January 18, 2023 • 45 mins
The transition from Founder to CEO is a watershed moment in your company, and in your life.
A great Founder creates something from nothing. A great CEO takes the next step, and builds mechanisms of success. They turn that vision into a well-functioning machine. Becoming a great CEO is a matter of tactics and personal growth. Today, NFX General Partner Gigi Levy-Weiss reveals how to get there, with special guest Avishai Abrahami, the founder of Wix. Avishai built Wix into a company of about 5,000 people, with 1.4 billion in revenue. They’ll cover how Founders can become great CEOs, measurements that most startups miss, the difference between good failure and bad failure, and more. (edited)
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(00:08):
Of course, in the beginning, you don't haveother Pete, so you kind of like you do it
yourself.
And this is what you should be doing.
But, very quickly, when the companies arearound 30 to 50 people, fixes should be a goal.
Your goal should be that you build a team andframework that will do it for you.
Today, NFX's general partner, Gigi Levy-Weiss,is sitting down with Avishai Abrahami, the CEO
(00:29):
of Wix.com.
Avishai has Wix into a company of about 5000people with $1,400,000,000 in revenue.
They'll cover how founders can become greatCEOs, measurements most startup smith, the
difference between good failure and bad failureand much more.
Let's jump in.
Hi, Avishai.
Hey.
Thanks for joining us for the podcast today.
(00:51):
I was waiting a long time for this, and I'm sohappy that you're with us.
I don't know if you know, but a few years ago,I wrote a piece and made a video for artifacts,
which is called what makes a strong startupCEO.
It's one of our top performing essays, I think.
And it basically something that I really focuson, which is what makes a startup founder
(01:12):
really good as a CEO, but even moreimportantly, so what it makes them really good
as leaders.
And this is exactly why I wanted to talk toyou.
You know, if you're the founder of weeks, youknow, your world class CEO, you know, that's
what I think You're super star, super founder,super goals driven.
You're great.
From what I can see from the outside inrecruiting and supporting and motivating Flint,
(01:33):
And so, you know, the success of the company, Ithink, is very much because of that end of the
team that you recruited.
I mean, how large is the company today?
Like, how many users today?
We have 200 and the 30,000,000 users.
And all of them are small businesses.
Right?
No.
And we actually have everything.
Every mix.
Right?
We have a lot of small businesses, but we havealso a lot of Pete that went into a project or
(01:54):
school project.
We have about, probably around a huge amount ofstudents, like, from the United States schools
or University of Colleges.
And, we are selling to 100 and 92 Countries,which is everywhere possible in the in the
planet.
And how many and how many languages like otherwebsite, like in every possible language?
I think we support Pete, if I remembercorrectly.
(02:14):
And what's the company's revenues or less?
About 1,400,000,000 for this year.
Oh, that's a nice number.
And how many people in the company
company is around 5000 people.
And how many years ago did you start it?
We started at the end of 2006.
So I would say 2007.
So that's quite a while ago.
That's quite a while ago.
(02:35):
That's for sure.
Yes.
It is true.
And so founders, everybody listening.
I mean, I think that you guys should really payattention here because in the next kinda half
an hour to an hour.
Avisha is gonna help you understand aboutleadership, which is where I think this company
excels.
So, you know, one of the topics that we talkabout is the difference between being a
founder, which is just a practical thing ofstarting a company.
(02:56):
And then turning this into being a good CEO,which many of the founders have never been
before, and then turning this into being agreat leader and the personal growth that you
need to undergo to be good at all these things.
And, you know, as we know, there are many thatare good at being a CEO in terms of the
manager, managerial skills.
There are others that are good at beingleaders, not graded.
Ding CEOs, and some are good at both.
(03:17):
So can you tell me a little bit about the 1stdays co founding Wix?
Like, what were you like then?
You know, how did you changed some debt pointonwards.
Well, you're talking about me personally.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You personally.
You're not gonna get off the hook.
First of all, I think that there's a Founder.
I was very lucky that I had 2 strong cofounders with me and, give a couple and gig
(03:38):
with a genius, my younger brother, which isbrilliant.
And very early we had Neil Zoil joining.
So team around me was phenomenal.
And and I think that is probably my biggesttrick.
If you ask me, what is the best trick that onetrigger can say and teach or explain is get
phenomenal talent for the journey with you.
(03:58):
I'm always saying that, my biggest Kiel, thefounder and CEO, is that I grew up in a family
where I'm the least intelligent person in thehouse.
And because both my brothers are brilliant andmy parents are, and I'm the older kid, so to
feel comfortable.
And, of course, you know, so I learned tomanage people smarter than me because that's
what the older kid does.
Right?
He's managing his young brothers and hisparents.
(04:19):
And, so for me to feel at home, I need to be sohonored that people are the smart enemy.
And I think that gave me huge advantage overmost founders that I know.
Because a lot of people try to createenvironments where they are the smartest person
in the room.
And for me, it just feels natural.
So for me to feel uncomfortable, I need to besurrounding other people that I smarter than
it.
I mean, that's the number one thing I can say.
(04:40):
The biggest difference, right, is if you thinkabout what is the biggest difference between
the founder to see So the founder, you have anidea.
Right?
And, of course, you start a company.
Everybody can do that.
What makes a good founder is that he can createa clear vision, execute on the vision, hire
really good people and deliver the product,work on the marketing campaigns, human, his
founding team, and get to a point when acompany start a good CEO, to transition to BCO,
(05:03):
you don't do those things anymore yourself.
You need to build a mechanism to hire goodpeople.
You need to build a mechanism and a team thatwill do the marketing.
You need to build a mechanism to do theproduct.
You need to build a mechanism.
Okay, to do the engineering.
And when I talk about a mechanism, part of it,of course, is is human factor, right, when you
need to have really good engineers The otherthing is that you need to have a mechanism is
(05:26):
also how you measure when it's doing thingswell.
Right?
So you need to have something that is visibleto say, well, we're doing things well.
We're progressing.
And then the next part is, of course, that it'salways clear why and how we're trying to
achieve something.
So I think when I started, I think a lot of thethings were not so clear to me that this is my
number one goal is to build mechanisms thatwill do that and not do it myself.
(05:49):
Of course, in the beginning, you don't haveother Pete, so you kinda like you do it
yourself.
And this is what you should be doing.
But very quickly, many companies around 30 to50 Pete, This should be a goal.
Your goal should be that you build a team andframework that will do it for you.
I love that because this is very much likeconcept that I like writing about and talking
about, which is that I always say that the roleof the and there's a manager is to basically
(06:12):
create the strategy, which is the vector inwhich you need to run, then to put the team in
place, which is the people that are supposed tocarry the company in that vector, then create a
set of KPIs that are the measurements to makesure that you're in the right direction and
then basically take a step backwards.
Let team go in this direction and measure it.
And then in a cycle, go back after, you know,used to be maybe an old company used to be
(06:35):
every year, and now it's in a startup.
It's like every week and ask yourself, are werunning in the right direction?
Do we have the right team to take us there?
And how are we measuring the right things?
And then if you don't have the right strategy,shift it a little bit.
If you don't the right team fix it.
And if you're measuring the wrong things, fixthe KPIs, and then just continue on and on and
on.
Flint what I hear from you is that you'rebasically saying it same where it is basically
(06:56):
building the mechanism, which is a set ofmethodology process and KPIs and getting the
best people to do that and just repeating thisagain and again and Did I get it right?
Yeah.
You did.
I did notice that companies have a bit ofvariety on what are the mechanisms to use and
how to build them.
But if you look at the better companies, it avariety is not so big.
(07:17):
Essentially end up being very similar.
And not on the on the least on the principle,then you covered a lot of them.
When you said, measure, make it visible.
Make sure that you have the great people.
And, of course, those are the output is theoutputs of of that process of the mechanism.
But the mechanism themselves, I think, are alsovery similar.
So I'll be a lot about how to do the meetings,how to run project.
(07:40):
And, I mean, those are essentially what makethe mechanisms.
Right?
And, like, what I noticed is that if you lookat great teams, Those are very similar.
So could you give, like, a few examples of theunique mechanisms you have in weeks?
Like, the few thing that you put in place thatyou think we're core to the management
methodology that made weeks what it is andallowed you later on to scale because these
(08:01):
mechanisms were in place so that everybodycould use them.
Yeah.
Let me start with the principle.
Okay?
So we put the principle very early, which is,if you can't measure it, it didn't happen.
Okay?
We measure everything and it cannot measure it.
It didn't happen.
So this is a very clear one saying you can'ttake pride on something that is unmeasured.
Okay?
If you did something, I think it's gonna implysupport that it didn't, well, it's worth
(08:23):
nothing.
Right?
You cannot measure it.
If you do marketing and can measure animprovement, it's worth nothing.
Okay?
Don't mention it because it didn't happen fromour perspective.
But, anyway, and it's fine.
Right?
It's fine to do things, and we found that theydidn't do the effect that we want we actually
also measured the amount of James you triedsomething, right, which is a positive thing
because not everything you're gonna do.
So we added another principle which says allowfailure.
(08:45):
This is going the top principle, but when youtake it into a deeper one level, it become more
interesting.
So for example, let's look at the chart andhiring.
Okay?
How do you build a mechanism around that?
So a mechanism around that, the one we ended upwith is that we test everybody.
Well, there's one exception.
If people work with a person before somebody wetrust, work with somebody before, we know who
he is, but we test everybody.
(09:06):
So if you're coming to Wix and you wanna be anengineer, we're gonna test you what everybody's
doing that.
But if you're coming to weeks and you wannawork for HR, we're gonna also test you.
And because that's a principle that we agreedon that that mechanism of hiring, had to come
up with a test that ended up saying, well,what's the most important thing for HR?
The most important for HR is that they'rebringing the right talent.
So we test everybody in a job by letting theminterview people that already work at Wix that
(09:31):
we know.
So then we will see how well they evaluatesomebody on a base Morgan interview and compare
it to what we know on that person.
Mhmm.
By doing that, we've created a test that allowsus to know how good somebody is.
From that point, then when we do hiring, wealso measure the quality of the people we
hired.
Right?
And as a result from that, we can always tunethe HR processes and get a better and better
(09:51):
mechanism right, and better talent in a jar,which, of course, influenced the talent in all
of the company.
And so this kind of thinking, I think, is veryMorgan, and this is something that takes quite
a while.
Pete me jump in a few of these because I findthem super interesting.
I think when I love the concept of testingeverybody that joins the company, I think that
there's not as a company too small to actuallydo that.
(10:12):
And many times I get pushback from founders whoeither fear that good candidates are not gonna
want to, take a test because they're justcoming to work in a small startup or others
that are saying that they wouldn't know how totest each one of these roles because, you know,
they're either techies or their product Pete.
What would you say to a young founder that saysmaybe I should start with testing only when
we're, like, few hundred people?
(10:33):
Because I like you think that you should startsuper early.
That is an idiot.
I'm not joking.
Right?
We are the first child who's at that test.
Okay?
And she was a super senior, way more seniorthan our company in that stage needed.
And it says a lot about the person that shewas, like, willing to go for this process.
Okay?
It says about a lot about hair.
Right?
That she was willing to participate in that.
(10:54):
And engineers, there's no other way to hireengineers.
Now you cannot talk about software.
That's complete rubbish.
And when it comes to design, obviously, you doit.
