Prioritizing holistic people operations to support business growth with Matt Hoffman of M13

Maren Kate
Welcome to Talent and Tech. Today we have Matt Hoffman on the show. I'm really excited to be chatting with Matt. We also did a conference years ago back in the before times when those were in person. Matt is currently the Partner and Head of Talent at venture firm M13. In this role, he coaches founders across the portfolio on hiring the best talent, building healthy, high-performing cultures and Matt also sits on the board of several HR tech companies, including NorthStar and interviewing.io. Matt was also the previous VP of People at DigitalOcean. So, Matt, I'm super happy to have you on the show and to talk about all things talent, startups, recruiting, etc.

Matt Hoffman
Awesome. I'm really happy to be here. I don't think chronologically our conference was that long ago, it just psychologically feels like a lot more.

Maren Kate
Yeah, I think it was only three years ago but it just feels like a different time. Awesome. So what was your first job?

Matt Hoffman
So my first job, so I, actually, straight out of college went to graduate school to get my doctorate in Organizational Psychology. So I didn't actually have a real full-time job until I was in my mid-20s, which is both good and bad. It's actually an interesting experience to try to study the world of work without a lot of work experience. I wouldn't actually totally recommend that to other people. But outside of teaching at NYU, which I did for my graduate fellowship work, my first real corporate job was helping to do ‘voice of the customer’ market research because I came from a research background and I just knew how to run surveys and do statistical analysis. So it was an interesting experience to the world of work. Was an experience to kind of how you collect data. I definitely use a lot of that stuff now but pretty different to what I'm doing now. It's definitely been a bit of a journey.

Maren Kate
So what was that journey? How did you go from there to what you're doing now?

Matt Hoffman
Yeah, I actually…Well, obviously, I went to graduate school for my doctorate. I actually wanted to be a professor. I really love teaching. I thought I would teach at a business school or teach at a university and teach psychology or organizational psychology. And I really, really do love teaching but a lot of the work in academia is not obviously about teaching, as I learned. It's about research and other things, which I certainly love doing, but it wasn't exactly what I was most excited about. I found I could actually have more of a direct impact actually doing the work itself in the field and that's why I changed. So like a lot of people who have their degree in IO, you go IO Psychology, industrial organizational psychology, I went out to work in corporate America for a big organization, JP Morgan, and a lot of the work was doing this ‘voice of the customer’ research for Six Sigma type of research which was really big when I started at companies like JP Morgan Chase. They were super big on Six Sigma and that was kind of my first intro to collecting data to understand employee sentiment, which is really important. I think, whenever you're going to do large-scale organizational change, you've got to start with data on what's working and what's not. I had a couple of different experiences working in corporations like that. Doing employee surveys at JPMorgan Chase, I helped work on the overall employee engagement survey. Really great learning experiences but it wasn't until about like 10 years into my career that I discovered working in startups and that's really where I think my passion and my interest took off. I've always been interested in helping make organizations better and companies better so that people could have better experiences and my personal experience is that you can actually do that more directly on a smaller scale. Less bureaucracy, quicker speed to doing things, quicker or more openness to try new and creative things. So it really wasn't until I started working at startups at a company called Return Path that I really saw the power of what strategic, smart, progressive HR teams could do and I haven't looked back since. It's been amazing.

Maren Kate
This is always so interesting because at our company, at Avra, we work with a bunch of companies, startups mostly, and also candidates, obviously, that are interested in working with those startups and something that I often hear is, “how do you transition into startups?” So what did that look like for you? How did that happen?

