Transcript

Always be recruiting, w/Paul English, co-founder of Kayak

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I remember walking into the lunchroom. And I see this boat. I've never seen a boat before. I didn't know how to swim. They was asking everyone to join the crew team. And right away my answer was no.

That's Arsha Cooper. He's an author and motivational speaker. But back in high school he was a Chicago kid who had never seen a boat. Until one day he walked into the cafeteria and there it was. Bright white.

and thirty four feet long. Behind it. played a video of Olympic athletes rowing. Brought in by recruiters. And beside it?

Recruiters from a local rowing team. No one on the TV screen looked like me. And it was just so foreign. That I said no to the opportunity. Arshe wasn't the only student who said no.

So the recruiters. Change tactics. I came back the next day and that was pizza. And I'm a sucker for pizza. But it takes more than pizza.

To get kids to fall in love with a sport. The first time on the water, they pushed us out, and everyone was afraid. I mean we had these guys that were used to the craziest things that happen on the west side of Chicago. And we were all in the boat and people were crying. They wouldn't

Dip their ore in the water. And they pushed us back into the dock and we didn't Go for a row that day. Parce coaches. kept encouraging their young team to push out again.

Sit tall. Great. You belong here. One catch at a time. Follow the person behind you.

So it becomes the sport of meditation. A sport of competitiveness. And you're following the person behind you and you just hear the blade slapping against the water. You're like downloading that Serenity. And that was like a true introduction to wellness.

He eventually became captain of the country's first all black high school rowing team. The next thing you know, I went from this kid who didn't have much dreams and ambitions to walking through Ivy League schools and regatta's with My teammates from the west side of Chicago.

He would go on to help found more crew programs in low income communities around the country. My vision is to make sure the sport reflects the diversity in this country and and so I go to schools, I go to bow houses and I help them to diversify their programs. We give academic support and college recruitment support. It's been awesome.

It's not really about just being fast. It's about developing great humans through sports and through team. The way Arsha talks about rowing doesn't just inspire young people. It also May have just inspired you.

That's the incredible power of recruiting. It connects amazing talent with opportunities. They might not otherwise see. But it's also not something you do just once. Recruit is a constant drum beat.

And that goes extra when you're hiring at scale. That's why I believe you should always be recruiting. The more your business scales, the more tempting will be to delegate this task to others. Resist that urge. And never stop personally scouting.

For your next. Eleven star employees. You gotta have incredible talent at every position. Huge push. There are fires burning when you're going out. Can you believe it? Such an idiot. And then you go back to this is totally gonna be amazing. There are so many easy ways. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right. Oops. We're gonna have a three-bedroom apartment.

Not ball ten years later and be like, well that's just how you do it. We haven't made it just how you do it. This is masters of scale. I'm Reed Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn. Partner at Graylock.

And your host. And I believe you should always be recruiting. The more your business scales, the more tempting it will be to delegate this task to others. Resist that urge. And never stop personally scouting for your next eleven star employees.

Take a moment and consider. The carnival barker. What image comes into your mind? Maybe a gentleman. and a red and white striped jacket and a wide brim straw hat.

He's yelling about a unique specimen of nature. It happens to be just inside. This tent. Step right up and see the amazing three tailed mermaid. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. He's inviting you into a skill game. That's ever so slightly rigged. Try your hand at the ring toss, folks. Just five dollars gets you five throws. It's an aggressive sales pitch.

And it's probably not the tone you want to take in your own business. But the carnival barker doesn't stop. They keep up their spiel for hours. drawing in crowds from all corners of the fair. When it comes to recruiting, I don't recommend you become a carnival barker.

Step right up, step right up to the HR department. Try your hand at the amazing marketing associate position. Forty five hours a week gets you sixty K plus Full health coverage. But I do think you should borrow this one page from the Barker's playbook.

Hiring and recruiting is a constant need. Not something you can check off the to-do list once your key leadership is in place. You should always be recruiting. Not just for the jobs that you have open right now. But for the ones that will exist next year.

