Do you love us… yet?
“Do you love us... yet?” — I asked to the engineer sitting in front of me. It made him smile. We had another sip of the chai we had taken from the Chai Point in Bangalore and walked towards a quieter place from the roadside cafe.
We both knew what it meant. He was not happy in the company. There were so many problems. What’s the direction of the company? How much time before we hit the break-even numbers? Why did that person in the office leave? How do we reduce the number of hours we spent in maintenance of the current stack? And I had taken time to answer all those questions. Spent almost half an hour last week I was in Bangalore. It surprised him that I would spend so much time explaining things to him. I think he was happy. But seems now again he was not so happy.
He was a pretty good performer when he had first joined. Things just went somehow downhill after sometime. I do not know what happened. I guess I was busy. Or he had a bad manager. Something just snapped at one point of time.
I pushed him — “I know you are just OK. I do not like that. This is pretty shitty way to spend your 20s. You should quit. If I were you, I would do that”. It shocked him. It hurt his ego. I could see his face grimaced. “You are firing me?”. I was taken back. I was being honest. “Of course not. I want you here. But I do not want 50% of you. I need all 100%”. I paused. “I either want all 100% or nothing at all. There is no mid-way”.
He was comforted a bit. At least the emotional pain was gone. He said — “See I am finishing my work. I do not have to be excited about everything I do. “ He paused thinking. “May be it will get better. It’s good we talk regularly. There are lot of questions I have. You come here once a month. Getting answers makes things better. It may get better”. He smiled. I smiled.
It somehow never worked for me. Founders build companies that literally are extensions of themselves. Knowlarity is a very passionate company. We are brutally honest and say things upfront. “Good enough” is not sufficient. You got to be “committed with everything you got.”. I remember, after a large funding round around two years back, I had hired a lot of people. I had people who were “Good enough”. I waited for them to fall in love with the company. They liked the work. They never loved it. It never happened. When push came to shove, these people snapped and left. We wasted each others time. Fortunately there were a lot of pushes and shoves.
“Think about it and let me know….. let me know tomorrow.” — I said. I am going to increase your work. If you figure out a way to fall in love with this company, it will be a breeze. However, if you are trudging along, you will snap.” I smiled. “And you will leave. You will hopefully go work in a place you love. And you will thank me in a year from now”. I said smiling.
“I have tried hard. We have to go one way or another. May be you can be boomerang in a year from now.”
He didn’t come next day. He was not well. I did not push. He came the day after and resigned. I was happy. I hoped he was happy too.
Life is too short to spend doing things we are not passionate about. The startups are too hard to have people who can’t find their passion here. May be their destiny has a bit more of search left.
I have had this play out many times as we build Knowlarity. All said and done, breakups are painful. How do I pick the right person so that every single person is a cultural fit? I have hypotheses and we have iterated on them.
I remember our first experiment in 2011. I had everyone take Myers–Briggs Type Indicator test to see if certain personality types work best for us. We had a disproportionate number of “Feelers” and “Perceivers” that stayed more than a year. “Feelers” are emotional people. “Perceivers” are comfortable with ambiguity. It made sense. Those were early stages. Early stage startups people have to be “excitable” people. They have to be comfortable with ambiguity. You may not know how we will reach there, but you have conviction that you will.
The second discovery hit me in my gut. I found very little correlation between academic pedigree and on-job performance. I have a degree in Computer Science from IIT Kanpur and an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University. I took comfort in the fact that somehow I knew “more”. It wasn’t true. The colleges did not matter. The best engineers came as much from IITs as any other college. The best business people similarly have studied in various MBA schools — or not gone to do an MBA at all. It all depends on what you do after college.
If we had to make a choice between Mr A — with high academic pedigree and B — with lower academic pedigree and both having achieved same professional accomplishment in the same time, I would pick Mr B. Given he started out lower — no support of a branding of the college and network and learned more reaching the same position as Mr A. If he were to continue, he will achieve more in the next couple of years while he is in Knowlarity.
It is counterintuitive but it has worked for us. Hunger, desire to constantly learn, hard work and curiosity allow people to quickly leave behind their academic background and build their career on their own merits.
So much so, that learnability — curiosity to discover new things and ability to learn, hard work — nothing in the world worth achieving is achieved without a lot of hard work and humility — team before me, have become the pillars of our hiring practices.
What’s the most difficult thing you have done in your life? I ask. We in India, surprisingly, have pretty sheltered life. We don’t flip burgers in High School and are not kicked out of the basement by our parents when we turn 18. Things have been taken care of and always gone up.
If you haven’t hit your lowest, you are always afraid of it and won’t take risks. Though I hardly get people who have cracked JEE while running a Paan shop to feed the family, we get one, we jump. Once you seen the worst, you are liberated.
Such cultural traits have been a much better predictor of success of people in Knowlarity. While specific skills — tech, sales and operations are important too but we find that these kind of people can learn _anything_. When there is a will, there is a way. Low skill but highly motivated people learn and soon are superstars. High skill but low level of motivation require a lot of cajoling but mostly don’t work out.
Its a journey. Every company has a DNA and it takes time to uncover it. And then make sure that people with “right” cultural fit are chosen and accepted. Its a tribe that got to strengthen its culture code. It has been seven years and we finally feel that we have it distilled down to some basic principles. If I make sure we get the right people, may be I can stop having to ask “do you love us… yet”. I will know the answer.