When it comes to financials, let somebody builda Morgan, and then, you know, so I think that's
completely wrong.
What I personally like other than coding wherethere was a practical test that you actually
take as a test.
What I personally like is giving people kind ofmissions to do and then come back and present
(11:18):
them.
Is this what you guys like as well?
Well, yeah, it's something right in the HR.
What we did is that we actually Pete herinterview, and then we asked care after that
about the people that, you know, we did it fora few HR candidates, and we just compare what
they told us to what we knew about the peoplethey interviewed.
Right?
So that was a task, but in the office, right,that interviewed over 2 hours.
(11:38):
Let's jump for a second into hiring, which, youknow, I think, you, as you said before,
surrounding yourself with people smarter andbetter than you is the key.
How do you think about hiring and the startupin the early stage and hiring Pete talent?
And we spoke about testing them, but, like,what processes do you think could be in place?
Like, how many interviews?
Who should interview a person?
And kind of what percent of your time do youthink you should spend as a young founder on
(12:01):
hiring, kind of dedicating to finding the bestPete.
Until you have direct to them, I'm gonna saythat.
Right?
Because even as a startup, you have anobjective.
You know, only one in people in the company.
Well, you should spend all the time neededuntil you have fifteen people that are the
right people.
Right?
So it can be a lot of time, and then at somepoint, it could be very little time.
When it comes to hiring, I'll give you anexample.
(12:21):
I cycled for 22 people before I found the OmerScheima CMO.
So I hired.
I moved people to different things.
I fired Pete.
I think it was around 22 people that they hiredwithin about a year in something, right, year
and a half.
And some of them I hired as juniors and hopethat they're gonna be or, like, I didn't give
them any official title to everybody in thatteam.
(12:43):
So I was looking at who's gonna be the best.
And then when I got to Omer after a few weeks,I was obvious that he's on a different level.
And this is another part of a very me.
It's a very important lesson that I learned inmy life is that it's very hard to know who's a
super talent on the interview even on the test.
You can suspect who's a super talent, but youare not you're not gonna be sure about it, but
(13:06):
a month or 2 after, it's very easy to know.
And in the beginning of a startup, it's soimportant to have super Flint.
So you should allow us of the room to makemistakes and replace so this is another very
important thing.
I wanna tell you another funny story aboutOmer.
I'm just, so after I hired Omer, and my nextguy that I wanted to hire, was for me that now
is the CEO of IronSource.
(13:27):
It was before IronSource and now.
So we're talking and he said, you know, yeah.
Might be interested.
And then he asked me to talk to Omer after anhour a half that he was talking to Omer came
out and said, listen.
He's way better than me.
Don't hire me.
Keep him.
It's a nice story.
But this is another thing.
Right?
But there's only one guy.
I think that Tom is a legend.
(13:48):
Right?
But, anyway, that time, he was unemployed andneeded a job.
Right?
It's not like he was I found it to be superimpressive, and I was thinking with him about
whatever They can do next in weeks and then, ofcourse, started, the iron source and and build
this incredible company.
But I really believe that when you hire people,you should it's a startup, leadership cycle for
(14:08):
people if they're not the talent that you need,if they're not a super talent.
But in the startup, there's another thing.
Right?
You cannot really always hire the base peoplebecause you don't have the money.
You don't have the time.
Sometimes you have to understand that you needto Beller for some roles and then replace them
when you have you do have direct talent coming.
And what do you believe about kinda, you whenyou recruit somebody in, they're kinda okay
after a few weeks or a month.
(14:29):
Are you one of those people that believes ingiving people, you know, a few more months to
improve, or do you think that you should fixmistakes really quickly?
I think you should fix mistakes most of thetime quickly.
Not all the time.
It depends.
Right?
I'm just gonna tell my last this is like that.
A players hire a players, a plus players, aplus players, and b players, RSE players.
(14:51):
So if you want the organization to You cannotkeep somebody and make him into a manager as a
Pete.
Okay?
You'll find that your organization goes andsimply hire key players and deep players are F
players.
Right?
And so if you're not on top of that and youdon't keep super talents to be the majority of
the managers in the team, you will end up witha really bad organization.
I love that.
And it's also one of my favorite things.
(15:11):
I also love the what you said about, you know,when you're not sure that you have the right
person for top top job getting people if youcan to actually come and work without the title
and then keep yourself the optionality to seewho performs and give them that role.
This is something that I didn't rehear manypeople say.
I've done this many times before, and it worksreally well.
Clearly, harder to do, but when it works, itworks so well.
(15:33):
This is something that I give nobody a title inthe beginning.
And by the way, today at weeks, you can chooseyour own title.
So choose whatever title you want.
We're gonna say it's true.
What does that mean?
It means that we're not negotiating with youand watch your title.
I and you can take whatever title he wants.
We don't care.
It doesn't change your role.
It doesn't change what you do.
Not gonna change your salary.
K?
But if it's really important for you, what iswritten on your LinkedIn, feel free to buy
(15:56):
whatever you want.
We don't care.
I like that.
And it calculates Flint situation wheresomebody will, from a child will negotiate with
the candidate and then one child and then fightwith them and they argue about them.
And then I said, well, you know what?
We're gonna allow you to do that.
If your signs, if the guy signed, come to theorientation day in weeks, and the first thing
they see is that where you could choosewhatever title you want.
(16:17):
We don't
And do you think that over the years, what haschanged in the way you're thinking about the
kind of talent that you want?
I mean, did you need more penurial peopleearlier on.
And then as the company grow, you move todifferent type of people, do you still look for
the same kind of people?
How did that change over the years?
Why it depends?
It depends on the cycles growth of the companywhere it's growing.
(16:38):
So for example, we're now starting a newbusiness, which is in in the enterprise.
Business.
We're seeing a lot of larger companies usingWix to build their website.
Right?
And it's suddenly, you know, it's not a smallbusiness, a big company, requires different
things, a lot of enterprise thinking, right,and we don't have that.
So we need to hire people with experiencethere.
Right?
And extending into that is sounding the Currierto hire people that really know a lot of the
(17:02):
things.
And a lot of the regular things we do like, inmarketing and product.
I prefer people with less experience and a lotof talent because we can teach them how we do
things.
And on that, we have to unlearn them, make themforget about Currier already work and then try
to teach them new thing, how we work.
Right?
Obviously, it's sometime through something.
No.
I think developers different because it takes alot of time to be a really good developer.
(17:24):
And then moving from one environment to anotheris relatively easy most of the time.
It really depends what is the area.
And one is the if it's a new thing, if it's athing that exists in already a really good way
of doing that, then you wanna hire publicpeople that you can teach your way and not that
you have to unlearn something.
So it really depends.
There's no rule.
In a startup, you know, the best thing, ofcourse, is to hire a very experienced CMO from
(17:47):
a very successful company an amazing CTO thatis used to manage a thousand people and likes
coding himself.
So he needs very hands on on the code.
And a HR that knows how to build Morganorganization of a thousand Pete.
And if you if you can do that when your startupis starting, that's incredible.
But I never met anybody who did that at thatlevel.
Right?
So the fear in that is practical here are verydifferent.
(18:08):
And you have to understand that you're probablygonna people that are not all of them gonna
grow to the next level.
Right?
And that's fine.
And so it's so much easier, I think, to hiresomebody and say, well, you're helping me
manage this.
There's no city tile here.
And then when you actually get to a place whereit's a hundred people need somebody who knows
how to put in a child organization.
Right?
You can bring one without demoting them.
Yeah.
(18:29):
Definitely not always trivial.
And I think you guys did a great job.
Talk about measuring everything.
And, again, many founders that talk to end upbeing really decent or good at measuring the
core business KPIs because that's kinda whateverybody told them over the years.
So, you know, you have you know, you haveconversion, you have retention, you have
everything.
But then when it came to measuring things thatwere what they felt our support task to the
(18:52):
company.
They were really bad at putting KPIs to that.
Is Wix measuring everything on every front?
We are trying.
I gotta say, not as much as I want.
Right?
But, definitely more than others.
This is the first thing I wanna say.
Most startups that I meet and most companies,they measure even on the business measure a lot
less than they should.
Okay?
(19:12):
And so they come with conversion, and it'susually percentage based conversion, which is
not relevant.
You always have to measure conversion ondollars Then they measure a few things on sales
efficiency, then they measure a few things onother things, and they have, like, 5.
K?
You cannot understand your business from 5parameters.
There's no way to do that there.
And if you only focus on 5, somebody wants to,I don't know if it's true that Facebook used to
(19:36):
measure just interactions.
Or if you just measure interaction, just gonnamake product that add buttons that nobody
needs.
Right?
It's gonna add so much more interactions.
I don't think it's true.
Again, I have no idea.
I've never worked at Facebook, but I just wannashow something that is so silly.
Okay?
And the thing that a lot of the companies I seedo that, we actually generate pretty much from
the 1st days, I would say, probably about 20pages of things that we look in graphs on the
(20:01):
business side, which very quickly grew to morethan that.
But this enabled us to understand really why Ithink that the details that actually change in
the business, okay, and where we wannainfluence something.
When we see a drop, when we see improvement,where we don't understand something, Not
creating that visibility early on is gonna besomething that we leave you with so much that
you don't understand about what drives yourbusiness.
(20:24):
And I know there's ton of book about it like,oh, should you measure 5?
Should you measure free?
You should measure this is your no start.
I Beller seen a company that actually has foundthose 5 magical things.
So my opinion on that is that you do it andthen you're missing the action picture of
what's happening in your business.
And so early on in the weekdays, like, how manythings do you think you actually tracked to
(20:46):
understand what the business is?
I mean, I think about some of the company thatI ran and you know, I used to spend it was
definitely, I don't know, 15 to 20 minutesevery Morgan, understanding all the, you know,
like, looking at everything.
Making sure that I understand what's reallyhappening in the business by looking at a bunch
of things.
How many, you know, early on in the business?
How many things?
How many data points did were you guys lookingat to know where you are and to take smart
(21:08):
decisions?
Well, let let's look at that.
Okay.
So the first thing is, of course, where peoplecome from, so what countries, okay, what
keywords then the conversion on the landingpages, k, then the ads that worked, then
conversion from each one of them to theirproduct, then what people tried to do, so what
they told us was selected they're trying to doon Wix.
Then what they actually did, then what theyused in order to try and do that?
(21:32):
What is the correlation of success on that?
What kind of template to choose?
Okay.
When did they churn?
What did they buy?
Why would the support things they ask for?
Oh, and, of course, the quality.
The so this was a how pretty it was.
For us, it was very important.
It still is.
The content that they made and the how muchthey completed on the website in each
interaction.
So those are the basics one we measure for ourbusiness.
(21:54):
But it's allowing me to understand, well, weneed more templates.
So we need different ones.
So we have an issue with that thing and on thatthing.
Okay?
And that is true for every company.
There's always those things because you wannaunderstand your customers.
You need to follow on the customer.
Right?
Your George's conversion is an output from thishuge amount of thing that happening on your
product.
Right?
There's so much that's happening.
And if you don't look at the whole picture, youdon't understand the whole funnel and then how
(22:19):
to use the product, You don't understand whatis happening with the customers.
At the end of the day, we all work for thecustomer.
We don't work for ourselves to make money.
We work for the customer hoping that one daywe'll have enough value that we can actually
earn money from that, and then we can scale it.