And the year after that. This is not a task you can ever fully delegate. Even if your company has the best recruiting department in the world. It's a mindset everyone. From the CO to the assistant office manager should carry with them.

I wanted to talk to Paul English about this because few founders are as passionate and relentless about the subject of recruiting. An entrepreneur and philanthropist, many times over, Paul is best known as the co founder of the travel search platform Kayak. He sold startups to Intuit and Tran Micro. And most recently he sold the fin tech company Lola to Capital One. He's currently innovating in the podcast space with his latest startup.

Moon beam. And he's got lots of ideas for more. I now own two hundred and fifty six domain names and With each domain name I own There's an idea for a company.

As a serial founder, Paul's had deep experience in making those first critical hires that lay the foundation of every company. In fact, he knows so much about the subject he could teach a master class. So that's just what we've asked them to do. This is your Master of Scale master class in recruiting. Measure it out. into five lessons.

As you take your business from zero to ten, then from ten to one hundred and beyond, let them guide your way. Starting with. Lesson one. Recruit your inner circle. You might say Paul's recruiting journey started when he was in high school, and he recruit his mother to what he considered a very important task.

I'm one of seven. I've three brothers and three sisters. And grew up in a small home. And somehow convinced my mom to buy a Commonwear Vic twenty Which is our first home computer.

That three hundred dollar computer became an all consuming passion for Paul. He started seeking out other programmers who could help him advance his skills. I became obsessed with it. So I read the whole manual. Taught myself how to program and this was pre-web. So I had to actually go to computer meetings to find other hackers who learn how to. get different things out of the soundboard and how to manipulate the graphics on the screen.

One of the brightest stars in Paul's circle of hackers was actually his brother. His name is Ed English, he's most famous for having created Frogger. The Tari platform. For our younger listeners, it's impossible to overstate just how massively popular Frogger was at the time. Paul's brother

Was a bona fide gaming celebrity. But it wasn't long before Ed recruited Paul to be a composer for games. I was a musician at the time and I worked for him and I became a sound effect designer. That's when I learned that whoa, you can make a lot of money programming. Before long, Paul had written a game of his own.

The game is called Cupid. I still have the ROM chip. In Cupid, the player would try to capture the hearts on the screen without getting hit by one of Cupid's arrows. Paul had written the game for fun, but Ed saw something more. He said, This is more than a toy. I think you could sell it.

Paul sent the game off. In red heart shaped tins to game companies until one of them said yes. With his brother's help. Paul negotiated his first major sale. Sadly, after I sold it to them, they ended up folding pretty quickly. So my game never actually made it to market.

Paul's first foray in entrepreneurship. didn't give him quite the payout he'd been promised. but it showed him the power of recruiting the talent around you. Seeing the importance of recruiting happens naturally with most first time founders. When you're just starting out and your work is unproven, you reach for the people that believe in you.

Often that's friends or family. This is actually fine as long as this doesn't remain your recruiting strategy. Continuing to recruit your own immediate circle can lead to monoculture. So the first moment you are able to expand and diversify your professional network, make that your number one mission. Lesson two

Scout. Like your company depends on it. Because it does. Paul learned this essential hiring lesson. Several years later, at his first so called

Real job. It was at the Boston based software company, Interleaf. He started on the product development team in nineteen eighty nine. I remember interview, I mean, I was just a peon. I was a programmer and someone else ran the hiring process like

My boss's boss's boss. Paul was one of about 100 programmers in a thousand person company. But he started to get curious about how the firm handled new hires. How do we find these people? How do you decide who to hire and

How do you decide who gets to interview them and does everyone interviewing them get video power or not? How do you make a decision? I became really curious about all that, but it wasn't my company. I wasn't running the company. So I just kinda observed it and asked some questions. It was later when I started building my own companies that I started being like, oh my God. This is the only thing that matters. What Paul observed in those interviews would become a central point of his hiring philosophy. It's one you might be familiar with if you've heard our episodes with Anil Busry or Danny Meyer.

