Eytan Bensoussan, CEO at NorthOne, on Reverse Engineering Decisions to Uncover Intuitive Insights

Transcript

Eytan, welcome to the show.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:02:47

Thanks, Aydin. Nice to be here with you.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:02:49

Yeah, very excited to do this. Lots for us to talk about today. But as you know, one of the things that we love to start with is mistakes and being manager, being leader, being founder of a company. We tend to make a lot of these, and so we’ll leave it to you. If you think that you want to talk about something from the early days of when you first started leading teams or something more recent, what is a mistake that you recently made?

Eytan Bensoussan 00:03:13

So I’ll start with an early one that I made in my early days running north one and maybe a more recent one. When we started Northone, it was kind of a team of like a solo team, and very quickly, a cluster of people. We were always interviewing everybody, obviously, and still do in many ways. But I remember the first time I interviewed an engineer, and I’m not an. I mean, I have a science background, but definitely not a software engineering background. And my whole world was about, like, building teams and building, you know, kind of a. A great culture. And so when I would interview people, I would kind of project myself in the interview.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:03:49

And so I remember asking, like, who do you want to be in two to three years to this engineer? And I remember he answered me, I want to be a master craftsperson of my craft. And I looked, and I was like, it was so hard for me to process that because I understood intellectually what it meant. But I was so much about, like, I’m hiring the first leader of the organization who’s going to have people working for them at one point. And I remember almost wanting to veto this person. And we started kind of as a team who. We huddled and said, like, what do you think? And then they say, ethan, you’re totally wrong in the way you’re thinking about this. Like, everybody’s journey is completely different. Like, a master craftsman as a software engineer is a great thing.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:04:27

Like, we should actually, like, run to that. We don’t want people who just want to be people leaders. And that was actually one of the most important learnings that I took from it, which was just really understanding the motivations of a person and making sure that that matches to the role we’re hiring them for. I mean, that was maybe, like, the third interview with the company ever. Right? That was a meaningful one.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:04:48

Yeah. I think that’s a really, actually good point, because it is. I think you and I were chatting about this before we hit record, too, which is this idea of, like, hiring people different than you. Yeah, it’s kind of not hard to. It actually is hard not to project. Right. It is, like, probably, like, the default that we go. We often think about, like, even when building products, we’re thinking, well, I use the product like this.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:05:11

Or here’s what I would think. And so I think it’s usually like the default place that everyone’s mind goes to first. And so, yeah, that’s a really interesting experience on the hiring front, but let’s talk more about, like, hiring people different than you or working with people different than you. What have you learned over the years about that?

Eytan Bensoussan 00:05:31

I mean, I think it’s in a similar vein, understanding what I need to do to understand them and their motivations. And obviously, when you’re hiring, everybody wants to get a job and they want to be successful, but you can have a very impactful person whose goal is to actually become, like, to get lots of reps in a domain and they care more about throw me into the hardest work possible and they’re a lot less sensitive about how likely is your company to succeed. And it’s an afterthought where some people are like, this is my last shot before I’m going to start a family and I really want to make this a big bang. And just being able to kind of navigate that even post hiring. Right. But even as you’re getting to know a new person, like, it’s not obvious that someone at the outset wants to work 1215 hours a day, but in what conditions is that a palatable thing? And sometimes it’s not. And so really understanding and putting yourself in their shoes and asking them, like, just very honest questions about that is one of the best way I found to kind of de risk me thinking my patterns and my kind of intensity is just going to replicate itself in everybody I hire because whether I want to will it blue in the face, just not going to be the case. And so the remedy is just honest conversations and just like expectation management.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:06:45

So we know what the boundaries are.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:06:48

So let’s get really tactical here. What kind of questions would you ask during an interview?

Eytan Bensoussan 00:06:52

So during an interview, we’ll talk a lot about what does success look like for you in this role in a few years? And you kind of get the broad, like, where do they want to be themselves? But I’m like, so what’s going on? What’s in success in your personal life? You know, and it’s not about saying, I want to know if you want to get married, but what kind of a person do you want to be grooming for in yourself? And I kind of make sure that we’re focused on how do you want to develop as a person. We try to say, like, you know, talk to me about jobs you’ve had wherever the environment was really healthy for the kind of life you lead and the person you want to be. And we try to say, like, are they bringing factors that we can then replicate or actually is going to be the opposite of what we’re offering. So if someone’s like, I love clocking out at 04:00 p.m. you really allowed me to go to exercise. It’s great, right? But it’s just not something we can offer. And the more that we can bring that up front, and I often use a line, I say, you know, the greatest benefit we could give each other is to de risk the relationship. The more that you know about us in this hiring process and the more we know about you, the less likely we’re going to find ourselves in three months saying, I can’t believe you joined, or, I can’t believe I joined.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:07:59