Yep.
And so one of the things that I found out thatmeasuring everything gets you to is clearly a
(22:40):
good problem, which is transparency andeverybody seeing what's happening in the
business.
But that kind of forces you to be able toaccept failure in a much more meaningful way
than companies that where there's notransparency and people don't know that things
don't work.
How do you think about accepting failures inthis, you know, in the younger company?
And how do you deal with it in weeks todaywhere, you know, the larger the company
(23:01):
becomes, the easier it is to fall into the trapof There's a performance review and failures is
what gets you to get a lower performance.
And so, you know, what we know is that in hugecompanies, one of the reasons there's no
innovation is because people are afraid to failbecause your best routes to getting promoted is
not failing and just staying on track.
And we don't want that and start up anddefinitely not in weeks.
(23:22):
So how do you deal with allowing people to feelif it's the right kind of failure and not being
afraid this is gonna be negative.
I'm gonna distinguish, first of all, to make aclear distinction.
There's a big difference between I failedbecause I did it well.
I need the assumption that I was wrong.
It didn't work.
Yep.
And there is another kind of Beller which is Idid it badly, and it didn't work.
Okay?
(23:43):
And it's not the same because of the first one,I'm happy.
And the second one, I don't want you tocontinue to work at Wix.
Okay.
Well, obviously, not always, but this is theprinciple.
I think that we want people to do very thingsvery Beller, and then it might fail.
There's a few things that you wanna do.
Like, I would, a lot of time, mention thatproject will my decision.
(24:04):
I wanted it and it failed even if it's notalways true, because at the end of the day, I
think about it is that the team recommended.
I approved it.
Okay?
So from that point and on, it's myresponsibility if it fails or succeed.
Okay?
Mostly if it's failed, if it succeeded, itdoesn't have to be my responsibility.
But then if if a team will come and say, well,we did it, it doesn't work a lot come out.
(24:24):
It doesn't walk through what they did.
I would always be the first guy to say, no.
No.
No.
The is my project.
I approved it.
I wanted it.
And now I think it's to be part of the languageof the company.
The next thing is, we don't work on checking ifeverything you did.
There's, like, no Four room in which we look ateverything somebody did.
And we go, well, he did it.
He didn't work.
(24:44):
You did this.
He did work.
He did this.
It doesn't work.
All those tests happen in the background,right, food Morgan.
As part of the day to day activity, okay, whichmeans that you don't go around and Beller.
I succeeded or I failed.
Okay?
And experiment didn't work.
You just turn it off and move to the next So bydoing that, I think we've created much more
freedom for people to fail to test and findthat it's not working.
(25:06):
I think this is Oh, critical.
Then I also love your distinction.
I used to when I ran companies, I used todistinguish between what I called good failures
and bad failures.
Good failures are the ones where you basicallydid everything right and the assumption was
wrong, or the thing you wanted to test is just,you know, proved to be wrong, and that's great
because we now know not to do it.
And that's ours because you didn't work well ordidn't test as well or, you know, put out a
(25:27):
product that's buggy or something.
Let's jump for second to meetings.
I mean, you know, one of the tougher things ascompanies grow is the number of meetings and
the amount of wasted time on meetings that arethere just because they're there.
I know that this is something that you careabout.
How do you guys deal with that?
How did you make sure that in growing thecompany, the company didn't become a
bureaucratic, you know, meeting creator?
(25:49):
And what do you recommend founders in thatregard early on.
Well, first of all, I gotta say, I think wehave too many meetings, right, just to be
clear.
And I think that we might be better than othercompanies, a lot of other companies, but we are
definitely not where I think we should be.
I mean, that people most people should havemaybe a meeting a day.
And so I think that, the only people that havemore meetings should be management and
(26:09):
especially senior management because theyactually do nothing else except meetings,
right, at the job, but I think that most peopleshould have very little.
And and we're not there So I found that we dida few things.
1, we broke the company in what we call subcompanies, and each one of those has come like.
So each one of those is what we call a CEO ofthat team and that guy is a chairman.
The chairman is always for my management team.
(26:31):
Okay?
And this is what's very important.
What we found out is that people are alwayswaiting and trying to convince meetings So it
will always go up and down, up and down, up anddown, and people will wait for things and to
approval.
And we made a rule that says, well, that thisdeal of a team and the chairman can pretty much
Pete make any decision they want.
And which said essentially, now if somebodywanna make a decision, it can make the decision
(26:57):
with one person.
Right?
And because that person is for my managementteam, I trust him.
I know that he knows most of the time placesBeller as I do what we wanna achieve.
And so this did a magical thing for decisionmaking because I think the worst thing is not
just meaning.
It means that you don't get a decision in.
Right?
So you have another meeting and not a meetingand not a meeting, and things get delayed and
(27:18):
delayed and delayed.
So that was a, I think, very important thing.
We'll define a clear way to make decision basedon the person that is managing the team Wix E
Commerce managed by Eric, him and his chairman,his daddy, they can just talk to each other and
make a decision on almost everything.
And that did a dramatic effect.
(27:40):
When you start a startup, of course, you don'thave to think about those things.
Right?
You do need to think about something else andwe're gonna talk about it in a minute.
But because you are there, right, you havethirty Pete, you talk to each one of them every
day.
But if you are in a meeting and it's not anupdated meeting, let's say, I mean, but I'm in
the happening day, and there's, like, no actionitems coming from that meeting, written.
(28:01):
It was a waste of time.
So this is another rule that we have, and Ithink it's working pretty well.
Right?
A meeting has to have a clear why we are hereand a clear what's happening after, and every
project has to have a single owner.
There's one guy that owned that project.
And just a question on that.
Do you have, like, rules on what you need tosend before the meeting so that the meeting can
(28:21):
happen?
Yes.
But, you know, it's a company full of Israelisand Eastern European, you know, we can have
many roles.
It works less good than those mechanism Idescribed before.
Yeah.
The next part is how you do the projectmanagement.
Okay?
And this is an interesting thing.
Most project management usually would have youhave a product guy.
He writes specs, then you have another guy thatwould work a technical team and able to sprint
(28:45):
or whatever.
Right?
And we found that it's way better to say, well,the owner of project.
The name is the product part is the developer,and he actually come to the product guy for
clarification.
And on the other way around, and that made amassive reduction in meetings because now a lot
of the engineers are not depending on talkingto anybody in order to do what they want.
(29:06):
If they think the understanding, they'll do it.
Right?
And we kinda, like, made this framework wherethey present it Beller week.
You show what it did to the team.
So now the team meeting is about showing whatit did which is great for many different
reasons, but the more interesting part I thinkhere is that because the engineer owned the
feature, not the product guy owned the feature,and then Jenny can get decision and make
decision on that.
(29:27):
He doesn't have to escalate retro big meetings,which so that was not a massive thing that we
did.
It takes a lot.
You have to be really brave to do it.
It's very different than how people today areworking in most places.
Yep.
And what tools are you using for this projectmanagement in house?
Well, we use Monday.com, of course.
Of course.
I don't think that everybody knows, but clearlyMonday started as a week So let's jump for a
(29:49):
second to leadership.
And I'm gonna start by throwing in a statementthat I want you to tell me whether you think
it's right or wrong, but the statement is thatbeing a good manager and being a good leader is
not necessarily the same thing.
And that the the problem with being a startupfounder is that you need to be both.
I have no idea.
Don't know what's a good manager, and I'm notsure I know what's a good leader.
Tell you how I think about it.
(30:10):
Right?
If I look on the planet today, I I would rate aloan master leader and CEO at the team.
K?
And I know now people like him.
Don't like him.
But in reality, I I, like, look at what he doesin managing so many companies, I don't even
know how to compare, but I cannot do what hedoes in so many companies at the same time.
I cannot do it in one company.
K?
Is he a leader or the manager?
That's a good question.
I think he is a good example of both.
(30:32):
Right?
I think that he's clearly leading the Pete.
You know, there's different definitions ofleadership.
The one that I like the most is the one thatsays that a leader takes people to where they
should be, but they don't necessarily wanna goto.
Right?
It's the ability to get people to get out oftheir comfort zone and not necessarily do the
trivial stuff but go and do the things thatthey should do or the places where they should
(30:52):
be where without the leader, they wouldn't go.
And I think in that regard, you know, clearly,
What does the manager do?
Well, manager does a lot of the thing that wespoke about before that are good processes in
determining strategy and the recruiting of theright team and setting up the KPIs, and there
could be a great manager.
And I think we've seen people that are greatmanagers that, you know, there weren't great
leaders, which made it tough for them to getpeople to give more and work harder and be more
(31:17):
committed.
And then there could be great leaders whoaren't necessarily great manager
Alright.
So you're talking about white collaroperations.
So somebody is very good at defining everythingand making sure that people follow the
guidelines we discuss.
And another one that is actually making themexciting and understanding and taking them to
the goal.
Yes.
So I would argue that the second one cannot doit without being very, very detailed on what he
(31:39):
wants to achieve.
You cannot inspire people but giving a talk.
It only works in the movie.
Right?
In reality, you wanna talk about how to make aproject management or you wanna build a site or
you wanna do a CRM?
It's the one who leads that part of thatproduct or whatever.
You need to be so excited about the details.
Right?
You wanna tell a built in Electrify.
You need to know the details to lead peopleinto that because they're gonna see that you're
(32:02):
excited about what they do, which is thedetails.
And so you need to essentially manage thedetails, right, of the product that you're
creating and the customer interaction of allthose things.
So I think that both are very important.
I think you cannot be a leader without knowinga huge amount of the details of why you're
doing that and working with the team
On actually achieving it.
On the details.
(32:23):
Yeah.
I think one of the big things in leading peopleis making sure that they know that they really
understand the company's story and strategy andwhere it's going.
And this is becoming tougher and tougher as thecompany grows.
Like, at the beginning, you're, like, whatever,fifteen Pete.
You know, they just tier you all day long, andthey know exactly where you want the company to
go.
They know exactly what's your strategy.
And then it it becomes bigger and bigger, starthaving town halls and you record yourself as
(32:45):
stuff.
How do you make sure that everybody in thecompany kinda knows what's, you know, where the
company's heading, what's the strategy, and howdoes that change over the years?
Well, to be fair, honestly, it's kinda likewell, in the beginning, you said, everybody
knows.
Right?
Until a 100 and, I don't know, 50 to 200people, everybody knows what is happening.
Yep.
And the reason everybody knows what's happeningis because you just talk to people or talk to
(33:08):
people that directly talk to adequate.
Right?
And so that's super easy.
And most of the time, when you start and youbuild a startup, the story stays pretty much
the same.
Right?
In the 1st few years, unless you do kind of apivot, but then everybody knows if you did a
pivot, the stories stay pretty much fixed.
You're just doing the same story better andbetter.
When you grow, you need to start creatingcommunications.
So you build all the things.
As you said, company meetings, presentations,you talk to senior management, you talk to
(33:33):
their management, you do often, whatever, allhand meetings, whatever kind of meeting you
want, and and all those things.
But from my experience, I noticed that itmatters somewhat.
Right?
Essentially, as long as the company continue todo what it did before and you don't wanna
change anything essential, it's very easy.
And second that you wanna do something in adifferent way or change a lot of what the way
(33:54):
that the company thinks about something, itdoesn't matter how many company meetings you're
gonna do, how much It's gonna be very hard forpeople to actually believe that the company is
actually changing something.
