Transcript

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: It was important for us that people be able to reach this level of partnership, which again is a group of peers, even if they weren’t there at the founding of the company.

00:00:21 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Use a software for your iPad that helps you with ideation and problem solving. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins. I’m here with my colleague Mark McGranahan, and Mark, I know that, uh, we have to get creative with our hobbies here in this time of staying home. Uh, what have you been doing in regards to your piano lessons?

00:00:46 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I usually take lessons at my teacher’s house here in Seattle, but now we’re going all remote.

And we actually did this once, uh, last year during some snowstorms here, which shut Seattle down, and then I just like propped my iPhone up on my desk and we did our best, uh, but now that I have a little bit more experience with this podcast and with other AV stuff, trying to do a better setup, so.

Um, used a, a real mic to record and we set up multiple camera angles with my laptop video and my iPhone camera, and that’s worked pretty well. And then I think the next experiment will be actually plugging the digital output for my, for my digital piano kind of directly into an audio interface.

As well as getting a vocal mic and hopefully that will improve the kind of the piano sound quality that she hears on the other side.

00:01:35 - Speaker 2: Well, excuse to play with.

00:01:37 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I would be lying if I said that wasn’t a big factor.

00:01:40 - Speaker 2: We’ve got our summit next week as well, which we’re doing all virtual we meet in person for that, so we’re also going to Try to get a little creative. I guess the whole world is is doing that to some degree.

00:01:50 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, on the flip side of this, as a company, we have a lot of experience with remote, so this hasn’t been too big of a change for us. I’m talking to, uh, for example, people who are elementary school teachers and I just, I can’t even imagine.

00:02:01 - Speaker 2: So the topic we wanted to talk about today was hiring an engineering partner and maybe the Muse partnership model more generally. So I’ll link in the show notes to the job description we’ve got on the web.

Beautiful design there done by our colleague Leonard.

But, um, I think you wrote most of this, Mark, and, and I wanted to quote from the, the opener a little bit and, and maybe you can expand on this or explain it, uh, further. So the the page says this role is on our partner track, meaning that it has a high level of freedom and responsibility while earning a significant stake in the business. So, can you, uh, can you tell us what does it mean to be an engineering partner as opposed to, say, a soft software engineer as a regular employee.

00:02:45 - Speaker 1: So, our partnership model is, we have a very small team, all of whom are intentionally peers, including the founders, and who are treated more like owners than employees. So, in practice, I would say a partner is In between a typical startup employee and the kind of sole founder of a bootstrapped in the startup, it’s kind of in between.

00:03:08 - Speaker 2: And by typical startup employee here we talk about in the early days when it’s a small team, people have a lot of impact, I guess, on the, on the company because there’s just not that many of them, and option grants are common, which is sort of an option to buy company stock in the future if it does become valuable, uh, but at the same time, they don’t really get a lot of visibility into, say, the financials of the business.

00:03:32 - Speaker 1: Yeah, the typical model is you have the founders who are there when the company is incorporated and they get the vast majority of the equity and they have very outsized responsibility and decision making ability and and freedom and flexibility, and then you hire employees and starting with employee 1 and definitely on from there, they’re kind of a second and lower tier of staff by design. And what we want with the partnership is more of a model where those Team members are all peers, uh, in terms of the day to day work, in terms of their freedom and responsibility, and also in terms of their equity ownership in the business.

00:04:08 - Speaker 2: And just to make it concrete here, we’ve got 4 partners right now. So there’s Yumi and Yulia, with sort of the 3, that got started last year. Leonard joined us not too long after. So we’re a partnership of 4 right now, and we have maybe some contractors and things we’ve worked with, but for the For the most part, it’s really those 4. We’re all owners in the business and therefore, essentially peers. Uh, now we’re looking to fill in this 5th person, uh, who will come from an engineering background, but we want them to have that same kind of stake in the business or level of ownership or level of responsibility.

00:04:42 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, and it goes both ways like you have this higher level of ownership, you have more freedom, but because this is probably the last partner that will hire for some time. There’s a lot of responsibility. Like these 5 people, they need to make the business successful together. Um, so you really need to have a really high talent density to make that work.