And it’s a bad fit. And so as long as we kind of de risk the conversation saying, I’m not trying to, like, spish for something, I just want to know if we can set you up for success and whether you should run away from screaming from this or whether you should join. It leads to kind of some open opportunities for dialogue.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:08:13

Yeah, I think this is really important. I’ve also heard people talk about, get through the interview and then kind of tell the candidate all the reasons why you should not join, almost like, sell them against joining, and then if they still want to join, then you’ve de risked it a little bit more.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:08:31

Yeah, there are times when I would do that. Right. There are times when we’ve had a candidate where we think they’re technically, like, whatever competency we’re hiring for, this is the right person. But from all, like, is this going to be the right kind of person to do what we need the job. The skills are there, but is the mindset there? That’s when actually sometimes I pulled the trigger and said, like, look, let’s talk about really what this is going to be like. And are you excited about that? Like, I don’t. It has to be a feature and not a bug that we have kind of crazy hours sometimes, and things change very, very quickly. And if they get energized by that conversation, you can read it in their body.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:09:07

That’s a great sign when you see them, like, just kind of hedging. Like, ooh, I have to think about that. And you know that, like, deep down inside, they don’t want to say it, but there’s something in there that’s kind of, like, bugging them, and you have to just go and figure it out.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:09:21

Yeah. I love it. So let’s talk more about your day as a CEO. Part of the job is you’re often encountered with a lot of decisions coming from, you know, all sides. Some of them are easy. Some of them are more difficult. How do you think about decision making in your role?

Eytan Bensoussan 00:09:39

So I have had a long journey in learning to listen to my gut, and I think I spent a lot of the earlier parts as a professional trying to over rationalize and over engineer an outcome. And I remember just getting this. One of my mentors at one point just said, you know, the answer. Just say what they call it. We call it the day one answer. Just say it right now, and then go figure out where you might be wrong along the way as opposed to thinking. Let’s start building the logical stepwise function to get to the conclusion. And for so many years, I actually felt that my gut was muffled by all of this analysis that I wanted to do and thinking around the decision.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:10:22

And as soon as I released that, so many things became painless. And the job was about checking your thinking rather than deducing something from first principles every single time.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:10:32

So how do you go about that? So say that you have a, you know, you have a day one answer, and I love that term. Great term.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:10:39

Yeah.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:10:40

So how do you go about, like, what is the next step that you take in order to try and prove or disprove something? Like, is there, like, a rough framework protocol?

Eytan Bensoussan 00:10:49

Like, yeah, I live in issue trees. Like, my whole life. When I was in high school, I bought a whiteboard for my room and would, like, break everything into. Into issue trees. And so I typically think, like, just the uncomfortable. What is, like, just spit the answer out. Like, you know, we should try growing on this channel. Like, we should do this.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:11:08

This is a worthwhile invest. Why does my gut believe that? And so I try to, like. And say, well, how did I get there? And sometimes, you know, it’s. I try to, like, break them out into kind of mutually exclusive branches. Like, you know, I think that it’s a low risk bet, so I don’t have a problem. I’m not, like, betting the farm here. And then the other one is, I don’t know. I feel like I’ve heard stories of this working.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:11:27

So I’m starting to realize what is kind of building out to that answer. And sometimes I, like, kind of look at myself. It’s pretty weak sauce. I think it’s just not a good idea. But it’s actually this original process. There are infinity white papers with broken issue trees on my desk, where I just try to think through, how did I. How did my gut get me there? And I’ll tell you one thing that I found is that without knowing why, your gut is kind of a pretty educated guess maker. And it’s just combining so much information and kind of pattern matching.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:11:59

So to be able to kind of use that as the first place that you go to get to an answer, I say, on the balance, you probably start in the right direction. And then it’s about refining. And so it’s really, I mean, honestly, I can even show you, like, this is just filled with issue trees and issue trees of paper on me, plotting out ideas.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:12:16

So maybe let’s start there. What is an issue tree? So how do you define it? When do you use it? What’s just simple examples so that we can understand?

