Industry Episode with Zach Weinberg: Market Trends, Avoiding Hiring Bulls***ers, and Who Will Win In AI

30:11And so they were like entering the workforce in 2017, 18, 19. And sure, they had COVID. Boom times. Yeah, COVID was weird, right? For sure. But it's going to be interesting to watch these CEOs, the ones that have kicked the can. And I think a lot of them have kicked the can on reckoning with what the other side looks like, resetting the culture. So I guess how would you go about if you're in that situation or you recognize that your culture needs to be reset, how would you actually go about doing it? Well, I'll tell you exactly what I do. Now, these are not my – like I don't run this business that I'm going to help and fix.

30:52But I do this a lot with founders. You know, we do it through Operator, which is my little family office group. And I've done it, you know, before that just kind of for friends and whatnot. I really think like before you get to culture, before you get to all the values and all these other things that eventually you want to get to, I actually think there's like two fundamental drivers of this that you have to get to first. One is like quality of the people that you have. Like do you fundamentally actually have good people, which to me is a product of how you interview? And then two, do you have a culture of accountability?

31:27because if you have like a great, you just have good people around and you have this idea of like internal accountability, meaning like this person knows that their neck is on the line and it's like one name in the box, not five names in the box. The culture actually can like, it has this like natural ability to fix itself because smart people are held accountable. And what happens when you hold smart people accountable is they do good things. Like that's kind of my fundamental thesis of management is like 90 % of it is gritting smart people and holding them accountable. And the rest of it is like lip service and it matters, but not as much as those first two things.

32:01How do you actually ask that question of, I mean, those are, those are, I agree. I think those are interesting things, but like what, if you're thinking that, and generally you're not at a hundred or zero, yes, I have those two things or no, I don't. Right. But how do you think about actually assessing it? So the accountability one is really easy. And I do this with founders often, which is I can, you can do it. You don't need, first of all, it doesn't have to be me. And like literally anybody can do this. You go to sit down in a room and you say, for the next 12 months, what are your top five priorities in this business?

32:31And they'll have, most people will have those. You say, okay, cool. For each one of these priorities, what are the three most important projects that have to happen? Work streams, let's call them, whatever, for this like little metric that you care about to be hit. And there'll be like a revenue growth one and there'll be some like new product expansion one. Okay. Now, so now what we've got is like 15 projects. And I go, cool. For each one of those projects, who gets fired if it doesn't go well? And right there, the answer to that question, you can almost see it a lot of times in the founder's eyes because part of what they have to do is they have to think.

33:02They're like, huh, well, like that's, it's actually these two people. And like when they start to do, they start to put two people in a box and you're like, that's it right there. You can, you know, there's no accountability because the 15 most important things at your company should have one name against them. It can be the same name for a few things, But like, if you don't know this thing that you just told me in four seconds is like one of the most important things that's supposed to happen at your business and you don't know who's accountable for it, like that's a fucking problem. And I think if you just did, board members don't do this, but they should, of like, where are the names?

33:33Like you tell me all these priorities, like who is the human being who I'm going to go yell at or, you know, ask hard questions of, whatever you want to call it, if it's not going well. Now, I think if you can just do that little exercise over and over again, and by the way, you don't have to do it at the company level exclusively. You can take that same little process and go to the head of engineering and say, okay, for you, head of engineering, what are your top five priorities? And what are the 10 key projects on your team that matter? And then who is accountable for it? The second piece of that is then you go ask that person, do they know?

34:08because sometimes what you'll get is the CEO will be like, oh, you know, Jane over here is accountable. And then you ask Jane, you'll be like, Jane, did you know you're accountable for like this thing over here? And she's going to say, well, I thought it was, you're just looking for the delta between like what the management thinks and like what the actual people think. And I swear that entire process, two hours, most of it is finding time on Jane's calendar to figure out if she knows that she's responsible for this thing. Like, it's not that hard. But nobody does it. Usually that's how I just try and diagnose this stuff.

34:42And the beauty is you can do that in almost any company type, software, e-com. It could be an accounting firm for all I care. Just who's accountable for that client? That's how we do it on the culture of accountability. And you're going to find problems, but hopefully not too many. On the other side of it, usually what I look for, it's hard to evaluate existing talent because like, I don't know if you're good at this or bad at this. I don't have like the objectivity. You mean from the outside in? It's hard for you to evaluate. Yeah. Like how do I know if your head of marketing is good? Like maybe, maybe.

