🌏 How to hire top talent overseas, why you need a writing culture, ...
I listen to 10 hours of podcasts a week, so you don’t have to.
This is the 48th edition of Best Business Podcasts featuring My First Million, In Depth, and The Logan Bartlett Show.
What you need to know
🌏 How to hire top talent overseas
📝 Why you need a writing culture
🧢 Who holds CEOs accountable?
BONUS segments
🔢 The 4 zones of competence
😨 Never make decisions out of fear
🌏 How to hire top talent overseas
🥉 Third place (3 min read vs 57 mins listening)
What a story. Nick Huber went from being a customer of Support Shepherd to part-owner. How? By leveraging his audience. In exchange for promoting the startup, he negotiated 15% equity in the overseas talent agency. This story is worth a listen.
Alas, that’s not the key takeaway we’re going to discuss today. Most of us don’t have 250,000+ Twitter followers as leverage. Instead, we’re going to talk all things overseas talent and how you can benefit your bottom line.
What they say
Finding overseas talent
I wanted to hire somebody in the Philippines. I met Marshall Haas who owns Support Shepherd.
I made a deposit for them to hire somebody. They got me three candidates to interview. I was blown away and hired all three people.
It costs me $5 an hour ($800 a month) to get these people to work for my service company. Fast forward 4 months later, I had 15 people.
Not only were they doing the simple stuff but they were answering sales calls and guiding a customer in one of my facilities looking for a specific unit.
They were able to do exactly what our American reps do except instead of paying $70,000 a year we pay $10,000 a year. It was a game changer.
Nick Huber
A win-win situation
Our employees in Colombia and the Philippines are just as wealthy as us. They have the same lifestyle we do.
Instead of working for $2 an hour with not the best conditions, they now get to work for American companies and it changes their lives.
This is an incredible opportunity for them and for us. Now a lot of people are making that switch and getting employees over there.
Nick Huber
What I say
Why it matters: 10 years ago, hiring overseas was a headache. Recruitment, HR admin, and tax liabilities stopped many business in their tracks. But it’s so much easier now (or so I’ve heard). Companies like Deel make it easy for you to hire and grow a global team by taking payroll and compliance off your plate. In a time where cost cutting is King, my money is on more companies hiring top talent overseas.
Between the lines: Now that friction is reduced for overseas hiring, what kind of roles can you realistically offshore? I don’t think it’s a question of skill, but a question of culture. You can find good developers, marketers, or designers anywhere in the world. What you really need to ask yourself is what roles are needed to make your beer taste better?
A lot of management overhead is needed to integrate overseas employees into your company. There are cultural differences and communication challenges to be mindful of. Consider hiring abroad for roles that don’t directly impact your secret sauce (finance, HR, research, and admin roles) and hire mission critical roles in countries with the same language and cultural norms as you.
📝 Why you need a writing culture
🥈 Second place (5 min read vs 54 mins listening)
Writing is the translation of your thoughts onto paper. Perhaps, that’s why good writers are under-appreciated. We all think our thoughts are clear and well structured, so our writing must be too. Right?
In reality, an 11 year old is a more proficient writer than 50% of American adults. That’s scary. What makes it worse is the fact that writing has so many other benefits: it structures your thinking, it refines your ideas, and it clarifies your communication.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a company with exceptional writers in every role. Brie Wolfson believes otherwise. She sings the praises of her former employer, Stripe. Brie lays out the benefits of a writing-first culture and actions you can take to adopt this too.
What they say
Why is writing important?
The greatest impact from Stripe’s writing culture is twofold.
(1) You produce something that somebody else can benefit from.
(2) There’s intrinsic value. Writing is a path toward more rigorous thinking.
Writing made us better thinkers as an organization, not just better communicators.
Brie Wolfson
Ideas to get started
What Slack channels do you have? Is there a retrospectives one? If not, your retrospectives will probably get stuck within team channels.
If you’re the company leader and you want to see all of the retrospectives, you have to follow every single team and keep checking to see if there’s anything interesting in these channels.
If you have a retrospectives channel, folks can post there and set the stage for more cross collaboration thinking.
It’s obvious to organize communication channels around working groups. It’s less obvious to set them up around curation layers.
My favorites include team updates (new people joining), leader snippets (what leaders are up to), shipped (new stuff just launched), state of (status of existing work streams), notes/decisions (scan relevant meetings), and board slide review (to help people level up).
There’s a positive feedback loop here. Ask yourself ‘What work will my cross functional counterparts be interested in?’ This reinforces global thinking and helping each other out.
Brie Wolfson
Build and they will come
If you build the channel they will come and post. A leader could say ‘We are now opening up this retrospectives channel so we can be more reflective about how things are going. Here’s a place to post your work.’
Be super prescriptive about how to lean on them. What kind of work do you want retrospectives on? What’s the template for that? How often do you want people to post?
The critical component is when you launch that channel, seed it with really good content. That way you don’t get the empty shelf problem.
Not everything will stick but the stuff that does will make a really big impact.
Brie Wolfson
What I say
Why it matters: Many of us struggle when we see a blank page staring back. The cursor taunts us. Our anxiety increases with every flash. That’s why templates are so important. We’re not starting from zero. Brie argues this is one of the biggest pitfalls holding companies back. Below, she shared Stripe’s shipped email template:
Summary: What did you do? How does it help the company?