Matt Hoffman
Yeah, it's really hard and to be honest I didn't even know much about startups. I certainly didn't think I could ever do it. I just figured, you know, talent and OD is a big company type of thing. So I was actually recruited by your recruiter for this company, Return Path. I actually working at Avon at the time, which probably half the people don't even know what that company is, but at the time it was a pretty big company and it actually had an amazing HR organization. It was known for actually doing really interesting and powerful things in HR. Didn't obviously help the business long term. The business model was just kind of doomed to fail over time. I remember being recruited and was like, why would they want someone like me? I've never worked for a company of less than, like, 5000 people. Why in the world did they want me? But they actually wanted someone who had this big experience at scale. But what I found out for me is my style actually works better in smaller companies. A lot of people try to make the shift but you really do have to kind of adjust your mindset. There's a lot of people that think they can come over from these big companies to startups and you have to be very comfortable with ambiguity. You have to be very comfortable without a lot of team supporting you. So if you're more of a big picture, kind of delegate type of person, you're probably not going to be successful in an early-stage startup where everyone needs to roll up their sleeves. So you've got to get excited about doing that. For me, luckily, that's my favorite thing in the world is to get in there and build. But if you are interested and you think that kind of describes you, reach out to people like me, reach out to VC talent people. We're always looking for ways that we can support hiring for a portfolio companies. Big corporate environments can be great training grounds to learn about best practices but a lot of companies won't recruit from there because for the reasons I said. But if you think that's interesting to you, a good way to start is to reach out to the recruiters on the teams or reach out to VC talent aggregators who helped our portfolio grow and hire. We're always looking for amazing people. It's just that's not a traditional hire and that's probably not what they're going to do first. But, you know, the skill set wise, it's super, super transferable you just have to have the right mindset and approach. Being successful in big companies is a very, very different skill set.

Maren Kate
Yeah, it's funny, my entire experience has been startups and my own little businesses in college. So I actually kind of wish I would have had some big company experience somewhere in there because I didn't realize until later on how vastly different. I just assumed everything ran like startups run. You know, changes happen fast, it is ambiguous, and there is a high quotient of chaos but the good part of that is things can move fast, there's a lot of changing pieces. When I talk to friends that are in larger companies or when we've worked with larger companies, I was just kind of taken aback by the difference. I assumed it was like one-off from a startup, like, big companies were just larger startups but they do seem categorically different.

Matt Hoffman
They’re so different. I feel like you would kind of hate it, to be honest. I think it's a good learning experience but I don't think you would love it. And like I said, just the way things get done is very, very different and for some people that's ideal but, typically, in my experience, the pace is slower. I mean you’re even seeing this now. Look at the recent news with, like, Facebook and Google. They are not startups anymore. They're enormous. They're starting to realize that their ability to move quickly and innovate is really hard. That's why they're kind of reevaluating what the right size for them is. It's a very, very different skill set to operate in that type of environment, much more around stakeholder management, much more about bringing people along. Great, great skills to have but ones you don't need to have in small startups where it's more can you do quickly? Can you build?

Maren Kate
And ones that could be detrimental.

Matt Hoffman
Yes, absolutely. If you're over-reliant. Sometimes you just gotta move quick, right?

Maren Kate
Yeah, yeah, that's so interesting. So the startup you moved into from Avon, what did they do? Also, how did you get to where you are now, and what you're doing now? Especially helping startups versus working in the startup you're investing in and supporting.

Matt Hoffman
Sure. So the company I went to is a company called Return Path, which was one of the forerunners of really best practice email marketing. Helping vendors get into people's inboxes in a safe and healthy way, get whitelisted, use best practices to avoid spamming, all that type of stuff. They're not around anymore. They were acquired and built into another company. What was interesting about Return Path at the time was it was a fairly successful business but it was really known for having a great culture and really progressive practices. The CEO Matt Blumberg had actually written a book called Startup CEO, which talks about best practices.

Maren Kate
I remember that book actually.

Matt Hoffman
Yep. So that's about the company I was at and he's since wrote, with one of his board members Brad Feld, about healthy boards and amazing boards. So really great people practices and a lot of what I was brought in to…So there were already a couple of hundred people, really successful, they'd been around for 10 years so not your typical quote, unquote, startup but what they were looking for was someone to help operationalize some of their practices around talent development and supporting the operations in that way, which is why they're interested in someone from a bigger corporate background. So it was an amazing fit because, finally, this company that really cared about the things that I did, from a values and culture perspective, I can help them scale and operationalize their systems, but I learned a ton about how you can and should treat employees in a really positive way and also have a very successful business. So it was a great experience. I was there for about three and a half years. I learned a ton. I'm almost certain I learned more than I kind of gave them but sometimes that's the best experience. Then in 2015, I was recruited to join a company called DigitalOcean and DigitalOcean was the exact opposite in a lot of ways. It was a relatively early company that had raised a ton of money. It was one of the first companies in the cloud infrastructure space so, obviously, just ridiculous growth, ridiculous revenue, your prototypical rocket ship but they didn't quite have any people infrastructure in place or cultural infrastructure in place to help the organization scale with the business. So I joined. They were just under 100 people. Not really a lot of people systems in place. They had one recruiter but they couldn't quite figure everything out. And, in part, one of the reasons why they were looking at someone like me is they had an amazing business but they needed to make the culture better and needed to make the People Operations better and Return Path was kind of known for that. Actually, the founder had read that book that you and I talked about, Startup CEO, and that's how they connected and it just seemed like an amazing opportunity to kind of build something from scratch with resources to back that up. They were really committed to creating a great place to work. When I had left Return Path, we were just named the number two best place to work in the country by Forbes magazine. DigitalOcean was really looking to do the same thing to turbocharge your recruiting efforts, to really increase retention, all the reasons that you and I know why culture and people practices count. So I joined there. We built up the team pretty quickly. The company obviously scaled incredibly rapidly. It's now a public company. I think over the four years I was there we grew from, I'm gonna say, under a hundred to five or six hundred at the time I left and, obviously, just known for some really great and unique business practices. We were named the best place to work in New York City by BuiltIn, and a couple of other recognitions in Harvard Business Review but, obviously, the biggest success is just the success of the company and that's in no small part to the quality of the people team and how we were able to hire and retain and grow.