35:16What I look for is the interview you ran. So I'm like, all right, I know you hired this person to run marketing. Plus you have like these five job specs that are open, usually more than that. Show me the job spec. You pull the job spec. Okay. In this job spec, are there clear responsibilities that are laid out? Are there clear skills mapped to those responsibilities, right? You need to do these three things. Therefore, you need to be good at these five. And then is there a set of case interview questions like shit I'm going to test you on tied to those skills? Because most people don't do like really difficult case interviewing.

35:52Now, people are learning this over time, which is really great. but like all right if you're a marketing person if one of the things that they need to be really good at is like tailoring the marketing message by customer segment because like they're in charge of not just global marketing but product marketing cool did you test their ability to do product marketing in the interview show me the case question where you ask them for four hours to go do a bunch of work to like test that skill and most people don't have all of that lined up and so So then what happens, especially at the senior level, is that bad people who are good communicators sneak through.

36:33The bullshitters, all right? Because the bullshitters are very good at talking about all the things they're going to do and why they're good at it. And they're just really bad at actually doing those things. And you get this like crazy catch-22, which fucking kills me, which is as you get more senior, the chances of that person being a bullshitter go up. not down. Because if they've made it that far in their career, one of the things they've actually gotten really good at is bullshitting. And so until you like test their actual skill, that false positive rate at like a senior executive level, I mean, I find myself falling into this trap all the time, right?

37:11You talk to this person and they sound wonderful because they're like an amazing storyteller and you get really excited and you're like, this is definitely I'm going to be the person for this role. And then you eventually, hopefully, hand them a case question and they shut them in. Well, and that's where the skip level, even within your own organization, the people that are good bullshitters are generally very good at managing up as well. And the people underneath them are the ones that will know that they're full of shit. And it's hard to get those people to say that their boss is full of shit.

37:48But you can tease it out, right? And you can tell what they're not saying. And on the hiring process thing, one of the things I find interesting or helpful is you really need someone that's not incented to get the hire through in a very meaningful way to look at the candidates as they come in and the body and the totality of the interview process and be able to veto them. because we didn't let our flat iron to to a very for a very long time we did not let our hiring managers independently hire somebody because we wanted a third-party review of the interview and the case that they did you have to be because that person and it's it's human bias and i'm victim to of it and and i'm sure you are like it's you've been you've been looking at all the candidates and you've calibrated against all these people you've met and you've kind of concluded hey, maybe this is the universe that's out there of people and what's good.

38:50And we need this role. And so let's just take a chance on the 60 % that this works out and the 40 % it doesn't. That feels a worthwhile calibration. And someone that's removed from it can have the ability, and generally it's good if it's a founder from the outside in, like a co-founder that can kind of put a bullet in that process. But they're the ones that can be objective and say, no, we're not going forward with this. We have to keep banging our head against the wall. And it's so hard to look the person in the eye who has got the person to the finish line and they're ready. But at the end of the day, they know.

39:24You look at them and you give them and they will make their pleas for it. But they know that it's not the caliber of person that you really want to bring into the organization because all those things spread, right? And lowering the bar there will allow it to spread throughout. Yeah. The bad false positive hire is like, one of the worst things possible for any company. My hope is like, if you have a culture of accountability, it eventually weeds the bad people out. And then if you have a really good culture of case-based interviewing, testing the actual skills in this person in a problem they have not seen before, that's the most important part.

40:04You have to give them a problem they haven't seen and force them to start from scratch and do real work. Eventually, if you just do those two things, you kind of end up in a pretty good spot because you're getting better people in and then you're holding accountable the better people and so all of a sudden like a lot of the riffraff slowly will like work its way out it's not a perfect system but it's pretty good and so a lot of like what i try my best when talking to founders is like i'm not i can't write your values i don't know how you you're meeting culture i don't any of this stuff but like i bet you if you just work on these two things, everything else is going to get significantly easier.

40:44And honestly, that's what I end up, I find myself spending time with founders on is mostly like those two little tricks. Hey, Logan jumping in here, just with a brief request, if you're enjoying this episode, or you have a favorite episode, would love for you to share that with anyone that you think would benefit from it. Anyone that is trying to be a better founder, a better operator, a better board member, a better investor. We'd love for you to share any episode that you think makes sense with them. We're trying to get the word out, continue to share with people in the ecosystem. And so that would be really, really helpful.