And I think Microsoft demonstrated that wedeclined, right, Yep.
Until that they were talking about the cloudand the cloud, and nobody was kinda like
nobody, Microsoft actually used their owncloud.
And then one day, Satya came and said, well,you have 3 months to work everything to the
(34:16):
cloud.
And then it actually happened.
So a big part, I think, of how you tell a storywhen you would do a change is to make one of
the statements.
On basis with API first approach, right, in inAmazon, you have to be very clear where we're
not discussing that anymore.
This is how we do it.
So when a company is very small, you can createin a conversation.
Company is very big.
(34:37):
You kinda have to be a bit more blunt about it.
But I think to to get the message in a biggercompany, when something changes, Right?
You have to be very, very clear about, well,this is not the presentation.
This is our discussion.
This is what's gonna happen from now And, ofcourse, you can do it in a nicer ways and or in
a, like, business way, which I think was aeither you build it API first or you go home.
(34:58):
Yep.
Right.
And when you do something, right, and it's abigger company, then you have to ask yourself,
well, is this something that will continue whatwe did before?
This is something new.
If it's something new, you have to be very,very wonderful, and make sure that everybody
hear that message.
How do you think about transparency in thecompany?
I mean, one of the things in call in a companyand being able to be a great leader is and I'm
talking about before becoming a public companywhere you have restrictions or what you can and
(35:22):
can't say sometimes, but how do you balance theneeds to basically communicate and be
transparent and give everybody the feeling thatthey're in the know.
And then on the flip side, not share, you know,not telling them that when things are not going
well and so on because they are, you know, manyJames, they're gonna get afraid.
They're gonna be looking for a job.
They're gonna think that the company's notdoing well.
Do you balance that over the years?
(35:42):
Well, I think that, 1st of all, why?
I think that's the most important part of why.
And, I mean, if you're starting to build acompany and you're making sure you bring great
talent.
Okay?
Then if you give that talent, all theinformation that is they need, the result will
be that great things will happen, even withoutyou do anything.
Doing anything to do to cause it, right,because you have great talent that has the
(36:03):
information they need.
And and so my belief is that sharinginformation as much as you can.
And that would mean that I would have stringsthat show all the sales, all the KPIs, what
users did, what users didn't do, all the issuesit support.
I would have screens.
I would send reports to the level that peoplewould just always come back and tell me this is
too much.
We need to reduce it.
(36:23):
And I would like, no.
No.
No.
Don't read it.
I don't mind, but I want it to be available allthe time.
So I was pushing it in a very aggressive way.
And I mean, that created a phenomenal returnbecause a lot of really smart people know these
things that, or can we date years that wouldn'thappen without that information.
So I just kept pushing it in every medium I hadcompany meetings, team meetings, screens around
(36:48):
the office, emails, weekly emails, monthlyemails every possible way.
When you're a public company, of course,there's something that you wanna share.
You you can no longer share, and that's verysad.
That's very tough.
How do you think about keeping your companyfast?
I mean, I know that you are really fast perperson, and you care about speed.
And as companies grow, they James slower.
(37:09):
What are the methodologies that you have inplace to keep everybody around you fast?
Well, so from what I noticed is that,essentially, there are a few reasons Beller,
that actually took kind of reason that thingsare getting slower.
So the first one is lack of urgency, and lackof urgency means that if you work at Microsoft,
you don't feel that Microsoft would beeffective, but what do you do?
(37:29):
Right?
It's like it doesn't really matter.
Well, it might matter to you, to your career,to what your boss is saying, but it's not gonna
influence the bottom line of Microsoft.
Right?
So the way I think about it is that you need toconnect people to the customers because when
they're connected to the customers, you know,that it does matter for the customer using
their product.
Do you wanna connect people to the customers?
(37:51):
I think this is super important to createmotivation.
It's also important to create understanding andexpertise on why you're doing things and how to
do them once a customer experience.
I think this is the first part, and I thinkthat's essential.
The second part is things slow down a lot ofthe time because of complex decision making.
Which is not your who's the owner, and we tryto make that everything as a clear owner.
(38:11):
Long decision making, as I said, well, you needapproval from this guy to get from that guy, so
we need an approval from that guy.
And we eliminated that by creating the subcompany's structure.
We have the chairman and the CEO that can cometo every decision.
Then a lack of resources, and lack ofresources, I wanna be clear, it's not lack of
engineers, right, or lack of whatever.
(38:31):
It's kinda like because it's the fact that youneed UX.
You need a product guy.
You need to try the content.
And if you are waiting in line to get thosethings, obviously, you are slower.
K?
So you need to make those either reallyavailable, or what we did is that we just gave
every large team to own resources.
So there's no team in Wix that actually dependon somebody else to get those resources.
(38:52):
So that was very important.
And I think those are the things that weidentified that create a dramatic effect in
velocity.
Till other layers for that, right, it's how youwrite the code that makes a big difference.
For example, when you build one service, yourcompany start, your company has 3 or 4
services.
And when you have 3 or 4 services, well, youcan just write every service from scratch, and
it's okay.
But when you grow and you have a 1000, then allthose blocks that give you advice on how to
(39:16):
write 1 or 2 services are no longer relevant.
Because it's a very different problem managinga 1000 live services.
Right?
It's very different than 2.
So this is something that you have to to keepconsideration.
If you are really good technically, I think youshould do it from day 1, but if not, you're
gonna have to find that you have to dorefactoring or what.
So that's another important thing.
Getting very clear product and projectmanagement methodologies.
(39:38):
I think it's also very important for avelocity.
So those are the things I wanna say heresomething else, Gigi, if I may, which is not
exactly that.
Right?
Not exactly direct answer to your question, butI also need a lot of time from founders.
And I think that takes startups, right, orcompanies have only two situations.
The first one is that they don't have enoughresources for all the things.
(39:59):
It's obvious they need to do.
And the second one is really a disaster for thecompany where they have enough resources, but
not enough things to do with them that willdrive value.
K?
So I always remind that my teams is that aslong as you have too many things you wanna do
and not enough resources when in good place.
You're in a good position.
Let's jump to a bunch of practical questions.
So Back to the office, remote, or hybrid, westill get these questions from our founders,
(40:22):
you know, motor companies, larger companies.
What's your view on that?
Like, how do you keep the company efficient?
Do you allow people to work from home?
What would you recommend the small start up todo?
So I'm
gonna say, 1st of all, let's start up workingfrom home is suicidal.
Okay?
That's my opinion on that.
This is how the culture of the company gonna becreated.
The language of the company will be created.
(40:43):
Everything that will create the company goingforward is credit in those early days, it
cannot happen if you do it from home.
Right?
So I mean, for a small startup
I agree.
100%.
Work every day from the office.
Well, it's very hard for me.
Right?
I I heard many opinions back.
I said I just saw a few companies share with mesome information.
And they look at ways to measure what peopleactually do when they work at home.
(41:03):
So, apparently, and it depends which countryand what is, but apparently, the last day of
the week and the 1st day of the week has becomevacation days.
Mostly the last day of the week.
If you have an event Thursday, if the UnitedStates is Friday, So the actual amount of
productivity that happened on that day goesdown by 70% approximately from what I've seen.
And on the 1st day of the week, it also targetsaround 60%.
(41:26):
And then during the free middle day of theweek, it actually goes up, but mostly because
those companies require people to arrive 3 daysa week to work.
So I think that maybe when everybody wasworking for a moment, it was obvious that you
have meetings all the time, and it was okay.
But I don't believe that it's a We didn't taketest that yet at week.
So I don't know what to tell you, but I thinkthat, obviously, it's not as good as working
(41:50):
from, the office.
And till what stage, like, from your experiencewould you recommend insisting on everybody
arriving to the office?
Like, thirty people, hundred people, I mean,clearly a very generic question, but can I give
people a pointer?
Well, that went wrong.
I would say it's 0 to a 100, everybody in theoffice,
for sure.
And then for my 100, you might be saying thatif you believe that they're actually working
(42:13):
the same level, maybe that's something you cando.
But I gotta say again, I'm finding myselfliving in that lesson.
I think that it's just not true.
And, again, I just saw some data about it.
I think that people just don't work as my phonehome.
It's very, very hard to force yourself to doit.
I agree completely.
I also think that there was a period of time inCOVID when people didn't go out where the
(42:33):
initial analysis shows very high productivitybecause people literally had nothing else to
do.
They finished all of Netflix, and so they werehome and they were working.
But now I think that, as you said, especiallythe 1st and last day of the week, but also just
in general, it's very difficult to give thesame level of focus.
And so, you know, we are for early stagestartup, we're strongly recommending being as
(42:54):
much as possible together.
We think that what I also read a lot ofresearch about is around fact that it's easier
to do repetitive mundane tasks from remote, butwhen you need to work on innovation, when you
need to work on new features when you need towork on something that's actually a change from
the norm that reduces the ability to deliverdramatically.
By the way, to this minute, to this podcast,right, I just came for a meeting.
(43:15):
We worked on some feature, and there was this,the the sales engineer and was describing
something.
And I was in that meeting.
It was a few other Pete.
I would just say the brainstorming on thewhiteboard.
Yep.
Okay.
And we came on with a super simple solution forthat.
Alright.
That will probably save us months ofdevelopment.
There is no chance Beller that this kind of adiscussion would happen over a video chat.
It's just impossible because the interaction,there was somebody who went to the port.
(43:38):
Somebody said, somebody came, somebody had somesomebody else on-site, you know, all of that
James credit, okay, this brainstorming sessionthat he cannot do in me.
I Beller seen that happening in a bit Beller.
Vichai, if you wanted to recommend one book ormovie or podcast or something to founders that
are looking to get Beller, What would that be?
Alright.
So I'm gonna tell you my favorite.
(44:00):
Alright?
And, it's kind of an amusing one.
Alright.
So it's called the replacements.
It's a movie with Keanu Reeves as a quarterbackin an NFL team that is going on a strike and
they bring this team of replacements to playinstead of the team.
Right?
And I think this is the Beller book or anythingI've seen on team building.
Right?
And so that's my favorite one.
(44:21):
It shows that can find somebody who's reallygood at one thing.
They have to compensate on it for another guywith other people.
It shows what his team spirit, how it's Beller,It shows that normally when bringing a team in
the beginning, they'll fight, and then you haveto find a way to actually focus them around
something.
It shows so much.
It funny movie.
And I think for me, it's the best evereducational thing I've seen about team
(44:43):
building.
Oh, I have to admit that I didn't see it, andI'm gonna watch it this weekend.
Now I have something that I got out of it.
I gotta say it's also very silly.
So
Beller, you know me, you know, that sillydoesn't scare me.
Oh, the other way around.
Just gonna say, you know, one of the thing thatthis is, from that movie, but there's another
thing.
So one of the thing I learned in my wife andecho from my head from that movie is that
(45:04):
winners always want the ball when the game ison the line.
Okay?
Again, it's a Pete movie.
Right?
Yep.
Obviously, that fits there.
I know that if I have a project k?
That is something that can move the needle alot on the business side.
All the winners in the company will fight aboutwho gets the ball.
Interesting.
Alright?
Yep.
And who gets to do it?
K?
And immediately, I know that this is gonnahappen, and this is also a way that I know
(45:24):
who's actually a winner.