00:05:01 - Speaker 2: So you’ve used this turn of phrase freedom and responsibility, and I don’t know if that’s a call back to the Netflix deck, sort of internal employee hiring and culture deck, but I read this, I’ll link to it in the show notes. I read this many, many years ago and it really had a big impact on me and how I think about teams and hiring and and management.

00:05:20 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, very familiar, a classic. And interestingly, I think it’s been both very influential, yet it’s still quite contrarian.

00:05:28 - Speaker 2: Having a lot of latitude, having a lot of ability to make choices in your daily work, also comes with it, yeah, responsibility to do the best thing for the business, and you don’t have someone sitting there telling you what the right thing to do is. And maybe this comes to the conventional relationship you often happen have between employers and employees, which is one of the boss tells you what to do and the employee knows they’re successful in their job when the boss is happy, so it’s really largely about pleasing what whoever has the authority says they want. Uh, which produces some, some strange dynamics, uh, sometimes and some power. Obviously there’s a huge power asymmetry there as well.

00:06:10 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and that was a big motivation for me in designing our partnership model. I wanted individual success to be measured by the market as much as possible, so it’s not about pleasing your boss or getting some committee to give you a certain rating. Um, there’s one or two people who are working in each discipline, so it’s very clear if your work is having the right impact for the business.

00:06:30 - Speaker 2: And maybe we can talk about the terminology of calling it partners or partnership, and in particular, in contrast to the term that you often hear in Silicon Valley, which is founder. So what, what’s the difference there? Why do we use this term partner?

00:06:45 - Speaker 1: It was important for us that people be able to reach this level of partnership, which again is a group of peers, even if they weren’t there at the founding of the company. There’s certain things like you’ll always be able to call yourself, you know, a member of the founding team or a founding partner, but we think it’s important that people can come in, uh, demonstrate their skills, prove their value to the business and join this group of peers as a full partner.

00:07:11 - Speaker 2: Yeah, founder is a funny piece of terminology, right? It’s not a job title. It’s not like VP of engineering or something. Uh, it’s a statement of where you were at a particular time.

And I’ve certainly used that title for myself quite a bit on, you know, CVs or whatever, just because, yeah, I do start companies, that’s sort of my, um, my career. And, and so when you’re doing a jack of all trades, just getting things off the ground, uh, type of a role, well, founder does seem like the right description for that.

But it does rule out people coming in later and having a really big, or even a foundational, you might say, impact. Uh, and I think of some famous examples of this. For example, uh, Howard Schultz, I think it’s the fellow’s name from Starbucks. He wasn’t one of the founders of Starbucks, but he, in the sense of being this pivotal person that helped make it what it is today. He was, or that we just don’t have a word to talk about that, basically.

00:08:12 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and typically there’s a very narrow and rare path for people to say become a CEO externally, and that happens sometimes, of course, um, but the default path is you read the job description and it says like employee of X division, you know, doing this subset of that thing and even before you’ve talked to the first person at the company, it’s clear you’re going to have a very prescribed and small impact, whereas if you come in and say with the job description. You’re going to be a partner in this business, you’re going to own a big chunk of it, and we’re going to expect and hope that you step up to that with your contributions. Um, you’re setting a much higher ceiling for people to reach up to.

00:08:49 - Speaker 2: The one thing I was concerned about when we got this off the ground and 3 of us, the 3 initial partners had this idea to have this small talent dense team was that it would really restrict our, certainly our ability to grow quickly, although that wasn’t, uh, specifically a goal for us to grow the team quickly. But actually that we would rule out the ability to hire a potentially really great people, really great people in that particular craft who don’t have that other dimension of either their skill set or maybe just their interest. Being an owner of a business and feeling that responsibility for the whole thing being successful, versus kind of focusing on your craft and your specialty. It is not something everyone can or or wants to do. And so we rule out being able to hire some a really great software engineer who doesn’t want to be a business owner and be worrying about the fundamentals of the business. Um, and so I was, I saw that as a risk. I felt like when Leonard joined us, uh, that was a great validation of this model because he wanted that. He wanted to. You know, this is a very talented guy. He had the option to go lots of, uh, very prestigious big tech companies. And one of the reasons he told me that he, he wanted to work with us is that chance to have a high impact and be an owner in. Uh, in a business. And so he’s both really great at his craft, which is design, but he also has the mindset to care about, pay attention to, and contribute to all the other aspects of the business.

