Suresh Khanna, how the devil are you? Good to see you, my friend. How’s it going, Tom? Good to see you. Good to see you too. Yeah, it’s going well. I was just saying, have been eager to get you on, thinking back to some of our experience together and some of what I’ve learned from you over the years.
Definitely wanted to get your take on some of these matters. So I appreciate you spending some time on it. One of my favorite topics is hiring. Yeah, I love this stuff. It’s great. Do you want to just give a very brief sort of overview of what you’ve done over the years up until now?
Sure. I’m based in San Francisco, I’ve been in technology my whole career. I kind of started out as an investment banker doing tech mergers and acquisitions in the first .com era. And then really quickly, I was like, I don’t want to be the guy with the spreadsheet and the suit on like running the numbers.
Like I want to be the entrepreneurs on the other side of the table. Like they’re having all the fun and they’re in the game. And so pretty much the rest of my career after that first investment banking job has been operating companies, tech companies, big companies early in my career, like SAP
and Google. I ran North America sales for Google for a number of years. And then kind of left Google and I was like, hey, I want to work in much smaller environments, take much bigger risks, have much bigger impact. And so the whole chunk of the last part of my career has been working in startups. I was the chief revenue officer and then president for a company called AdRoll, which is now like a 250 million revenue business.
It was a ton of fun, hired a lot of people there and made a lot of mistakes, learned a lot of stuff. And then founded a company called pieces, which is a series A, developer tools company. And I’m currently the president of a series C point of sale and payments company in the Canada space called Treez.
Which is who we’re working with right now, supporting you- full circle. Sort of moving into just the numbers. How many people have you hired across the course of your career? Oh boy, hundreds, hundreds of people. Some amazing ones, mostly amazing ones I’d like to say, but yeah. Some misses along the way, but yeah, hundreds.
Very good. So then you must have some stories. So let’s hear, sort of best and worst hiring surprises, if you can think of some. The one that comes to mind right away in terms of the best hire or hiring surprise was- I almost never hire people right out of university. I’m like, let’s let these people go spend a year or two on someone else’s dime, figuring out how to pay their rent and do their laundry and how to figure out how to get groceries. I don’t need to be the person, you know, with them on the team. Like I’ll pick them up right after they figured all that out.
And against my better instincts, I hired an SDR right out of college two years ago. And this person just lit up the charts in terms of like intelligence and creativity. And this is an SDR hire. I’m like, I think this is going to go really well. And so, you know, we had a one month kind of ramp period where maybe if the quota was 20 appointments a month, we gave the person like five appointments a month while they ramp.
And this person got 20 appointments in their first five days. It was wild. I mean, this is first job out of college. And they just like figured out where their audience was talking. In that case on Twitter. And so instead of all the usual stuff that an SDR would do, it’d be okay, like how do I build a list?
How do I write a cold email? How do I use outreach? They’re like, I’m just going to go find out where my audience is talking. And then they went and inserted themselves in the conversations in a very authentic way that wasn’t salesy, but was just intelligent. And the appointments just started flowing.
And so, less than a month then I’m like, I think I’m going to promote you to an account executive. And the person became an account executive. And then within two or three months was like the top account executive. It was amazing. It was I think, a real testament to, I think the power of hiring
somebody that is, you know, self motivated, really bright, really ambitious, and creative. Conversely? Worst hire- so many choices, so many choices. We won’t use names whatsoever. There’s been a couple examples where there would be somebody that I was like, this is either going to go really well or really badly.
And almost always, those hires tend to end up going really badly. And there’s one in particular that was, I’d say again, like I’m a sucker for candidates that are really sharp, really smart, quick learners, right. And this person had that trait in spades and they were wildly ambitious. And the issue was ego.
And the issue was like, are they going to collaborate? And sometimes with account executives, you maybe squint your eyes and you’re like, maybe I can get away with them not being the most collaborative person in the world. It was definitely a high risk hire and it bombed like nobody’s business. It didn’t last very long.
It was a short tenure of terror, I’d say. But it was, it was really bad. I felt terrible afterwards. What’s your secret in recruiting to sourcing top talent? You know, I think at some point in my career, I really started to reflect on what am I actually looking for? What are the traits of the most successful people that I’ve worked with?
And I think that I’ve been able to get a very clear sense for myself of what I want. And also how to assess people on those traits. And for me, it’s four things. I’m looking for people that are really smart. And I think smart if you’re an academic is quite different than smart, if you’re in a commercial role.
And so it’s less about like a raw IQ. And to me, smart is about quick learner. I hop on the phone with the CEO of a company in a particular vertical and quickly figure out how to ask the right set of questions to extract information. You’re a good question asker in other words, right? But you have to be smart to ask questions.
You don’t feel like, oh, I don’t want to sound dumb. I’m a little nervous. I’m insecure. Smart people tend to just like go for it and ask questions and they’ll learn quickly. So that’s one. The second thing is ambitious. I call it wired for greatness. I’m looking for candidates that wake up instinctively and want to be somebody, right?
Like they are motivated intrinsically to go be successful for themselves. They want to grow, they want to learn, they want to achieve. When you get a few of those people around the table, it’s infectious. The third thing is people that are really collaborative. And so are you going to work- are you ambitious for the team, not just for yourself?
And I very much relate it to collaborative as low ego is the fourth one. So there’s a humility. It all sort of fits together when you find these people, right. So that’s, you know, that’s what I’m looking for. And then the question becomes, can you figure that out?
Right. And actually assess them on these trades. Very good. So then secret or unconventional interview question or tactic? And I guess you’ll be giving it away with this but- that’s okay, that’s okay. As you’ll hear, I think it’s fine for people to know. Again, because I’m interested in really smart people who are quick learners, I like to throw them off a little bit but in a relevant way. Like, it’s not going to be like how many tennis balls can you fit in a 737? But I like to pick something off someone’s resume. So like I remember a candidate once that was like an Olympic, like a junior Olympic mountain biker.
And so I might pick something like that and be like, okay, so you’re applying for an account executive role. You have to have business instincts. Let’s talk about mountain bikes, but let’s do it from the business perspective. What do you think the margins are on a mountain bike company? Like, if you were the CEO of a mountain bike company, how would you think about your marketing strategy?
So taking something that I know that they know that world quite well, but turning the camera angle. Nice. Very good. So then finally, most important piece of wisdom on hiring you wish you’d known earlier. I genuinely believe that 90 percent of the game, if you’re a leader is actually hiring the right people.
If you have an entire team of people that are smart, collaborative, humble, ambitious, low ego, I mean, that team is going to wake up, come together collaboratively. No one has egos. They’re going to work together and they’re like motivated, like what a place to work. And so I think for me, it is nothing else on my calendar is more important than getting into the interview process hands on and helping us find the right talent.
And when you find them selling like hell, because those people probably have lots of other places to go and you’ve got to close them. But if you do that, like it’s the most important thing to do as a leader. Amazing. Some absolute pearls of wisdom here. So I appreciate it. Suresh, thank you very much.
Thanks. Take care, Tom.