And you can see that once you embrace thatprinciple, I think it's super important.
Beller, I think that's an amazing closing Pete.
Avishai, thank you so much for sharing yourexperience with us.
I think there's tons of girls of wisdom herethat founders will be smart to take.
And thanks so much, and looking forward to nexttime.
My pleasure.
Excellent.
(45:44):
Thanks.
Of course, in the beginning, you don't haveother Pete, so you kind of like you do it
yourself.
And this is what you should be doing.
But, very quickly, when the companies arearound 30 to 50 people, fixes should be a goal.
Your goal should be that you build a team andframework that will do it for you.
Today, NFX's general partner, Gigi Levy-Weiss,is sitting down with Avishai Abrahami, the CEO
(00:29):
of Wix.com.
Avishai has Wix into a company of about 5000people with $1,400,000,000 in revenue.
They'll cover how founders can become greatCEOs, measurements most startup smith, the
difference between good failure and bad failureand much more.
Let's jump in.
Hi, Avishai.
Hey.
Thanks for joining us for the podcast today.
(00:51):
I was waiting a long time for this, and I'm sohappy that you're with us.
I don't know if you know, but a few years ago,I wrote a piece and made a video for artifacts,
which is called what makes a strong startupCEO.
It's one of our top performing essays, I think.
And it basically something that I really focuson, which is what makes a startup founder
(01:12):
really good as a CEO, but even moreimportantly, so what it makes them really good
as leaders.
And this is exactly why I wanted to talk toyou.
You know, if you're the founder of weeks, youknow, your world class CEO, you know, that's
what I think You're super star, super founder,super goals driven.
You're great.
From what I can see from the outside inrecruiting and supporting and motivating Flint,
(01:33):
And so, you know, the success of the company, Ithink, is very much because of that end of the
team that you recruited.
I mean, how large is the company today?
Like, how many users today?
We have 200 and the 30,000,000 users.
And all of them are small businesses.
Right?
No.
And we actually have everything.
Every mix.
Right?
We have a lot of small businesses, but we havealso a lot of Pete that went into a project or
(01:54):
school project.
We have about, probably around a huge amount ofstudents, like, from the United States schools
or University of Colleges.
And, we are selling to 100 and 92 Countries,which is everywhere possible in the in the
planet.
And how many and how many languages like otherwebsite, like in every possible language?
I think we support Pete, if I remembercorrectly.
(02:14):
And what's the company's revenues or less?
About 1,400,000,000 for this year.
Oh, that's a nice number.
And how many people in the company
company is around 5000 people.
And how many years ago did you start it?
We started at the end of 2006.
So I would say 2007.
So that's quite a while ago.
That's quite a while ago.
(02:35):
That's for sure.
Yes.
It is true.
And so founders, everybody listening.
I mean, I think that you guys should really payattention here because in the next kinda half
an hour to an hour.
Avisha is gonna help you understand aboutleadership, which is where I think this company
excels.
So, you know, one of the topics that we talkabout is the difference between being a
founder, which is just a practical thing ofstarting a company.
(02:56):
And then turning this into being a good CEO,which many of the founders have never been
before, and then turning this into being agreat leader and the personal growth that you
need to undergo to be good at all these things.
And, you know, as we know, there are many thatare good at being a CEO in terms of the
manager, managerial skills.
There are others that are good at beingleaders, not graded.
Ding CEOs, and some are good at both.
(03:17):
So can you tell me a little bit about the 1stdays co founding Wix?
Like, what were you like then?
You know, how did you changed some debt pointonwards.
Well, you're talking about me personally.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You personally.
You're not gonna get off the hook.
First of all, I think that there's a Founder.
I was very lucky that I had 2 strong cofounders with me and, give a couple and gig
(03:38):
with a genius, my younger brother, which isbrilliant.
And very early we had Neil Zoil joining.
So team around me was phenomenal.
And and I think that is probably my biggesttrick.
If you ask me, what is the best trick that onetrigger can say and teach or explain is get
phenomenal talent for the journey with you.
(03:58):
I'm always saying that, my biggest Kiel, thefounder and CEO, is that I grew up in a family
where I'm the least intelligent person in thehouse.
And because both my brothers are brilliant andmy parents are, and I'm the older kid, so to
feel comfortable.
And, of course, you know, so I learned tomanage people smarter than me because that's
what the older kid does.
Right?
He's managing his young brothers and hisparents.
(04:19):
And, so for me to feel at home, I need to be sohonored that people are the smart enemy.
And I think that gave me huge advantage overmost founders that I know.
Because a lot of people try to createenvironments where they are the smartest person
in the room.
And for me, it just feels natural.
So for me to feel uncomfortable, I need to besurrounding other people that I smarter than
it.
I mean, that's the number one thing I can say.
(04:40):
The biggest difference, right, is if you thinkabout what is the biggest difference between
the founder to see So the founder, you have anidea.
Right?
And, of course, you start a company.
Everybody can do that.
What makes a good founder is that he can createa clear vision, execute on the vision, hire
really good people and deliver the product,work on the marketing campaigns, human, his
founding team, and get to a point when acompany start a good CEO, to transition to BCO,
(05:03):
you don't do those things anymore yourself.
You need to build a mechanism to hire goodpeople.
You need to build a mechanism and a team thatwill do the marketing.
You need to build a mechanism to do theproduct.
You need to build a mechanism.
Okay, to do the engineering.
And when I talk about a mechanism, part of it,of course, is is human factor, right, when you
need to have really good engineers The otherthing is that you need to have a mechanism is
(05:26):
also how you measure when it's doing thingswell.
Right?
So you need to have something that is visibleto say, well, we're doing things well.
We're progressing.
And then the next part is, of course, that it'salways clear why and how we're trying to
achieve something.
So I think when I started, I think a lot of thethings were not so clear to me that this is my
number one goal is to build mechanisms thatwill do that and not do it myself.
(05:49):
Of course, in the beginning, you don't haveother Pete, so you kinda like you do it
yourself.
And this is what you should be doing.
But very quickly, many companies around 30 to50 Pete, This should be a goal.
Your goal should be that you build a team andframework that will do it for you.
I love that because this is very much likeconcept that I like writing about and talking
about, which is that I always say that the roleof the and there's a manager is to basically
(06:12):
create the strategy, which is the vector inwhich you need to run, then to put the team in
place, which is the people that are supposed tocarry the company in that vector, then create a
set of KPIs that are the measurements to makesure that you're in the right direction and
then basically take a step backwards.
Let team go in this direction and measure it.
And then in a cycle, go back after, you know,used to be maybe an old company used to be
(06:35):
every year, and now it's in a startup.
It's like every week and ask yourself, are werunning in the right direction?
Do we have the right team to take us there?
And how are we measuring the right things?
And then if you don't have the right strategy,shift it a little bit.
If you don't the right team fix it.
And if you're measuring the wrong things, fixthe KPIs, and then just continue on and on and
on.
Flint what I hear from you is that you'rebasically saying it same where it is basically
(06:56):
building the mechanism, which is a set ofmethodology process and KPIs and getting the
best people to do that and just repeating thisagain and again and Did I get it right?
Yeah.
You did.
I did notice that companies have a bit ofvariety on what are the mechanisms to use and
how to build them.
But if you look at the better companies, it avariety is not so big.
(07:17):
Essentially end up being very similar.
And not on the on the least on the principle,then you covered a lot of them.
When you said, measure, make it visible.
Make sure that you have the great people.
And, of course, those are the output is theoutputs of of that process of the mechanism.
But the mechanism themselves, I think, are alsovery similar.
So I'll be a lot about how to do the meetings,how to run project.
(07:40):
And, I mean, those are essentially what makethe mechanisms.
Right?
And, like, what I noticed is that if you lookat great teams, Those are very similar.
So could you give, like, a few examples of theunique mechanisms you have in weeks?
Like, the few thing that you put in place thatyou think we're core to the management
methodology that made weeks what it is andallowed you later on to scale because these
(08:01):
mechanisms were in place so that everybodycould use them.
Yeah.
Let me start with the principle.
Okay?
So we put the principle very early, which is,if you can't measure it, it didn't happen.
Okay?
We measure everything and it cannot measure it.
It didn't happen.
So this is a very clear one saying you can'ttake pride on something that is unmeasured.
Okay?
If you did something, I think it's gonna implysupport that it didn't, well, it's worth
(08:23):
nothing.
Right?
You cannot measure it.
If you do marketing and can measure animprovement, it's worth nothing.
Okay?
Don't mention it because it didn't happen fromour perspective.
But, anyway, and it's fine.
Right?
It's fine to do things, and we found that theydidn't do the effect that we want we actually
also measured the amount of James you triedsomething, right, which is a positive thing
because not everything you're gonna do.
So we added another principle which says allowfailure.
(08:45):
This is going the top principle, but when youtake it into a deeper one level, it become more
interesting.
So for example, let's look at the chart andhiring.
Okay?
How do you build a mechanism around that?
So a mechanism around that, the one we ended upwith is that we test everybody.
Well, there's one exception.
If people work with a person before somebody wetrust, work with somebody before, we know who
he is, but we test everybody.
(09:06):
So if you're coming to Wix and you wanna be anengineer, we're gonna test you what everybody's
doing that.
But if you're coming to weeks and you wannawork for HR, we're gonna also test you.
And because that's a principle that we agreedon that that mechanism of hiring, had to come
up with a test that ended up saying, well,what's the most important thing for HR?
The most important for HR is that they'rebringing the right talent.
So we test everybody in a job by letting theminterview people that already work at Wix that
(09:31):
we know.
So then we will see how well they evaluatesomebody on a base Morgan interview and compare
it to what we know on that person.
Mhmm.
By doing that, we've created a test that allowsus to know how good somebody is.
From that point, then when we do hiring, wealso measure the quality of the people we
hired.
Right?
And as a result from that, we can always tunethe HR processes and get a better and better
(09:51):
mechanism right, and better talent in a jar,which, of course, influenced the talent in all
of the company.
And so this kind of thinking, I think, is veryMorgan, and this is something that takes quite
a while.
Pete me jump in a few of these because I findthem super interesting.
I think when I love the concept of testingeverybody that joins the company, I think that
there's not as a company too small to actuallydo that.
(10:12):
And many times I get pushback from founders whoeither fear that good candidates are not gonna
want to, take a test because they're justcoming to work in a small startup or others
that are saying that they wouldn't know how totest each one of these roles because, you know,
they're either techies or their product Pete.
What would you say to a young founder that saysmaybe I should start with testing only when
we're, like, few hundred people?
(10:33):
Because I like you think that you should startsuper early.
That is an idiot.
I'm not joking.
Right?
We are the first child who's at that test.
Okay?
And she was a super senior, way more seniorthan our company in that stage needed.
And it says a lot about the person that shewas, like, willing to go for this process.
Okay?
It says about a lot about hair.
Right?
That she was willing to participate in that.
(10:54):
And engineers, there's no other way to hireengineers.
Now you cannot talk about software.
That's complete rubbish.
And when it comes to design, obviously, you doit.
When it comes to financials, let somebody builda Morgan, and then, you know, so I think that's
completely wrong.
What I personally like other than coding wherethere was a practical test that you actually
take as a test.
What I personally like is giving people kind ofmissions to do and then come back and present
(11:18):
them.
Is this what you guys like as well?
Well, yeah, it's something right in the HR.
