🗂 Use PSHE to evaluate employees, how to make life changing decisions, ...
I listen to 10 hours of podcasts a week, so you don’t have to.
This is the 23rd edition of Best 3 Podcasts of the Week 🥉🥈🥇, featuring Acquired, All In, and Lenny’s Podcast.
What you need to know
🛣 How to make life changing decisions
🍿 Why the a16z haters are wrong
🗂 Use PSHE to evaluate employees
BONUS story
🍾 The secrets behind Gusto’s hiring ritual
🛣 How to make life changing decisions
🥉 Third place (4 min read vs 4 hour 24 mins listening)
I’m failing you with this roundup. It’s nigh on impossible to fit in 4+ hours of listening into a 4 minute read. I’ve done my best to pick out the most impactful part that you can use in your day to day life - Jeff Bezos’s regret minimization framework.
David and Ben followed Jeff’s journey as he built Amazon into the trillion dollar business that we know today. This episode is perfect for your next road trip. For those of you who don’t have half a day to listen to a podcast, enjoy this quick read.
What they say
How to make life changing decisions
Jeff wrestled with the decision [to start Amazon]. He and Mackenzie had just got married, they loved their life, they loved living in New York.
Jeff was the heir apparent to take over D. E. Shaw. He called up his parents and they said stay at D. E. Shaw.
He was thinking about what to do and he came up with this framework for making this decision.
He called it the regret minimization framework. It’s such a beautiful way to frame big life decisions.
The framework is this - when I’m 80 years old and I look back at this fork in the road, which path am I going to regret the least.
When you look at it that way, the answer is brain dead obvious. When he’s 80 and he’s like ‘Well, I could’ve built Amazon, but I stayed at D. E. Shaw’ - that’s some serious regret.
David Rosenthal
What I say
Why it matters: Trust. Your. Gut. There’s a reason why old sayings survive the throes of history. The saying most likely originated from the unsettled feeling in your stomach when you know something is wrong. David argues that Jeff is an entrepreneur at heart and the framework was helpful to validate the decision he knew already.
Albert Einstein also trusted his instincts. He told the Saturday Evening Post in 1929 “I believe in intuitions. I sometimes feel that I am right. I do not know that I am.” Albert said it’s better to trust your instincts and see if they’re right rather than dismiss them and regret not listening to your intuition.
The regret minimization framework invariably aligns with your gut. I used this myself when moving from the US to the UK with my wife. Back then, Medicspot was two co-founders with bold dreams. I knew I’d regret not taking the leap of faith in joining Zubair and Oli. Fortunately, the move has been all I’d envisioned and more.
Between the lines: This framework encourages you to think as if you have the value of hindsight. Mike Pallett, an executive coach, uses a great ice breaker that follows a similar lens. He asks:
What advice would your 80 year old self give you?
What advice would your 18 year old self give you?
Thinking from both the fountain of youth and the wisdom of age helps you to make better decisions in the present. Here are my answers:
80yo - Have fun, stay healthy, laugh
18yo - Be bold, take risks, place bets
These aren’t polar opposite. I can often do both. It’s helpful to check myself every year and see whether or not I’m following the advice I’ve given to myself.
🍿 Why the a16z haters are wrong
🥈 Second place (3 min read vs 1 hour 39 mins listening)
Grab the popcorn. We’re diving into the $350M seed investment by a16z into Flow. Why is this controversial? It’s not the what. It’s not the record size of the investment. It’s the who. People were up in arms because Flow’s founder is Adam Neumann, former co-founder and CEO of WeWork.
The haters came out strong on Twitter, from Andrew Gazdecki
… to Chris Bakke
What they say
How does Flow capture value?
What’s interesting about Flow is Neumann is going to create a consistent brand and experience across the country.
I’m not sure if that’s really been done before, where there’s a brand for apartment living.
It’s simple to measure if it’s going to work or not. Can Neumann deliver lower vacancy rates and higher rents?
Can he then buy apartment buildings at market prices? That’s the arbitrage.
David Sacks
How does Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) benefit?
There’s brand value among entrepreneurs that have had failed startups or issues with their first startup imploding and knowing there’s still a second bite at the apple.
First Round Capital did an analysis of all the investments they had made and one of the biggest predictors of success in a startup was that it was the founder’s second startup.
If you had failings the first time around, you’re more likely to have learned from those failings to improve your performance the second time around.
As an entrepreneur, I look at a16z after this investment and think these guys will still back great entrepreneurs even if things went sideways. This is the ultimate case for that.
David Friedberg
What I say
Why it matters: Ignore the trap of trying to make everyone happy. It’s natural to step on a few toes on the way to greatness. That’s exactly what a16z are doing. Sure, they pissed people off with their investment in Neumann. It won’t hurt them one iota if they continue to focus on delivering value to the people that matter: founders and investors.
