somebody leaves as a founder, you see it as a negative on you, that somehow you'd let them down or you failed them. And so you take those departures personally. And I think likewise, when you say goodbye to somebody in an earlier stage company, they also take it very personally. For some reason, when you have to change up your team from, say, zero to couple hundred employees, those departures are somewhat emotional. And once you get beyond 10, 20 million in revenue, somebody will actually come in, as you mentioned, Harry, and say, I'm going to take you to 200 or 300, but that's it. And then you'll need to make a change. But early on, it becomes a very emotional thing. And I think it's just hard. You're trying to save everybody and keep everybody on the bus, and that's just not possible or realistic. So I think as you get...”
2017-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Upscale Management Teams Effectively, When Should The CEO Play The Role of "Lifeguard" & What Role Does The Board Play In The Team Upscaling with Matt Straz, Founder & CEO @ Namely · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Moments that then add up to having to make a decision. So, I think turnover and retention, some amount of turnover is absolutely necessary for a company to grow and is endemic to a company who's growing fast. There's just going to be turnover. And that turnover rate is going to be higher in the future.”
2017-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Upscale Management Teams Effectively, When Should The CEO Play The Role of "Lifeguard" & What Role Does The Board Play In The Team Upscaling with Matt Straz, Founder & CEO @ Namely · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say so to some degree. I think it's sometimes difficult to predict what the org is going to need next, and it's evolving constantly. So what the org needs next is also a reflection of how well somebody's doing in that position or not and how well they're scaling. So it's a very iterative process because in reality you would prefer not to have to replace anybody. And you would hope that they would all perform well. So, but when you start to see cracks start to form in that performance, you do have to recognize it and be upfront. And that's where I think regular one-on-ones and especially performance reviews. Sometimes you just need a level formality around it to kind of point out where some of the challenges are. The more forthright you are, the better. Earlier, the better. But honestly, sometimes it just doesn't become apparent until there's some major event or some major lapse. It could happen in a board meeting. It could happen with a major deal that doesn't close. It could be from customer feedback. There's a lot of”
2017-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Upscale Management Teams Effectively, When Should The CEO Play The Role of "Lifeguard" & What Role Does The Board Play In The Team Upscaling with Matt Straz, Founder & CEO @ Namely · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think it needs to be handled extremely carefully and with a lot of finesse. The more senior the person, the more delicately it needs to be handled. And I think the company can never disclose why somebody left, but the individual who leaves, that's a lot of times, especially at a senior level, will leave it up to them as to how they describe why they're leaving. The conversation itself can be very quick, or it can be drawn out over a series of weeks and months. But to some degree, you know, the role of the CEO founder is to be playing this game of three-dimensional chess in their heads and kind of seeing where all the pieces are going to move over a period of months and years. So I think on the part of the founder, they will start to get an idea of what might be the next position that needs to be kind of up-leveled or changed. And then strategically over a period of time, you need to have those discussions with the people that might not be with the company long term.”
2017-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Upscale Management Teams Effectively, When Should The CEO Play The Role of "Lifeguard" & What Role Does The Board Play In The Team Upscaling with Matt Straz, Founder & CEO @ Namely · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is a bit of an art, and it is absolutely essential for senior leadership hires that the board is involved and that I include every board member speaks with and interviews our finalist candidates. And I need buy-in from them just like I need buy-in from our leadership team. So they are integrated into that process. I think the art part of it is sometimes you need to have your own team sign off on the person before the board does. And then on other roles you want to get the boards buy in before you then run that person by your own leadership team. But it's a bit of an art and you also are hurting cats in a way because there might be differing opinions on the board about somebody and somebody may have some strengths and some weaknesses and sometimes you need to then bring in somebody else to complement that person's skill that the board has signed off on.”
2017-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Upscale Management Teams Effectively, When Should The CEO Play The Role of "Lifeguard" & What Role Does The Board Play In The Team Upscaling with Matt Straz, Founder & CEO @ Namely · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so that is a huge part of my personal strategy. We're interviewing all the time. So we have, I make an absolute point to be very transparent, even if we're going to add somebody or top somebody and we're going to bring in their boss. I'm very, very transparent and I'm very upfront with the person that's going to have a new boss and a new leader that they participate in the process. And part of the balancing act, frankly, at this stage is getting the board literally on board with a senior hire and then also getting your own team on board. It's a real balancing act because you really need everybody in alignment and that's a lot of people. It could be potentially a dozen people that you need to get aligned to a senior level hire. So it's a very involved process that can stretch for weeks or months and you have to get alignment from everybody.”
2017-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Upscale Management Teams Effectively, When Should The CEO Play The Role of "Lifeguard" & What Role Does The Board Play In The Team Upscaling with Matt Straz, Founder & CEO @ Namely · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's definitely a balancing act. You don't want to be seen as just going out and hiring mercenaries or outsiders for every single position in the company. At the same time, you're growing so fast that it's quite difficult for somebody to scale internally and move up as fast as the company is scaling. So I think you need to be really, really thoughtful about it. Some of the things that we've done is actually creating intermediate titles. So for example, we used to just have maybe manager, director, VP. Now we have senior manager, senior director. So there's a path for people to move up within the company. I'd also say that as much as possible, maybe not at the leadership level, but in the mid-levels of the company, I think for every person you bring in from the outside, you want to try to promote somebody from within. And I think Google subscribed to that approach, and I think they did it pretty well. So we've tried to do the same thing.”
