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Olof Mathé

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31
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2019-01-25
most recent
2019-01-25
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1
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  1. “Introduced mix max to them. And in part, this is an aspirational value. And I'm confident we'll get there within a five-year timeframe.”

    2019-01-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The 3 Stages of Denial For Founders When Scaling, Why You Will Likely Be Unable To Hire Through Your Network & The Interview Question All Founders Must Ask with Olof Mathé, Founder & CEO @ Mixmax · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I guess I'll paint this in terms of some higher level goals that we have in the company. So we tend to think about this on the impact we want to have in the world in terms of product, customers, ourselves, our own team, and what the business looks like. And so for us on the product side, it's creating an irresistible and irreplaceable product that people depend on every day. And we really think about this as people. And people should have an emotional, positive reaction to MixMax as a product. We're not necessarily a product you sell to a company, which is a big contrast from a lot of other SaaS products. And so when it comes to customers, one of our actually company values is, and this is kind of our first company value, is turning customers into heroes at work. This is also, I'd say, we want this to have emotional resonance, both for people on the team and for our customers and users. And so the idea here is that when you start using it MixMax, you literally become the hero at work and other people are grateful to you for having”

    2019-01-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The 3 Stages of Denial For Founders When Scaling, Why You Will Likely Be Unable To Hire Through Your Network & The Interview Question All Founders Must Ask with Olof Mathé, Founder & CEO @ Mixmax · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Oh, wow. I think I always prefer when this question is asked of someone who I worked with directly. I would say one of my strengths is probably that I'm optimistic to a fault. And so I also think it's kind of impossible to be a founder if you're not to some extent. And I think my biggest weakness, and this is something I've worked a lot on in 2018, is not micromanaging and being a better, hopefully one day great manager of managers and being a coach to team leads.”

    2019-01-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The 3 Stages of Denial For Founders When Scaling, Why You Will Likely Be Unable To Hire Through Your Network & The Interview Question All Founders Must Ask with Olof Mathé, Founder & CEO @ Mixmax · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “That is probably going on Twitter right after I shot off my alarm and I'm still in bed. There's nothing that jolts you into action and gets your adrenaline going than A, looking at your illuminated rectangle and B, reading about some other company or startup that's prettier than you are, growing faster than you are, closing more bigger customers than you.”

    2019-01-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The 3 Stages of Denial For Founders When Scaling, Why You Will Likely Be Unable To Hire Through Your Network & The Interview Question All Founders Must Ask with Olof Mathé, Founder & CEO @ Mixmax · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I would say the CEO has more roles than that if by management upscaling you mean helping the management team grow. I think as CEO, if you're truly great, you're also an amazing coach to everyone on the team. And being an amazing coach is actually one of my most aspirational development areas. I think apart from that, there are other obviously important areas that you own as well, setting the vision and mission for the company being the chief arbiter of the kind of management team, the ultimate owner of the customer experience and product experience holistically.”

    2019-01-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The 3 Stages of Denial For Founders When Scaling, Why You Will Likely Be Unable To Hire Through Your Network & The Interview Question All Founders Must Ask with Olof Mathé, Founder & CEO @ Mixmax · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Wonder if this will be a first or not? This might not be. What's wonderful about Silicon Valley is how much we adore entrepreneurship above everything else. And entrepreneurship is fundamentally about creating something for nothing, creating new futures that other people can imagine. And what strikes me here is while we have this adoration of entrepreneurship, the way we're supposed to build companies is like a monoculture. There's traditionally like one way to build a company, one way to fund your company, one way to do things, X, Y, and Z as you grow. And so I'm really interested in more models for how to structure companies, the remote work trend, I think is a little bit part of this, which I think is very interesting. Distributed companies overall. I think there's a ton of innovation to be made in terms of various different funding models and how the types of companies you might be building outside of the traditional like VC One model. So I'd love to see more.”

    2019-01-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The 3 Stages of Denial For Founders When Scaling, Why You Will Likely Be Unable To Hire Through Your Network & The Interview Question All Founders Must Ask with Olof Mathé, Founder & CEO @ Mixmax · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “That probably still remains SBQR by Mary Beard, who's a professor of Roman history at Cambridge University. So in your neck of the woods. And so what's fascinating about this book, Mary Beard, who's the author, traces the history of kind of the Roman Republic. It ends just when the Roman Empire begins. And what's really excellent about this book is she interrogates the evidence for why we think we know what we know. And in doing so, she has this wonderfully dialectic tone that brings you along as a reader. And it's a wonderful kind of exposition of the scientific method in that way.”