41:18Now back to our conversation. You've gotten yelled at on Twitter before for espousing the case interview and that you're really just trying to get free labor from people or whatever, that they want jobs and you're making them do work. But one of the questions I actually have outside of exploitative labor tactics to get information and your ability to do that. Well, can I just say one thing about that one? It's like, OK, if they're really good at what they do and then we get their work, then we hire them. Why do I want the bad person's free? I don't want their shitty case study. Oh, totally. Didn't do a good job.

41:56And generally the case actually isn't overly – I mean it can be constructive to the business. But like, you know, it also could be a post or like a, you know, something that that you looked at. We do case interviews and they're generally something that we like looked at nine months ago. And it's not like we're going to go back and relitigate if we could have done the deal or not. It's. And also, by the way, like if you want to get paid to interview, don't take the interview. Yeah, just don't do it. Yeah. There's actually there's actually a decent solve for this. If you don't want to if you don't want the job, you actually don't have to do the case.

42:28It's called freedom of thought. And I'm not forcing you to interview here. Like, that one bothers me. One of the things that it indexes towards to some extent is in how you calibrate the people that have had the experience versus the people that are maybe high upside and looking at the person that maybe is in a slightly adjacent industry or job or responsibility, but they're super high upside because like you're grading on a curve for them versus is the person that's been there, done that going to plug in and maybe they're more capped in their competency in some ways, but, uh, but, but their case might look better because they've actually done the literal job before.

43:11How do you think about those two and how you grade on that scale or that curve? I think a lot comes down to proper case design, which is not a sexy problem to work on. And it's really annoying and tedious to do it, but you have to think really deeply about for this job, and not just like by function, but by level, right? Is it a VP job or a director job or an entry level job? Is this case actually testing the thing I care the most about? Because there are some jobs where, you know, experience is important, but really what I want is like intelligence, work ethic, attention to detail. And I'm willing to take a risk on like a semi-inexperienced person who's just like really fucking smart.

43:54And so those are the high upside. Generally, those are the needle moving things in a business, right? You don't want to do that with a GC. Yeah. I mean, I'll give you an example of this actually from my own experience. But when we were hiring product managers at Flatiron and I ran the product team on a day-to-day basis, one of the biggest challenges in product management in healthcare in our little weird world is the number of people who had any material experience doing this was like four. and so you just there's no and they were all 90 years old or whatever just because the industry was stodgy and so you had to take chances on people outside like it was the first tech healthcare company that was trying to be innovative certainly in new york right i have to imagine yeah could you imagine go to go to recruiter and be like okay i need software product managers with experience in enterprise oncology and they're like i don't that's there's no one And we knew that going in, so we had to think through, all right, well, I'm not going to get the perfect person here.

44:59So what do I actually care about? Do I care about their software skills? Do I care about their feature design skills? Or do I care about their strategy chops? And we actually ended up where, for me at least, what I really cared about was their ability to do strategy and to be customer-facing. I didn't care as much about their technical skills because I felt like our engineering team was really, really good and that they would be able to bridge the gap. And so a lot of our interviews were about, like, can you think through the strategy of the product? And we designed the cases that way. And, you know, interestingly enough, like the guy who ended up being our head of product, kind of like my number two in the pharma business, had zero product management experience before we hired him.

45:41But he was just exceptionally bright. and he had worked at Bain before this and had done, you know, real consulting style thinking. And I know everybody loves Bain or whatever, but they teach you, I think, to think critically. I just think you have to tie it to the job. Whereas like, you know, if you're hiring somebody to go take over your 200 person engineering team, yeah, you probably need somebody who's like managed at least 50 to 100 engineers before. And so you want to test a little bit more of like those skills. And we just spend a lot of time, and I do this now at CurieBio, and honestly, really, my co-founder does this.

46:19I kind of say this is important, but he's really the one that does it, of just, like, really thinking through the cases. And we spend a lot of time, like, debating, like, is this case going to give us the answer we want to see? Or is it, like, only semi-predictive? And we tweak the cases quite a bit. So you customize a case for like each role you need to hire for in some way, like trying to solve for this specific problem. It's pretty tedious to do it. But yeah, we effectively have like one case per job. And, you know, within sometimes these two jobs are very similar. So we use the same case for both of them.