Maren Kate
What were the biggest lessons that you learn during your time there?

Matt Hoffman
So for me, it was just how important it is to get your people operations right to support the business, right? The business model that the two founders Ben and Moisey Utertsky came up with was brilliant, right? Super easy to use cloud infrastructure, really focusing on the customer, really focusing on lovability, focusing on simplicity. That was a brilliant, brilliant business idea and the company business-wise was doing incredibly, incredibly well. But they were struggling to grow because they hadn't yet prioritized best people practices and focused on creating a great culture. It's not enough to just have a great business, right? So we really invested in building a People Operations infrastructure to support the growth of the business ahead of the business. We knew the business was going to take off. We knew we were going to have to grow. But we really wanted to invest early on in great interview practices, a world-class recruiting team, and an emphasis on DE&I. By doing that stuff early, we were able to create a good foundation for all the growth that came. The other lesson is how important talent development is. The first person I hired was actually not another recruiter but was actually this amazing woman to lead our talent development efforts. That actually had a couple of really positive impacts that were, I think, foundational to our growth. One, we created a great culture. It doesn't matter how quickly you can hire if everyone's leaving, right? So really focusing on talent development. I know you know this. That's why people stay. They stay because the company is going to invest in their growth and they can do the best work of their lives and continue to grow and develop. So by focusing on development, we had a huge impact on retention, which meant we needed to recruit less. We still need to grow but at least we didn't have to replace the people who are leaving. The next thing that we helped managers become better managers, which meant that our teams were more high performing. So we invested a lot of time in, you know, like every startup every manager is a first-time manager and we wanted to teach them how to be better managers, especially on the engineering side. That had a huge impact. And just kind of the brand that we built, becoming a great place to work, helped us hire faster, helped us keep people longer, and help the people who are there perform better. All of which led to the growth we had. We went from super high turnover to single-digit turnover definitely in under a year and that stuff catalyzed everything else we wanted to do. A lot of companies won't emphasize talent development until later on. They'll just focus on recruiting. But those two things don't happen in isolation from one another. By focusing on your employees, by focusing on culture, by focusing on growth and development, that can have a really huge impact on your ability to recruit better. We were getting more referrals, all that stuff. So really focusing holistically on all parts of People Operations helped us grow really quickly and really smartly.

Maren Kate
I think that's a super important point is the idea of holistic People Operations because definitely what everyone sees, and you know, if you're a founder or on a leadership team at a startup right now and your hiring nine times out of ten it's going to be we need to get this person in yesterday. It's like you're very focused on a goal but we get a little bit I think, myopic and lasered in.

Matt Hoffman
Because what happens next, right? You get them on but how do you onboard them? How do you make sure they're successful? How do you make sure, especially at senior levels, that they're making the people around them better? You can't ignore that just to focus on hiring.

Maren Kate
I think that, yeah, talent development and growth is definitely not talked about nearly as much as it should be versus talent acquisition. I always think recruiting is so interesting because it's kind of like the different side of the same coin from sales because there's so many of the same things that you need to look at, even from a data standpoint, even from just funnels and things like that. But I'm sure you've seen this is you can sell, sell, sell at the top level, you know, the top of the funnel, as a company you can have those growth numbers but if the majority of your customer base is churning out it doesn't matter. And it's the exact same thing with recruiting, you can have a pipeline and be putting butts in remote seats, so to speak, constantly but if they're underperforming if they're churning out, what is the point?