00:10:22 - Speaker 1: There’s only a subset of people who are interested in this model, and that’s fine because within that universe, they seem especially interested in what we’re doing and kind of more inclined to join our venture versus a typical startup where they’d be, you know, employee number 76 and earn 0.01% or whatever. Um, so I think it’s kind of concentrating and focusing our recruiting ability into uh the type of people who we most want to work with.

00:10:50 - Speaker 2: Now, this works for a 5 person team, maybe you could even imagine 67. I don’t necessarily imagine it would scale to, I don’t know, 1520, 25 people, um, but how do you, how do you think about that if we did at some later time feel like we did want to grow the, grow the team because the opportunity in front of us or the, the, um, money we’re earning from customers makes it possible to do that.

00:11:15 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think maybe there’s separable axes there. So I think it would be harder to have partners as you go beyond 67 people, although there is precedent for that, of course, and professional services firms that have big partnerships, uh, but you, you might be able to separate kind of how many employees, how many staff total you have versus what percentage of them are are partners, even if there’s some coupling there. I would also say that we did.

Design the partner model, kind of the current iteration of it, specifically for 4 to 7 people, because that’s the size of one team, or maybe 3 to 7. And when you go beyond 6, maybe 7 people, you don’t really have one team anymore. You have 2 teams that you like, you know, team divisions and like extra communication and coordination and decoupling and stuff like that. And it’s kind of a different way of operating.

You can, you can’t do it totally as modically mind melting like we do now. So I think it would also change in that respect if we move beyond 7 people, but I’m hopeful that we can um get quite far with this small team again, because of the talent density and because of the leverage you can get these days with SAS.

00:12:20 - Speaker 2: And it’s interesting change for both of us maybe because we do come from that startup background where hiring and growing the team quickly is seen as an absolute requirement. And uh you were an engineering manager, ran a team at Stripe. How big was that or how many people were sort of under your um authority there?

00:12:41 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I managed teams from like 3 to about 50 at Stripe, so I saw a gamut and indeed a huge part of your time as an engineering manager at a company like Stripe, we are growing very quickly, is actually the mechanics of growing a team.

So it’s like, you know, recruiting, interviewing, onboarding, training, team, cell division, off boarding. I probably spent like half my time doing that. And so part of the idea with a deliberately smaller partnership is you can spend more of your time focusing on the actual products in the business.

Now there’s anything wrong with doing those other things. I quite enjoy them. Um, but if you, if you want to grow very fast, you have to invest a lot in it and it necessarily detracts from your work on the product.

00:13:24 - Speaker 2: Yeah, certainly for me, there was an appeal to being in more of a maker mode, be able to spend more of my time doing writing, product development, design, and so on.

Uh, at Hiroku, I was my sort of my largest management experience and at one point had a, yeah, quite large, uh, team under me there and you can do a lot with a big team of expert people.

It’s, it, it, it can be a really amazing thing and there are super, uh, opportunities very worth going after that that basically require that.

Uh, but then on the other side of things, yeah, being able to make stuff and be really close to, I don’t know, I like a pretty close personal relationship with quite a lot of our, um, our early users and now customers, and that’s a lot harder to do if you also need to be, uh, making your team and all of the, the care and feeding of that, uh, your priority.

00:14:18 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and to circle back to something we mentioned earlier, I think you have that. That much more direct relationship with the customers and the product and and again the evaluation loop is much cleaner, with a large company, you have like, you know, various management chains that are quite deep, you have the different functional areas, you know, you have multiple phases of roadmap planning, the evaluation process is very complex, and so you end up spending a lot of your brain cycles like managing that social dynamic, uh, whereas here I think we have much more focus on our product and our customers.

00:14:51 - Speaker 2: The time that you need to put into getting everyone on the same page, even if it theoretically we all agree roughly where we’re going and what the pressing problems are, there’s these huge sophisticated systems that, um, larger companies use. Google’s, I think, known for the OKR system. Uh, when I was at Salesforce for a little while, I got exposed to this thing called V2O. Uh, and these terrible acronyms are very necessary systems that allow you to take a large group of people and get everyone on the same page about what you’re doing and focused around a particular business priority and have everyone understand how their work can fit into that. And by comparison, I think you mentioned this, uh, earlier. By comparison with a small team, we basically have a team summit once every 2 months. We spend a week going really deep on big picture questions and spending a lot of time with each other and having casual conversations, and that basically works great for getting everyone on the same page and aligned to use the manager speak there. Um, and that’s kind of all you need, plus uh like a weekly, uh, planning meeting and, and, you know, with a con on board, kind of, you, you’re all set. The, the meta elements there are much easier and much more, uh, much simpler.

