MGMT Boston - The Endeca Effect - Special Report (3/5)
The Endeca Effect - People
Good people that work well together is a fundamental necessity in startups. Finding ways for them to grow to keep them together long enough to find success is even more important! One way to do that is to ask unreasonable things of them. The Special Operations group was another place where Endeca could bring in talented folks they didn’t necessarily have a place for yet and keep them busy before reorganizations or strategic repositionings as the company grew.
It’s not enough to just be smart either. You have to find people who can think through hard problems, communicate, be collaborative, and make good decisions through distributed decision making.
Here are their learnings about people:
Smarts Aren’t Enough
Hiring smart people was an important part of Endeca’s success. But that’s not enough. Are you a good person? Do you have the right headroom to think through hard problems and make good decisions? That was just as important! You need to find smart people who can figure stuff out, are committed to the cause, and will work through problems. (J.A.)
If markets are the “at bat” then people are the “batters”. You need to find people who will be adaptive, willing to learn, and be able to dig in. When we started Jellyfish Dave Gourley, Phil Braden & myself (all Endeca alums) wrote down the qualities of the types of people we wanted to hire at the very beginning. We knew it was fundamentally critical to our success. I hope that 15 years from now the Jellyfish crew is off building incredible startups, with Jellyfish’s success as an important platform and pre-condition to their future success. (A.L.)
The caliber of people make such a difference. I joined when we were 25 people and had amazing early managers like Keith Johnson, Andrew Lau, Jack Walter and Jason Purcell. If you raised your hand that you were willing to try different things, they gave it to you and I had 4-5 different roles over my time there. (J.Y.)
Seeing Different Styles
At Endeca, we had really good people. I had seven or eight managers during my time at Endeca, so I got to see a lot of different leadership styles. After I’d been a manager for a period of time, I learned that I was spending most of my time on getting people to perform vs. coaching the best performers. The people who were really good didn’t need much help and were a much lighter lift. So I learned to focus on hiring well, first and foremost, to help lighten my management load. Also, when I was in Sales Engineering, I worked closely across three different Sales teams. One of the Sales teams was particularly collaborative, encouraging, and motivating with each other. There was a clear difference in performance and morale on that team and we definitely replicated and emulated that style when we started Toast. We tried to create a “we are great” culture, inspired by Tony Hsieh’s, and his book recommendation, Tribal Leadership. (S.F.)
When Julie Yoo & I started Kyruus, it was so helpful when we could say a couple sentences to each other or refer to a personality from the Endeca days using shorthand based on the previous experiences we’d had together. It was like “going to the same school” or “training alongside the same physician”. (V.M.)
Caring & Having Fun
It was definitely a group of high horsepower people but also a thoughtful group that was fun to hang out with and kept in touch with over time. I remember a conversation I had with Andrew Lau some years ago where he said “You choose to work with people again not because they’re perfect but because you know them & their imperfections and you still want to work with each other”. A lot of us at Endeca found that community. When we were starting Kyruus we hired a new CFO who had a meeting with Steve Papa. Our CFO came back from that meeting and said it’s clear Steve adores you & Julie. The amount of energy Steve put into helping us out at different times specifically meant a lot. I tell our team all the time that I hope Manifold serves as a platform for your current growth like Endeca was for me. (V.M.)
Be Ready to Present
Presenting was a big part of our interview processes to help evaluate candidates and also used as enablement with the team. When I joined Endeca I was originally brought in to expand the core platform offerings to the Manufacturing industry. Steve Papa brought me in to meet with Jim Baum, then President and COO. I was coming from the Product Lifecycle Management practice at Deloitte, and I spent least 45 minutes explaining the intricacies of PLM and how Endeca could integrate in to the PLM ecosystem. Eventually I asked Jim about his background, and quickly realized he more or less invented Product Lifecycle Management at PTC over the prior decade. He didn’t stop me once! He just let me ramble on like an idiot! You always had to be prepared but we had fun with it too. (J.A.)
The Toast crew was going to leave at one point to start their own e-commerce mobile company. We let them go out and pitch to VCs and they agreed it was more of a feature than a company. We created an opportunity for them to do that inside of Endeca and build a business. The 2nd e-commerce app in the app store was written by Aman & Steve at Toast - Shoebuy. (S.P.)
KEY:
J.A. = John Andrews, Director Strategic Marketing > VP, Marketing & Product (2004-2012)
S.F. = Steve Fredette, Software Engineer > Sales Engineer > Manager, Special Operations > Manager, Development (2005-2012)
A.L. = Andrew Lau, Engineer > Professional Services > VP Engineering (1999-2008)
V.M. = Vinay Mohta, Software Architect & Developer > New Market Development (2000-2006)
J.Y. = Julie Yoo, Software Engineer > Professional Services > Sales Engineer (2001-2006)
S.P. = Steve Papa. Co-Founder & CEO (1999-2011)
Series Outline:
Products - coming Monday
Other Resources:
Boston Tech Big Board - building out data on every Boston area venture backed software company I can find
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