IVP’s Hypergrowth Podcast: MasterClass CEO David Rogier’s Top Four Tips for Hypergrowth

In IVP’s Hypergrowth Podcast series, IVP investors talk with CEOs of the fastest growing companies and discuss the ins and outs of company building in the hypergrowth environment.

In our second episode, IVP investor, Roseanne Wincek, sits down with David Rogier, Founder and CEO of MasterClass. David talks at great length about the company, how he thinks about hiring during each stage of growth and scaling quickly — from board members to employees, and what all of this has taught him about being an effective leader for a company during its high growth phase. IVP led MasterClass’s $35 million Series C in 2017 and their $85 million Series D in 2018.

It all started with a lesson from grandmother.

Starting with half a million dollars from a trusted VC to help David “go think of a great idea,” this entrepreneur-at-heart found inspiration from his family roots. His grandmother, who helped raise him, provided one piece of advice that’s stuck with him since the third grade.

“Education is the only thing that a person can’t take away from you.”

She was right. So much so, that David used this advice to take the $500K he raised to build an education platform to give the masses access to the expert advice they didn’t know they’d longed to learn. Founded in 2013 to give everyone “access to genius,” MasterClass is a prime example of hyper-growth. Two years ago, when IVP invested, the company employed 30 people and had just released their 13 thclass. Today, the company has tripled in size, released its 50 thclass and launched an online subscription streaming service.

Intuition coupled with customer interviews helped David identify what would make people excited to learn online. He found one reoccurring theme: people would pay to learn from the best. If classes are taught by the best in the world, students know that they are getting real, relevant, battle-hardened learnings. To test his thesis, he built a fake website and found that students were clamoring to buy classes from the masters. MasterClass was off to the races.

Since the company’s start in 2013, David and the team at MasterClass have built a brand that has attracted the world’s best. Serena Williams teaches tennis, Carlos Santana demonstrates the art and soul of guitar, Spike Lee doles out the intricacies of independent filmmaking, Annie Leibovitz shows the art behind photography, and Steph Curry helps even the best ballplayer understand the precision needed to shoot and score.

David tackled attracting the masters but also had to grow his company from infancy to the growth stage in the crowded online learning market.

To do this, David shared a few of the lessons he learned along the way with Roseanne.

Recognize the fundraising process is like an art.

“Don’t ever send a pitch deck before a meeting.”

Unless you’ve got stats like Uber, David says, it’s hard to explain your story to an investor who may fail to understand the company’s full potential from a series of slides without verbal context. In the early stages of investment, investors look for team caliber and dynamics, market fit and hyper-growth potential — things that are hard to see in a pitch deck in isolation. Wait to send the deck until after the meeting, allowing the ability to highlight the story — and opportunity — in person.

Plus, understand that each round is different. A founder story highlighting the genesis of a company may land at the early fundraising rounds but will not secure a growth investment, where illustrating key hires who understand growth and scale become more important to gain capital. Finding the right people to guide each phase of storytelling to investors is crucial — and iterate along the way.

Find board members that support you. Not ones that try to run the business.

“If you have a bad board member, you’re in a world of pain.”

A company grows through a robust network of board and investor support. As a leader or CEO, the choice of board members becomes more critical as the company grows. Do lots of homework. Talk to entrepreneurs who have worked with this investor in good outcomes and in bad. Figure out why a person would be additive to the company’s culture and growth, as well as a support network and sounding board.

Find an outlet for the inevitable emotional rollercoaster ride of entrepreneurship.

“Have a great therapist.”

With any entrepreneurial endeavor comes high and lows. David’s trick combines routines like keeping a daily gratitude journal, talking with a trusted friend or advisor, and regularly speaking to his therapist. Why? Issues at work arise from people dynamics and decision making among them. While a therapist may not understand business goals or growth metrics, they do understand how people interact as well as their patterns of behavior. These can then help leaders predict how a team member may act or respond. This guidance and third-party sounding boards can reduce decision fatigue and ease the growing pains of a high-growth business.