What shipped: What does it do now that it didn’t before?
Context and motivation: Why did the company want to do this work? Why was it prioritized? What should be different now?
Under the hood: What is the story behind how it got here?
For our eyes only: What would go down in the history books about it?
Success criteria: How do we know if we did a good job? What were our metrics?
What’s next: How does this impact our future? How to keep tabs if anyone wants to stay up to date?
Thank you: For anyone who contributed.
Between the lines: Writing is essential for new ideas, contrarian views, and best practices to cross-pollinate within a business. However, good documentation and repositories aren’t enough on their own. You also need a culture that embraces feedback, facilitates conflict, and welcomes different perspectives.
Many companies claim to have an open and inclusive culture but the reality is a stark contrast to what they say. If you’re nodding your head because I just described your company, there are things you can do to turn the tide.
Start by walking the walk. Embody the values you want others to embrace. Actively solicit feedback and ideas. Share your kick off documents and retrospectives. Adopt a short toes policy. By setting the tone yourself, people will slowly but surely model the same behavior and new norms will begin to crystallize.
🧢 Who holds CEOs accountable?
🥇 First place (6 min read vs 1 hour 27 mins listening)
Who holds you accountable? Most people say their manager. But what if you don’t have a manager? This is the difficulty many CEOs face. They lack the support that everyone else gets. They lack the hard truths, constructive feedback, and tough love that we all need.
Matt Mochary is the CEO coach for Sam Altman, Brian Armstrong, and Naval Ravikant. He shares his insights on why CEOs need a manager and how a coach can fill that role. Drawing on his years of experience coaching the best of the best, Matt emphasizes the value of accountability, guidance, and challenging yourself to take the difficult path.
What they say
Why CEOs need a coach
Every person does better when they have a manager. A manager is really an accountability partner and a thought partner.
Managers say what are your priorities? What are you going to do? Later, they check if you actually did them.
The CEO is the only person that doesn't have a manager. They usually don't perform as well as if they did.
Every CEO should go out and get themselves a manager now.
Your manager has to hold you accountable. They've got to sit down with you every 2 weeks and you have to be willing to tell them everything.
You've got to find someone who's not deriving a paycheck so they're not afraid to hold you accountable.
That's what I think the value of a coach is. It requires someone who will not let you get away with taking the easy path.
Matt Mochary
What I say
Why it matters: The CEO is often the driving force behind a company's success, but they can't do it alone. Without a manager to keep them accountable, CEOs may struggle to prioritize their work or hold themselves to the highest standard.
This is where a coach comes in, providing the accountability and guidance needed to stay on track. A coach can also serve as an unbiased sounding board, offering a different perspective and challenging the CEO's assumptions and decision-making.
Between the lines: Could this manager role be filled by a board member? Matt argues no. A CEO needs to open up and reveal their inner most thoughts. Most CEOs wouldn’t dare do this with a board member for fear of them not following on in the next investment round.
It’s clear that trust is essential for this to work. I say this from personal experience. I’ve been fortunate to have had a coach for almost 2 years. It has paid dividends to have had someone listen and share advice on my professional and personal life. By exposing the whole picture - my secrets, my goals, who I am - the guidance I’ve received has been so much more impactful.
BONUS segment
🔢 The 4 zones of competence
(1) There's the zone of incompetence: things you're not good at. You should outsource these to someone else.
(2) There's the zone of competence: things you could do but you don't love them and someone else can do them just as well as you.
(3) There's the zone of excellence: thing's you're really good at but you don't like doing them.
A lot of what CEOs do are in this zone because they think it's their responsibility. In reality, it's not always things the CEO has to do herself.
(4) There's the zone of genius: things you do that you're uniquely good at in the world. You love them so much you don't even notice you're doing them.
Only do the things in your zone of genius. This helps you to eliminate all the things that are de-energizing.
That's what Zuckerberg did at Facebook with Sheryl Sandberg. That's what Brian Armstrong did at Coinbase with Emily Choi. It allowed them to go back to being the product visionary.
Matt Mochary
By focusing on what you do best, you're more productive, efficient, and ultimately, happier. Outsourcing or delegating tasks that are not in your zone of genius can lead to increased innovation, improved decision-making, and better leadership. By doing so, you also surround yourself with a team of individuals who are skilled in areas that are not your strengths.
BONUS segment
😨 Never make decisions out of fear
When we feel fear or anger our brain activity goes into our amygdala and our thoughts become very simplistic. They become fight or flight. Those are pretty uncreative thoughts.
You need to recognize that fear and anger give bad advice. We should not act in those moments.
I make a bet with people when I come across a situation where I sense they feel fear.
I say 'You think if you do this action then Outcome A will occur. I disagree with you. I think if you do this then outcome B will occur.'
I say 'I'll make a bet with you. Let's have you do your action and let's see what actually happens.'
I've made this bet hundreds of times and I've never lost. Not because I'm a genius but because they're in fear and I'm not. A 5 year old could do it.
Matt Mochary
Making decisions based on fear or anger can have serious consequences, both in our personal and professional lives. Whether it's reacting impulsively to a conflict with a colleague or making a hasty business decision out of anxiety, allowing these emotions to guide our actions can lead to missed opportunities, damaged relationships, and long-term regrets. Learning to recognize when we're in a state of fear or anger, and taking steps to override these emotions is crucial for making effective decisions.
Shoutouts
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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.