Eytan Bensoussan 00:12:25

Yeah, I just take this core idea, which is typically like a conclusion, right? So I try. I actually reverse engineer. I say, what’s the conclusion? And then I try to say, what are the different parts of that answer? So it almost literally looks like branches out of a tree. So I say, you know, we should migrate everything from slack to teams, right, as an example. And I really believe that this is what we should do. And so I’m like, why am I thinking. So I say, first one is pricing. So I’m like, I feel like there’s a better pricing.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:12:53

And I kind of put a pricing piece, and then I jot anything I can right out to saying, why do I feel that? Well, my back of the envelope is this, and I looked at the pricing pages, and I got a little bit of data to substantiate that this gut that it’s more affordable. And then I think about, like, there’s two or three features that just keep on really lighting up for me about teams that I’m not seeing in slacken. And it’s not that we’ve made this move, but I think, well, what are they and what is that? And I bring these out, and the way that it’s organized is really looking like the branch of a tree with this first idea, and then all the different, very different components of why that was a compelling idea. And then you kind of break down each tree. So you’re thinking, okay, you have one branch, which is, let’s say, features that are eye popping, and maybe there’s five of them. So you take that and turn that into five different sub branches of that one. You look at each one. Are they really as cool as I thought they were? What do they unlock and I just kind of go through there, and I go pretty far down where at one point I’m like, the level of detail I’m at right now is just no longer helpful.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:13:52

And I stop, and then I check my gut again. I’m like, do I really still believe in that answer? And, like, I’ll be honest. I very often convince myself in or out of things, but I feel conviction that the process I took gives some level of rigor and thoughtfulness going into it.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:14:09

So this is really interesting because you’re taking, again, something which is a gut feeling and then allows you to even understand it more deeply. And sometimes it sounds like you’re trying to convince yourself or you’re just trying to validate. Is this the right direction? Sometimes you convince yourself not. Do you use this kind of method for other things as well? Like, is it part of convincing others on the team or explaining the why behind a decision?

Eytan Bensoussan 00:14:37

So, yes, I’ll give you the good timeline and the bad timeline of that. The good timeline is, like, typically, I’m known as thinking in threes at the company, and people just say, like, every time I like why, I’ll give you, like, three big answers, so, way to push myself to really break things down. And so when people say, you know, why would you say that we should hire this influencer for our thing? Well, here’s, like, my first answer is the price. You know, their audience, et cetera, et cetera. I kind of have mental issue trees that I’m kind of, like, laying out in words. I talk about that all the time. However, the bad version of that is when you apply it to what’s a simple decision, and you start sounding like a bit of a robot. So someone’s like, where should we go for lunch today? I’m like, well, we should go probably to that next restaurant.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:15:21

Well, why? Because I’m solving for price and location and spicy level, and all of a sudden, you’ve just taken the joy out of choosing a restaurant, and you’ve turned it into this very mechanical process. So it’s even just balancing myself on saying some answers don’t need to be analyzed a ton, but ones that, you know, I just. Look, there’s, like, a little, you know, jiminy cricket at the back of my mind saying, I feel like there’s a little more here to unpack than this, like, quick answer you have in your mind. That’s when I start sitting down with a pencil and paper.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:15:50

Yeah, I love that. And it makes sense. All these things are this balance, and you’ve got to figure out how deep to go. How do you decide if something is a decision you should take or if you should get somebody else to make that decision? You’re trying to understand your gut, but sometimes you, you know, given whatever the area is, like, maybe you have a gut feeling, but maybe you shouldn’t trust your gut because it’s just your gut. It really isn’t developed in that area.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:16:17

So I maybe overdo this a bit, but when I make a decision, I’m actually looking for my point of view, not necessarily the decision that will ultimately be made. And I have to be able to have my own point of view and the question at hand. And I almost instinctively am like, who knows this better than me right now? Who can I pressure test this? And I kind of just want to hear, and I’m a very extroverted thinker, so I actually need to hear myself saying something to realize, actually don’t believe what I’m saying. So it’s a process, and I try the number of people I have reached out cold who have some level of expertise they’re feeling, hey, look, I’m thinking through this decision. Could I have 15 minutes of your time? I’ll be so grateful. I get, I don’t know, 30 or 40% hit rate on that. And it’s given me just a small army of people around the world who I’m like. Whenever I think of that, I think of them or someone at the company, someone, one of our investors.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:17:08

I often try to pressure check my thinking with at least one, if not smart or experienced person in that area.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:17:15

Yeah, I love that. That’s definitely just an army of people that can help validate things. So one of the other things that I know, we. We talked about something that you’re passionate about is also just, like, empowering people. So talk to me about how you do that at the company, and it sounds good. We should empower people as leaders, but what does it mean practically? I don’t know if you have examples or a story of when you did that and it worked well, yeah. Just anything like that to tell us about how you do it.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:17:48