    2019-01-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The 3 Stages of Denial For Founders When Scaling, Why You Will Likely Be Unable To Hire Through Your Network & The Interview Question All Founders Must Ask with Olof Mathé, Founder & CEO @ Mixmax · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Yeah, well, I think it's some version of tell me about a project you worked on that failed and tell me how you could have changed the outcome or perhaps the other version of that question might be when was the time that you brought a project forth and where you had to redo your approach entirely based on third-party feedback?”

    2019-01-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The 3 Stages of Denial For Founders When Scaling, Why You Will Likely Be Unable To Hire Through Your Network & The Interview Question All Founders Must Ask with Olof Mathé, Founder & CEO @ Mixmax · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Another one would be asking them what their core area for professional development is. And so it's different if you have a new ICU who's just graduated to college. Like I wouldn't expect a very deep answer there for someone who has been a functional leader for a long time. I'd expect enough self-awareness and introspection for them to have a couple of areas of professional development that they're working on. And I'm less looking at a specific functional skill and more what are the kind of general work skills that they're trying to get better at. And there's a lot you can probe on here. How they discovered that this was an area who first gave them that feedback, tell me about a time when you did thing X that is your area of improvement.”

    2019-01-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The 3 Stages of Denial For Founders When Scaling, Why You Will Likely Be Unable To Hire Through Your Network & The Interview Question All Founders Must Ask with Olof Mathé, Founder & CEO @ Mixmax · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “So one question I love to ask is some version of if your current CEO went to you today and waived their magic wand, what is it they would change that would make you cancel this interview process and stay at your current job? And so what I want to get out with that question is have they thought through the conditions, like what exactly it is that they're not satisfied with and what it is they're looking for next and how do they know they can't get that from their job currently and have they even entertained a conversation with their current CEO about making the job that they're currently and perfect for them? And so if they haven't then the likelihood of them doing the same at mix max is going to be very high and so that just means”

    2019-01-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The 3 Stages of Denial For Founders When Scaling, Why You Will Likely Be Unable To Hire Through Your Network & The Interview Question All Founders Must Ask with Olof Mathé, Founder & CEO @ Mixmax · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Yeah, this is one of the non-fun parts of running a company. I think if it's someone who you hired into very senior role, that conversation in some ways, it's both easier and harder than letting someone in an IC role go. And in very many cases, I think that hire knows that themselves. One of the things I've discovered just on my personal learning journey is it's very hard to disguise what you think of people's performance on the team. And so what you can do as a leader acknowledging that it's, you know, you probably can't hide it even though you think you can is to often both ask for feedback from that person and also give clear action-oriented observation-based feedback.”

    2019-01-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The 3 Stages of Denial For Founders When Scaling, Why You Will Likely Be Unable To Hire Through Your Network & The Interview Question All Founders Must Ask with Olof Mathé, Founder & CEO @ Mixmax · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Way I think about it is everyone who joins the team in some shape or form needs to impress the team day one, week one, and continuously impress the team from there. Another core litmus test is have they made the function exponentially better within 90 days? And if you have any hesitation about that question at 90 days, it's probably not the right person.”

    2019-01-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The 3 Stages of Denial For Founders When Scaling, Why You Will Likely Be Unable To Hire Through Your Network & The Interview Question All Founders Must Ask with Olof Mathé, Founder & CEO @ Mixmax · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Well, I think a core indicator from that, which you might uncover in the interview process, is whether they've done it before in some shape or form. And that also helps you avoid a little bit ending up in either ends of that spectrum that we mentioned before, the spectrum being hiring someone who's just way too senior and has the immaculate 20-year resume from Google, Facebook, Amazon, Salesforce versus the candidate who's the brilliant generalist startup hire and finding someone who helps scale before.”

    2019-01-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The 3 Stages of Denial For Founders When Scaling, Why You Will Likely Be Unable To Hire Through Your Network & The Interview Question All Founders Must Ask with Olof Mathé, Founder & CEO @ Mixmax · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Oh, yeah, I was going to say another really nice benefit of the consultant provided you find the right one right is A, if it doesn't work out, it's really easy just to let them go after a month because you haven't communicated to the entire team that you have a brand new VP marketing or whatever it might be. The other thing is this consultant can help you find the senior leader. You very likely don't even know how to interview someone in that function. And so you can pay them and they can help you find the right senior leader for that function.”