Between the lines: Don’t be afraid to take big swings. It’s ok if they don’t always pay off, as long as you have enough chips on the table to rebuild again. Only time will tell if a16z’s bold bets pay off. If they win, they’ll be seen as one of the best VC firms of all time. If they lose, they’ll likely remain as a Tier 1 firm.
🗂 Use PSHE to evaluate employees
🥇 First place (6 min read vs 1 hour 31 mins listening)
Shishir is co-founder and CEO of Coda and was previously Head of Product and Engineering at YouTube. He has been exposed to and adopted many great frameworks over the years. Shishir reveals a few of his favorites from his upcoming book.
What they say
How to evaluate employees
We used this framework PSHE. It stands for Problem, Solution, How, Execution.
If you’re a junior product manager, you get handed a problem, a solution, and the how. All you have to do is execute the playbook and that’s all we expect.
When you get a little more senior, you get handed a problem and a rough solution. You then figure out the how. What are the milestones? How are we going to organise this?
When you get even more senior, you get handed a problem and you come back with the solutions. We judge you on the creativity and effectiveness of the solutions.
At some point, you’re senior enough that you tell us the problems. You say ‘I know you told me to go and work on activation, but actually I think our issue is brand, or whatever it might be.’
This way of evaluating people is not specific to product management. You can do the same thing for engineers, designers, sales people, and so on.
Shishir Mehrotra
Reference checks > interviews
I value the reference check over interview signals. What you get out of 30 minutes of artificial scenarios is never going to compare to what a good reference check will give you.
The best way to assess PSHE is through references.
Pick product managers for example. We all know amazing H level product managers. Their counterparts usually love them. They run super efficient meetings and their communication is always clear.
But you’ll ask [the referee] ‘When you’re deciding which problem to solve, who is the leader and are they picking the right problems?’
Or ‘When there’s a hard problem, who is regularly coming up with the best solutions to them?’
[The referee] will tell you the product manager runs a great meeting but the CEO tells them what to do or another person solves the problem.
Shishir Mehrotra
How to run a killer reference check
PSHE is hard to assess during an interview but incredibly easy to assess during a reference check.
You have perverse incentives during a reference check. People generally don’t like criticising people.
I try to not make it obvious to them that I have this ranking.
I’ll say things like ‘When you think about this person, what one of these 4 personas are they most like? (1) They regularly come up with the problems for the team to be focussed on (2) They solve problems in a really creative way (3) They’re really good at getting a team moving (4) They can take a playbook and execute with high precision.’
You want to give them an opening where they don’t feel like they’re judging. Once they start talking, they’ll reveal what they really feel.
Shishir Mehrotra
What I say
Why it matters: None of us are perfect. We’ve all made at least one bad hire. I’ve personally made two in my career. Each one bad for a different reason (at least I learned my lesson each time).
With that said, one of them could have been prevented if I’d listened to this podcast beforehand. It’s clear as day what I should have done differently.
Pick up the phone and call the referee rather than settling for an asynchronous Q&A.
Use the PSHE framework to understand if they were capable of S or if they were just good at H.
It’s ok to fail if you learn from your mistakes. I’m going to live and breathe PSHE when hiring to do exactly that.
Between the lines: As soon as I heard the PSHE framework, I searched for a hiring template I could use and share with the team at Medicspot. To my surprise, I couldn’t find a thing. So, I created my own. Here’s a basic set of questions you can use to assess candidates using the Problem, Solution, How, Execution framework.
BONUS story
Importance of rituals
Dharmesh Shah, co-founder of HubSpot, says when we’re building companies, we build two products. One for our customers and another one for our employees. The product we build for employees is culture.
Interestingly, when you ask people about their culture, the way they’ll answer the question is through rituals. Rituals are a mirror of culture.
Shishir Mehrotra
Gusto’s hiring ritual
When you get an offer call from Gusto, they have the entire group of people that interviewed you join the call. This is instead of the recruiter which is what most companies do.
They all say something about why you’re amazing and why you should join Gusto.
It’s an interesting ritual in so many ways. For the candidate, what an amazing experience.
For the company, what if someone voted no? It doesn’t matter. You’re on the call. You’ve got to work with this person and make them feel welcomed. It’s a signal to the company about how important hiring is.
Shishir Mehrotra
Try asking founders and friends what are their company rituals. Steal the best bits to improve your company culture and signal what’s important to you.
Shoutouts
When I find newsletters, podcasts, or books worth sharing, I’ll feature them here:
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Note, these quotes were pulled at different points of the episode. Some sentences were left out to make the narrative clearer and more concise. Podup is not associated or affiliated with any podcast (unless otherwise stated). All roundups are independently written and do not imply any sponsorship or endorsement by the podcast.