Hiring right is better than hiring fast.

“If you hire too fast, your bar will drop, and you won’t hire great people.”

When a company hits the high-growth stage, recognize hiring the right people will take first priority. At this stage, roles and responsibilities change — and fast. Figure out how to remove the people or candidates who can’t or don’t have the ability to scale. Companies start off with a gaggle of original employees who build the business through blood, sweat, and tears. During a growth-stage hiring stint, however, it’s vital to differentiate current employees who can grow into the next role, while also finding future A player new hires through an honest dose of reviews from all levels of staff during the hiring process.

As a company grows, the touch point from employee to CEO diminish. Putting trust in the team to get the right people on board comes with transparency and a high bar. A helpful differentiator for hiring new employees? Assign a project. You’re hiring someone because of their work, not just their interview skills.

The full transcript is below.

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Transcript

Narrator: Welcome to IVP’s Hyper-Growth Podcast. In this series, we talk with CEOs of the fastest-growing companies and discuss the ins-and-outs of company building in the hyper-growth environment. If you like what you hear, consider following us on SoundCloud or subscribing to our podcast on iTunes. Thanks, and enjoy the show.

Roseanne: Hi, I’m Roseanne Wincek, an Investor at IVP. IVP is a thirty-nine-year-old venture firm, solely focused on high-growth later stage tech companies. I like to think that we specialize in hyper-growth, that unique phase in some of the very best company’s lives. IVP has had the privilege of investing in and working with many hyper-growth companies including Dropbox, Twitter, Snap, Coinbase, Compass, Discord, Appdynamics, Crowdstrike, Glossier, and of course MasterClass and we get to see the phase firsthand. Today, I have David Rogier, CEO of MasterClass joining me. David founded MasterClass in 2013 with the vision of giving everyone access to genius. We led MasterClass’s $35 million Series C in March of 2017 and their $85 million series D in September of 2018. MasterClass is a prime example of hyper-growth. When we first invested, less than two years ago, the company was only about 40 people, and they had just launched their 13th class. Today, the team is nearly three times the size, is on its 50th class and has launched a subscription streaming service. Today we’re going to learn a little bit about how David has gotten to this point, what he wishes he had known, and how he deals with hyper-growth. I’d love to start by hearing you describe MasterClass in your own words, and a little bit about what inspired you to start the company.

David: So, the company started probably a year and a half before launch. I was working in the venture at the time. And I was investing in startups. And I realized that I miss building stuff, so I actually went to the head of the fund that I was working at, and I told him that you know, I think I want to start something I’m not sure what. And he invested about half a million, and he told me to basically go think of a great idea. And that seems awesome. It’s also really, really scary because I know this was the only chance of my life I was going to get to actually do that and it’s a lot of pressure, and I didn’t have a great idea. And I tried lots, I tried tons of ideas, and then I kept going back to a story that I heard from my grandmother. So, my grandmother helped raise me, and I remember I was eight or nine years old in second grade or however old you are then. I went to her house after school one day, and I was complaining about all the math homework I had, which obviously I did not have a lot of math homework because I was like eight or nine. And she told me that she had a story to tell me. And I was like,” Oh God, that’s the last thing I want to hear”, and she tells me this story. So, my grandmother was 16 years old living in Krakow, Poland. Her and her mom went on a family vacation. Dad stayed home to take care of some work he was supposed to do and would join them there in a day or two. And while they were on vacation, the Nazis invaded, they took everything, and they killed her father. She flees to New York City. The only job she can get is on a factory floor. She works on a factory floor, and she decides she wants to become a doctor. She finds every medical school she can find. She applies to all of them. She gets a no from every single school. She keeps working the factory floor, applies again the next year, gets a no from every single one. And she starts calling up the deans of admissions and asking, why I am not getting in? They all hang up on her except for one who says, I’ll be honest, you have three strikes against you, you are a woman, you are a foreigner, and you’re Jewish, and hangs up the phone. It’s crazy to think that he thought that was like OK to say at that time, right? She goes, she goes back to the factory floor, she applies again the next year. She then gets into one school and becomes a doctor. And I was staring at her, I’m like age eight or nine, and she goes…”David, the point I’m trying to make to you is that education is the only thing that a person can’t take away from you”. But that changed how I thought about my school and my education. And I thought if this is my one chance where I can build a company, I want to build something other people can’t take away from others. And for me, that meant, I was going to build an online school.