Yeah. So I’d say that this really works when it’s a two way street. If someone is willing and wanting to be empowered and you want to, that really makes magic. The problem that I see with a lot of people is that they try to empower people who have no desire to be giving this kind of a growth mindset or growth feedback. And so it’s a little bit like you’re offering all of this energy, and it’s not really being focused anywhere by the recipient, and that’s okay. Someone doesn’t necessarily need to grow on all things at all times. But the moments when I’ve seen it really be magic is when I find someone who’s just so hungry to get better at something and I can co opt that. And what I do typically is I try to first identify, just explicitly, is this something that you really want to work on and get better at? Sometimes it’s a need.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:18:33

I need you to get better on this, or is this something that is actually meaningful to you? And if we get an okay on that, or if the need is just there, then I actually almost shadow them and they shadow me for just a little bit of time. So typically, I’m thinking of this one person at the company. I’ve worked with her a lot, and what I did is the first time we worked together, I did the work and she watched me. Like, I wrote three of the emails. I showed her how I problem solved so she could pick up some. I think we discussed it. We almost looked at it like a third body experience. We finished the thing.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:19:03

Okay, now talk about what you just saw, you know? And like I say, I give myself an eight on ten for that experience of what I produced and given the amount of time I invested in it. And then I kind of show. And that allows someone who’s willing to learn to say, these are the tools I use. Now you do. And the next one, it’s like, she’ll do it, and I’m going to watch her. And then we talk about after that. How did that feel for you? Where were you getting blocked? We try to make it a dialogue, and once you do one or two of these, then you can actually have a far more productive kind of ping pong match on. How do you think these should work? And the thing that I’ve seen myself fail in is when all that I do is give feedback.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:19:41

I’m like, this is how it should be. This is how it should be. And this is what I think. And you almost don’t give an explicit opportunity for the person to process out loud with you. And I think that’s where a lot of the learning comes. It’s almost a kind of post mortem on the exercise, whether it’s writing emails or handling a partner call and watching how that works, that last investment on the after and really discussing and reorienting the person’s compass and what good looks like. That’s the empowerment part, because then they now have the tools to start figuring it out themselves. And so just this person I’m thinking about, we did this two or three times.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:20:15

She’s now 95% autonomous. And every time I look at what she’s doing, like, oh, yeah, yep, yep. That totally resonates. And there’s like one or two little nudges that I’ll give. To me, that’s the greatest feeling of success, to see someone pick up a toolkit and run with it. But it really was because she specifically was so hungry to get better at a handful of skills that we decided to work on. And I think that’s that moment that I really look for.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:20:38

Yeah, I agree. The willingness has to be there. And some people are just so hungry, they’re just ready to grow, ready to take on more. And it’s a true joy working with people like that. I was going to ask you, though, so on the, you said in passing that sometimes you just give so much feedback and then there isn’t enough time to process. How do you think about just how to also give people positive feedback during the process, too. Right. And not just the, oh, like, you know, you could do this and don’t forget this.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:21:09

And some of the more critical stuff. I found that this is one of the things that can be challenging at times. And, you know, different people work in different ways. It’s just some people can’t handle too many constructive feedback items all at the same time. And you kind of need to punctuate it with some. This is what you’re doing great. And, yeah, any. Just tactical things that you do there.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:21:32

So this is actually a. It’s a really important tool, you know, the way in which you get feedback, and it’s so specific to the person’s stage in their career. And so I’ll give you an example how I got this wrong. And now I’ve learned kind of my own version of it. So especially with people who are a little more junior in their career, I used to start by asking a lot of questions. It’s the best way to kind of, in my view, give a safe way for someone to kind of explore an answer with you. And the problems that I would answer, everything is like, would you think about this? Had you thought about that? Problem is that especially at some points in someone’s career, you know, especially when they’re learning, they kind of want to know, what does good look like here? I need to learn the patterns to be able to have a strong point. And I remember just getting this feedback.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:22:18

I’m overwhelmed by your questions because, like, I’ve only done this for two or three years, and you’re asking me, like, very specific questions that I don’t have the tools for. And I just realized, like, okay, yeah, I gave really thoughtful and well rounded feedback to somebody who’s just hungry to do a good job and to be able. So it started me also, you have to understand who the counterpart is. If a person is capable, has either the seniority or just the mindset of someone who can jam with that. That’s a really empowering way to kind of de risk that feedback process through question. But when it’s someone who’s just trying to get things done or we are in a rush, giving someone a very strong point of view, it actually liberates them because that’s one less thing they have to start, like, you know, problem solving. And then I always couch it with, I want you to, like, call it where am I, like, violently wrong here? Like, just explain to me where I’m wrong. But otherwise, they have this ability to just execute and knowing when you are in situation a, which is someone wants to truly immerse themselves in the answer space or someone just wants to get you done.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:23:22