Matt Hoffman
That's exactly right.

Maren Kate
So, the talent development pieces is so interesting and then I would say like with M13, first of all just for listeners, describe what M13 is, how you all work with startups, your philosophy on venture, and especially how it's different from traditional VC, maybe.

Matt Hoffman
Yeah, it's actually a perfect segue as I finished the story. So I was at DigitalOcean for about 4 years and like a lot of heads of HR, and I know you know this, head of HR, especially at a startup, is almost certainly the most stressful position. Maybe CEO is more, maybe it's not. Because you have so much responsibility. You're carrying the psychological weight of everyone else who you hire so it's a position that's ripe for burnout. I forget what the stats are recently but I remember at one point the average early-stage HR people leader lasted like a year, maybe two, right?

Maren Kate
Wow

Matt Hoffman
So I was there for four years. Because you just burn out so quickly.

Maren Kate
I can see that.

Matt Hoffman
For sure, right? I was ready to do something differently. I was lucky enough that I came to work at M13 with our founding CEO at DigitalOcean, who had founded this new type of venture firm called M13. And what was really cool about the opportunity, and I think what's unique about M13, is almost all of the partners here at M13 come from operating backgrounds and we all have different areas of expertise, right? So I bring people experience to it. We have another person who was a former CMO of Gilt Group and GOAT and they bring in marketing experience. Someone who has data experience with the former head of comms from Virgin. We have a partner with the product experience. We all have these different types of experiences that we bring into the work we do in venture. And what I think makes us different is that operator mindset to, one, really create empathy for the founders but also we have this lived earned experience to hopefully make them better. We are not traditional. We're pretty hands-on even as partners with the companies we work with, hopefully in a healthy way, where we're not telling them what to do but we'll actually sit down with them and work with them on making their businesses better and founders appreciate that experience. So if a portfolio company needs help with their HR tech strategy I'll work with them, if they don’t have comms they’ll work with Christine, if it's product advisement or marketing they might work with Lizzie, data advice they might work with Rob. We all bring this experience and work very closely hand in hand with the companies we work with and that to me was just the perfect opportunity, right? Because I didn't necessarily want to go build another startup or help build another startup and go really deep. This is an opportunity to go very broad and work with a lot of early-stage companies, hopefully, make them better, hopefully, make them better places to work, hopefully, make them higher performing, and have that impact at a greater scale than I could with just one individual organization.

Maren Kate
Yeah, I think that that makes total sense. Have you noticed this becoming more of a trend in venture, maybe even the last few years? I don't know how other firms are actually executing on it but I do feel like, at the highest level, it seems like firms realize they have to have more of a focus on, at minimum, talent, at maximum, the different functional areas that a startup needs to succeed. I don't remember that. The last time I raised venture capital, which was like, 2013, I don't remember firms being as hands-on and I don't remember that focus. Is it something new? Has it always been like it?

Matt Hoffman
I think it's something new. I think firms have always had these platform teams but, usually, it's just one or two people who are just stretched way too thin. I think they're recognizing that the investment is worth it to help their portfolio companies get better, especially when capital is so abundant. And maybe that changes now but when capital is really abundant you have to differentiate yourself in some way in providing those levels of services and support. You know, PE firms have always had that level but it's very different from venture capital, which has always tried to be a little bit more founder-friendly, hands-off type of approach. But I think you can be founder friendly and support these portfolio companies and founders in really positive ways by giving them the expertise and, look if it makes for better outcomes that's a win for the investment firm and it's a win for our LPs. So far, that's certainly been the case for us. But I do see more and more firms building out their senior-level executive support team in that way.

Maren Kate
And in terms of when you're working with a startup that takes capital from M13, obviously, it's different at different stages but kind of what's your investment sweet spot, first?

Matt Hoffman
As a firm, we invest in four areas. We invest in what we would call the future of commerce, the future of work, which is HR tech, which is obviously where I kind of spent a fair amount of time, in the future of health and in the future of web3. So we really look for companies that are building scalable platforms. We come from a consumer background and so we look for companies that have this consumer point of view in terms of user experience and broad ability to kind of grow and scale but those are the areas we mostly invest in. We almost exclusively invest in seed and series A because we think that's the area that we can have the most impact in given that we want to work with these companies and make them better. At a later stage, you probably don't need our help as much. And we typically look to lead investments and write the lead check.