What we did is that we actually Pete herinterview, and then we asked care after that
about the people that, you know, we did it fora few HR candidates, and we just compare what
they told us to what we knew about the peoplethey interviewed.
Right?
So that was a task, but in the office, right,that interviewed over 2 hours.
(11:38):
Let's jump for a second into hiring, which, youknow, I think, you, as you said before,
surrounding yourself with people smarter andbetter than you is the key.
How do you think about hiring and the startupin the early stage and hiring Pete talent?
And we spoke about testing them, but, like,what processes do you think could be in place?
Like, how many interviews?
Who should interview a person?
And kind of what percent of your time do youthink you should spend as a young founder on
(12:01):
hiring, kind of dedicating to finding the bestPete.
Until you have direct to them, I'm gonna saythat.
Right?
Because even as a startup, you have anobjective.
You know, only one in people in the company.
Well, you should spend all the time neededuntil you have fifteen people that are the
right people.
Right?
So it can be a lot of time, and then at somepoint, it could be very little time.
When it comes to hiring, I'll give you anexample.
(12:21):
I cycled for 22 people before I found the OmerScheima CMO.
So I hired.
I moved people to different things.
I fired Pete.
I think it was around 22 people that they hiredwithin about a year in something, right, year
and a half.
And some of them I hired as juniors and hopethat they're gonna be or, like, I didn't give
them any official title to everybody in thatteam.
(12:43):
So I was looking at who's gonna be the best.
And then when I got to Omer after a few weeks,I was obvious that he's on a different level.
And this is another part of a very me.
It's a very important lesson that I learned inmy life is that it's very hard to know who's a
super talent on the interview even on the test.
You can suspect who's a super talent, but youare not you're not gonna be sure about it, but
(13:06):
a month or 2 after, it's very easy to know.
And in the beginning of a startup, it's soimportant to have super Flint.
So you should allow us of the room to makemistakes and replace so this is another very
important thing.
I wanna tell you another funny story aboutOmer.
I'm just, so after I hired Omer, and my nextguy that I wanted to hire, was for me that now
is the CEO of IronSource.
(13:27):
It was before IronSource and now.
So we're talking and he said, you know, yeah.
Might be interested.
And then he asked me to talk to Omer after anhour a half that he was talking to Omer came
out and said, listen.
He's way better than me.
Don't hire me.
Keep him.
It's a nice story.
But this is another thing.
Right?
But there's only one guy.
I think that Tom is a legend.
(13:48):
Right?
But, anyway, that time, he was unemployed andneeded a job.
Right?
It's not like he was I found it to be superimpressive, and I was thinking with him about
whatever They can do next in weeks and then, ofcourse, started, the iron source and and build
this incredible company.
But I really believe that when you hire people,you should it's a startup, leadership cycle for
(14:08):
people if they're not the talent that you need,if they're not a super talent.
But in the startup, there's another thing.
Right?
You cannot really always hire the base peoplebecause you don't have the money.
You don't have the time.
Sometimes you have to understand that you needto Beller for some roles and then replace them
when you have you do have direct talent coming.
And what do you believe about kinda, you whenyou recruit somebody in, they're kinda okay
after a few weeks or a month.
(14:29):
Are you one of those people that believes ingiving people, you know, a few more months to
improve, or do you think that you should fixmistakes really quickly?
I think you should fix mistakes most of thetime quickly.
Not all the time.
It depends.
Right?
I'm just gonna tell my last this is like that.
A players hire a players, a plus players, aplus players, and b players, RSE players.
(14:51):
So if you want the organization to You cannotkeep somebody and make him into a manager as a
Pete.
Okay?
You'll find that your organization goes andsimply hire key players and deep players are F
players.
Right?
And so if you're not on top of that and youdon't keep super talents to be the majority of
the managers in the team, you will end up witha really bad organization.
I love that.
And it's also one of my favorite things.
(15:11):
I also love the what you said about, you know,when you're not sure that you have the right
person for top top job getting people if youcan to actually come and work without the title
and then keep yourself the optionality to seewho performs and give them that role.
This is something that I didn't rehear manypeople say.
I've done this many times before, and it worksreally well.
Clearly, harder to do, but when it works, itworks so well.
(15:33):
This is something that I give nobody a title inthe beginning.
And by the way, today at weeks, you can chooseyour own title.
So choose whatever title you want.
We're gonna say it's true.
What does that mean?
It means that we're not negotiating with youand watch your title.
I and you can take whatever title he wants.
We don't care.
It doesn't change your role.
It doesn't change what you do.
Not gonna change your salary.
K?
But if it's really important for you, what iswritten on your LinkedIn, feel free to buy
(15:56):
whatever you want.
We don't care.
I like that.
And it calculates Flint situation wheresomebody will, from a child will negotiate with
the candidate and then one child and then fightwith them and they argue about them.
And then I said, well, you know what?
We're gonna allow you to do that.
If your signs, if the guy signed, come to theorientation day in weeks, and the first thing
they see is that where you could choosewhatever title you want.
(16:17):
We don't
And do you think that over the years, what haschanged in the way you're thinking about the
kind of talent that you want?
I mean, did you need more penurial peopleearlier on.
And then as the company grow, you move todifferent type of people, do you still look for
the same kind of people?
How did that change over the years?
Why it depends?
It depends on the cycles growth of the companywhere it's growing.
(16:38):
So for example, we're now starting a newbusiness, which is in in the enterprise.
Business.
We're seeing a lot of larger companies usingWix to build their website.
Right?
And it's suddenly, you know, it's not a smallbusiness, a big company, requires different
things, a lot of enterprise thinking, right,and we don't have that.
So we need to hire people with experiencethere.
Right?
And extending into that is sounding the Currierto hire people that really know a lot of the
(17:02):
things.
And a lot of the regular things we do like, inmarketing and product.
I prefer people with less experience and a lotof talent because we can teach them how we do
things.
And on that, we have to unlearn them, make themforget about Currier already work and then try
to teach them new thing, how we work.
Right?
Obviously, it's sometime through something.
No.
I think developers different because it takes alot of time to be a really good developer.
(17:24):
And then moving from one environment to anotheris relatively easy most of the time.
It really depends what is the area.
And one is the if it's a new thing, if it's athing that exists in already a really good way
of doing that, then you wanna hire publicpeople that you can teach your way and not that
you have to unlearn something.
So it really depends.
There's no rule.
In a startup, you know, the best thing, ofcourse, is to hire a very experienced CMO from
(17:47):
a very successful company an amazing CTO thatis used to manage a thousand people and likes
coding himself.
So he needs very hands on on the code.
And a HR that knows how to build Morganorganization of a thousand Pete.
And if you if you can do that when your startupis starting, that's incredible.
But I never met anybody who did that at thatlevel.
Right?
So the fear in that is practical here are verydifferent.
(18:08):
And you have to understand that you're probablygonna people that are not all of them gonna
grow to the next level.
Right?
And that's fine.
And so it's so much easier, I think, to hiresomebody and say, well, you're helping me
manage this.
There's no city tile here.
And then when you actually get to a place whereit's a hundred people need somebody who knows
how to put in a child organization.
Right?
You can bring one without demoting them.
Yeah.
(18:29):
Definitely not always trivial.
And I think you guys did a great job.
Talk about measuring everything.
And, again, many founders that talk to end upbeing really decent or good at measuring the
core business KPIs because that's kinda whateverybody told them over the years.
So, you know, you have you know, you haveconversion, you have retention, you have
everything.
But then when it came to measuring things thatwere what they felt our support task to the
(18:52):
company.
They were really bad at putting KPIs to that.
Is Wix measuring everything on every front?
We are trying.
I gotta say, not as much as I want.
Right?
But, definitely more than others.
This is the first thing I wanna say.
Most startups that I meet and most companies,they measure even on the business measure a lot
less than they should.
Okay?
(19:12):
And so they come with conversion, and it'susually percentage based conversion, which is
not relevant.
You always have to measure conversion ondollars Then they measure a few things on sales
efficiency, then they measure a few things onother things, and they have, like, 5.
K?
You cannot understand your business from 5parameters.
There's no way to do that there.
And if you only focus on 5, somebody wants to,I don't know if it's true that Facebook used to
(19:36):
measure just interactions.
Or if you just measure interaction, just gonnamake product that add buttons that nobody
needs.
Right?
It's gonna add so much more interactions.
I don't think it's true.
Again, I have no idea.
I've never worked at Facebook, but I just wannashow something that is so silly.
Okay?
And the thing that a lot of the companies I seedo that, we actually generate pretty much from
the 1st days, I would say, probably about 20pages of things that we look in graphs on the
(20:01):
business side, which very quickly grew to morethan that.
But this enabled us to understand really why Ithink that the details that actually change in
the business, okay, and where we wannainfluence something.
When we see a drop, when we see improvement,where we don't understand something, Not
creating that visibility early on is gonna besomething that we leave you with so much that
you don't understand about what drives yourbusiness.
(20:24):
And I know there's ton of book about it like,oh, should you measure 5?
Should you measure free?
You should measure this is your no start.
I Beller seen a company that actually has foundthose 5 magical things.
So my opinion on that is that you do it andthen you're missing the action picture of
what's happening in your business.
And so early on in the weekdays, like, how manythings do you think you actually tracked to
(20:46):
understand what the business is?
I mean, I think about some of the company thatI ran and you know, I used to spend it was
definitely, I don't know, 15 to 20 minutesevery Morgan, understanding all the, you know,
like, looking at everything.
Making sure that I understand what's reallyhappening in the business by looking at a bunch
of things.
How many, you know, early on in the business?
How many things?
How many data points did were you guys lookingat to know where you are and to take smart
(21:08):
decisions?
Well, let let's look at that.
Okay.
So the first thing is, of course, where peoplecome from, so what countries, okay, what
keywords then the conversion on the landingpages, k, then the ads that worked, then
conversion from each one of them to theirproduct, then what people tried to do, so what
they told us was selected they're trying to doon Wix.
Then what they actually did, then what theyused in order to try and do that?
(21:32):
What is the correlation of success on that?
What kind of template to choose?
Okay.
When did they churn?
What did they buy?
Why would the support things they ask for?
Oh, and, of course, the quality.
The so this was a how pretty it was.
For us, it was very important.
It still is.
The content that they made and the how muchthey completed on the website in each
interaction.
So those are the basics one we measure for ourbusiness.
(21:54):
But it's allowing me to understand, well, weneed more templates.
So we need different ones.
So we have an issue with that thing and on thatthing.
Okay?
And that is true for every company.
There's always those things because you wannaunderstand your customers.
You need to follow on the customer.
Right?
Your George's conversion is an output from thishuge amount of thing that happening on your
product.
Right?
There's so much that's happening.
And if you don't look at the whole picture, youdon't understand the whole funnel and then how
(22:19):
to use the product, You don't understand whatis happening with the customers.
At the end of the day, we all work for thecustomer.
We don't work for ourselves to make money.
We work for the customer hoping that one daywe'll have enough value that we can actually
earn money from that, and then we can scale it.
Yep.
And so one of the things that I found out thatmeasuring everything gets you to is clearly a
(22:40):
good problem, which is transparency andeverybody seeing what's happening in the
business.
But that kind of forces you to be able toaccept failure in a much more meaningful way
than companies that where there's notransparency and people don't know that things
don't work.
