The adventure starts for the new Blindfeed crew
Reflections on week 1 as one crew
The call for adventure often starts deep within you. You can’t resist changing something about your life.
Sometimes this call ends up in changing your surroundings, to explore the world via travel. It might be you end a relationship or like the new Blindfeed crew go have the courage to start over and go all-in on a purpose that matters to you.
This post is part of our experiment to share our reflections each week about what it means to build something meaningful from scratch. Each written from the unique perspectives by all the Blindfeed crew members. Below you can find the reflections from me as the founder and CEO of Blindfeed.
From founding to funding
A couple of months ago we officially founded Blindfeed and raised capital from people who helped build products like Google Maps, Google Assistant and N26. They saw what we saw, and long story short we got the opportunity to work on our purpose and create meaningful work. It also gave us the opportunity to hire world-class people to join us on our mission.
The hiring paradox
However, to actually find the people who are not only world class but also want to join you on your mission for the right reasons is incredibly hard. The industry tends to hire really fast as there is a high demand for talent, yet they often default to hiring professionals who are already very experienced in their domain, or future stars that have the potential. The problem with this approach is that you don’t hire for resilience and grit. Unless you hire people who can be truly committed to your purpose, they will opt-out when things will get hard. We often discouraged people to continue the process, by being radically transparent and say, this might not work. It’s going to be difficult. It’s gonna require sacrifice. It might be that you’ll have to look for another job in 12 months. However, if you believe in our purpose, and you think it’s a problem worth solving then let’s continue.
Our manifesto and our values made it very clear what type of personalities would foster in a place like ours. It probably was one of the best tools for filtering out the talent who aren’t able to make sacrifices in the short-term for a potentially big upside in the future. It attracted incredibly talented individuals who believe in our mission. They came from all over the world, some even proposed to work for free. It was kind of a surreal experience, to be honest. After dating dozens of candidates for a couple of months, we are grateful to have put 2 out of the 4 puzzle pieces together. And with that our puzzle for hiring a world-class team. The first crew will be a team of 6. A product designer, marketing and engagement manager, two full-stack developers, and me and my co-founder who is the CTO (and full-stack as well).
To build a remarkable user experience Liam Ho joined our crew as the product designer obsessed about creating memorable user experiences. Who despite his extreme loyalty (first time he ever quit his job) dared to leap into the unknown and join us. To build an engaged community of ambitious professionals, Anna Boguslavska joined our crew. She’s a scientifically educated (Ph.D. in linguistics) marketing and engagement manager who dared to switch to Blindfeed when she already signed a contract elsewhere. Both of them demonstrated throughout the “dating” process that they wanted to join us, not because of the buzzwords, salary or equity but because of their belief in our purpose. There are still two puzzle pieces to go, with two full-stack developer roles open, but we’re very grateful to have found two people with this level of commitment to the mission. The commitment bar isn’t something that is negotiable to us, and we don’t care how skilled someone already is or could be.
Week 1 with the new Blindfeed crew
Today, we’ve completed our first official week at Blindfeed and starting our second. Normally when you get new people onboard there is the desire to get them to create the things that you so desperately wanted to do but didn’t have the time or skills for. It’s also where we believed most companies fail at. You miss the opportunity to truly connect, to truly understand each other, and discover ways how to best collaborate together. That’s why the first week was really designed to get everyone aligned with (and co-create) our vision, values, and strategy. More importantly, it was focused on understanding ourselves and each other. Our different personalities in the team, the different styles of how we operate and communicate. All of which happened in an extremely transparent and vulnerable way.
If you start your first day with deconstructing your personality, holding a mirror in front of you, and trying to understand yourself on a deeper level, you are asking a lot. I thought I was asking too much to open up entirely. However, I must say it’s been incredible how courageous everyone was by showing their vulnerability to everyone. I’m very grateful to have had the first week like this one.
What we’ve done in our first week as one crew
Understanding our personalities
We used a scientifically backed Big5 trait model broken down in two aspects per trait (this method had over 700 citations by the scientific community). To learn more about this go to Understandmyself.com.
After the test, we shared our results with the entire group and elaborated what this meant to them and others.
User Manuals (how to work with you)
This was an exercise we did to be super honest with yourself and others how to best work with you. This resulted in a one-pager per person that included:
- What’s my style
- What I value
- What I don’t have the patience for
- How to best communicate with me
- How to help me
- What people misunderstand about me
Blindfeed Values workshop
We already created values for Blindfeed. We wanted to make sure they reflected the crew as a whole. They also were designed to make clear that if we value X, it devalues Y.
We removed 3 values that were too vague or didn’t reflect the group, altered two values, and added 1 new value.
Checkout out our values.
10 year Vision & Strategy Workshop
We already had a 3 pager that explained our vision for the future and the strategy how to make it happen. It’s internal only, so can’t share that. However, below is the method we used…
Just imagine it is ten years from now. We are the dominant company in the industry. Ask ourselves:
- What industry do we dominate?
- Who is our customer (this should be a real live human being, not a corporate entity), and what pain do they have that are we solving for them?
- What is unique about our solution that causes the customer to choose us over the competition?
- What asset (human or physical) do we control that makes it difficult for any competitor to copy your solution? In other words, what is our moat (i.e. how to maintain a competitive advantage)?
Share our life stories
5 years ago I would have said; This sounds wishy-washy. Or what a load of spiritual bullshit. However, we strongly believe that you should be able to bring yourself to work. Not leave your human side at home and only bring your professional robot to work. This was a big risk, of course. However, when I shared my life story in detail first (while I always tend to speak last), with the bad and the good, everyone leaped in and shared things they didn’t share with many people in their lives. I also have to mention, that everyone opted for this exercise. It wasn’t an obligation, and I also believe because we already shared very personal sides of ourselves with the flaws in our personality, a real connection happened as we learned things about each other, that might have taken you multiple years of close friendship to find out. It truly helped us understand more about each other (at least from my perspective this was true ;)).
I do want to end this reflection of week one with a note. I’m very grateful to have discovered that the entire Blindfeed crew…
- Was incredibly open-minded about sharing their vulnerabilities and showing the sides of them that they are least proud of
- Trusted each other to share very personal sides of themselves
- Dared to challenge each other on their initial statements, listened carefully and were open-minded enough to change their minds
Yours truly,
Björn
Founder & CEO of Blindfeed.com
P.S. For the curious ones
If you believe this work matters, and you are an engineer, product designer, data whisperer, or a storyteller. Send me a message [bjorn [at] blindfeed . com] or have a look at Blindfeed.com. We’re always looking to expand our team with individuals that dare to leap into the unknown.