47:02But, you know, I'll give you an example at Curie. I have other examples that are not biotech, but so much of what we look for in much of our scientific hiring is the ability to look at a semi-formed therapeutic idea and really think about, is this interesting? Could it eventually be a drug that matters? And how can I actually take this idea and make it better? because so much of like what people that are really good in drug discovery are actually really good at is taking these kernels of really interesting insights and making, we call it elevating them, but kind of like making them better. And I was like, oh, this is really interesting, but what if you pointed it over here and tweak these three things?

47:47That was a very, very complicated skill because you have to be, you know, deeply scientific in nature and biology and chemistry and thinking all the way through to the product. So it's not easy. And a lot of people can talk about it, but doing it is hard. So we build, we have a case-driven way of evaluating people's skills in doing this. Honestly, by giving them somewhat real examples of companies, I mean, we blind them, but of companies that we've seen that we thought were interesting and we could make them better, ones that we didn't think. and we give very little direction. We just kind of share the materials and basically say like, go.

48:32And the response variability is really, really high because some people look at this and have no idea what to do, which is great because you kind of weed them out. And then you have some folks who's like, oh, I know how to do this. And then you look at the answers, it's not great. And then there's some people who really just thrive in this because they're like, oh, this one's great. Here's the tweaks we're going to make. And they come back with like pretty detailed thinking and they've called experts, they've done a bunch of work. And it's a wonderful case because it really weeds out the people in the skill set that matters for the job.

49:01But it took us a while to like work through this case and to tweak it and be like, oh, let's use this company and not that company. And honestly, again, my co-founders do this now. I don't do it day to day, but like they're still tweaking the case. I know they're still tweaking the case because I see, you know, changes to it. And that's just for like one job. Are you locking people in a room for this or are you giving them like a take home homework on it? We do take home because we want to see people's ability to do deep work. And I find it's very hard to see if you can test someone's deep work in an hour.

49:41So our cases are hard and they take time. And like for the free labor folks, you know, like, yeah, basically. uh and you know some some people can spend 10 plus hours sometimes on this stuff but you know that's what we're looking for we're looking for the people who are are excited to do this work i've actually found the people who are very good at the job they don't care that it took 10 hours because actually like doing it you know and they get it's helpful it actually weeds out the people who don't want to do this job um but yeah it's a take it's mostly a take home and then some we do a take home and then we do a in-person review.

50:21Yeah. Articulation of it. I always worry a little bit about the take home, especially on our side when we're doing like deal specific things, because there's answers you can go get from people in the industry on. Obviously, we try not to have our perspective informed by the outcome in some way. And so we pick a business. Generally, that's it in near enough time that we thought about it that there isn't a clear answer. But other people will know the company and will have good soft spots to probe on. And so it's something that we've gone back and forth thinking about. Right now, we do take home as well.

50:56And then we do the same thing where someone comes in and presents it to us. Yeah, because then you can poke at it a little bit. How did you get to this answer? It's the iceberg and what's underneath it, right? You see the depth. If you just keep asking the question of like, you know, one click below, you can't fake that, right? You can't fake if you really did the went above and beyond to figure it out or if you mailed it in on it. And I agree with your perspective of like, you have to enjoy the process or the inputs into all this stuff because only rarely does, do you get to do the really strategic, interesting thing, which in my world is making an investment, I guess yours as well.

51:39But like the point at which you get to do that is so rare. And so if you only enjoy when you're actually doing it or the outputs, it's going to be hard to do the job at all. The other thing to remember is like you've got to have a senior group of people, whether it's the founders or the senior executives who spend the time on this stuff and care about it and, you know, think deeply about the hiring process and the hiring philosophy and, you know, how we're going to test these skills. and they don't poo-poo it. The thing that a lot of people, what I think it takes them a little bit of time to buy into is this idea that like everyone sucks at interviewing.

52:18Everybody sucks at it. I suck at it. If you just like ask a bunch of random questions and you think you're getting like a predictive answer on somebody, no, there's no chance. You know, like maybe you get lucky sometimes and you know, this thing is predictive of that, but the error rate on that is going to be extremely high. Why do you think that is? because your questions aren't actually predictive of that person's success in the job they're like pseudo predictive you know they're like they have some predictive value but there's so many places where like yeah they would get it but you missed that you didn't test this thing you're really testing their skills you're kind of like asking them to regurgitate history and the past and you're going to miss things because you know you didn't do like an actual rigorous assessment of the job it's kind of like would you would you hire people think about this way Would you hire a pilot to fly your plane without ever testing them flying the plane?