How do you think about accepting failures inthis, you know, in the younger company?
And how do you deal with it in weeks todaywhere, you know, the larger the company
(23:01):
becomes, the easier it is to fall into the trapof There's a performance review and failures is
what gets you to get a lower performance.
And so, you know, what we know is that in hugecompanies, one of the reasons there's no
innovation is because people are afraid to failbecause your best routes to getting promoted is
not failing and just staying on track.
And we don't want that and start up anddefinitely not in weeks.
(23:22):
So how do you deal with allowing people to feelif it's the right kind of failure and not being
afraid this is gonna be negative.
I'm gonna distinguish, first of all, to make aclear distinction.
There's a big difference between I failedbecause I did it well.
I need the assumption that I was wrong.
It didn't work.
Yep.
And there is another kind of Beller which is Idid it badly, and it didn't work.
Okay?
(23:43):
And it's not the same because of the first one,I'm happy.
And the second one, I don't want you tocontinue to work at Wix.
Okay.
Well, obviously, not always, but this is theprinciple.
I think that we want people to do very thingsvery Beller, and then it might fail.
There's a few things that you wanna do.
Like, I would, a lot of time, mention thatproject will my decision.
(24:04):
I wanted it and it failed even if it's notalways true, because at the end of the day, I
think about it is that the team recommended.
I approved it.
Okay?
So from that point and on, it's myresponsibility if it fails or succeed.
Okay?
Mostly if it's failed, if it succeeded, itdoesn't have to be my responsibility.
But then if if a team will come and say, well,we did it, it doesn't work a lot come out.
(24:24):
It doesn't walk through what they did.
I would always be the first guy to say, no.
No.
No.
The is my project.
I approved it.
I wanted it.
And now I think it's to be part of the languageof the company.
The next thing is, we don't work on checking ifeverything you did.
There's, like, no Four room in which we look ateverything somebody did.
And we go, well, he did it.
He didn't work.
(24:44):
You did this.
He did work.
He did this.
It doesn't work.
All those tests happen in the background,right, food Morgan.
As part of the day to day activity, okay, whichmeans that you don't go around and Beller.
I succeeded or I failed.
Okay?
And experiment didn't work.
You just turn it off and move to the next So bydoing that, I think we've created much more
freedom for people to fail to test and findthat it's not working.
(25:06):
I think this is Oh, critical.
Then I also love your distinction.
I used to when I ran companies, I used todistinguish between what I called good failures
and bad failures.
Good failures are the ones where you basicallydid everything right and the assumption was
wrong, or the thing you wanted to test is just,you know, proved to be wrong, and that's great
because we now know not to do it.
And that's ours because you didn't work well ordidn't test as well or, you know, put out a
(25:27):
product that's buggy or something.
Let's jump for second to meetings.
I mean, you know, one of the tougher things ascompanies grow is the number of meetings and
the amount of wasted time on meetings that arethere just because they're there.
I know that this is something that you careabout.
How do you guys deal with that?
How did you make sure that in growing thecompany, the company didn't become a
bureaucratic, you know, meeting creator?
(25:49):
And what do you recommend founders in thatregard early on.
Well, first of all, I gotta say, I think wehave too many meetings, right, just to be
clear.
And I think that we might be better than othercompanies, a lot of other companies, but we are
definitely not where I think we should be.
I mean, that people most people should havemaybe a meeting a day.
And so I think that, the only people that havemore meetings should be management and
(26:09):
especially senior management because theyactually do nothing else except meetings,
right, at the job, but I think that most peopleshould have very little.
And and we're not there So I found that we dida few things.
1, we broke the company in what we call subcompanies, and each one of those has come like.
So each one of those is what we call a CEO ofthat team and that guy is a chairman.
The chairman is always for my management team.
(26:31):
Okay?
And this is what's very important.
What we found out is that people are alwayswaiting and trying to convince meetings So it
will always go up and down, up and down, up anddown, and people will wait for things and to
approval.
And we made a rule that says, well, that thisdeal of a team and the chairman can pretty much
Pete make any decision they want.
And which said essentially, now if somebodywanna make a decision, it can make the decision
(26:57):
with one person.
Right?
And because that person is for my managementteam, I trust him.
I know that he knows most of the time placesBeller as I do what we wanna achieve.
And so this did a magical thing for decisionmaking because I think the worst thing is not
just meaning.
It means that you don't get a decision in.
Right?
So you have another meeting and not a meetingand not a meeting, and things get delayed and
(27:18):
delayed and delayed.
So that was a, I think, very important thing.
We'll define a clear way to make decision basedon the person that is managing the team Wix E
Commerce managed by Eric, him and his chairman,his daddy, they can just talk to each other and
make a decision on almost everything.
And that did a dramatic effect.
(27:40):
When you start a startup, of course, you don'thave to think about those things.
Right?
You do need to think about something else andwe're gonna talk about it in a minute.
But because you are there, right, you havethirty Pete, you talk to each one of them every
day.
But if you are in a meeting and it's not anupdated meeting, let's say, I mean, but I'm in
the happening day, and there's, like, no actionitems coming from that meeting, written.
(28:01):
It was a waste of time.
So this is another rule that we have, and Ithink it's working pretty well.
Right?
A meeting has to have a clear why we are hereand a clear what's happening after, and every
project has to have a single owner.
There's one guy that owned that project.
And just a question on that.
Do you have, like, rules on what you need tosend before the meeting so that the meeting can
(28:21):
happen?
Yes.
But, you know, it's a company full of Israelisand Eastern European, you know, we can have
many roles.
It works less good than those mechanism Idescribed before.
Yeah.
The next part is how you do the projectmanagement.
Okay?
And this is an interesting thing.
Most project management usually would have youhave a product guy.
He writes specs, then you have another guy thatwould work a technical team and able to sprint
(28:45):
or whatever.
Right?
And we found that it's way better to say, well,the owner of project.
The name is the product part is the developer,and he actually come to the product guy for
clarification.
And on the other way around, and that made amassive reduction in meetings because now a lot
of the engineers are not depending on talkingto anybody in order to do what they want.
(29:06):
If they think the understanding, they'll do it.
Right?
And we kinda, like, made this framework wherethey present it Beller week.
You show what it did to the team.
So now the team meeting is about showing whatit did which is great for many different
reasons, but the more interesting part I thinkhere is that because the engineer owned the
feature, not the product guy owned the feature,and then Jenny can get decision and make
decision on that.
(29:27):
He doesn't have to escalate retro big meetings,which so that was not a massive thing that we
did.
It takes a lot.
You have to be really brave to do it.
It's very different than how people today areworking in most places.
Yep.
And what tools are you using for this projectmanagement in house?
Well, we use Monday.com, of course.
Of course.
I don't think that everybody knows, but clearlyMonday started as a week So let's jump for a
(29:49):
second to leadership.
And I'm gonna start by throwing in a statementthat I want you to tell me whether you think
it's right or wrong, but the statement is thatbeing a good manager and being a good leader is
not necessarily the same thing.
And that the the problem with being a startupfounder is that you need to be both.
I have no idea.
Don't know what's a good manager, and I'm notsure I know what's a good leader.
Tell you how I think about it.
(30:10):
Right?
If I look on the planet today, I I would rate aloan master leader and CEO at the team.
K?
And I know now people like him.
Don't like him.
But in reality, I I, like, look at what he doesin managing so many companies, I don't even
know how to compare, but I cannot do what hedoes in so many companies at the same time.
I cannot do it in one company.
K?
Is he a leader or the manager?
That's a good question.
I think he is a good example of both.
(30:32):
Right?
I think that he's clearly leading the Pete.
You know, there's different definitions ofleadership.
The one that I like the most is the one thatsays that a leader takes people to where they
should be, but they don't necessarily wanna goto.
Right?
It's the ability to get people to get out oftheir comfort zone and not necessarily do the
trivial stuff but go and do the things thatthey should do or the places where they should
(30:52):
be where without the leader, they wouldn't go.
And I think in that regard, you know, clearly,
What does the manager do?
Well, manager does a lot of the thing that wespoke about before that are good processes in
determining strategy and the recruiting of theright team and setting up the KPIs, and there
could be a great manager.
And I think we've seen people that are greatmanagers that, you know, there weren't great
leaders, which made it tough for them to getpeople to give more and work harder and be more
(31:17):
committed.
And then there could be great leaders whoaren't necessarily great manager
Alright.
So you're talking about white collaroperations.
So somebody is very good at defining everythingand making sure that people follow the
guidelines we discuss.
And another one that is actually making themexciting and understanding and taking them to
the goal.
Yes.
So I would argue that the second one cannot doit without being very, very detailed on what he
(31:39):
wants to achieve.
You cannot inspire people but giving a talk.
It only works in the movie.
Right?
In reality, you wanna talk about how to make aproject management or you wanna build a site or
you wanna do a CRM?
It's the one who leads that part of thatproduct or whatever.
You need to be so excited about the details.
Right?
You wanna tell a built in Electrify.
You need to know the details to lead peopleinto that because they're gonna see that you're
(32:02):
excited about what they do, which is thedetails.
And so you need to essentially manage thedetails, right, of the product that you're
creating and the customer interaction of allthose things.
So I think that both are very important.
I think you cannot be a leader without knowinga huge amount of the details of why you're
doing that and working with the team
On actually achieving it.
On the details.
(32:23):
Yeah.
I think one of the big things in leading peopleis making sure that they know that they really
understand the company's story and strategy andwhere it's going.
And this is becoming tougher and tougher as thecompany grows.
Like, at the beginning, you're, like, whatever,fifteen Pete.
You know, they just tier you all day long, andthey know exactly where you want the company to
go.
They know exactly what's your strategy.
And then it it becomes bigger and bigger, starthaving town halls and you record yourself as
(32:45):
stuff.
How do you make sure that everybody in thecompany kinda knows what's, you know, where the
company's heading, what's the strategy, and howdoes that change over the years?
Well, to be fair, honestly, it's kinda likewell, in the beginning, you said, everybody
knows.
Right?
Until a 100 and, I don't know, 50 to 200people, everybody knows what is happening.
Yep.
And the reason everybody knows what's happeningis because you just talk to people or talk to
(33:08):
people that directly talk to adequate.
Right?
And so that's super easy.
And most of the time, when you start and youbuild a startup, the story stays pretty much
the same.
Right?
In the 1st few years, unless you do kind of apivot, but then everybody knows if you did a
pivot, the stories stay pretty much fixed.
You're just doing the same story better andbetter.
When you grow, you need to start creatingcommunications.
So you build all the things.
As you said, company meetings, presentations,you talk to senior management, you talk to
(33:33):
their management, you do often, whatever, allhand meetings, whatever kind of meeting you
want, and and all those things.
But from my experience, I noticed that itmatters somewhat.
Right?
Essentially, as long as the company continue todo what it did before and you don't wanna
change anything essential, it's very easy.
And second that you wanna do something in adifferent way or change a lot of what the way
(33:54):
that the company thinks about something, itdoesn't matter how many company meetings you're
gonna do, how much It's gonna be very hard forpeople to actually believe that the company is
actually changing something.
And I think Microsoft demonstrated that wedeclined, right, Yep.
Until that they were talking about the cloudand the cloud, and nobody was kinda like
nobody, Microsoft actually used their owncloud.
And then one day, Satya came and said, well,you have 3 months to work everything to the
(34:16):
cloud.