The nuance between the two to me is like, the difference between night and day. And it’s like getting like antibiotics if someone just needs a Tylenol, vice versa.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:23:31

Yeah. So, and then if someone is more senior, then you focus on the questions and the coaching more.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:23:37

Yeah. Also, commensurately, my expectations are higher. Right. Like, I’m asking questions there not only just to remove any sort of intimidation, but because I expect a more senior person to come in with strong points of view. And so my actual goal there is actually, like, what is your point of view? And then I can decide if I disagree with it or not. And that’s where I think as you get more senior, the question thing is not just a technique to remove defenses, but it’s actually a bit of me. My ability to evaluate whether or not someone who is senior enough comes to the design situation we’re looking at or the customer support situation with a very good point of view that is, I’d say, scaled to where they are in their career.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:24:21

Yeah. It’s always like, why this stuff is difficult is because there is no one single answer. It depends the person’s seniority. Like you said, maybe they’re a very senior person, but this is like a new area for them. So there’s a lot of factors to consider there.

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Aydin Mirzaee 00:25:27

So we’ve been talking about feedback. I’d also love to get your take on performance management. Like this idea is, you know, has goes through cycles. I feel like within companies where everyone’s like, performance management doesn’t work, we should just do continuous feedback. And then, you know, you swing back to let’s do performance management cycles, and so on and so forth, and everybody’s got a different take. How do you think about performance management at Northone?

Eytan Bensoussan 00:25:55

I think performance management has the ability to be one of those boogeymen that just takes up all the space. If you say we have a culture of feedback and a culture for performance management, and you’re a company with at least one layer of management, you can start expecting that people’s calendars will start spinning up with lots of one on ones that you didn’t expect. You’d say, okay, well, the manager should be giving feedback to their reports. That’s maybe an hour every two weeks or an hour a month. But the problem that you get is that all of a sudden, people who are on the same level, I should give you, we should do feedback with each other and then across departments. And I remember once discovering that you had a person who was doing like 10 hours worth of feedback every two weeks. And I’m just like, that is not going to be productive because you’re spending. You have to prepare for it, you have to, you know, and so I think the, for me, the feedback is about at the beginning expectation setting, what must be delivered, what are the expectations on your behavior and on your output? That to me is like the starting stone.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:26:51

And then I typically have a monthly 1 hour feedback, and I kind of do two things for it. And it’s very lightweight, but I find that it really helps. Course correct. First, I typically ask, who have you worked with over the last month in a meaningful amount of time? And it’s up to the person to tell I don’t have to go fishing here, I’m not looking for time logs. And so I just email or slacken each one of those people saying, what did you work on with this person? Did they meet your expectations? What were they doing really well and what were they doing less well? And I just kind of pulled that together. Unfortunately, I’ve actually been using chat GPT to synthesize all these notes. It’s been like a pretty interesting experiment, but that’s actually where I come in saying, look, here’s what I’ve heard from people around you, and this is where I believe, and then we kind of problem solve that and become small little iterations. I find that when feedback stretches too long, there’s so many things that have built up and so much time has gone bye that it’s very hard for the person to be actual about it.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:27:43

But also when feedback is too much and too frequent, you’re almost like you’re scrapping for something. You’re just looking like, what can I actually tell this person that’s helpful? And typically say what’s on your mind? And to me, a feedback session where you say, all you have to say is, what’s on your mind is really very low value. It’s part of feedback, but it can’t be. That is, I’ve checked the box on developing this person and the feedback sessions themselves are like little milestones for me to say, am I seeing this person grow as fast as I want them to? And that’s actually something that you see over a couple of data points. Where is the growth rate and the ability? Like, how many times am I repeating the same feedback month over month? If I start seeing that it’s more than two months, that’s a flag for me. Why is this coming back over and over again? And so that helps me triangulate other things about the person in their career.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:28:28

Yeah, I love this. Do you actually do this once a month for all of your direct reports?

Eytan Bensoussan 00:28:33

Yeah.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:28:34

So 1 hour. So it’s, it’s almost like you’re doing it 360. But maybe you’re just, I mean you’re, you’re probably not messaging a lot of people or you’re messaging like one person.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:28:43

3230.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:28:44

Wow. You’re doing that much. Wow. So you take this really seriously.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:28:48

Look, it’s, it’s a template. It takes me no time. I just send it out, you know, to maybe two to three people for the person and then like, I can read and I synthesize it. Right. So the investment for me was just figuring out like what’s the right frequency and then what are the inputs? Because my bigger problem is that if I’m giving someone feedback, I can just see what’s in my eyes, right. And I need to understand like, is this engineer blowing up my designer’s life or not? Right. Or is this like growth manager actually being a good partner to the design team or not? And I won’t know that unless I ask. So to me it’s, if I’m going to take an hour of my time to sit down for feedback, it better be like loaded with a actionable improvements so that this person gets better.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:29:33

