[Highlight] Shishir Mehrotra (Superhuman CEO) on Careers at Big Tech vs. Startups

0:00Hey, Ben Kesnoka here, co-founder and general partner at Village Global, a network-native venture firm. What you're about to hear is a clip from a longer conversation. If you'd like to listen to the full-length version, find the link in the description. And of course, subscribe so you don't miss the next one. Enjoy.

0:21Most people think Silicon Valley is like 10 ,000 different companies, but it's really not. It's actually two companies. One's called Silicon Valley Inc. and one's called Google Inc. And they're each like different government systems. So Google Inc. is a benevolent dictatorship, and Silicon Valley Inc. is a capitalist democracy. And they have the pros and cons of each system. So what's the biggest pro of a benevolent dictatorship? You get clear decision-making lines. So in practice, that may not feel like clear decision-making lines. They gave this analogy of it's kind of like imagine you were trying to get bread.

1:02So sometimes when you're sitting inside Google Inc., it can feel like you're sitting in one bread line, then another bread line, then another bread line, then another bread line. Just with your cup out. Exactly. It's an Oliver twist. At the end of the 20 bread lines, you will get an answer. There is a path to get an answer, and somebody tells you you get bread or you don't get bread. The people inside Google Inc. look out at the people inside Silicon Valley Inc., and they look out and say, look at these people running around with their heads cut off. They're all conflicting with each other. They've got, you know, like they were putting three coffee shops in the same corner.

1:35Like, why do they do that? They should have a meeting, one coffee shop. Like, that's the obvious thing to do. The people sitting inside of Silicon Valley, Inc., look up at the people inside Google, Inc., and they're sort of up in this big window, and they look like they're in the bullet bureau, and they all have, they don't exactly know how they got there, and they're kind of wondering, what do those people do, and how do they stay? And the people up there have all realized the secret. And this is the punchline of the analogy. Like I said, it's not very positive for Google. But the punchline of the analogy is all the people sitting up there have realized the one secret to staying in that Politburo is create one more breadline.

2:13And you get to stay. And it was like, this person tells me this. And there's a lot of implications in that. So one implication that is when you join a bigger company, you're going to learn a set of skills that are very company specific. And there's nothing really that wrong about it. If I think about I had a good run at Google, a lot of the things that made that work were things that actually don't transfer anywhere else. It's very specific to that place. It also means when you're joining Silicon Valley, Inc., you're joining this mass of companies where the way they move around looks disorganized the way that, like, if you looked at the United States, it looks disorganized, but it's actually quite efficient.

2:59And it's like, you know, if this one doesn't work, you sort of move to this other one. No central planner comes and tells you that, hey, your project is shutting down and moving your people over here. It's not really how it works. More like you just sort of move between these things. So just, yeah, I think it's a good point. I hadn't thought about that because we've all, probably all of us who've tried to recruit folks into organizations in the Valley often have to counter position against big tech. Yeah. And the idea that, hey, you could go join Google or, you know, at this point, maybe even OpenAI, Anthropic, whatever, you will learn a set of things specific to that company.

3:27Nothing wrong with that, but don't overestimate the transferability if you decide you don't like that job. Whereas come join our startup, it may or may not work out, but you'll leave with a set of skills and experiences that are highly transferable, including to starting your own company someday if that's what you want to do next. That's right. And I think they're just a different set of skills. And what it leads to is the end of what I normally tell people is joining one of those companies is a many-year commitment. Because you're not going to really understand how the bread lines work in the first year, two years, three years.

3:54And so if your view is like, I'll go there for a year, I'll build something cool, and I'll go somewhere else, you're completely deceiving yourself. That's not how it works. Like, you go there, you learn, and then four or five years in, now you're able to have a real impact. And the chances that you're going to actually switch after that point is unlikely. And they have natural positive feedback loops. So that's a little bit of how I counterposition. Any other hiring-related questions? We're going to switch topics in a sec. But yeah, go for it, Anthony. Yeah, here's... And we'll just run the mic to you, Eric.

4:24Again, hustle over, please. It's right there. What are your thoughts on using recruitment firms versus running the process in-house?

4:40I think recruitment firms, well, first off, I'd say in a lot of cases, your investors have recruitment firms that can be really helpful. I think there's a couple of things recruitment firms can do that are really helpful and some that I think are not that helpful. I think recruitment firms that source out of a pool that you're unlikely to be able to source from yourself, I think that's incredibly helpful. For the more junior employees, that often is things like, we made very heavy use of, our primary investors were Greylock and General Catalyst. Both of them did college recruiting in a way that we would never do.

5:15They put feet on the ground at every college. There's no way we're going to hire two people from colleges every year. There's no way we would sit at every college and do that. So that's a good example in my mind of they're sourcing a pool that you couldn't source. At the other extreme is executives, and there are executive recruiters who sort of rotate enough through a market that they have a pulse on people that you may not know would be looking and can get you access in a unique way. I think those can be pretty effective. I think some people hire recruiting firms to run a good recruiting process, and I think that's very ineffective.

5:55I think you have to be very good at, you know, running, you're running your own process of how do you, how do you run your loops? How do you make decisions? What does run your own, what does a world-class recruiting process look like if you own and operate it yourself? Oh, gosh. I mean, pricing is part of the product. Recruiting is part of the product. I mean, I think this is a, every company has done it differently that I've seen. How do you do it at Grammar? Yeah. I mean, I think the, there's a couple choices you make in that that are, that, that end up being very important. I think if I had to name a few, probably the most important first one is who's the decision maker on hiring.

6:32And each company I've worked at has done that a little bit differently. At Microsoft, there was a role called the ASAP, the as appropriate. So as a person who was not in the direct chain of command of that person that would do the last interview and make the final hiring decision, they could override or they could in either direction. At Google, it was all done by committee. and it was intentionally a committee of people that were not involved. But in all, in Amazon, they use a tool called bar raisers that do something similar. But I think the philosophy of don't allow the person who's most desperate to add someone to their team be the decision maker on the person, I think is a pretty important philosophy.

7:12Another one that's pretty important to me is what I call, actually, maybe I should have stacked them differently. For me, the most important thing is I think companies that do great recruiting do great reference checking. I'm a pretty believer in do every front door reference check you can, but back door reference checks are a good idea too. There's a way to do them without upsetting the world. But I think the idea that in small 30 minute slices you can understand better how this person is going to work than people that work with them for the last five years is like sort of misunderstanding how people actually operate.

7:49Thanks so much for listening to the Village Global podcast. You can check us out online at villageglobal.vc. We'd love to hear from you, your feedback, your ideas, your inspirations. You can email us at hello at villageglobal.vc.