Roseanne: So how did you go from the leap of online school to MasterClass? I mean just you know, when you think about the typical online education companies, they take school and just stick it on the Internet.

David: Yup and they’re horrible.

Roseanne: How did you- Fair! How did you reinvent that model?

David: So one, I posted an ad on Craigslist up and down the state, on small farm towns, offering to pay people. I think it was eight or 12 bucks just to talk to them about their education. Because I wanted to hear how they wanted to actually learn and how they actually learned. Then I thought about why I don’t like to take online classes, and I like love to learn. And then, three, we built a fake website that we bought ad traffic to, to just see what people would like to try to do. And you clearly saw that if you make classes from the best in the world it was going to attract more than just the average person, because think about it, for me, it was about this, with me and a class from Aaron Sorkin and I like, I don’t want to write a screenplay. I’ll never write a screenplay. If Aaron Sorkin would teach a class on screenwriting, I would take that in a second just because I want to know. So if you get the best in the world, it would actually expand the size of the market. I don’t think it really clicked with us that we should make the classes being really high quality and put as much effort and work as you make into making a film to class until we were trying to figure out how to actually film our classes and we didn’t have any filming experience. And I remember I went… I was asking friends, and some suggested I talk to this guy named Bill Guttentag, who’s a professor at Stanford who won two Oscars for docs that he made. We went out to lunch with him. We had so many questions about how do you hire a crew, how do you find a crew? And then he’s like, you’re just not going to ask me to do it? And we are like, “Wait, What? You would shoot it?” He was like, “It sounds fun!” Well, we could get somebody with two Oscars actually direct our classes and that totally changed how we thought about things that we could do it at, at that tier. And so now you know our team is full of people that have won from Emmys to Oscars.

Roseanne: So, with the Stanford professor, did you have an instructor at that point or were you still trying to find instructors?

David: At that point, we had our first instructor, and so we needed to figure out how to actually film that class.

Roseanne: What resonated with him? Why did they think this was interesting?

David: So I actually asked him, but I waited till we finished filming.

Roseanne: Yeah, you don’t want them to think too hard about it and maybe say no.

David: Yeah, I think this is one thing that surprised me about all our instructors. They all had someone in their life that helped mentor them, and they really want to give back. It’s been hard for them to find a way to do it. These people are incredibly busy, and so it’s really hard for them to teach at a traditional school, and if they do teach official school, it’s really a small amount of people that they can actually impact. Right, a class of 12 people or 20 people. And so, I think what would actually… really appeals to them is that this is a chance to reach so many people and people who otherwise would have never had a chance to learn from them. And that was the same thing for Jim. I mean Jim was like “Look, I give tons of money back to school, education, but I actually want to help teach.”

Roseanne: It’s actually the mission and the vision that’s really resonating with people. Today it feels like everybody wants to do MasterClass. We’ve been surprised that there’s been this network effect on the instructor side. Right? But you get instructors, and they bring in more instructors, and you get instructors to walk in the front door because they want to be, they want to participate and saying they want to be associated with all the great people.

David: I underestimated the strength of that effect. I mean now we say no to nine out of the 10 people that come to us, and I remember talking to Steph Curry. Steph makes tons of money. Why is it that he wants to teach? And he says, “well imagine if I could have taken a class like this from Michael Jordan and I wish I had that. And so, I wish I could give back and maybe I’ll have an impact on some people. I want others…like at least want to try to help.”