2017-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Upscale Management Teams Effectively, When Should The CEO Play The Role of "Lifeguard" & What Role Does The Board Play In The Team Upscaling with Matt Straz, Founder & CEO @ Namely · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's fair. I think what I look for are people that can get us to 10X more growth, right? There's people early on that will help you get to your first million in ARR revenue. And then you'll hire a next wave that'll get you from 1 to 10. And then you're looking for people that can get you 10x or more, 20x from there. So potentially going from, say, 20 to 30 million in revenue to 200 to 300 million in revenue. So I think the four to five year timeline is probably right on, assuming that you want to grow about 10x over that period.”
2017-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Upscale Management Teams Effectively, When Should The CEO Play The Role of "Lifeguard" & What Role Does The Board Play In The Team Upscaling with Matt Straz, Founder & CEO @ Namely · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think the hardest thing about this, at least one of the hardest things about doing this is that when you're up leveling your team, you are”
2017-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Upscale Management Teams Effectively, When Should The CEO Play The Role of "Lifeguard" & What Role Does The Board Play In The Team Upscaling with Matt Straz, Founder & CEO @ Namely · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think one big realization was that for me to be successful as a founder, CEO, and perhaps unlike anybody else on the leadership team or in the entire company for that matter, the founder is expected to, or at least the hope is there that the founder will be able to up-level themselves through every stage of the company's growth. One big realization for me was that if I wanted to stick around and be relevant, that I was going to have to change the way that I led the company and the things that were required of me. And so in the beginning, it might be being a jack of all trades and doing five or six things well. Later on, it becomes all about recruiting a great team. So I think the first recognition was that, hey, if I'm going to be able to stay with this company and continue to be useful, I need to uplevel my skills constantly, just like I'm asking my leadership team to do.”
2017-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Upscale Management Teams Effectively, When Should The CEO Play The Role of "Lifeguard" & What Role Does The Board Play In The Team Upscaling with Matt Straz, Founder & CEO @ Namely · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Giving people more than one thing to do. So you might, for example, hire a CFO, but then also kind of float out there that maybe they could also do the COO job or the head of HR job or a few other jobs. And I found time and time again when I give people multiple things to do. It's a recipe for failure because the company's growing so fast that they will end up just being spread too thin. And then you'll have to replace them because they're not doing the core thing that you hired them to do and you've managed to distract them by giving them lots of other things to do.”
2017-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Upscale Management Teams Effectively, When Should The CEO Play The Role of "Lifeguard" & What Role Does The Board Play In The Team Upscaling with Matt Straz, Founder & CEO @ Namely · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Found that to be absolutely the case that people are good at different stages of the business, and as a founder and as a CEO and as a leader, you need to be very thoughtful about people getting them in the right roles not only now, but putting them into roles and giving them titles that will give the flexibility for them to be able to stay with the company long term. So a very common thing that I've seen happen, and I've done it too in each of my three companies, is title inflation. Giving somebody a title that they want now, which will then sometimes box them out of being able to progress with the company longer term. And unfortunately, if you do that, it's very hard to give somebody a lesser title. You have to say goodbye to them and replace them with somebody else with the same title. So I think there's many, many ways that you can mess this up. And I think there's also a number of ways where you can make it possible for somebody to stay with the company.”
2017-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Upscale Management Teams Effectively, When Should The CEO Play The Role of "Lifeguard" & What Role Does The Board Play In The Team Upscaling with Matt Straz, Founder & CEO @ Namely · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I should give a lot of credit for this two pack gradient, Sequoia, and to my entire board because they've seen this movie before. They see companies go from the small startups to awkward teenager startups in between and then mature adult startups and mature companies. And so they've been really helpful because they've been typically kind of six to eight months out ahead of me. So I think most founders love their team. And so to change that team is a pretty hard thing to do if you have a heart and a pulse. you grow to love the people that you're working with but when you scale really fast you have to change your team and you have to up level your team and sometimes you have to say goodbye to people and it is said that by the time a software company goes public on average they will go through 4.1 complete leadership teams which means that they will have to cycle through an entirely new team about every 24 months or so so that's how that process starts”
2017-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Upscale Management Teams Effectively, When Should The CEO Play The Role of "Lifeguard" & What Role Does The Board Play In The Team Upscaling with Matt Straz, Founder & CEO @ Namely · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I had worked in small to mid sized businesses basically my whole life. I had founded two other companies and they had both been acquired by somewhat larger companies. And I had been working in a holding company called WPP, which is an ad agency holding company. And I was working with hundreds and hundreds of small to mid-sized companies. And they all had one thing in common, which is they were people-driven businesses and had either no or abysmal HR software. as an employee and as a manager, I was deeply frustrated by that. And I kind of put a pin in that and said, someday I want to solve this problem. And eventually I was able to.”
2017-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Upscale Management Teams Effectively, When Should The CEO Play The Role of "Lifeguard" & What Role Does The Board Play In The Team Upscaling with Matt Straz, Founder & CEO @ Namely · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source