    2019-01-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The 3 Stages of Denial For Founders When Scaling, Why You Will Likely Be Unable To Hire Through Your Network & The Interview Question All Founders Must Ask with Olof Mathé, Founder & CEO @ Mixmax · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “The way I think about this, and we actually had one of our senior leaders join the team this way, and this is, I think, very different from IC hiring. One of the challenges of hiring senior talent and building out a function that you know very little of is, of course, you know nothing about the function. And so what that means is there are a host of unknown unknowns that are unknown unknowns to you but won't be to someone with more experience in the function. And so I see it really helpful if you're building out whatever it is, HR or sales or marketing or perhaps product or design, whatever function it might be, engineering for the first time to have a very senior consultant come in and work with you for a good couple of months. And the main advantage there is you get kind of a litmus test of what it's like working with the senior leader in this function before you even commit fully to building up the function. And in some cases, the person who's”

    2019-01-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The 3 Stages of Denial For Founders When Scaling, Why You Will Likely Be Unable To Hire Through Your Network & The Interview Question All Founders Must Ask with Olof Mathé, Founder & CEO @ Mixmax · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Great question. I think all of the examples you mentioned are great. The one thing I'd emphasize there, which I think just generally helps, is having a personal relationship with your executive recruiter. People like to do work with and for people they like on a personal basis. And this will just shine through. And so much of senior leadership hiring, right, is you really need someone who will work with you. You need a candidate who you'll totally click and jag with on a personal level. And so the candidates will just hear that in the recruiter's voice too if they have genuine enthusiasm for you as a founder. And that will go a long way.”

    2019-01-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The 3 Stages of Denial For Founders When Scaling, Why You Will Likely Be Unable To Hire Through Your Network & The Interview Question All Founders Must Ask with Olof Mathé, Founder & CEO @ Mixmax · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Think as founders, we kind of through our hubris again, we kind of neglect the deep nuance and complexity of any other function than the one that we own are really familiar with. And so unless you're a founder recruiter, you don't realize this. So it's great to have some guidance from your board there. A couple of obvious key differences.”

    2019-01-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The 3 Stages of Denial For Founders When Scaling, Why You Will Likely Be Unable To Hire Through Your Network & The Interview Question All Founders Must Ask with Olof Mathé, Founder & CEO @ Mixmax · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “On the recruiter side specifically and have a chat more about why very often you can't do this through your own network unless you directly hired senior talent before. If you think to know you write the right recruiter, you almost certainly don't. And the reason for this is I think overall as founders, we have a lot of hubris, which is a great asset when trying to find product market fit. And it's pretty counterproductive when you're trying to build a senior team. And so we've probably worked with recruiters to help us fill IC roles in the past. even have great relationships with a couple of those recruiters. And so we kind of underestimate the complexity and richness of the talent market. And so we think that someone who's a great IC recruiter is also going to be a great senior management or leadership recruiter. And the truth is, of course, vastly different. And so they're kind of an entirely different set of recruiters, which is sounds obvious when you just hear it, but you're probably not aware of, at least I wasn't for.”

    2019-01-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The 3 Stages of Denial For Founders When Scaling, Why You Will Likely Be Unable To Hire Through Your Network & The Interview Question All Founders Must Ask with Olof Mathé, Founder & CEO @ Mixmax · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “yourself another version of same stage of denial, which is, okay, I realized I can't find a candidate through my own network. I think I know the right recruiter to help me fill this role and invariably you actually don't and you really need professional help.”

    2019-01-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The 3 Stages of Denial For Founders When Scaling, Why You Will Likely Be Unable To Hire Through Your Network & The Interview Question All Founders Must Ask with Olof Mathé, Founder & CEO @ Mixmax · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “I think as you mentioned, this is kind of the second stage. So you finally got convinced that, oh, you need someone to own this particular function and that person's not you and you're willing to invest. And so I think the stage of denial expresses itself in a couple of different ways. One is you tell yourself as a founder and like very reasonably so, because as founders were typically pretty well connected, we know a bunch of other founders. A lot of us have worked at some potentially worked at some big prior, successful startup. We have investors, et cetera. They have really been Rolodexes. So we tell ourselves, we can do this through our own network. And we tell ourselves that, hey, it's going to go way faster because that way I, as a founder, am going to be running the process, I can really sell the vision. I don't have to do this through the intermediary of someone else. And of course, for gazillion reasons, it almost never works out that way, although it can. And once that doesn't work out, you kind of tell yourself.”