Roseanne: I guess on the upside on the instructor recruiting, there’s been this flywheel and the brand and people really like identify with us. But what’s been harder about actually getting instructors to either sign up, or participate, or show up?

David: As we have grown on the instructor’s side, it’s gotten easier, so they now know who we are. They also trust and have faith in our quality and our process. But you lose some of the ability to claim that you are a startup. And so, when you know if you want to be small, the ideal size, you want to be smaller or something, you won’t change it, well you can’t say anymore we are a small company. They all have friends that have made money from this. And so, it’s harder in some ways to kind of, to please.

Roseanne: It’s kind of like, oh I read that you raised $85 million in September. Frankly, I want to switch gears a little bit and talk more about your experience as a CEO. And just last week, I went to this panel where there were three CEOs and actually talking about their fundraising experience. You’ve raised about $140 million dollars — a lot of money. So just tell me about how you attacked the fundraising process?

David: I didn’t realize the fundraising process is like an art until probably I worked in venture and I was like, “Whoa there are some entrepreneurs who are so good at this”. And so, when we got to a raise on our next round, I talked to a bunch of entrepreneurs and asked them for advice and there was like this whole skill and craft I didn’t even know existed. And so, I think for me what I found was really helpful, like every stage that when you raise, I try to find some entrepreneurs who have at least done that stage, if not a stage ahead. I ask them for what their advice is because each stage has its own nuances.

Roseanne: Totally.

David: Small things when you start out, like or in the very early stage, I learned don’t ever send a pitch deck. Every investor asks for a pitch deck, don’t ever send it — the odds of you sending a pitch deck.

Roseanne: And is that like before a meeting or after that meeting?

David: Before the meeting. It’s fine with after the meeting. Before a meeting, don’t ever do it because I’ve never found one that, I’ve never done that, and it actually worked. Two, it’s hard in a pitch deck to, unless you are Uber and your stats are just like huge and up and up and up, especially at the early stage, Seed or A, it’s so hard to explain and show how much potential your company has. In a pitch deck you’re probably not going to, and what will happen, an investor will look at pitch deck, scan through it and be like “I’m not interested” versus in person. So like an investor asking for the pitch deck, I would do everything I could to not, in order to not send that. In the early stage rounds, where they’re like investing a lot in you, in the market, I found, so you’ve got to tell a great story. My grandma story which works great in the first couple rounds does not land at all in the growth rounds. When you start talking investors who are especially ones who are just focused on growth stage, it’s much more like I just want to see what are the numbers? And so that changes who you bring to a pitch. So you know these, you know in this last round I would go with our head of finance not only because like he’s great and so on top of everything but also I need them to feel safe that we are on top of our costs, our numbers, and I want them to feel trust and faith in that person because even though they are investing in me, they’re also investing in the kind of strength of that finance organization.

Roseanne: The infrastructure that you’ve built around you so that you can be the steward of $85 million dollars.

David: Yeah and they want to know how- is there somebody that I picked to run that team that actually is going to be good, somebody who understands and thinks about it the exact same way as them.

Roseanne: You figured out how to navigate it. But I guess what I would love to hear too is what investors did that really impressed you that you really liked, what did investors do that really turned you off?

David: Getting a bad investor can cripple the business. If you have a bad investor on the board, and I saw this when I was in venture. If you have a bad board member, I mean you are in a world of pain and so a criteria for us was making sure that we choose investors that are going to be great board members and everybody has, defines what that is on their own. For me a great board member is somebody who gives fantastic, who gives great advice, helps on parts of the business, is there to also help coach you, but is not somebody who wants to run the business. Because the boards I’ve seen that have somebody on like that who wants to run the business without being in the business ends up being a mess. And so, one of the things I did for each of our investors as I talked to lots of founders that they are on the boards of and asked them for the best parts of them and the worst parts of them and what shocked me was like the worst parts of them. So, I remember talking to, thinking about taking on a new investor, and she gave me a list of her founders I should talk to. And so, you always want to talk to that list, but you also want to talk to the ones who they don’t give you. I remember I called one of the ones on her list and she had fired that founder from their own company, and I was like “wait, what? “And I was like…

Roseanne: That’s like a ballsy reference.