Which of course you can find in our Masters of Scale feed. With any startup, the first ten people you hire are really important because they set the tone for the next hundred people you hire and the next thousand people you hire. Paul is exactly right. Those first ten hires aren't just for your employees, they are your cultural co-founders. Their skills and capacities not only determine what your company can do, but who you can be.

In fact, you can scout for these early co founders before you even have a company at all. As soon as you have an idea, whether it's for a new department, a new initiative, or a new business. Start scouting your network. for who you can recruit to help. Even if

Your goals are not yet fully defined. That's something Paul learned when he was recruited to be the co-founder of Kayak. It was two thousand four, and Paul was already a successful entrepreneur. He had left in her leaf. for the startup world and told his first company, Boston Light Software.

To into it. Right before the dot com crash. He'd also founded the cybersecurity firm Intermute. with his brother Ed. Now

Paul was on the hunt for his next big project. I basically said, I think there's this thing called a V C or Venture Capitalist. I've never actually met one But I hear that they help people create successful companies. Paul met one of these fabled VCs. At Graylock.

And Bill Kaiser. I called Bill and I said, I want to start another company and I want to do something really big. And Bill said, There's an office at Graylock. Come set up tomorrow. Paul joined Greylock as an entrepreneur in residence, a part of his story I actually didn't know. As an EIR. Paul's task was scouting for his next big idea.

And the people who could help pull it off. I have a friend, Larry Bond, a general catalyst, who called me to look at a company for him. I was leaving, one of the other partners saw me and said, Oh, what are you doing here today? So I'm meeting with Larry Bond and he said, There's an entrepreneur named Steve Hafner. Who wants to create a travel company, would you talk to'em? Steve Hafner already had a job in travel.

He was a senior executive at Orbits. But orbits had been struggling. And Steve had a theory about why. Went down to legal seafoods. Had a couple of drinks.

And he pitched me and he said a big problem at orbits was seventy percent of the people who used orbits would find the flight they wanted. They would then leave orbits and go direct to the airline and book it there. And orbits therefore got no money whatsoever. And he said, There's gotta be a way where we can make money even if we don't sell the ticket. So we came up with the idea of doing a pure search engine. Where we didn't sell anything. Steve and Paul started brainstorming right there in the restaurant about the pure travel search engine that would eventually be known as kayak.

It would be simple. Fast. And instead of listing certain flights, they would list every flight and hotel on Earth. We collaborated on How one would build such a site and what else it could do. And we had a lot of fun talking about it. And he said, Why don't you join me? I'm looking for a CTO.

Notice how fast. Steve Hafner leaned in to recruit Paul. Remember, they had just met. If co founding a company is like entering a marriage, this would be like running off to Vegas to elope. And I said, No, I just sold my last company. I'm gonna go create another one. And I said, I'll find a CTO for you. What are you paying? He said a buck fifty and four percent. So hundred fifty thousand dollars and four percent of the company.

I said, I think that sounds great. I run a group called Boston CTO. It's all the best CTOs in Boston. I'll find someone for you. But Steve asked Paul again. Why don't you do it? And again. Paul said no.

He said, What would it take to have you do this? And jokingly After a couple of drinks, I said I don't know at a minimum fifty fifty. And he stuck his hand across the table and he goes, You're in, partner. This fast reply.

Prompted an equally fast answer from Paul. Yes. After lunch. The brand new co founders went upstairs to the offices of General Catalyst, where Paul had been visiting at the start of the day. Joel Cutler, the VC, said, How did it go? Steve says, Good news is Paul's my co founder now, my equal co founder, we're each putting a million dollars in, which he neglected to mention to me during the lunch.

But It really was one lunch and it just showed that Steve and I have very impulsive I mean, there's so many things that I love about entrepreneurs, but my favorite skill is the impulsivity. When you see something, just jump on it. Well, it's a bias to action and also speed. So, for example, you're saying impulsivity, which is you know one way of looking at the positive, negative, but the speed of it, the speed of making decisions, because it wasn't just the speed of the code. that you were later constructing kayak. It was the speed of

operations and execution and building it and including the let's go now. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. This bias for speed over everything, including efficiency, is a key factor in the entrepreneurial mindset. And we'll take a closer look at recruiting with speed later in the episode. But it's worth hearing this little coda to Paul's story.