    2019-01-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The 3 Stages of Denial For Founders When Scaling, Why You Will Likely Be Unable To Hire Through Your Network & The Interview Question All Founders Must Ask with Olof Mathé, Founder & CEO @ Mixmax · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “And running really big processes, and perhaps they're not really adapted the size of company or app. So easy to swing between those two extremes once you've done the generalist, you want to go super senior only to discover that that wasn't the right answer either.”

    2019-01-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The 3 Stages of Denial For Founders When Scaling, Why You Will Likely Be Unable To Hire Through Your Network & The Interview Question All Founders Must Ask with Olof Mathé, Founder & CEO @ Mixmax · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Think that transition comes at kind of all of the points I mentioned. If you're a SaaS company and a decent economics and you're north of a million dollar ARR, that's probably one way of looking at it. If you have more than eight direct reports, it's probably to make the move from a generalist hire to a more specialized hire. In my own experience, I think we've been guilty of swinging between the two extremes. And I think that's really easy to do in hiring. So it's really easy, for example, whatever function you start with a generalist who totally knows how startups work is super scrappy, able to contribute to five other functions out of their area of direct domain expertise. And the issue with that candidate or that person in your company is they're very unlikely to be able to build processes and scale an org. And on the other side, when you hire the senior VP LinkedIn, et cetera, is everything they're going to do or going to want to do is going to set you back 30 to 50K because they're used to having huge budgets.”

    2019-01-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The 3 Stages of Denial For Founders When Scaling, Why You Will Likely Be Unable To Hire Through Your Network & The Interview Question All Founders Must Ask with Olof Mathé, Founder & CEO @ Mixmax · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “I think that is just one dimension of many, and I think it depends on the culture you have and the type of business you're building. This sounds a little bit to me potentially like the third stage of denial, which is they will grow into the role. And so it's worth emphasizing that growing into the role is not just scaling upwards, it's also molding themselves to the culture and uniqueness of your company. And so we've definitely been guilty of this at MixMax, but it's really easy to swing between two extremes. On the one hand, you have the version of, hey, let's hire the super senior director VP from Salesforce or LinkedIn or Facebook or whatever it might be. That's kind of the one end of the extreme.”

    2019-01-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The 3 Stages of Denial For Founders When Scaling, Why You Will Likely Be Unable To Hire Through Your Network & The Interview Question All Founders Must Ask with Olof Mathé, Founder & CEO @ Mixmax · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “And then find someone else out to do it. I think as founders, particularly in areas where we have domain expertise where it's very susceptible to postponing this hire. And so kind of what happens if you do a domain expert hire who literally has 10x the knowledge and experience in a field than you do?”

    2019-01-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The 3 Stages of Denial For Founders When Scaling, Why You Will Likely Be Unable To Hire Through Your Network & The Interview Question All Founders Must Ask with Olof Mathé, Founder & CEO @ Mixmax · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “I would say a couple of rules of thumb, and I'll talk about a kind of generally and then specifically as a founder CEO. So I think for any founder who might not be CEO, almostly the rule of thumb is as soon as you have more than eight direct reports, you need to hire someone to replace yourself or at least take over most of the work. And ideally, they become an entire functional leader, not just a director of function X, but literally an owner of the entire function. And for any function, I'd say where no one on the founding team has direct domain expertise once you're past perhaps one or two IC hires, if you know that this function is going to grow, then you might just as well hire a senior leader to actually build out that team no matter how small it might end up. And then last, as founder, CEO, and that's perhaps the most difficult one because it's really hard to CO to let go. I'd say figure out what area you want to own, own it for perhaps top six months.”