00:16:09 - Speaker 1: Yeah, now I think the flip side of all of this, uh, freedom and responsibility and minimal management infrastructure is you really need the partners to take a lot of initiative and to have good judgment and to have good taste.

And I think that’s reflected in the type of people who uh we tend to find applying for these partner roles.

They tend to be people like perhaps former entrepreneurs, uh, serial independent contractors, um, people who have a lot of experience doing uh open source projects or running things like that. Um, people who have worked at very small startups, it’s people who kind of just tend to take initiative and take responsibility for their own career success that I think finds, um, the most traction with our model.

00:16:50 - Speaker 2: Good judgment and making good decisions, making wise decisions, I think it’s a huge part of this, and you want to be able to trust in everyone’s judgment.

When you talk about the split a little bit between.

Maybe founders, employees in the startup world or maybe more classic business. There’s, let’s let’s call it management and labor, uh, or boss and employee, that that sort of thing.

Another really influential source of kind of business know-how for me was, uh, Peter Drucker’s book Management to this giant collection of business essays from I don’t know, the 1980s or something like that, which still are remarkably applicable to uh the modern world of tech companies.

And in management, he talks about sort of the, what makes a manager, a manager is not. managing a team or the people side of it, it’s feeling responsibility for and having the suitable authority to make the business be successful, the whole business, whereas an individual contributor, a crafts person, what have you, their job is to make a particular thing.

So if your job is to build a website for the company. You’re gonna build the website, make it as successful as possible by whatever uh criteria you’re given. But beyond that, you, you probably have a vague, certainly strong but vague interest in the overall health of the business and that you want to make something you’re proud of, and of course you want your job to continue to exist, and you want all your colleagues to continue to be employed there, but you don’t really have any levers for making the business be successful or not outside of your specific domain.

00:18:27 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and there are a lot of good reasons why um companies have this, this management and labor dynamic and it can work very well and indeed I had spent a lot of my career working in that model, but I, I wanted with Muse to not be spending so many brain cycles on like, you know, convincing people they should be doing stuff and like motivating them to do stuff that wasn’t necessarily stuff they were interested in and like judging their work constantly. I just want people to more like do the thing that was right for the business out of their own initiative, and I think we’ve been able to get that here.

One other thing that this reminds me of is uh dealing with miscellaneous business stuff.

So for example, expenses. This, this can become a huge mess in big corporations, kind of, uh, classically, you know, you have the programmer who can’t get a decent computer or they have to do like a multi-week uh procurement process to get a hotel, we have to use some terrible, you know, flight booking software. And here the model is much simpler. It’s you’re a partner in the business, you essentially own a piece of this bank account, and you need to make good decisions about how we use it, and we mostly trust you to do that. And so if, you know, you think you should buy, you know, I don’t know, a new mic for a podcast, you know, do that or if We’re deciding where to have the summit. It’s not like an us versus them dynamic on the expense. It’s, we can go somewhere more expensive and that’s less runway for for all of us in the business.

00:19:45 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think that element of looking at the money in the bank account and seeing, you know, what’s possible or what is wise to spend money on for equipment is one thing, but a, a very challenging topic in any model is individual compensation.

That is how much money do you get paid.

I remember talking to Yuli about this early in the The business, which is, you know, transitioning from the employee mindset, which is one of, OK, I’m going to negotiate with my employer. Not exactly in an adversarial way, but you could say you have different incentives, you have different interests. The employee wants to negotiate to get as much money as they can, and the employer wants to get the, uh, the employee to work for as cheaply as they can. And then they hopefully through that tension, negotiate to some fair middle ground.

By contrast, when everyone’s a partner, you basically look at the Money in the bank account, you look at the spreadsheet of growth and customers, and you look at financing possibilities, and you go, OK, well, if we game this out, like what can we afford to pay ourselves?

