The Art of Company Building & Team Philosophy

The world is changing so quickly now that we don't necessarily know what we're going to need to build tomorrow. And the only thing you can build today if you don't know what you need to build tomorrow is a team that can build anything. [Music] So right now, what does your day-to-day look like as a chief product officer? I mean, it's a typical answer was mostly meetings. Um, yeah, I guess I know.

There was a meeting on my calendar that was like, "You're recording a live podcast." That'll be live. Come on now. Yeah. So, so we mostly I think there's kind of three big big pillars. One is uh strategy and direction and alignment and and kind of decision-m. We run we have a couple of rituals like every week we do what we call EPD review which is a a review meeting where anyone can kind of sign up and help get decisions made. We have a couple other rituals. I do like a Q&A every week and we do um these fireside chats Friday. My favorite

ritual is we do demo days every Friday at 8:00 a.m. Pacific we do demo days and it's my it's my favorite meeting not of the week not of my time at Verscell. It's my favorite meeting I've ever attended and we do it every week. Nice. And it's just anybody can sign up. Anyone from across the company can sign up just present anything you worked on that you want to you want to share with the company. So anyway, that's kind of one piece is like strategy alignment and shared rituals. Another piece is just supporting the team. Um you know I I

meet with as much of the team as possible very regularly and just try to help unblock and provide clarity and etc. And then the last piece is hiring. Uh we're hiring at Verscell. uh helping to build and grow the organization. One of the things I I repeated adnauseium to anybody who will listen is the world is changing so quickly now that we don't necessarily know what we're going to need to build tomorrow. And the only thing you can build today if you don't know what you need to build

tomorrow is a team that can build anything. Right? So, we're building up this team that can really flex and and move into whatever different area we need to. Um, and I I call us lowercase a agile. Not agile philosophy, but just like we're really really agile. We move from thing to thing. Yeah. We we we move very fast here. Man, I was at Facebook during the move fast and break thing these days. I thought we move fast. Moves so much faster than Facebook ever moved in my time there.

Early days might have might have been faster, but yeah, we moved really fast. Yeah. But uh it's a different scale of organization. But you are growing very fast, right? Uh Versell has grew drastically over the past two years. I think in terms of number of employees, I think um we're growing, but we're not growing that quickly. Uh we're around 600 employees total. Interestingly, we're kind of globally distributed. I think during uh very heavy growth phases during uh COVID, we kind of hired anybody wherever they were and we're like the world might be like

this forever. Yeah. These days, I think we really want teams to be kind of at least time zone aligned or teams to be ideally colloccated. So, if you can have a self-contained team either in San Francisco or New York or Berlin, it's much better for the sort of like the satisfaction and health and productivity of the individual team because the collaboration really benefits from when I can be like, "Hey, look at my laptop. This is this. Try it out yourself." Rather than being on a meeting and be like, "All right, let me share my screen. Can you guys see that? Now I got to restart

my browser. Oh, wait. Hold on. Let me close Arc and open Chrome. It's worse. You have to like schedule the time when you can just jam on something. And so, you know, I'm not an RTO uh zealot. But I really do believe in kind of colllocated teams. Yeah. And and sort of Yeah, that's what we're going to do. But we're we're growing um very thoughtfully and very intentionally now. Um whereas I think a couple years ago I mean maybe it was this uh zero interest era uh you know growth at any