And then it actually happened.
So a big part, I think, of how you tell a storywhen you would do a change is to make one of
the statements.
On basis with API first approach, right, in inAmazon, you have to be very clear where we're
not discussing that anymore.
This is how we do it.
So when a company is very small, you can createin a conversation.
Company is very big.
(34:37):
You kinda have to be a bit more blunt about it.
But I think to to get the message in a biggercompany, when something changes, Right?
You have to be very, very clear about, well,this is not the presentation.
This is our discussion.
This is what's gonna happen from now And, ofcourse, you can do it in a nicer ways and or in
a, like, business way, which I think was aeither you build it API first or you go home.
(34:58):
Yep.
Right.
And when you do something, right, and it's abigger company, then you have to ask yourself,
well, is this something that will continue whatwe did before?
This is something new.
If it's something new, you have to be very,very wonderful, and make sure that everybody
hear that message.
How do you think about transparency in thecompany?
I mean, one of the things in call in a companyand being able to be a great leader is and I'm
talking about before becoming a public companywhere you have restrictions or what you can and
(35:22):
can't say sometimes, but how do you balance theneeds to basically communicate and be
transparent and give everybody the feeling thatthey're in the know.
And then on the flip side, not share, you know,not telling them that when things are not going
well and so on because they are, you know, manyJames, they're gonna get afraid.
They're gonna be looking for a job.
They're gonna think that the company's notdoing well.
Do you balance that over the years?
(35:42):
Well, I think that, 1st of all, why?
I think that's the most important part of why.
And, I mean, if you're starting to build acompany and you're making sure you bring great
talent.
Okay?
Then if you give that talent, all theinformation that is they need, the result will
be that great things will happen, even withoutyou do anything.
Doing anything to do to cause it, right,because you have great talent that has the
(36:03):
information they need.
And and so my belief is that sharinginformation as much as you can.
And that would mean that I would have stringsthat show all the sales, all the KPIs, what
users did, what users didn't do, all the issuesit support.
I would have screens.
I would send reports to the level that peoplewould just always come back and tell me this is
too much.
We need to reduce it.
(36:23):
And I would like, no.
No.
No.
Don't read it.
I don't mind, but I want it to be available allthe time.
So I was pushing it in a very aggressive way.
And I mean, that created a phenomenal returnbecause a lot of really smart people know these
things that, or can we date years that wouldn'thappen without that information.
So I just kept pushing it in every medium I hadcompany meetings, team meetings, screens around
(36:48):
the office, emails, weekly emails, monthlyemails every possible way.
When you're a public company, of course,there's something that you wanna share.
You you can no longer share, and that's verysad.
That's very tough.
How do you think about keeping your companyfast?
I mean, I know that you are really fast perperson, and you care about speed.
And as companies grow, they James slower.
(37:09):
What are the methodologies that you have inplace to keep everybody around you fast?
Well, so from what I noticed is that,essentially, there are a few reasons Beller,
that actually took kind of reason that thingsare getting slower.
So the first one is lack of urgency, and lackof urgency means that if you work at Microsoft,
you don't feel that Microsoft would beeffective, but what do you do?
(37:29):
Right?
It's like it doesn't really matter.
Well, it might matter to you, to your career,to what your boss is saying, but it's not gonna
influence the bottom line of Microsoft.
Right?
So the way I think about it is that you need toconnect people to the customers because when
they're connected to the customers, you know,that it does matter for the customer using
their product.
Do you wanna connect people to the customers?
(37:51):
I think this is super important to createmotivation.
It's also important to create understanding andexpertise on why you're doing things and how to
do them once a customer experience.
I think this is the first part, and I thinkthat's essential.
The second part is things slow down a lot ofthe time because of complex decision making.
Which is not your who's the owner, and we tryto make that everything as a clear owner.
(38:11):
Long decision making, as I said, well, you needapproval from this guy to get from that guy, so
we need an approval from that guy.
And we eliminated that by creating the subcompany's structure.
We have the chairman and the CEO that can cometo every decision.
Then a lack of resources, and lack ofresources, I wanna be clear, it's not lack of
engineers, right, or lack of whatever.
(38:31):
It's kinda like because it's the fact that youneed UX.
You need a product guy.
You need to try the content.
And if you are waiting in line to get thosethings, obviously, you are slower.
K?
So you need to make those either reallyavailable, or what we did is that we just gave
every large team to own resources.
So there's no team in Wix that actually dependon somebody else to get those resources.
(38:52):
So that was very important.
And I think those are the things that weidentified that create a dramatic effect in
velocity.
Till other layers for that, right, it's how youwrite the code that makes a big difference.
For example, when you build one service, yourcompany start, your company has 3 or 4
services.
And when you have 3 or 4 services, well, youcan just write every service from scratch, and
it's okay.
But when you grow and you have a 1000, then allthose blocks that give you advice on how to
(39:16):
write 1 or 2 services are no longer relevant.
Because it's a very different problem managinga 1000 live services.
Right?
It's very different than 2.
So this is something that you have to to keepconsideration.
If you are really good technically, I think youshould do it from day 1, but if not, you're
gonna have to find that you have to dorefactoring or what.
So that's another important thing.
Getting very clear product and projectmanagement methodologies.
(39:38):
I think it's also very important for avelocity.
So those are the things I wanna say heresomething else, Gigi, if I may, which is not
exactly that.
Right?
Not exactly direct answer to your question, butI also need a lot of time from founders.
And I think that takes startups, right, orcompanies have only two situations.
The first one is that they don't have enoughresources for all the things.
(39:59):
It's obvious they need to do.
And the second one is really a disaster for thecompany where they have enough resources, but
not enough things to do with them that willdrive value.
K?
So I always remind that my teams is that aslong as you have too many things you wanna do
and not enough resources when in good place.
You're in a good position.
Let's jump to a bunch of practical questions.
So Back to the office, remote, or hybrid, westill get these questions from our founders,
(40:22):
you know, motor companies, larger companies.
What's your view on that?
Like, how do you keep the company efficient?
Do you allow people to work from home?
What would you recommend the small start up todo?
So I'm
gonna say, 1st of all, let's start up workingfrom home is suicidal.
Okay?
That's my opinion on that.
This is how the culture of the company gonna becreated.
The language of the company will be created.
(40:43):
Everything that will create the company goingforward is credit in those early days, it
cannot happen if you do it from home.
Right?
So I mean, for a small startup
I agree.
100%.
Work every day from the office.
Well, it's very hard for me.
Right?
I I heard many opinions back.
I said I just saw a few companies share with mesome information.
And they look at ways to measure what peopleactually do when they work at home.
(41:03):
So, apparently, and it depends which countryand what is, but apparently, the last day of
the week and the 1st day of the week has becomevacation days.
Mostly the last day of the week.
If you have an event Thursday, if the UnitedStates is Friday, So the actual amount of
productivity that happened on that day goesdown by 70% approximately from what I've seen.
And on the 1st day of the week, it also targetsaround 60%.
(41:26):
And then during the free middle day of theweek, it actually goes up, but mostly because
those companies require people to arrive 3 daysa week to work.
So I think that maybe when everybody wasworking for a moment, it was obvious that you
have meetings all the time, and it was okay.
But I don't believe that it's a We didn't taketest that yet at week.
So I don't know what to tell you, but I thinkthat, obviously, it's not as good as working
(41:50):
from, the office.
And till what stage, like, from your experiencewould you recommend insisting on everybody
arriving to the office?
Like, thirty people, hundred people, I mean,clearly a very generic question, but can I give
people a pointer?
Well, that went wrong.
I would say it's 0 to a 100, everybody in theoffice,
for sure.
And then for my 100, you might be saying thatif you believe that they're actually working
(42:13):
the same level, maybe that's something you cando.
But I gotta say again, I'm finding myselfliving in that lesson.
I think that it's just not true.
And, again, I just saw some data about it.
I think that people just don't work as my phonehome.
It's very, very hard to force yourself to doit.
I agree completely.
I also think that there was a period of time inCOVID when people didn't go out where the
(42:33):
initial analysis shows very high productivitybecause people literally had nothing else to
do.
They finished all of Netflix, and so they werehome and they were working.
But now I think that, as you said, especiallythe 1st and last day of the week, but also just
in general, it's very difficult to give thesame level of focus.
And so, you know, we are for early stagestartup, we're strongly recommending being as
(42:54):
much as possible together.
We think that what I also read a lot ofresearch about is around fact that it's easier
to do repetitive mundane tasks from remote, butwhen you need to work on innovation, when you
need to work on new features when you need towork on something that's actually a change from
the norm that reduces the ability to deliverdramatically.
By the way, to this minute, to this podcast,right, I just came for a meeting.
(43:15):
We worked on some feature, and there was this,the the sales engineer and was describing
something.
And I was in that meeting.
It was a few other Pete.
I would just say the brainstorming on thewhiteboard.
Yep.
Okay.
And we came on with a super simple solution forthat.
Alright.
That will probably save us months ofdevelopment.
There is no chance Beller that this kind of adiscussion would happen over a video chat.
It's just impossible because the interaction,there was somebody who went to the port.
(43:38):
Somebody said, somebody came, somebody had somesomebody else on-site, you know, all of that
James credit, okay, this brainstorming sessionthat he cannot do in me.
I Beller seen that happening in a bit Beller.
Vichai, if you wanted to recommend one book ormovie or podcast or something to founders that
are looking to get Beller, What would that be?
Alright.
So I'm gonna tell you my favorite.
(44:00):
Alright?
And, it's kind of an amusing one.
Alright.
So it's called the replacements.
It's a movie with Keanu Reeves as a quarterbackin an NFL team that is going on a strike and
they bring this team of replacements to playinstead of the team.
Right?
And I think this is the Beller book or anythingI've seen on team building.
Right?
And so that's my favorite one.
(44:21):
It shows that can find somebody who's reallygood at one thing.
They have to compensate on it for another guywith other people.
It shows what his team spirit, how it's Beller,It shows that normally when bringing a team in
the beginning, they'll fight, and then you haveto find a way to actually focus them around
something.
It shows so much.
It funny movie.
And I think for me, it's the best evereducational thing I've seen about team
(44:43):
building.
Oh, I have to admit that I didn't see it, andI'm gonna watch it this weekend.
Now I have something that I got out of it.
I gotta say it's also very silly.
So
Beller, you know me, you know, that sillydoesn't scare me.
Oh, the other way around.
Just gonna say, you know, one of the thing thatthis is, from that movie, but there's another
thing.
So one of the thing I learned in my wife andecho from my head from that movie is that
(45:04):
winners always want the ball when the game ison the line.
Okay?
Again, it's a Pete movie.
Right?
Yep.
Obviously, that fits there.
I know that if I have a project k?
That is something that can move the needle alot on the business side.
All the winners in the company will fight aboutwho gets the ball.
Interesting.
Alright?
Yep.
And who gets to do it?
K?
And immediately, I know that this is gonnahappen, and this is also a way that I know
(45:24):
who's actually a winner.
And you can see that once you embrace thatprinciple, I think it's super important.
Beller, I think that's an amazing closing Pete.
Avishai, thank you so much for sharing yourexperience with us.
I think there's tons of girls of wisdom herethat founders will be smart to take.
And thanks so much, and looking forward to nexttime.
My pleasure.
Excellent.
(45:44):
Thanks.
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