00:20:50 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. And related to that, I like that we have a relatively simple compensation model that also, I think mostly pays people for the responsibility that we’re asking them to take versus for their negotiation negotiating leverage. Um, so our model is essentially there’s some dollar amount that we want all the partners to be earning roughly and then depending on their situations, the cash versus equity balance might be a little bit different.

00:21:17 - Speaker 2: So when it comes to the stock compensation, Uh, you had a, a, a bunch of strong feelings about that, and in particular the way that maybe option grants for startup employees are a little bit of a raw deal. You got people get stuck with tax burdens and exercise windows and things like that.

00:21:33 - Speaker 1: Thought about a bunch of different things, but we ended up mostly on um options, mostly for legal and tax reasons, um, but we try to give way, way more than is standard for an employee again to reflect this, this kind of being in between an employee and a founder. Um, and also we have this no cliff and uh the exercise window is very long. So basically the idea is once you’ve Worked at the company for a quarter, you’ve contributed a lot of effort, you’ve earned this equity compensation and it’s yours to keep, uh, basically for as long as the US government will allow us to let you keep it. Um, and the, the terms are as simple and as favorable to the employee as the staff as possible.

00:22:13 - Speaker 2: And that that was something I was pretty passionate about as well, because having done a lot of businesses over the years and divvied up ownership in different ways and that sort of thing, you often see this thing where you have these typically 4 year grants, uh, for founders, it’s often even more dramatic where essentially in the beginning, you just divide the company three ways, uh, and then you get diluted over time. But the Sort of the ownership that you have reflects what you happen to negotiate for, what the circumstance of the company happened to be at the time when you came in the door. And what I really prefer is that there’s something that is based on both the contributions you’ve made to date, but also reflects the commitment that you have made in the, you know, in the near term in the next couple of years. I think 2 years is kind of a nice time window on that. And furthermore, that if your life circumstances change, or if you decide that you no longer have good contributions to make to this business, you’re not in the what they sometimes call the investing in peace um situation, which is you’re kind of sitting around keeping your chair warm because you have this great option grant or this great stock grant that you want to see out to the end, but you’re not really actually in a position. You have these weird cliffs and things, you’re motivated to, OK, I want to stick around till next February because that will make a big difference for me. Uh, but it’s something that is a little bit closer to, uh, your, your salary, which is, as long as you’re contributing, you’re earning, and then at some point, if your circumstances change and you want to be elsewhere. I guess I don’t like people being chained to a thing. It seems bad for both parties. It’s certainly bad for a person to not be moving on from a role that they’re no longer, no longer want to be in. But similarly, I think it’s bad for the company that becomes a person who’s not contributing with the same passion and the same vigor and maybe that is space in the cap table or space in the sort of the team seats, uh, that could be given to someone else that’s in a better position to contribute.

00:24:21 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think the typical 4 year stock grants plus 1 year cliff plus 30 day exercise windows can really contribute to that feeling of people feeling locked to the company or compelled to sit and wait it out and I think both of those are not healthy.

And indeed we’ve tried to do other things to make it feel like People have their own independent free lives and they’re not like chaining themselves to this company for 4 to 6 years when they join.

It’s more like you come in and you do this like rotation of this tour and after 2 years, you can choose to re up or you can choose to go in a different direction with your career and both of those are totally fine uh with the company and totally reasonable things to want to do with your own life.

And you know, another example of this would be, um, we try not to have Which basically prefer cash compensation to benefits so that if you don’t have all these like weird tentacles into your personal life in the form of benefits like you’re earning this compensation and then if you want to um move in the future, you don’t have to like unwind all these benefit entanglements with the company that you just have more cash that you can use to spend on those things as you will.

00:25:28 - Speaker 2: You mentioned earlier the Agency partnership and this was uh was also something that I think you brought into our discussion when we were formulating this model that, um, I had never really thought about before. But there is the case of, yeah, maybe something like a designer brand agency, uh, maybe something like an attorney’s office, sometimes maybe medical practices are this way. Uh, maybe, probably my best exposure to it, although I don’t know how accurate it is, is, uh, the TV show Mad Men, where they have these basically ad agencies that that have this small set of people who are the partners, and then of course, there’s a larger group who are the, uh, let’s say the standard employees. What exposure did you have to the partnership model via Uh, this kind of, this kind of business and, and how did that play into the, the idea here?

00:26:16 - Speaker 1: Yeah, mostly via the professional services world, you know, accountants and lawyers and so on and Uh, we, we drew from that two of the key aspects for our current design.

