3 key secrets to building extraordinary teams
David Cancel, the CEO and founder of Drift, wrote a deep dive on how to think about finding and recruiting the kinds of people who build incredible startups. Among the factors he looks at:
Scrappiness (Importance: 35%)
The four most telling words a new hire can say: “I’ll figure it out.” If you find someone who says that (and can follow through on it), you know you’ve found someone with drive — someone who will plunge headfirst into any challenge and help move the company forward. But to clarify, the type of drive I look for in new hires is different from traditional ambition. Because traditionally ambitious people, while hard workers, tend to obsess over their own personal rise up the corporate ladder. They always have an eye on that next title change, from manager to director, director to VP, or VP to C-suite, and that influences how they perform. That’s why a decade ago, while running my previous company Performable, I added a new requirement to our job descriptions: “Scrappiness.” Today, it’s one of our leadership principles at Drift.
Scrappy people don’t rely on titles or defined sets of responsibilities. Instead, they do whatever it takes to get the job done, even when no one is looking, and even if the tasks they’re performing could be considered “beneath their title.”
Takeaways from F8 and Facebook’s next phase
We had a greatly informative conference call with our very own Josh Constine and Frederic Lardinois, who were checking in from Facebook’s F8 conference in San Jose this week. In case you weren’t able to join us, the transcript and audio have been posted for Extra Crunch members:
Josh Constine: To look at the biggest announcements from the day, I think one of the most interesting items was that Facebook is moving more heavily into dating. Facebook announced that it was getting into dating last year, but now it’s actually going to allow you to say that you have a secret crush on a friend.
Previously, Facebook dating was just about strangers, and that made it more of a competitor with things like Tinder or Bumble, but now that it’s actually opening up to dating with friends, it enters a new market that’s more akin to an old failed app called Bang With Friends, it’s a little bit inappropriate we know, but Facebook has actually seized this huge opportunity that because you might have thousands of friends, you might be more likely to have a great match with somebody you already are friends with, than with a total stranger.
Simultaneously, Facebook is actually going to start getting into the “meet new friend” space. Forever, it has been only been about recreating your offline social network online. But now it actually wants you to expand that offline and online network to new people entirely. That meet new friends product could spell trouble for startups like Hey! VINA, or Bumble, Side App, BFF which are designed to help you meet friends.
And eventually, Facebook could actually turn this into a serious moneymaker, because whenever you have a product where people are trying to get discovered or do networking, there will be people willing to pay to have extra visibility in that product. And so I think that there will be new opportunities here for Facebook, but also decreased opportunities in the dating and meet new friends space. So if you’re considering making an investment in the startup in that area, you might want to think twice.
How tech entrepreneurs think of Universal Basic Income
UBI is in the news pretty regularly these days, but how do tech entrepreneurs think about this approach to social welfare? Sherwood Morrison investigated how founders are thinking about UBI today, and what a world with UBI might look like for starting a company:
“We have a strong idea that when basic income is introduced, people will stop working. This is even what people think before receiving the money. They think, I’ll start a business, I’ll quit my job, and we have a lot of women who say, I’ll quit my marriage to my stupid husband because I’m not dependent on him anymore. All of a sudden, the basic income comes, and you have more possibilities. You’re free to go. Once you can say no, it’s different to say yes,” says [Founder Michael] Bohmeyer.
Why carriers keep your data longer
We’ve always known that our carriers save all kinds of information about us, from our phone records to our locations. What we haven’t really known is how long they have kept that data.
Rob Pegoraro researched all four of the major telecom carriers and found that the data retention policies were all over the place, from Verizon holding data one year to AT&T holding it for a whopping five years (as a reminder, TechCrunch is ultimately owned by Verizon).
He discusses why the carriers have such different policies and why they really don’t need to be holding on to our private data that long:
Monitoring network performance is the biggest reason to keep this data.
“You can’t ensure a good end-user experience without having an understanding of where those users spend time and how they move around on the network,” said Brendan Gill, president of the network-surveying firm OpenSignal, in an email forwarded by a publicist.
And that data remains useful for a while, he added: “The argument for retaining historical data is that some events/activities only happen periodically — like seasonal effects/storms, or major entertainment or sporting events — so if you want to forecast, you need that data.”
Another industry analyst said your utility for keeping it declines after 18 months.
“From a network perspective, one year gives you just barely a year-over-year comparison,” said Roger Entner, founder of Recon Analytics. “Ideally, if you want to do a year-to-year comparison of how your traffic on your network changed, you’d want to do a year and a half.”
How Amazon’s HQ2 could disrupt government IT, for the worse
Amazon’s HQ2 project may have been killed in New York City, but its DC-half is still very much underway. We have a special guest post from Giacomo Bagarella, who works for the Massachusetts Digital Service, on the profound challenge facing the federal government as Amazon moves in:
What I’ve witnessed at a small scale is likely to play out with HQ2. First, the federal tech workforce is large, and accounts for a large portion of the D.C. area’s pool of STEM workers. According to Office of Personnel Management data for the executive branch, 47,000 civilian federal employees worked in occupations like computer engineering, statistics, cryptanalysis, and information technology management in the Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia region in March 2018. (OPM’s database does not include the military and intelligence community, so the actual total is higher.) Depending on how you cut data on private-sector employment, the federal government accounts for roughly one in eight STEM workers in greater D.C.
ICYMI: Earlier this week:
- Nine lessons on how Niantic reached a $4B valuation
- Verified Expert Brand Designer: The Working Assembly
- The curious case of Slack’s missing $162 million
- Diving into TED2019, the state of social media, and internet behavior
- What we want to know in the We Company (WeWork) S-1
- Equity Shot transcribed: Slack’s S-1 and Uber’s IPO terms
Thanks
To every member of Extra Crunch: thank you. You allow us to get off the ad-laden media churn conveyor belt and spend quality time on amazing ideas, people, and companies. If I can ever be of assistance, hit reply, or send an email to danny@techcrunch.com.