53:13I would not. Right, exactly. And so like to me, that's kind of like, okay, so you're going to hire this person to do this job, but you really only asked about their history of flying planes and how they felt during the flight or whatever. But you didn't like put them in the fucking simulator and see if they can do it. Like I always like the airline ones because this is like giant fear of death. That's also how I evaluate my politicians. I'm like, would I want this person flying my plane? Like, do I believe that they would actually like figure out how to do this? And like, Or would they question the merits of plane?

53:45And if the plane is, yeah, what, what, what planes incentives are. The other one I like is like, if this person told you the plane was safe and then you had to get in the plane, would you do it? And it's an interesting disqualifying thing. That's, that's the point that I find most helpful in the interview process. When I'm generally meeting with people, it's at some point at which it's qualified in some way. And I find my best skill in it is the clarity of do after all this input. And it sort of goes back to the earlier point about the person with the veto at the end of the day. But like I didn't do a lot of the hard work at times that got the person in the funnel.

54:32But I can assess if we're going to want this person to be around for an extended period of time or if we could see them in the career for a while. And at some point, especially when you're going through all the reps of interviewing people, you can lose the forest through the trees. And it does take the clarity of the outside perspective of someone coming in and just kind of intuiting, does this person fit in with the culture or the work style of the people? it's so hard like you know even if you spend all this time it's still so i'll give you an example of this stupid mistake we made at flat iron i have an endless supply of these uh but like we were i'm not gonna i don't want to throw the guy under the bus but like we were hiring for a senior finance role let's call it uh and not not our cfo who got us through that because jason's awesome this is before his time um and one of the things you obviously want like a pretty senior your finest person to be able to do is to build your like FP &A model, right?

55:35They want to forecast this business, like figure out how, and usually the way I would suggest interviewing like that type of person is just hand them open Excel and say, go. And, you know, you get to give them some data. You get to give them some of the basics, basic assumptions, but like, can they actually like build a model? Can they think through assumptions? And a lot of people don't want to do that because it takes time. But to me, you're hiring somebody you're going to pay them$500 ,000 a year. Like they should probably know how to do that. or at least reasonably know how to get through it.

56:03And we interviewed this guy and he comes back and built this beautiful model. It wasn't like fully right because he kind of did it in isolation just by himself, but it was pretty good. And what we missed because we didn't test for it was he was completely incapable of like interacting with other functional leaders and like gathering their input and tweaking them up. He could like do it in isolation, But once you put them in a cross-functional environment, it was not good. Just like couldn't weird human stuff, I guess. But we didn't test that. And so because we told them to do the model in isolation.

56:41And so I guess that's kind of like why this is so hard, because even though I thought we had really thought about this case question, I thought it was hard and it's not easy to do a model, especially in our old business, not easy business. But we missed that other piece of like that cross-functional interaction. And that's what blew them up. and we had to get rid of them. And it was like a huge hoopla. It was a massive tax on our time. Even after you do all of this, you can still fuck it up at the end. Yeah, well, and there's a number of these cross-functional roles that it requires perspective on a bunch of different functional areas of the business.

57:18And I think about product or product marketing or a bunch of these different areas that end up looking into sales and marketing and engineering and have a bunch of different considerations. And then the CEO cares about them as well because it's the positioning of the company externally or whatever it is. And oftentimes you're best served by having people that grew up in the organization in some way because they have the credibility to go to these different departments and say, know who actually knows how to get something done. Or they remember when this person was hired in the process and they were on the interview panel or whatever, and they have the credibility to sit with that person and say, hey, this is a real high priority.

58:00I'm going to have to go back to the CEO with this. I really need this faster. And when you come in from the outside, sometimes it's just hard to build that credibility. And especially in remote culture where you're coming in and you just don't have the interfacing with people on a day-to-day basis. And so how do you build that nexus of credibility with a bunch of different cross-functional areas of the business? It's just it's really hard. And I've seen a lot of companies now. They're trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube from the remote work thing. And they're crawl, walking, running back into it because of the cross-functional element of like working together.