Maren Kate
Okay. Once a company has become part of your portfolio, how do you approach everything from the talent audit to helping them build that world-class talent function?

Matt Hoffman
So as soon as a company joins our portfolio, we'll sit down with them, and we'll take a look at their strategy and how they're thinking about it. A lot of VC firms will help them with just hiring. Obviously, we do that as well but in line with what you and I are talking about, we'll probably sit with them first and focus on their people infrastructure, which means what do your job descriptions look like? What does your interview process look like? What does your pipeline look like? How can we focus on those things? Before we give them great candidates, we want to make sure that they know what to do with them, they know how to assess them, they have the right roles for them, and they are going to support them once they’re in the jobs. So our partnership work is really helping them build scalable infrastructure and then we have an amazing community pipeline we can help fill up with them.

Maren Kate
Tell me if it's different between seed and series A but what are the biggest mistakes that you see? Or even just things, maybe not even mistakes, just things that are overlooked?

Matt Hoffman
I think one of them is what we just talked about is that they'll focus so much on just filling open roles that they won't take a look at are these the right roles to fill. So think about organizational design early. Focus on how you're going to set them up for success. You know, a typical example is they may think they need the most senior head of sales or engineering that they can get when you actually don't early on. You probably need more of a mid-level, mid to late career person who's going to come in and do the work, right? So now you've wasted three months on the senior level search and you've wasted time when it turns out that they can't do what you need to do because you didn't think thoughtfully about what the organization looks like. We've seen this movie before a lot, a lot of times and so we can sit down with them and help them think about that before they start the recruiting process. I think that's a big one. I think how are you gonna be thoughtful about comp, equity, making sure that you're being equitable across your team, making sure you're being fair about that. You're not overhiring, you're not paying people too much of a differential for the same type of jobs. All of that kind of stuff are structural things that we can help early on. So most of your mistakes are pretty common and they're not catastrophic mistakes, I should say, they're pretty common and it's easy to recover from it but if we can save a few cycles by helping you think more broadly in the beginning that's an area of value I think we can help you get better at really quickly. I've always believed that you can be much more helpful by, I know this is a cliche but, teaching them how to recruit in the first place than just giving them a list of candidates and that's really been the ethos of how M13 works.

Maren Kate
Then when you're working with your portfolio companies and your startups and you're recommending, how do you approach the, I call it, recruiting partner landscape? So there's a variety of different companies, services, and tools that startups can go to when they need to hire and it can be anything from a Diversa, which is retained search, to a platform that you get vetted candidates, to on-demand recruiting support like what we do with Avra. We’re plugging in recruiters into your talent team to help scale. And then there's obviously all the different tools from AI interviewing to Test Gorilla, things like that. What is the toolkit that you suggest for startups? Or does it just vary widely, startup to startup?

Matt Hoffman
It varies. We have partnerships with all the agencies you’re talking about and when a company is ready to do an executive search, typically, we'll work with them and help manage the search. I don't pretend to think we can do a better job than executive agencies. That's what they're great at. They've got networks that we don't necessarily have yet at scale but we can make sure that the process is good and that's kind of where our partnership fills in. We always keep an active talent community of candidates we think are great now and great in the future. The problem is a lot of times is that when you meet someone who's great on the market sometimes there's an open role in your portfolio company but usually there's not. So this perfect kind of synergy between when people are looking, what they're looking for, and what your portfolio needs that's a really hard kind of Venn diagram to split, right? So for us, it's more about we want to get these connections with great talent and great recruiters but we want to keep them long-term for when things do come available rather than just place people on the market. That's a really hard one to do. For us, again, if we can focus high level on infrastructure that will be, in our experience, that is more a value add and that's more scalable.

Maren Kate
Yeah, I like the teach a man to fish thing because it really is true. So many things will change week to week, month to month at a startup and markets will change but if you know the underlying infrastructure dynamics you can adjust to it a lot faster.

Matt Hoffman
Yep. I think that's exactly right and hopefully, our teams find that helpful. So far they have.