One is this idea that anyone can make partner over time. So, when you form like a law firm, the people who founded the company, they have their names on the sign, sure, but over time as other people make partners, they take on that sign and then make a new one with the new partner’s name on it, right? And I really like that dynamic. Again, I think it allows people to step in and and for the talent and the company to rotate um.

The other was this idea that in these professional services firms that are structured as partnerships, the partners are not just for example, really good lawyers, they’re also responsible for the health of the business. So that’s things like bringing in business, doing recruiting for the firm, taking care of all the miscellaneous business things that one needs to do, making decisions about, you know, the office or whatever, and um again I isolate that model of these people who feel more responsibility than just their narrow functional expertise.

00:27:17 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that style of, I guess call it rotating partnership also fits in with the the tour of duty idea that you mentioned, which is Someone can be a partner and a prime driver at the business for 20 years, but then maybe they want to retire, maybe they want to move on to new things, maybe they want to focus on their family.

And I feel like sometimes the cult of personality stuff that we get in the tech world a little bit produces something where key people moving on to their next thing or in some cases dying, right? Like that happened with um the Walt Disney Company.

You know, the, the Disney Company basically lost its soul and was totally lost in the weeds for a pretty long time when Walt Disney passed, unfortunately quite young, relatively speaking, and it took a really long time to reform itself because it was so built around this one visionary genius individual.

And while granted, Disney was a a a unique genius uh and um.

I think it is the case sometimes that if we build companies in a way that kind of assumes these these founding people who were there at the beginning, the only people that can ever drive it forward, uh, that actually doesn’t create a long term healthy business.

And if people can do their tour of duty and then rotate out and others can take it to the next, uh, take it to the next level and you have something where that’s a, a normal, um, Normal way that you do business as opposed to an exceptional event, it seems to me that actually makes a healthier business over the long term.

00:28:49 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think so, and I hope so. Of course, we’ll have to see over the next 248 years, how that actually works out, you know, the mechanics of it, but I’m optimistic. Should we talk a little bit about how we bring these partners on, you kind of alluded to it with like the ramp or the process, uh, but there’s actually a quite deliberate thing that we do there.

00:29:07 - Speaker 2: As someone who’s done a ton of hiring in my life, uh, I’m pretty passionate about pilot projects. And so just putting aside the the partner topic for a moment, I think the way that hiring often happens, which is based on a series of intensive interviews and then going to a full-time offer that’s contractually or at least implied to be something that lasts for many years, seems like a very strange step function that you go from, let’s have some conversations to now we’re gonna like commit to this huge event. Often coupled, I think there’s some connection there to the um.

Kind of the um the uh in-office type teams where someone maybe actually needs to move to a new city.

But yeah, that, that huge commitment based on essentially just some conversations doesn’t produce great results from what I’ve seen, and I really love pilot projects, uh, where you basically hire someone on a contract basis for a week or 2 weeks or a day or whatever, whatever can fit into their.

Their life effectively and you really try to work with them as if they were on the team, uh, for a real project and then at the end of that both sides, you know, the, the potential person being hired onto the team, they see inside what the team is really like maybe they see some of the, the dirty laundry that isn’t so visible just from the outside and they can get a real sense of what it’s like.

And then of course on the employer side you, you see what this person can really contribute. Be it not just how they represent themselves in an interview. Uh, but the partner thing adds a whole other dimension.

00:30:39 - Speaker 1: Well, it’s basically extending the ramp.

So, again, in a typical startup model, you basically have this, this terminal level which is employee, and once you’re hired, you take this step function and you’re an employee and that’s it.

And our model has uh a couple more steps. So we do this initial. Um, do initial, you know, phone conversations or, you know, reviewing open source work on the basis of that, we’ll do a 1 to 2 week trial project and if that goes well, then we move into a longer contract where we’re evaluating the person for the partnership and that’s typically 2 months, maybe 10 weeks. And then at the end of that trial period, we will make a decision together about uh making them an offer for a partner, and that we found is enough time uh this this two month period is enough time for them to step into the level of partner. You can really understand the the code base and the product and the business and really, you know, get into this mind meld with the rest of the partnership.

00:31:40 - Speaker 2: Mind meld is a great way to put it. One thing I’ve found through this process that is really different.