I mean the interesting thing is We then went pitch Greylock on kayak and Greylock turned us down. So that was disappointing. I'm like I'm an EIR. I mean I thought I was already vetted. A No investor. Gets it right every time.

And likewise, the majority of recruiting meetings don't end with forming a billion dollar business. When you're scouting for talent, you'll fail more often than you'll succeed. That's just one more reason. To keep doing it. Lesson three.

Recruit people whose strengths are your weaknesses. From the very first meeting Paul English and Steve Hafner discovered that while they were aligned on mission, They had complimentary skill sets. Steve was already a veteran.

in the online travel space. Paul had the eye for design and simplicity. that would be critical to building kayak. I have an intolerance for complexity. It's literally a weakness of mine. Sometimes you need complexity.

And I'm just not good with it because my mind is very oriented towards simplify, simplify, simplify. And with kayak. We always try to figure out how can we get more white space, less stuff on the screen, but make it so clear that we have no abandonment issues that people don't leave the site. They just see what they want, they click it. And they get the flight of the hotel they want and we make some money. Paul's so called weakness was also his greatest strength.

But That cuts both ways. We could talk about my weaknesses for a couple of hours. I have a terrible memory. I'm not good in large meetings.

I'm not good with paperwork. I'm not good at managing finances. I'm socially awkward. I think I have face blindness. Sometimes I don't recognize someone that I had dinner with two years ago. I meet them in the street and I forget that I had met them before. I get lost I have bad sense of direction. Okay, that's probably enough. I'm terrible at operations. I'm bored by

Spread sheets. And you know, we learned of a sense of humor about all the things that I'm terrible at. We have some similar weaknesses. One of the things that I I think I started a trend or was very early in a trend of in the valley of having a chief of staff. When I first hired a person to be my chief of staff, I remember a VC saying, Well, who do you think you are? The president? And I was like, No, no, I just recognize that I'm not as good at these processes. There's balls that I drop and that I need a very senior accomplished person to be helping me because their strengths, you know, kind of plug into where my weaknesses are.

When you have a firm grasp. on all your weaknesses. That actually frees you up. To double down on your strengths. And then you can hire for the traits you lack. So the first thing I do when I start a company is I say

who's gonna do operations for me because they do all the stuff either that I'm incompetent at or that I'm bored at. And with a really good ops person, I think it to work on the fun stuff. Being clear eyed about your own shortcomings can help shine a bright light on your recruiting needs. But doing a truly honest inventory of your personal weaknesses is actually easier said than done. Especially

for early stage founders. Competent at everything. You may not even know yet where your true strengths lie. So if you don't know that

How can you hire for it? Paul has two pieces of advice for that. One is simply to select really honest people when hiring. I think it's good to be self aware. It's good to have truth tellers around you, people that

are really raw with you and tell you when you're full of sh or when you're Head of your skis. The second piece of advice? Be open enough. to allow that kind of raw advice.

to land. I've always said that people follow confidence, but they're loyal to vulnerability. And so if you're vulnerable with your team about the things you're terrible at. Someone will lean in and take that over for you. My team are superstars.

And they hide all my incompetence. But if you're good at recruiting It's really all that matters. When you've build substantial wealth through your business, it's often tied up in a single equity position. The upside is real, but so is the risk, and knowing when to act isn't always obvious. Creative planning works with business owners to build a strategy around concentrated equity.

When to diversify, how to manage tax risk, and how to protect what you've spent years building. Creative planning where wealth works together. Learn more at creative planning dot com slash masters of scale. Humans will never be more intelligent than AI. There's gonna be two types of companies. Those are great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future?

That is human centered. I'm Rana El Chayubi. And on my podcast Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future. And we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in.

Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show. Because every Friday we release a second rapid response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely from Ford's CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find, just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there. We're back with Paul English and his master class in recruiting.

If you're enjoying this episode, you can share it using the link masterscale.com/slash English. And to hear my full conversation with Paul, become a member at Masterscale dot com slash membership. It's time for lesson four. Recruit at speed.

Earlier in the show, we heard how Paul was recruited to be the co-founder of kayak. over the course of a single lunch. It's a quintessentially Entrepreneurial story. But it also flies in the face of another classic piece of hiring advice.

Choose carefully. This is what he said about hiring your very first employees. With any startup, the first 10 people you hire are really important because they set the tone for the next hundred people you hire and the next thousand people you hire. This is absolutely true. And it's why many founders, including myself

Preach caution. When it comes to your first hires. Bad ones. Are hard to get rid of. And course correcting.

Can be painful. So it surprised me a little that when Paul and I spoke about the scouting process, he said this. One rule I have for recruiting is When you first hear someone's name, a clock starts ticking. I have seven days to make her an offer letter.

Seven days. From There's this person I met. Two Here's an offer.

If you don't think that this sounds like a recipe for precision. You're not alone. Some people say is seven days too fast, you make a lot of mistakes, but speed and accuracy are not at opposite If you watch Formula One races And you watch the pit cruise.

They're really fast. And if they make a mistake, people die. But To operate at that speed, the way you do it is just very process oriented. You know, you're really good at how you use tools and how you check yourself. And recruiting can work like that. That sounds pretty good.

Who wouldn't want formula one type precision in their hiring? But mastering that blend of speed and precision takes practice. Let's hear how Paul does it. Let's say that I'm creating a new health startup. And you and I are brainstorming about it over coffee in San Francisco.

And you say, Wow, there's a woman I met Oh. Worked on Google Health for a while. She was a VP marketing mayor. I'm forgetting her name. As soon as this person is identified, that seven day clock. Starts ticking.

Mm. That's a lot I have to do in seven days. I have to get her name. Find her, convince her to meet me. And then in that first meeting It's really a conversation to get to know each other.

Okay, so you've gotten to that first conversation. Now your challenge is to get acquainted in a way that feels organic, but also answers your burning hiring questions. It's a balancing act. All recruiting is about fifty percent selling and fifty percent evaluating. First of all, try to get a rapport really quickly with a candidate. I find something on their resume or their LinkedIn profile that I'm excited about, and I'll jump right in. Use that as common topic. Get them excited.

And then I evaluate them largely on are they fast? Can they handle curveballs? Have they been able to handle change?'Cause by definition startup is all about change. Notice what's underneath Paul's advice. Start. From a genuine place of curiosity to make a human connection. Then start focusing your questions more and more precisely to seek out what you really need to know.

I don't believe in theoretical questions because if you ask a theoretical question, you get bullshit answers. So what I do is I pick a project on their resume. And you say, Who did you work with on that? Like did you work with Quality engineers. Tell me one thing about them that blew you away. And one thing about them that annoyed you.

Note. Paul isn't asking candidates. to rat out their irritating former colleagues. This is about getting them to speak. with specificity.

You can make up a name. I don't really care who they are. And the reason I ask this on a specific project, specific people. is they tend not to bullshit me when you get specific and they'll tell me something they really loved about someone and something they really didn't like. What I can discern from that is first of all If there's not something that excites you, but everyone on your team That's red flag. Red flag. Cause everyone has strengths.

And if you can't tease out someone's strength to learn from Red flag. And then everyone has weaknesses. And if you can't pull something out that someone could have done better, it means you don't have a critical eye. Through asking specific questions, Paul has learned how to step on the honesty gas pedal and blow past the platitudes. Remember

Finding truth tellers is one of your most important goals. Truth tellers are even more important. When it comes to arguably the most underappreciated weapon in your hiring arsenal. The reference check. I believe reference checks.

can actually tell you more about a candidate than a one on one interview. In an interview. Your candidate will be well practiced and on their best behavior. A great reference can tell you what the Canada is like day to day. Sometimes they give me three or four references. I'll look them up.