And to me, where that investment holds true, when I’ve actually seen, it’s because someone is growing so fast through that feedback that they’re increasing their verblosity and they are reducing the kind of quicksand that everybody else is in when they’re not having a good time working with someone else. So I think the benefits when the feedback is working and the person is growing with it, they very quickly pay off. But it’s a very kind of. You dont find that very often.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:29:56

Yeah. So thats super interesting. So is that your one on one, the one that you do on a monthly basis or so then do you have one on ones on top of that?

Eytan Bensoussan 00:30:04

Yeah, I try to make sure, depending on the person. Right. Some people dont really need my time and they know to hit me up, but there are some people where they need more time with me because of things that were working on together. So I just create a one on one where im like, look, heres 30 minutes, youve got my time every week. If you have nothing to discuss, you should feel embarrassed that you didn’t cancel the calendar invite. But if you have things to discuss, I’m there with you and it’s just us to say, how’s this thing going? It’s more of a project management course correction, whereas the monthly feedback is really a professional opportunity for course correction. I think both happen. I play very dynamically with them, by the way, if I feel like I talk to person, I don’t think we need our weekly one on ones anymore.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:30:47

Let’s just move to a monthly cadence or hit me up if you need time. They know enough by now that I really don’t mind that and they shouldn’t feel afraid. Oh, I’m losing Facetime and it’s a bad thing. I actually surface it by saying if we’re not making good use of FaceTime, that’s actually a bad thing. But if we’re actually being productive together. That’s actually, like, you should never double check yourself.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:31:09

Yeah, I love this. Okay, so we’ve talked about the one on ones and the feedback session. The one on ones are mostly, they could be anything where people report to. You can come with any issues, whatever they want to talk about.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:31:24

We open a Google Doc.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:31:25

Got it. Okay.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:31:26

So we shared Google Doc, and we both load up things that are going to be useful for that one on one.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:31:31

Okay. And then when it comes to, let’s talk about the team meetings. So your executive, your staff meeting, how often does that happen? What do you all discuss there? How does that get populated with topics?

Eytan Bensoussan 00:31:46

So it depends on different levels. So I am very involved with the marketing team and the leadership team. So I kind of have sometimes two roles that I’m playing on the marketing team. 15 minutes stand up. Every day, the whole team comes together. We each go through what we did during the day where we’re getting blocked, where we need to park time later for help. That is maybe one of the best things I have done in terms of creating culture in a sense, because we can start getting to know each other, but also managing expectations and having no surprises. It really gives people an opportunity.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:32:16

Like, I got to talk about what’s going on, as opposed to, like, the human instinct to be like, I’ll talk about this next week. It’s just I feel like this piece of work’s not shaping up the way I want it to. That’s one. And then every week, you know, on the marketing team, we have like an hour long meeting where we review everything from the last week, where the metrics are as a result. How are we changing or not changing what we’re going to be doing this coming week? And what does this mean for the end of the month? Like clockwork. That’s a really important rhythm for that team. On the leadership side, we have a weekly meeting, and it starts with every Thursday. The full metrics of the company come up to us, and they’re always accessible, but they’re kind of like, officially stamped.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:32:54

Okay, this is the metrics for Monday’s meeting. And the obligation of everyone on that leadership team is to go through those metrics and to surface questions about anything, but also be prepared to talk to the metrics from their area if you have nothing to say. Everything going to plan? Great. Don’t say a word. I don’t care. But if there’s a metric, that’s like, you feel like, hey, this is good. I want to give some preview. This is heading in the wrong direction.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:33:19

And here’s what I’m going to do about it. It has to start with that. And so it allows that kind of two way discussion on metrics. And to me, the metrics piece is the most important of all. If it doesn’t start with metrics, it’s a lot of, like, last in, first out. Like, what’s the last thing that was on your mind? Like, this meeting’s on a Monday. So like, what do you think on the weekend? That’s what I started talking about on Monday. Like, what’s the, I call it like the mind control of the blogosphere.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:33:43

Like, so you, the latest article you read or the latest podcast you heard, that now becomes what the whole management team is going to talk about. And the way that we defend against that a little is by saying the metrics are the first thing. Then we have like maybe strategic topics that we can talk about. And they’re typically like the kind of people on the leadership team. There aren’t that many times where I’m like, this is a very silly thing to talk about. It’s usually like, we all understand these are pretty important. And so that seems to work fairly well. And then every now and then we’ll just create an ad hoc problem solving on one of those things that came out.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:34:16

We’ll put 3 hours on the calendar together during the week and really go at it.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:34:20

Love it. And then, so is there anything that happens on a longer cadence? So these things seem to happen on a weekly basis. Is there anything that happens at a longer timeframe?