From the kind of hiring I’ve done elsewhere, is I need to basically emotionally open myself to this person as if they were.

A partner in the business. And for me, that’s actually for me it’s very personal like my.

My work life and and the things I’m trying to accomplish in my venture and the feeling of ownership, you know, it’s it’s sort of people jokingly say things like it’s my baby when they talk about a business that they own, uh, but that’s, that’s how I feel. It’s, it’s, um, it’s a very personal thing for me and so to talk about the most.

Difficult challenges or the open questions, uh, within the business is a kind of vulnerability. Take that leap a little bit and present them with the unfinished thinking and the open problems that we’re grappling with and then you see if those conversations. Have a spark or or allow you to come up to come up with new ideas or better decisions, or go in new directions that are uh that are maybe better than what they would have been without this contribution of this this person and that’s a good sign that uh that they are someone that’s will add something new to the partnership.

00:33:02 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that process is really important and again, you need the time for that to unfold properly. If you just like surprise the person with their initial interview, like here’s this weird company, we’re building this wild product, we have this different organizational model, here’s all the challenges we’re facing. Do you want to sign up, you know, for the next two years of your life to do this? They’d be like, uh, I don’t know, how can I tell? Um, you really need some time for that to, uh, you know, get folded in with the partnership over the course of a couple of months.

This relates to one other thing that I think is really important, which is this is a genuinely two-way process. I think companies often think of interviewing as like we’re assessing this candidate for a fit at the company, which is true, but I think if you’re doing it right, you’re also giving the candidate uh the opportunity and the chance to evaluate, you know, their fit for their life with what this company is up to.

And uh again these conversations help with that and we encourage it. You know, we say we’re gonna come up with, with our, you know, opinion about this. We also want you to take an honest look at if this honestly somewhat unusual company is right for you and it’s not right for everyone, which is fine. And again, we have because we have some time, uh, they have a chance to decide before they make a bigger commitment.

00:34:13 - Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly so that it’s, it’s, it is really this intimate relationship you’re entering into.

And you can like what a company does from the outside, you can like its product, that may or may not mean that you fit in with the team, uh, or that you have something to contribute or that your unique energy is going to take the team in new directions that are are net positive.

I like to talk sometimes about working chemistry. It’s this really ineffable thing and it’s hard to guess from from interviews for sure because it it doesn’t specifically have to do with liking someone, but I like to measure working chemistry by when you sit down and collaborate on a thing together. What comes out? Does magic happen? Does something amazing that you could not have made individually, um, does the result of that collaboration have something really special to it?

00:35:05 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m really happy that we’ve been able to find great working chemistry with the partnership so far. It gives me, you know, so much energy and it’s very rewarding professionally to have that.

00:35:15 - Speaker 2: Well, Mark, would you recommend this model to other companies? We’re pretty early in the experiment here and maybe we’ll have to report back a couple of years in, uh, but is this something broadly applicable or is it just something pretty specific to Muse, this little indie software development firm doing a pretty nichey product?

00:35:34 - Speaker 1: So there are things that are specific to our unique company, but I think this underlying idea of uh trying to increase the talent density, trying to give your staff much more responsibility, basically, uh, giving them the freedom and responsibility to step up. I think you could find that a lot of people actually do. And conversely, if you treat people as like, uh, you know, employees with very narrowed roles and very little ability to make decisions on their own, indeed that’s what they’ll do. Um, so I would encourage people to see if they can set a higher, higher ceiling and higher expectations for their staff.

00:36:11 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, speaking for myself, you know, the, the proof will be in the output in the product that we deliver and whether it’s something customers like and whether the business can be viable, but I’m really, really enjoying working on a small partnership with people I can really trust where I can.

Be spending a lot of my time making things, but also, uh, we make decisions largely by consensus, uh, and that I can really trust in the judgment and decisions that we all make together and I think the decisions we make are are better than what we would make individually.

That’s been really personally very satisfying for me and that that matters a lot uh to me is that I have a workplace that is, um, I’m excited to get up and be a part of every day.

Absolutely. If any of our listeners out there have feedback, please feel free to reach out to us at @museapphq on Twitter or hello at museApp.com by email. I’d love to hear your comments or ideas for future episodes. Really enjoyed the chat, Mark. Likewise, Adam, see you next time.