David: That’s a very ballsy reference. And I was like, so do you like work with her? Are you on great terms with her?

David: And she was like, no, I hate her. I was like, that’s so fascinating and interesting, that a VC would give me an entrepreneur to talk to who they fired and did not get along with. After I spoke to that founder, I did not want that person on our board.

Roseanne: I think that’s like probably the right outcome for you, but I feel like, I kind of admire that because the thing is, if you fired a founder and somebody is doing background research on you is going to figure that out in like two calls, and you might as well just be upfront about it.

David: I’ve had a case where that was the case where it was also somebody who they fired, they ended up being on fantastic terms, and that investor decided to invest into their next company. So that to me was a really great reference because look, here’s a founder that was not right for but look, I still work well together. This person still respects me. This person is choosing to work with me to get somebody who I fired wants to work with me again. Something else that did impress me, you and Eric, who led our C and D. In the C, did so many… I remember for the first time, did so many small things that just showed how much you guys cared and you wanted it. We had a deadline that I had to make a call about it. It was on Thursday night or on a Friday. It was at the end of the week. And you guys drove me from the office all the way down to Menlo Park.

Roseanne: In the pouring rain.

David: In the pouring, in the pouring rain.

Roseanne: That guy was such a psycho, the driver.

David: The driver was really, really, it was so scary. And you guys moved mountains at the firm to meet on a Friday afternoon in order… that you guys can make a call to hit our timelines. Which means, and then when I got to the office, you guys had ordered pizza for everyone on the team. So now I was on it, which was such a smart move because now everyone on the team was like, “I love IVP,” I am like, “they bought you a pizza. “That was like $100, one hundred bucks for everybody on the team. But everyone on the team was like: “No. Dave, I love them”.

Roseanne: Well, because you were to get back in time for a happy hour because you guys were celebrating.

David: That’s right.

Roseanne: That’s like a hundred thousand users or students, something like that. And so, you’re like “I’m sorry. I have to be back at this time”.

David: And then you order snacks for everybody. Yeah I remember with our B round, Rick and Amit at NEA made a whole deck of how they could help us and was specifically tied to us and it was like it also just shows that they really wanted to care and I think if I’m going to work with this person for a very long time I want somebody who is like jazzed. But there is a group of investors that are sketchy, and I think one of the best things about having advisors who are stage ahead of you, they’re able to help you on it, and there’s always some new ones who don’t know. But I think we’ve had, we’ve met some. They’re just sketchy from wanting to meet at weird places, at like weird times to ones who just act like they run the fund, they can make calls on their own and put out an offer, and then you find out that they don’t have the authority to make an offer and you like have to go convince actually the person in charge and you’re like if you’re going to lie to me about this, why do I want to work with somebody like that?

Roseanne: Let’s switch gears a little bit and talk about your experience as an entrepreneur. You know you’ve been doing this for five years. Looking back, what do you wish you knew when you were starting out?

David: So much. I think one of the things, so I got an MBA and almost everybody I talked to at the time, said that MBAs can’t be great entrepreneurs. And that I think planted a seed of insecurity and doubt in me about it. What I came to realize and see is that is just a bunch of crap because it’s so much about who that person is and how you adapt and learn. There’s no way you’re going know everything you need to to be an entrepreneur, so you’re just going to have to learn and so it’s about being open to learning, your rate of learning. Second of all, every startup, if you get lucky, has the stage changes and what you need to do if the stage changes. So especially as we’ve grown, this stuff I’ve learned in MBA has become more valuable. Early on, the first stages, MBA wasn’t that helpful but now it’s incredibly helpful. So, I think it’s also about what stage you’re in. So, I wish I had less doubt early on. Number two, I had this belief that being an entrepreneur was you spend most of your time on strategy. That is not true. You spend a very small amount of time on strategy. You spend most of your time on what’s not working, because if it is working, which is the goal, then you should not be spending time on it because you know you could.