But If one of the references seems particularly impressive, I want to track that person down. I also believe in code references. The candidate might not have listed someone. And again, through the magic of LinkedIn, I can find someone I know who knows this candidate. You have to be careful not to expose that they might be job hunting. But I'll call the intermediary and say, Hey, do you know this guy, Reed Hoffman? I'm trying to decide if I should recruit him. What can you tell me about him? And this is someone I know. Like they know me, they know you. They're gonna be honest to me. Just like in your Canada interview.

How you ask the question matters. A lot of times you'll say, you know, what is their weakness, but that Tends to get bullshit answers. And so what I'll say is if I do get the chance to work with Reed Tell me something I should focus on to make sure I'm a good manager for him. What do I need to do to make him stronger? It's another way of asking

You know, what's Reed's weaknesses. And when you ask it the way I just said You tend to get an honest response. There's one more piece of counterintuitive advice Paul has for us. It's not just a time saver.

It's a recruiting accelerant. During my reference checking, if the person is amazing I recruit them. I recruit the reference. Because if this is the best boss the person ever had, I want to work with them too.

As you step up your hiring, you'll need to move fast. Without sacrificing precision. So don't be shy about using these hacks in your next recruiting phase. Like a Formula One Pit crew. They'll keep you moving at speed.

Lesson five. Recruit your customers. Okay, this isn't recruiting in the classic sense of hiring. But employees aren't the only ones that build your business. Your users help build it too.

This is something Paul English has believed from very early on. Back to a couple other things on kayak. One of them, which astounded me. Is you put your cell phone number down is the customer service number for a while. Yeah, it's a trick I learned from Scott Cook. Scott is a great friend and mentor of mine add into it. I sold my little e commerce company to Intuit, joint dot com one oh, and then I served as VP Technology. And one time we were sitting in a meeting talking about how electronic invoicing and payments you work with in QuickBooks.

And we're kind of just ideating and coming up with a bunch of ideas. And you could see Scott like steam coming out of his ears and he had his arms crossed. He's kind of looking at his shoes and looking like more and more frustrated. And I looked at him like

Scott, what do you think? And he said, It's interesting what you guys think about our customers. There's a phone right here on the table. Can one of you pick up the f phone and call an actual customer and see what they think. Scott's point.

while coarsely made, struck a chord with Paul. It just made me think that it is nice what engineers think about a problem, but unless you talk to a customer, you can be making up stuff that no one cares about. Paul wanted to recruit. those customers to help make kayak better. So he had their call for help.

Come to him. The funniest call I got Was from an older woman who said, You know, I'm trying to get my daughter to come visit me. We're trying to find flights for her. She called me my cell phone.

I said, I'm happy to help you. Where'd you get this phone number? And she said it's on the bulletin board of the senior arm. So someone wrote my name Paul Travel. My cell phone number.

I said Have you tried kayak? And she's what's that? I said, It's a website to find flights. And she's Well we don't own a computer. This woman without a computer was not even really a customer. But it was a clarifying moment for Paul.

I learned something from the call. Travel can be stressful. And she wanted her daughter to come visit. And even though she didn't own a computer Yeah, I tuned my compassion skills during that call. And it made me more compassionate to the next person and made me just

Focus on We gotta make this simple. Making your phone number. The customer helpline may strike you as a bit of genius. Or

Like Russian roulette. Because if you fail to make your product simple. That phone. We'll be ringing off the hook. That reality is one reason so many companies tend to outsource customer care.

Or create a labyrinth of automated menus to keep customer service calls at bay. Paul noticed this too, and he had a big problem with it. My mom died. In two thousand and one.

And asked me to take care of my dad, who had an early stage Alzheimer's. He had rapid decline after my mom died. And then at some point I realized he was struggling on the phone. And many people with cognitive impairment They're okay one on one. They're not so good in groups and they're not so good on the phone.