58:39And that's one of the things I forget if I've said this before, but like everyone thinks they're more productive at home unless you have young kids running around and screaming or whatever. Or like your space is way too small to to to be able to work at home. But otherwise, every single person thinks they're more productive at home. You know who doesn't have more productivity is the organization. And you know what we measure and what matters is the organizational productivity, not your ability to bang through emails. And so if it's harder to work in a collaborative environment, that's actually not the right answer for an organization.

59:12It might be for you. That's great. You can get your work done and you're not bothered by people stepping into your office. But that's not the output the org is solving for, which I think people kind of lose when they get so on the island of like, no, I'm more productive at home. Yeah, I think people are better at doing work they understand at home because you kind of get in a rhythm. But you're not great at designing what work you should be doing in the first place and like making material big decisions and changes that require to be. It's kind of like, are you in thinking mode or are you in doing mode?

59:46And yeah, I agree doing mode is better at home, but like thinking mode is objectively worse. And you got to normally have to do both of those things at some point. I think I don't remember if I was on, we said this on one of the old podcasts, but we went to this model at Curie where we meet in person every six weeks to do the thinking and the planning and the culture work. And then we go home and then we do it again. And then we go home and we do it like roughly eight times a year. Now that is expensive travel and literally like the actual dollar spent traveling and hotel and all that other stuff.

1:00:18But being, having that like kind of balance of the two has, has, has done really, really well. It's probably cheaper than an office or comparable to an office, but you're opening up a different caliber of exec. You're not being constrained by location to the people you can hire, which at the end of the day, I think once upon a time, the like simple way of thinking of remote work was like, oh, there's cost savings on office space and you open up some talent pool maybe in some way or like offshoring was just like, oh, it's actually cheaper to hire people overseas than it is in the United States.

1:00:53But leaning into the caliber of people that you can actually get within the org and not being constrained by location is obviously the big unlock. The people unwilling to acknowledge that there were trade-offs. And I think we saw a lot of these over the course of the last couple of years. There just are like every single decision you make has two sides of a coin. And there's tradeoffs associated with this. And clearly expense or the willingness to lean in to travel on your side is like a tradeoff that you guys are willing to make with all of it. And there's probably some tooling you do or some process related stuff that you do that are just like a tradeoff for the benefit, which is fine.

1:01:29It doesn't mean remote work is bad. It actually means it's probably a good thing. You've just come up with a construct by which to make it work. I mean, you made one point, which I totally agree with, which is like, man, it is hard in this environment to be an outside hired, let's call it VP, SVP, with tens or hundreds of people that you've never met before doing things you haven't seen before to be effective and to like get that to work when everybody's working from home. and like there isn't that cohesive walk around like just coming in from the outside i gotta think the time it takes for someone to be effective is way longer the hit rates are lower it's part of why interviewing and having like a really good bench of whatever director vp level people in terms of skill is so valuable because you can work them up you know and you can to your point you can promote from within but you know like hiring in this the new cto after you've made 200 engineering hires like holy shit i don't know that is not a job i would like to take that sounds horrible it's a risky organ rejection thing too uh and it's just like it just it's so devastating to the business having to unwind back to your example of the illustrative finance person that went in and did that from flat iron like it's it's a real there's so many downstream implications with it.

1:02:54And it's one reason that I always go back to references and just getting to people that don't have incentives to say anything but the honest answer to you and really listening to what they say. Because no one, sure, maybe you happen to have the serendipitous connection to someone that they worked with a person and they have great information around it. But the truth the truth often can be somewhat muddled or people's just bias isn't to say bad things about a former co-worker. So really drilling into the specifics of like, hey, did they do this project in totality? And coming back to them and seeing if they say the same thing.

1:03:38Or is this one of the top 10 % of people you've ever worked with? And hearing what they say around it. And the answers of what you can tease out a lot of things about what they're not saying by asking very specific questions, forcing them to rank, forcing them to tie back accountability on individual projects. It doesn't allow them to skirt the, oh, they were a great coworker. They were nice. They did a good job, which is everyone's kind of biased to go to. So I think references are critical. And we have like a reference guide. you have to ask this, then ask this, then try and guide people through it.