Eytan Bensoussan 00:34:30

Well, there’s, I mean, two things. You have your weekly cadence, which to me is like the, like, I’m, I’m obsessing about our metrics every day. Like, I don’t, I actually have to get out of the habit of going to sleep and like, literally scrolling through our metrics, it’s like a very, I’m sure it’s like, not the right best practice for mental health.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:34:47

Yeah, I look at it when I wake up first thing in the morning, but yeah, at night is tricky. You don’t want to look at something that might get you down a rabbit hole.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:34:58

Like, I start pulsating with ideas. I’m like, oh, I’m not falling asleep now. So that’s the unit for us. I think we have two things. We do some monthly, like, here’s what happened in the past month, but the most important is every quarter because that coincides with both the board meetings that we have and a bit of a reset for the next quarter. So every quarter, we’ll typically have, like, a q one, q two, planning, typically, like a few weeks before the board meeting so that we come into that board meeting already understanding what’s coming up next quarter. And we can react here because of the metrics. Here’s what we’re doing.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:35:28

Here’s what work didn’t work, and then we try to do, I’d say, maybe twice a year, a proper, like, strategic reset. And I mean, by that is, it is. Here’s all the metrics that have emerged. Here’s the ones like red or green. There’s no middle ground. It’s either you’re happy with them or you’re not happy with them, and we have to discuss those. And then it turns into, so what does this mean about what we do for the rest of the year? And sometimes it can have no changes at all, and sometimes it just completely blows up our roadmaps and we think through something else.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:35:59

Yeah, I love it. It’s basically for everybody listening in. There is a system, and there’s a cadence, and one thing feeds into the other, and this is how you get the company running. I did want to just talk about one quick topic as well, which is this idea of building resiliency. You were on Leah’s product tea podcast. Leah was actually on Supermanagers a few weeks ago, too. She’s great. And, yeah, I just.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:36:28

I mean, it was awesome listening to you on the podcast. But what have you learned about building resiliency for yourself particularly? Right. Like, startups are an emotional roller coaster, and, you know, especially as a founder, as a CEO, people look to you and, yeah, any sort of, like, learnings or things that you could share on that front, I think the audience would love to hear.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:36:48

Yeah. So I think. Look, I’ll preface this by saying I know that I am wired in a certain way. Some of this I just like, it’s just how I am and maybe why I’ve self selected into this kind of a, you know, a life. But I was starting to say job. I’m like, it’s not just a child. It’s something that’s, like, a lot more than that. But I think there’s kind of, what do I create from a systems point of view and what I create from an acute pain management point of view on a system thing, I try to make sure my baselines are good.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:37:15

I try to make sure that, like, I have no worries on the family side, that I’m investing time with my personal family. It just creates this moment where you don’t have the role of CEO or manager. You can be someone else. A kid doesn’t care whether you’re meeting your KPI’s or not. They could care less. They just need a dad, a mom, an uncle, an aunt, and just be that person. So it’s almost like a way to not have that issue in my view, or at least in my life. A baseline of, like, exercise is just like, so foundational for mood control.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:37:50

Like, it just, it’s a night and day. If I don’t exercise, everybody around me knows it. They can be like, oh, no. Because it is just steady hand at the wheel and I kind of wake up super early to do it. That doesn’t bother me. But it is, like, so foundational to my ability to be an energy producer rather than energy consumer on people. So that kind of sets the tone, you know, manage that as best as possible. I think that the part when I really start feeling it, I have a couple of people that I talk to and they’re like my outlets and I can’t do it without them.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:38:22

Sometimes it’s a significant other. Sometimes it’s just a friend or another person that I know I really need to catastrophize out loud a little bit sometimes and then have them help me either pare down what I’m feeling or, you know, or actually say, this is a real big problem, go solve it. That to me, has actually been so having those, like three to four people, because no one’s always available for you to, like, vent to. Like, it’s a, you have to have like a, like a professional psychologist. But, um, that’s actually been pretty important to me. And so I invest in those relationships. Not a one way street. I care about these people.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:38:57