And when I realized that my father like literally couldn't make phone calls anymore, when the IVR would speak to him and say, press one for this, press two for that, he would talk to the Ivar and it wouldn't understand him. And it was a little bit embarrassing, you know, dignity stealing. I'm thinking Okay, he's paying money to his phone company. It's a phone company. Why doesn't a human answer?

When he presses zero. By two thousand and four. Paul had enough. Even as he was building kayak. He started a side project.

to help get a human being at any corporation on the phone. The project name speaks for itself. Get human. So I started Get Human as a blog to expose companies About how to get to a human.

He has a secret phone number, it's not on the website, but if you call this phone number, a human will answer. Paul didn't start Get Human for the sake of those companies. It was for everyday people like his dad. Or like that woman from the senior center. But he also knew

How much businesses stood to learn from the customers calling them? Some companies weren't thrilled about Get Human and would respond by changing their phone numbers. But others recognize the same recruiting potential Paul did. I remember a woman at Dell Computer She said, I work at customer support in Dell. I love what you're doing. We just canceled the phone number on your website, but here's the new one.

Fostering this kind of direct contact. is also a pretty cost effective way to do market research. Why spend money to talk to customers when they're already calling you? Why can't you just learn from your existing customers? In this spirit. Paul wants to recruit the users of his latest product.

Moonbeam. It's a podcast app. Inspired by an entirely different platform. TikTok. The cool thing about TikTok is not what it looks like the first day a week you use it.

The more you use it. It discovers interest in you. that you might not have even put into a configuration screen up front. They have just phenomenal machine learning. It makes me realize how bad YouTube is at this, but TikTok just nails me. Paul wants Moonbeam.

To learn its users just as well. The idea is you start up Moonbeam and immediately we start playing something. short curated clips by humans on our team as sort of the best minute From many, many podcasts. But then based on how you interact with it, do you listen to the whole thing?

Do you double tap on it to star it? Do you share it? Do you subscribe to it? Do you tip that podcast host? We feed that to a machine learning algorithm and we start feeding you better and better content. This feedback loop lets Moonbeam recruit its users as talent scouts, tastemakers, and critics. and it helps build a direct channel between audience and show creator. On that note.

To wrap up this final lesson. Paul pitched us on an idea to recruit you. The listeners of Masters of Scale. Reed, today you and I are talking. Right now it's Thursday. I have no idea when this is gonna air. I know your producers are gonna get real busy tonight. Uh working on this episode.

Imagine if for small set of users They were getting a live stream feed of this unstructured conversation with the two of us. And your producers were getting feedback from them. I wonder if we expose the listeners На час ту the подкаст хост автор факт. But even if we could expose the listeners to your producers, even in real time.

We wondered about that too. So True to the always be recruiting mission. We'd like to recruit you, our listeners, to the cause. If being able to react to produce your conversation

Is something you'd be interested in? Tell us on Twitter or Instagram. Where At Masters of Scale. I'm Reed Hoffman. Thanks listening.

Masters of Scale is a Wakewhat original. Our executive producers are June Cohen and Darren Triff. Our senior producer, Jordan McLeod. Our supervising producer is Jay Kunjabi. Our producers are Adam Skuse, Catherine Clark Gray, Hiley Bondi, Marie McCoy Thompson, and Christina Gonzalez. Our editor at large is Bob Safian. Our music director is Ryan Holliday. Original music and sound design by Eduardo Rivera. Audio Editing by Keith J. Nelson, Steven Davies, Andrew Naught, and Mike Gallagher. Mixing and Mastering by Brian Pugh. Special thanks to Chris Yay, Alisa Schreiber, David Sanford, Saida Sapieva.

Greg Beado. Adam Heiner Emily McManus. Kelsey Capitano. Tim Cronin.

Anna Pizzano, Ben Richardson, Mina Kurosawa, Sarah Tarter, Charlie Menesis, Janeme Ezequena, and Colin Howard. Become a member of Masters of Scale to get access to a year's worth of courses and content on the Masters of Scale courses app. Find out more at masterscale.com slash membership.