Roseanne: Move on to what’s next.

David: Move on to what’s next. If you have a great exec there who’s much better than you in that area and is going to do it, and so, you have to spend time on things that are actually not working, and so you have to be OK with that. I like that because that means I get to like my chance, like fix and change and create, but you have to be OK with that. Being an entrepreneur is really, really hard. There are, I mean, there’s just, there’s days I’ve cried. This hasn’t been good to my health. I’ve definitely put I’ve increased how much I weigh. I’ve definitely more stress. And those are some really hard and dark days. There’re also days where the high is like something you have never felt before, and your kind of own potential to have impact. And that’s like, I get chills about just saying now, that is so worth all those other days. But I didn’t realize what the low and high were going to feel like.

Roseanne: And so other than the highs, other than the highs being so good, how do you deal with lows? How do you navigate that? And also, take care of yourself in those situations?

David: I think the most underrated thing that every entrepreneur must do is have a great therapist. I found one that is amazing because we also see and realize and also have an exec coach which is great but I realized that what a therapists is, lots of the issues you can deal with at work are about people and the same people that cause you issues at work, are the ones that usually you talk about with a therapist and so the therapist actually, even though they don’t understand CAC and LTV and things like this. They actually can usually understand what’s going on at work. And the most valuable thing to me is they can usually if you get someone great, be able to explain to them what’s going on, help you predict what that person is going to do. And I found that to be amazing because now I know how the person is going to respond so I can kind of plan for it. So that I found is one fantastic thing. Two, is having friends and advisers that are a stage ahead of you, I think, is really great. Other small things I found that really help, are every night before bed now I write down three things I am grateful for, and that really helps, and I also write down in Evernote a list of really nice or great things. So these are nice things that people have said to me or really great things that happen at the company. So, whenever you’re in a dark day or a down day. I just look at that. I’m like, All right, like it’s actually going to be OK. I think one thing with founders as such as company grows, in the beginning, you were doing a lot of the hardest stuff and as you grow, your team should be doing a lot of it but your instinct, every instinct is still to work in the business instead of working on the business. And so, when you work on the business, you, it’s less about me owning CAC and more about our head of marketing, or growth, how do I help them own CAC, do as best of a job as possible. Because I’m not as deep in the weeds, as you know, that whole team is.

Roseanne: You get to a point where your company gets big enough, you can bring in these experts that understand CAC so much better than frankly you ever will, and that’s a huge boom to the company.

David: I can focus on something big that team can’t focus on or that exec can’t.

Roseanne: I’d love to talk a little bit about executive hiring and team building. I mean you’re in this hyper-growth phase, and the market is pulling your business forward so fast. How do you hire fast enough to keep up? And how do you scale culture? How do you keep what makes it special and great and magic?