I make sure that they’re not. I’m not just a taker, that I’m not just always saying, like, oh, my God, how’s this going to work? And every now and then, as unusual as it may sound, I just talk to my parents about big picture stuff because they’re looking at me as the arc of my life. And I’m fortunate to still have my parents and everything, and I’m looking at myself as my quarter, and they’re just like, you’re so much. There’s so much more to you than just what happens this quarter and what happens next quarter. And they just kind of make me take this step back and like, it’s just my, you know, my dad was like, this too shall pass, right? Like, and I had one mentor who once said, you know, and hes been very successful and he told me, he says, you know, when youre in it, you just cant understand how its all going to work. Hes like, but after it, you never realize how all these things just connected, the failures, the successes, the moments. You feel like every day youre about to fall through the ice, but once youre through the hump, you look back like, wow, it all came together as an orchestra to produce whatever it is that I have right now. And I think thats a nice thought to hang on to, even if its sometimes just, just to get me through.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:39:58

That’s been really helpful.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:40:00

Yeah, I mean, that’s awesome. And thank you for sharing that. I think these things are really important. And I will also agree with you that it’s the life that we choose as founders too, and it comes with a lot of ups and downs and you have to learn how to work with it. And what you’re saying makes sense. It’s you have to have systems to deal with it. And once you have these things in place, then they orchestrate the sort of outcomes that hopefully you’re looking for.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:40:29

Yeah. Coming back to the first question, when I started this journey, everybody was like, oh, you need a system, right? And I started thinking, what’s the system that I need? And like, it was almost like trying to be like, okay, what’s the system? And I just realized, what is it that I’m actually really wanting right now? I just want to talk to my friend who’s done something similar before. And like the system comes through who you are as a person. It’s your self awareness that creates the systems around you. It’s not like a manual or some sort of blog post on the five systems that people use. They can be inspiration, but if it’s not so unique, you’re actually giving yourself medicine. That’s not super impactful. And that to me was an important learning.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:41:07

Just do what you need and stop thinking about how scalable your system is or this and that. Just get yourself through the immediately, the short term and solve it again next time.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:41:16

One thing I found helpful is that whenever you have something like that that gets you down and maybe just puts you in a not great state, I mean, inevitably you’ve gotten out of that state. And so whenever you do it and you’re able to do it, write that down because you actually forget like enough time passes. But then once you’re like, oh, in these sorts of situations, this is what I do, and in these sorts, this is what I do. And eventually you do create this playbook and you’re like, bring it on. I can handle any one of those situations.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:41:47

It’s also as time goes on and your experience deepensitive and you have more game tape behind you, that’s what gives you the power and the confidence. Your first mistake feels life threatening and your first few failures. I mean, naturally. But as you kind of be like, I’ve come back from this and we’ve done this, and you start being like, that’s my confidence. It’s what I have been through already that gives me confidence that no matter what’s coming my way, I’ll find a way. And that becomes something that you don’t expect at the beginning of your journey. But over time, it just creates a little bit of a, like a fact base that you can just look back on and be like, okay, I got this.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:42:22

Yeah, totally agree. So atem, we talked about a lot of different topics, you know, definitely we talked about how to de risk, you know, a hiring relationship, the day one answer issue trees, how to think in threes, how to empower people and so much more. We usually like to end up on some rapid fire questions.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:42:43

Sure.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:42:43

And, you know, I’ll give you some choices and you can let me know if something comes to mind and, and we can go through. But what is something that you wish managers, leaders, CEO’s would stop doing?

Eytan Bensoussan 00:42:56

Trying to be people.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:42:57

They’re not awesome. And what is something that people should be doing? Managers should be doing that. Maybe they’re not investing in self awareness. Okay, and what is something that you believe that maybe not that many other people do?

Eytan Bensoussan 00:43:14

I love that one. I would say that the emergence of this is totally off topic of management, by the way, but the emergence of modern medicine has created a fundamentally big change to our evolutionary path as a species that I don’t think evolution prepared for. And I think, I don’t think it’s a good thing that we have medicine, but the system that has worked for us for all this time never really contemplated that we necessarily could get antibiotics or that we could kind of repair a broken arm and all that. And so I think that’s what’s really exciting about the phase we’re in. We’ve kind of like, co opted the evolutionary vector into our own hands, and that’s a kind of cool thing to think about.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:43:52

Yeah, that’s definitely a thought provoking answer and something that I’ll keep thinking about. So, eitan, thank you so much for doing this. I think this has been an awesome conversation and thanks for coming on the show.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:44:03

Appreciate it.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:44:05And that’s it for today. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of the Supermanagers podcast. You can find the show notes and transcript at www.fellow.app/supermanagers . If you like the content, be sure to rate, review and subscribe so you can get notified when we post the next episode. And please tell your friends and fellow managers about it. It’d be awesome if you could help us spread the word about the show. See you next time.