1:04:17I think maybe one positive, one negative. I think you can get weird interpersonal shit you can find in a reference. Is that positive or negative? That's a positive of the reference. You can find it. It's probably pretty reliable and consistent when people are like, I don't know, they can't control their temper or they don't work well in groups or they're like sweat under pressure and they lash out. Those kind of like weird interpersonal tics, which tend to hold a lot of like very smart people back because no one wants to work with them. I do think you can find those in references. I am more skeptical that you can find skill quality.

1:05:01Like how good are they actually at this, whatever, at this thing in a reference? Because there's one little thing that always bugged me about them, which is why do I think that the person I'm calling to do this reference is good at their job. And like, why don't I, you know, I'm going to call Joe over here about Mike, but like, what if Joe sucks? And then his quality bar isn't that high. So he's saying this is the best person he's ever worked with. And that might actually be true because he's worked with a lot of really bad people, you know, and so like, is that a bar for me? And I just, I remain skeptical of like most people's bar.

1:05:37Now, if you're coming out of like an amazing organization that like is very, you know, I trust like McKinsey does very, the people who are at McKinsey are like very good at giving references because they do a lot of performance review stuff. I trust that. Yeah. And it's also, I mean, you have to calibrate the, what their definition of success is or like who else has, when we're talking to investment banks about their analysts and we're, we draw on prior people that we know have been successful from their organization and say, hey, is this person on par? Are they below? Are they the same? Well, that's good because you have a benchmark to compare them to that you know, that you understand.

1:06:18But imagine they came out. They know what success has looked like coming through their doors before, which is obviously different than a random company that won't have the same expectations around what success looks like. But it's still informative. Again, it's an informative disqualifying thing in what you hear, not necessarily an affirmation thing to the positive. You do need to throw salt on what you end up hearing back. Yeah, that's probably right. Like you can probably get somebody out, but I don't know if the reference gets them in. You're almost like you're like looking for a reason to disqualify mostly.

1:06:56And we've definitely, in every job I've ever had, found stuff here and there on some people. And sometimes you look at it and you're like, okay, I knew this going in and I'm okay taking that weird interpersonal risk. And sometimes, you know, you don't. But I go back to like, if I want to know if you're going to be good at this job, I should just make you do it. Or as close to it as humanly possible. You know, I remember back in the day, I think it was the Stripe guys would always talk about like the engineers that they were recruiting would come like work for a day or something like that. And like, how logistically they pulled that off.

1:07:35I don't know. But, you know, yeah, that would be awesome if you could spend a day with everybody testing them before you like made a made a real hire. Maybe they take like a PTO day and you pay them as a consultant or something. But that's been hard, especially for senior people to do. So we just go back to the cases. It's not it's not easy. You add in a remote thing, you add in the distance where culture is like, yeah, this it sucks to be like in many cases to be a founder that has to retool. because you have so much stuff you have to fix all at the same time. And like, it kind of means you have to do it.

1:08:12You just have to like lay out the plan and pray. You have a few people on your team who are capable of helping you. And not to like always, you know, talk up my Curie co-founders, but like, it's just so much easier when you have like a team of people, that are just all good in various ways. That's why I spent so much time before we started this making sure the founding team was exceptional and gave a lot of generous offers and things like that. Because at Flatiron, at least with me and Nat, there were two of us who could run pretty fast. At Korea, we have four. And each one independently can do their own thing and be very effective.

1:08:54And so it's just so much easier for us to do multiple things at once. For the solo founders, the ones who's like started this company on their own and they don't really have like a number two or a three they trust or rely on that feels very hard and what what's the latest uh with with curie like how far into it i guess we haven't caught up since we had dinner or whatever a couple weeks ago or it's great man we um you know we almost 50 full-time people now uh it's mostly very senior drug discovery scientists, I'd say the team, what we really are good at is helping take early stage therapeutic ideas and making them better and giving them like a higher chance of success and wasting less money and therefore more founder ownership because you make fewer mistakes and you dilute yourself.

1:09:45You know, we kind of talk about like hit the first milestone in one round. Yeah. And it worked. Yes. Yeah. Because, you know, it's, it's not rocket science. Why hiring some of the best drug discovery scientists in the world centrally, and then kind of like fractionally staffing out, if you will, to smaller portfolio companies, I think of it as like using people at the top of their license, you know, like that six hour period for this person on our team is worth half the year of their salary. There's some things just exceptional at, and that's kind of been the thesis from the beginning is, you know, centralize some of the best talent in the world, but then allow individual startups to tap into that central expertise five hours over here, 10 hours over here, you know, and that's how you maximize everyone's value.

