We’re Building a 10x Culture with Fellow
Companies are ultimately collections of people. At their best, everyone is marching in the same direction, energizing each other and striving towards the same goals. More often, the motivation behind decisions never makes its way down the org chart, the company’s mission gets muddled, and people grow disengaged. These differences don’t stem from capital raised, revenue, market cap, PR headlines, or the number of employees — they stem from a company’s approach to culture and people leadership.
Historically, promising new entrants to the workforce have been funneled into leadership training rotational programs. These future leaders stepped into a clear management track, and companies spent years developing both hard skills in functional areas and soft skills in people management. At scale, these programs work well — companies have time and resources to prioritize developing future leaders. However, for organizations with a more rapid pace of growth, these programs simply don’t work. New business lines emerge more quickly than HR can plan for skill development among managerial recruits. Ultimately, the pace of change and growth makes these programs undesirable. Instead, high growth companies promote the best individual contributors; outperforming salespeople, engineers, marketers, and functional experts of all sorts are promoted into management roles that remove them from the day to day activities that they excelled at. In the absence of coaching, the best individual contributors don’t automatically equate to the best managers.
Aydin Mirzaee and his team lived this experience, and have built Fellow to overcome it. We’ve had the privilege of knowing
through his journey building his last company, Fluidware, which was acquired by SurveyMonkey in 2014. , alongside his Fluidware co-founders Amin Mirzaee, and Samuel Cormier-Iijima, found himself thrown into a management role once Fluidware started to grow rapidly. At SurveyMonkey, upon Fluidware’s acquisition, the three co-founders took on more extensive leadership roles with limited training and exposure to management best practices. The co-founders were outperformers across every dimension — except as managers, where they felt less certain and found the process ambiguous. They found no consensus on universal tactics within their peer group and the constant worry lurked in the back of their minds that they could be doing a better job. They started talking to other new executives in management roles at high growth companies, including the team at Shopify and found that they weren’t alone.Aydin and his team began to build what is now
— a manager’s co-pilot. Traditional HR tools used by managers are focused on reporting relationships and requirements, not on manager productivity. Aydin approached us with a unique worldview — asserting that 1:1s are the single biggest point of leverage in a manager’s week. These interactions are the core opportunity for leaders to share company mission and priorities and tackle roadblocks to company success before they cause customer churn or product deficiency data. Manager-report touchpoints also maintain employee engagement, motivation, and overall happiness.Fellow delivers great value from an HR perspective, but even more importantly, it acts as a true partner and coach to managers, who care deeply about becoming better managers. The best individual contributors get to that point by caring intently about their work, and their commitment to excellence continues as managers. Fellow recognizes that great managers — the 10x leaders who unlock 10x team performance by reducing weaknesses, driving collaboration and keeping motivation high — are created, not born.
We’ve been using Fellow at Inovia Capital alongside a number of fast-growing tech companies. It’s been quickly adopted by our entire team and has helped strengthen communication across our globally distributed offices. Accountability and communication are two of our core values, and Fellow helps us live up to both internally as colleagues. As a firm, we put people at the forefront of every decision we make. Our goal is to help build healthier people and communities, with greater access to knowledge, skills, and the world itself. Fellow helps leaders enable their teams to live up to and exceed their greatest potential at Inovia, Shopify, and many other organizations; we hope it will help leaders at yours as well.
Take a look, try it out, and make every manager a 10x manager.