Maren Kate
What interesting tools, platforms, tech, or services have you seen in the last maybe year or two that are maybe it's not game changing but maybe it's iterative but are things that you're recommending for companies and startups to use or even for professionals to leverage when they're looking for their next role?

Matt Hoffman
Yeah, I mean, working with companies, obviously, we'll do some of the basic things. We'll encourage them to have a good ATS in place. A lot of them don't even know how to set that up. Hopefully, we teach them how to do structured interviews, how to have really compelling job descriptions, how to interview, and how to make sure your pipeline is broad and diverse. We'll talk to them about that. We really want to make sure that when we do introduce them to amazing talent, they know what to do with them and they know how to identify that because we're never gonna say “you must hire this person”. That's not a VCs job. We're gonna say “we think this person is great. Here's why we think they're great. Here's how you can know that they're great and right for you”. And that's really different. Then when we meet candidates, like, we talked to potential candidates or talent all the time. There's someone on my team whose job is just to meet with people like that and we want to know what are you looking for. What's the thing that gets you most excited? What type of company are you excited about? What values are important to you? What type of work is most interesting? Where do you want to grow? The more that we can get to know the person that way, the more that we can hopefully match them with amazing opportunities. And those opportunities may not be ready right in the moment but they might be available in the next couple of months. The more we have that relationship we can hopefully help them create really great matches on both sides.

Maren Kate
Well, this is kind of, I mean, it's corollary but how much…maybe a better question is when do you think LinkedIn is going to get disrupted? Is it in the process of it? It has been kind of the number one professional network, the default, to where people go at least I would say in call it white collar tech. Yeah, I'm curious when will that be disrupted? When will we look at LinkedIn like we look at MySpace or maybe even like we look at Facebook now?

Matt Hoffman
I know a ton of companies are trying to and we actually just had this conversation. It's really hard because of the actual power of network effects. I think there's some things that LinkedIn does incredibly well, obviously, in terms of their ability to just have a comprehensive database of people and skills and experiences. I think there's an opportunity to do things differently. Like there's not a huge video component or the ability to know the person as a human. It's just what you see on their resume. I think better network verification of can they actually do the things they said they're going to do. There's opportunities for companies to get better at validating that network and certifying it. I think it's gonna be really hard to disrupt LinkedIn but I think there's lots of ways that it can be made better and I think there's space for the right company to do that. We're talking to a couple but I think those are some areas we get excited about.

Maren Kate
I think the network verification is right on the money. I was literally just thinking about this at lunch. You can say that you graduated from Stanford. You can say that you worked at companies you didn't work at. There's no verification when it comes to that and, hopefully, if a company is smart by the later stages they're doing reference checks. They're doing backchannel. They're talking to people that they worked with, or for, or around. But still, it feels like, for bad actors or even maybe people that don't have any ill intent and will say, “I'm really good at XYZ”, like, we've all met people that are excellent at interviewing and good at talking and probably would be phenomenal salespeople but when it comes to actual execution of said task or role they're not as good as you may think. I wonder if that is what actually eventually disrupts LinkedIn because that would be a massive value add. If there is some sort of percentage certainty that Maren says that she can build talent infrastructure but that's just my opinion of myself which, as we all know, is often our opinion of herself is not going to be the most on point. So how does that verification even happen?

Matt Hoffman
Totally. And I think that's kind of the point, right? You can verify pretty quickly whether they worked for a company or not as long as you're doing the right type of references but can they actually do the job they say they can? Well, that's what the interview is for but as you know better than everyone, interviews are not always the most predictive thing. Some people are good at talking about it rather than doing it. Engineering roles have definitely figured that out, right? There's lots of ways of doing coding testing and things like that to test what you can do but I think there's tons of opportunity to get better at assessing what they actually did in the job, what was their impact, and what would people who work with them say about it.

Maren Kate
Yeah, I agree. I think that's one of the things that's most difficult with the idea of recruiting, getting a job, etc. It's very similar in some ways to dating or to marriage where there's so many outlier cases that something can look great on paper but not be a fit. Something might not seem like a fit but is. So there will always be that level of humanity there. It will never be down to a science.

Matt Hoffman
That's what to figure out, right? Any company that figures that out is going to have the next LinkedIn on their hands. Come on my way! I think that's exactly right and that's also, by the way, the value of a really good recruiter because some things cannot just be automated. There is real value in humans talking to other humans and a good recruiter and a good interview can identify some of those things.