1:10:36That's what we do. Well, I assume there aren't too many biotech or biology executives or, sorry, academics that are thinking about starting companies. But if there's, I know there's always a fundraising event on the horizon. So, yeah, I guess if institutional limited partners want to reach out to me and I can pass along to you, I'm sure that's the biggest request or consideration. We're basically there, which is good for this new fund we'll announce soon. And yeah, we're at the finish line. We have like, you know, half the first fund deployed, about like roughly, you call it 15 portfolio companies, 50 people now.

1:11:19It's fun. It's fun to watch like the thesis actually play out. It always made sense. It's a, it's a interesting, I mean, YC for biotech or whatever is my always little simple pitch of it. I think there's a lot of things you can do uniquely that is different than Y Combinator. And I like, you know, I like doing for me, like some of the software founder discussions and meetings and this kind of stuff we're talking about, you know, on the side, really in my free time and, you know, some hours every week. Honestly, because there's a lot of stuff you can learn from how like tech people think and work and some of the technologies that you can apply.

1:11:58There's really good learning between the two. It's not always perfect, but I think like being able to traverse both of those worlds is valuable. um so i i enjoy it and you know i do basically like any from our family office like anything we invest in you know if somebody wants to talk to me like all right here's my cell phone number let's just like quickly chat but it comes it's funny right like people think you're an angel investing you talk about like business strategy and all this other stuff and i don't do any of that it's always people stuff culture hiring exact fighting whatever it's like um like a psychiatrist.

1:12:37It's an interesting thing where we can always ask any successful CEO, executive about just simple operating principles around finding product market fit on hiring people, firing people. When your company has outgrown someone in a particular seat, how do you manage them out with empathy? There's a handful of things that are just always interesting. and everyone finds help in. You can go back. I was talking about sales execs. I was talking to one of my friends today who runs communities for a bunch of different functional leaders. And he said his best attended thing always is quota comp planning for sales executives.

1:13:27And he's like, it's evergreen. Everyone wants to hear it within sales. It's like one of these things that we could talk to ad nauseum about and people won't get enough of it. And I think, I mean, it always gets, these fundamental things get to like, in a weird way, if you zoom out, just human nature and how we interact with one another. And there's so many lessons to be learned from like economic incentives on how salespeople act or organizational considerations and cross-functional interactions. Like so many of these things are just like trying to figure out the weirdness that is humans or how they operate.

1:14:04And I think people are just perpetually fascinated by like all the different org designs or considerations or HR things that, you know, a bunch of self-interested people will create or need to deal with. This is why all the big company CEOs and I do not envy their job and have like tens of thousands of employees like so excited about AI and whatever because they're like, I can get rid of people. Like I don't have to deal with these humans. I can use fewer humans for this. I bet you were going to say they were distracted from HR and selling, which is hiring and selling, no matter how high up you get in any organization, that ends up being your job at the end of the day are those two things.

1:14:43So I thought you were going to say AI gives them a mental distraction to go focus on. But yes, getting rid of people, I guess it does that as well. It is just cognitive overload. And it's not, everyone's always angry at you. It doesn't matter what you did. Someone's got a problem. And that's why the job is hard. That's why they get paid but yeah i do i literally i mean with a few exceptions i think i've i don't think i've ever met a like growth stage founder who's like yeah i wake up in the morning i'm like super pumped to work on all these human problems there's a lot my day it's a great day i've got i've got a lot of one-on-ones over the course of the next 12 hours and it's going to be it's going to be awesome i'm really excited about that yeah and then when i get back to my laptop something will have broken and a customer is angry.

1:15:30That's right. Oh, by the way, these two executives are fighting and they don't get along anymore, but they're both important. All the fun stuff of running a startup. Well, Zach, thanks for doing this. Fun to catch up. Appreciate it. Anytime. All right. Thank you for making it all the way through this episode with Zach Weinberg. Really appreciate you listening to the show. If you enjoyed our conversation, please share with anyone else that you think might find it beneficial. We look forward to seeing you next week when we're back to our regularly scheduled programming with a wonderful CEO of a super exciting company.