    2019-01-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The 3 Stages of Denial For Founders When Scaling, Why You Will Likely Be Unable To Hire Through Your Network & The Interview Question All Founders Must Ask with Olof Mathé, Founder & CEO @ Mixmax · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “I think this might seem a little bit facile. My question to that founder would be can you afford not to hire? And so in my mind, what senior leaders on the team do for you as a founder is that they free up your time. And so the real cost to you is opportunity cost. And a really good litmus test for you as a founder on this too is you're probably doing this function that you want to hire someone in for or leading the function. And you're probably constantly late or dragging your feet in terms of doing what”

    2019-01-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The 3 Stages of Denial For Founders When Scaling, Why You Will Likely Be Unable To Hire Through Your Network & The Interview Question All Founders Must Ask with Olof Mathé, Founder & CEO @ Mixmax · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “First of all, I would say once you have product market fit, which is an entirely different topic, probably worth its own episode, assuming you do, the answer is it's probably too late already and you should have hired them yesterday. And I think as founders, well, we have a couple of hesitations around it, and I'm happy to share where I think all of these retrospectively are wrong or false. Typically, what we as founders say is we hesitate to hire senior roles because either we think it's too expensive or we think it's too early. And so when we say it's too early, what do we really mean as founders? And I think it's a couple of things. One is we're actually insecure about whether we have product market fit. We're not sure whether the senior hire will even have headcount to build out a team. So we're nervous about that. Or we're insecure about not having a proven out thing x or thing y and marketing or sales or whatever the function might be. And we think it's too early to bring them on. And perhaps you worry even if you have product market fit, you're not sure what the right go-to-market strategy.”

    2019-01-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The 3 Stages of Denial For Founders When Scaling, Why You Will Likely Be Unable To Hire Through Your Network & The Interview Question All Founders Must Ask with Olof Mathé, Founder & CEO @ Mixmax · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Role. And in many cases, they can't. So, those are kind of the three stages of denial. And happy to chat more about them and my own personal experience with them.”

    2019-01-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The 3 Stages of Denial For Founders When Scaling, Why You Will Likely Be Unable To Hire Through Your Network & The Interview Question All Founders Must Ask with Olof Mathé, Founder & CEO @ Mixmax · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Yeah, this has definitely been a hallmark of 2018 for myself and I think for us at MixMax is starting to scale the business. And so as you say, what's really fun, there's all there like libraries written about product market fit and very little written about scaling. And in particular, building out a senior team. And so just if I look at my own 2018, I think as a founder, I definitely went through kind of three stages of denial in terms of hiring senior folks on the team. And so the first thing I think you say as a founder is, you know, hey, I don't think we need this role right now. You know, you think it's too early, it's going to cost you much, et cetera. And then once you realize that you actually do need this senior role, you tell yourself, I can find the right person on my own. I'm used to doing things on my own. I don't need help to find the role. And of course, once you realize that you can't or that you're hiring for the wrong level or that you've erroneously put people in stretch roles, then you kind of tell yourself, well, whoever I hire, they're going to grow into the”

    2019-01-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The 3 Stages of Denial For Founders When Scaling, Why You Will Likely Be Unable To Hire Through Your Network & The Interview Question All Founders Must Ask with Olof Mathé, Founder & CEO @ Mixmax · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Temperament. And I think I'd also hesitated a little bit about the business world. It just felt really boring. And this was in the mid to late august. And so fortunately, and this is where the inspiration point comes in, I had a friend who had started a business and he made it seem both really easy and really fun. And little did I know that it was neither. Definitely not easy. They're also fun. Of course, startups are also one heck of a grind. So I think that you need to be aware of and just make sure that they're still really existentially satisfying to you. Agree with Benefit of”

    2019-01-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The 3 Stages of Denial For Founders When Scaling, Why You Will Likely Be Unable To Hire Through Your Network & The Interview Question All Founders Must Ask with Olof Mathé, Founder & CEO @ Mixmax · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “You have now arrived at your destination. Olaf, it is such a pleasure to have you on the show today. Obviously a huge MixMax user myself, and I so enjoyed our prior episode on Saster, but thank you so much for joining my Dulcet British Tones again, Olaf. Thanks, thanks, Harry. Great to be here. But I do want to start, and for those that maybe missed our round one episode, how did you make your way into the world of startups and really come to found the game changer of email that is Mixmax Olaf? So in terms of making my way into the world of startups, I think there are kind of two things for me. One was values and then kind of a specific point of inspiration. So for me, a core value and kind of motivator for me in life has always been to feel that I'm creating something for nothing and that I can empower other people either to see the world in new ways or express themselves in new ways. And so I think that actually led me after college to try out academia. And I quickly realized that that was like way too slow for my.”

    2019-01-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The 3 Stages of Denial For Founders When Scaling, Why You Will Likely Be Unable To Hire Through Your Network & The Interview Question All Founders Must Ask with Olof Mathé, Founder & CEO @ Mixmax · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source