Maren Kate
Yeah, at my job at Magic, I'm the Head of Talent at a virtual assistant company called Magic, and one of the things that we've been integrating more and more into our recruiting process everywhere from VAs all the way up to more senior roles is scoping out a test project or test. Obviously, you can ask for more at different stages in the funnel and at different types of roles but to me, that is the best indicator of future success is how they interact. I think that a lot of the time it takes a little bit of time, not a ton, but it takes pausing and actually thinking, “what work do I want to see to make a judgment call on this” but really is a massive boon when you do it.

Matt Hoffman
Yeah, and you have to do it in the right way. Obviously, you want to try to make this bias-free, you don't want to kind of make people work for free but if you can find really realistic simulation about what someone does and how it works, that is almost always more predictive than just an interview alone. You really want to kind of balance those two things together.

Maren Kate
I agree. I totally agree. I would say, obviously, with the news cycle people are worried about inflation, the financial markets, recession, yada, yada, even though, in the US, we just posted record new jobs stats. What would the advice you'd give to someone who is actively looking for a job or thinking about making a move at this point in time?

Matt Hoffman
That's a great question. I think, be really clear about what you're looking for and why you're potentially looking to leave. It's really tempting, even in a big market, obviously, the market is shifting, it's really tempting to just say I want to go for where I can get paid the most. And I don't mean to minimize the value of being paid fairly and well. It's really important but, in my experience, it doesn't make up for not doing the work that you're excited about, not doing the work that's going to make you feel good with a company whose values are aligned with you, not doing work that’s going to be valuable. So really be clear about what you're looking for upfront and then feel like you have the opportunity to interview the company as much as they're interviewing you. I know it feels like, given all the startup layoffs, that the market is contracting but, as you saw today, the labor market is actually not contracting in any way. It's just shifting and really talented people will always have choices. Feel free to ask companies about how they do things or what it means for you. I think if you do it in a really healthy way, it's not going to put them off. If a company is really put off by you asking those things, it's probably not a place you're gonna be happy in long term anyway and they want to see that you're invested in a long-term future with the company. They don't want to feel like you're gonna leave in a year or two. So try to identify what's going to make you happy and want to stay and grow with the company and then really ask those questions. You will have a much better experience and you'll feel better when you're there.

Maren Kate
I think that's excellent advice. Matt, thank you so much for taking the time. I have just a few more quick questions that I always love to ask. What product or tool do you rely on the most to do your best work?

Matt Hoffman
Besides email and Slack, I guess, are the obvious ones. What is one that I use a lot? I think, like a lot of people, it's probably not super news but I'm really becoming enamored of the power of Notion and Coda and the ability to create those databases. There's so much knowledge out there across teams and the biggest problem has always been how do you document it and how do you share it. So tools that make it really easy to capture knowledge and share it in an easy way is just a huge productivity unlock for me so I like that. I can't say I'm the best at every cutting-edge tool out there but that's one that we started using a lot and I found really helpful.

Maren Kate
We use Notion a ton. This entire podcast is pretty much run through Notion lists and things. I do think it takes a little bit of learning but it's so worth it. What's been your favorite podcast or book from the last few months?

Matt Hoffman
Um, obviously, I'm not allowed to say this one but I think you do some really great stuff. I just started reading, because he's connected to M13, Adam Grant’s book Think Again. I think he's just a really smart person, and obviously I come from a psychology background, but how the way our brain can trick us into thinking we understand things we don't and just really understanding how the brain works and how we make decisions. I think Adam brings a really healthy approach to how human beings can be better in the workforce. I like the fact that he's always looking for ways to make people be their best selves.

Maren Kate
Ooh. I love that. I will add that to my list. I’m about to take a trip and I actually was looking for a business book. And lastly, but most importantly, how can people find more about you or about M13 if they want to pitch you their LinkedIn killer that's going to do network verification?

Matt Hoffman
Yeah, for sure. Please do. You can find me obviously on Twitter or LinkedIn. I'm still on LinkedIn despite the fact that we're trying to kill it. That's a really good way. Our website M-1-3 dot co, M13.co, is a great way to reach out to us and you can follow me on Twitter as well.

Maren Kate
Amazing and we'll put all those links in the show notes. Thank you again.

Matt Hoffman
Thank you for having me. This was a super interesting conversation.