David: So hard. Because your every instinct is to hire fast, but if you hire way too fast your bar will drop. There’s a risk your bar drops, or you don’t hire great people or people that fit into your culture that you want to create. I don’t think we are the masters of this at all. I think we’ve done some things right and we’ve made some big mistakes too. Some of the things that we’ve done right is, we actually adapt our process all the time because I think, because like one process might work early on, in your next phase does not work at all. So, we aren’t ever stuck on that. We hired a head of people. We hired somebody to act as that head because we were unsure if we needed ahead of people. That was one of the best moves we did, and we should have hired that person way earlier. I wish we had the person way earlier, but we’ve done things like there aren’t any assholes that work here. And so, I’ve learned that as you grow the company, which is just so interesting, is in the beginning when I would interview the person, that person would act just like they do for everybody. But as a company grows how that person acts around me is not the same. So, I realized, I can’t always judge if somebody is going to be an asshole or not because to me the person is nice. So, what we make sure in the hiring process is that at least one person interviews you, is somebody extremely junior because we want to see how you act with them and that person gets a lot of weight on the hiring process. Now all they’re trying to judge is if you’re an asshole or not. Two is in the performance. We actually do it twice a year, which most companies usually do it once a year. One, in that super high growth stage, the role changes every couple month, so you actually, I think, you need to constantly check that employ is doing a great job. But what we do in that review process is not just from your manager, everybody who works for you, and a certain amount of people who work with you across our teams also rate you. And so, we get to see like, are you a good teammate? Which I think actually plays a significant role in making sure that you don’t secretly hate people. So those are, I think, are some of the things we’ve done. Well, we’ve also done, and was new for us, when you have a high growth company there’s a lot of people who joined you extremely early on, and who are amazing and so smart and some of them can’t scale. So, you often see at high growth companies as they like, they feel like kind of purge out that group of people. I kind of hated that idea because these were people the blood and sweat for us, and I want to see if they can scale. And so, what we did, every single person in the company gets a career coach and so they have an opportunity to try to grow for that role. Now, there’s some people who do not work out and you know it hasn’t been a great fit, and they weren’t able to scale, but we’re trying to give them every opportunity to because I think there’s something great about the people who were there in the beginning because the people there, who were there the first stage, know how hard it was when you join. Now you’re like, well we are, we or our sales are, already good, we already have a bunch of instructors, but I want people in the organization “you know it was really hard to get instructors, or the first customers were so hard.” And so, I want, everything I can, you know, to give those people a chance to grow.

Roseanne: Yeah especially when those people are culture carriers.

David: Exactly.

Roseanne: Because they know what it was like. when it was hard. Not when you’re going through this fun when the market is pulling you forward. I’d love to hear a little bit about hiring mistakes that you’ve made. Where’d you get it wrong?

David: I definitely got this wrong in the beginning, I had to learn this, and I still don’t always do a great job of it. But it definitely have improved, and so I’m trying to get extremely fast about to move the person out of the organization, but I think I should be even faster at times. And I think if anything learned is to just…I’ve never once found somebody underperforming and then I push out the business and then wish I kept the person. That has never ever happened. So, I think to be even faster there. I had to learn the hard way that just because somebody is nice to me does not mean a person is a nice person. I also think there are some roles where you’re okay to hire somebody that has potential and maybe doesn’t have quite enough experience, but they’re so smart and so driven that you think they can get there. There are some roles where that risk is OK. I have, I had to learn. I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve always been a great on those things. Things we’ve done, I think I’ve been really great, we have almost every employee before they start here has to do a project. That is huge because what you realize, some will do interview well but like you aren’t hiring someone, you shouldn’t hire anyone based on their interview skills, you should hire them based on their work. So, having everybody do a piece of work, then you can see is the work good or not. And so that’s like a rule for almost every single role in the company. How do you build a company that the best employees are going to love it? And so, because if you build a company that’s for like the B players, you’re going to get all B players. So, I’ll give you an example, I won’t set what are the office hours or kind of work hours of the company like. I don’t say I need you at ten and you’re out by seven or whatever it is because if I’m an A player, I would hate that. I decide to work at six in the morning when before my kids are up. I want to go home early because my kids, and I’ll work at night, and so you have to make it for the A players. You do it for them because you want them to stay, and then you want to get the B players out.

Roseanne: This has been awesome. Thank you so much for the time and for being so candid.

Narrator: Thank you for listening to IVP’s Hyper-Growth Podcast. You can learn more about us on IVP.com or join the conversation on Twitter by tweeting @IVP.

Originally published at https://www.ivp.com on February 12, 2019.