The future of recruitment and venture capital leadership with Mike Mangini of Signalfire

Maren Kate
Today my guest is Mike Mangini. He is currently a Partner and Head of Talent at Signalfire. Mike's a former startup founder turned executive recruiter and founder coach and I'm really excited to have you on today, Mike, and to chat about hiring and especially the VC world and especially how Signalfire helps their portfolio company and just the trends you've been seeing in the last two crazy years of recruiting in the tech space. Welcome.

Michael Mangini
Alright. Hello, hello, hello. Thanks for having me.

Maren Kate
Absolutely. So my first question is a two-parter. What was your first job? Like the first paycheck or even if it was $5 from a neighbor. And then, what was your first professional job?

Michael Mangini
My first job was shoveling snow around my neighborhood when I was maybe just approaching double digits as I was a youth. My first professional job, if you can call this a professional job in terms of working for someone else, was selling coupon books door to door.

Maren Kate
How old were you?

Michael Mangini
Ah, it's questionable. I think I was 16 or 17.

Maren Kate
That actually sounds vaguely familiar. I feel like I remember that being a thing in school or something. I remember those coupon books.

Michael Mangini
Yeah, so the entertainment books was a thing. This was actually much more, or I should say, much less valuable than an entertainment book. This was an actual sheet of paper that had cutouts of oil changes. So you'd pay me $20 and on the cut out would be two oil changes and a muffler change or something like that. And I would have to convince people in a door-to-door setting to pay me $20 for this piece of paper and that's how I got my start.

Maren Kate
What kind of money did you make on it? Like, what was the business model?

Michael Mangini
I got actually, like, $3 for every piece of paper that I sold. And when you would leave the office in the beginning of the day and everybody would have a stack of papers that they would go to sell and they’d have their own little territory that they'd be walking around. And then at the end of the day, when you come back in, you'd ring the bell if you sold a certain amount of these papers. And fortunately for me, I was particularly good at selling this paper and I got to ring the bell a lot. Unfortunately, it didn't stick and I ultimately did not become a professional coupon seller. I kind of evolved through time.

Maren Kate
So that leads to the next question which is how did you go from a hotshot coupon seller to what you do now?

Michael Mangini
Wow. I don't know if there's enough time to really go through that. You know, I always liked the world of finance so I went to school, studied finance in school, became a financial advisor right out of school. You know, that was fun for a hot minute. I had this idea where my best friend growing up was drafted into the NFL and at that moment in time it struck me like a Mike Tyson punch in the nose, I love stocks, I love sports, why hadn't anyone created an actual exchange where I could trade equity interest in my buddy, in professional athletes, kind of like you exchange baseball cards?

Maren Kate
That’s a really good idea.

Michael Mangini
Thanks. I thought so too at the time and, since then, many have. And what wound up happening was we started this company called The National Sports Exchange. I left my job as a financial advisor, I raised some money from family and friends, and we built this really interesting fantasy sports company.

Maren Kate
Was this before, was this pre fantasy football, like, all of the DraftKings, everything?

Michael Mangini
It was way before DraftKings. It was at a time where Yahoo Fantasy Sports Leagues was king in the industry. There were also all sorts of other, sort of, little niche players in the space. It was a very cottage industry at this time but it was pretty clear that there was a lot of uptrend. There were maybe 15 million people, if I recollect the number correctly, I think there were 15 million total people playing fantasy sports at that time. This was circa 2002 and so what we did was we created this exchange with all this really interesting technology that we developed. We created this real-time dynamic ticker, which enabled prices to move dynamically on a website. That was pretty novel at the time. Anyways, I'm going way off track.

Maren Kate
No, this is super interesting.

Michael Mangini
What wound up happening was we created a really cool fantasy sports company. We raised some money to build it out.

Maren Kate
After the family and friends?

Michael Mangini
After the family and friends. We got a phone call from a gentleman by the name of Jeff Moorad, who later was known by the world as the guy who they made the movie Jerry Maguire after. It was a pretty interesting phone call and, ultimately, that cohort wound up buying my company. I moved to Newport Beach. We built out this new company called Protrade Sports, later got renamed to Citizen Sports. Fast forward a few years, we got acquired by Yahoo and that team ultimately ran all of Yahoo's homepage and fantasy sports. And so, to this day, I think the idea and the concept of trading equity interest in athletes is an interesting one. I would wager to say that with the new sort of web3 technologies and crypto, as that's coming onto the scene a little bit more heavily right now, you're probably going to see more of this stuff take shape in the future. We were probably 25 years too early at the time. But getting back to how I got to where I am, I don't want to sort of deviate from your question too much, my path is as a founder, as an advisor, this concept of building a company and getting advice and helping a founder along that journey was always one that struck me really deeply. And, you know, 12 years ago, I sat across a breakfast table with Chris Farmer, who is the founder of Signalfire, and Chris had pitched me on this idea of building a venture capital firm, that was just different than any other he had seen, any other that we had experienced. And this was right around the time that Andreessen Horowitz was coming online with their model, which became ultimately an extraordinarily disruptive model among venture. And the idea is simple. It's provide a bunch of value for founders. It's do recruiting work. It's provide all sorts of strategic guide points and reduce friction points for them as they're building their company and be a help. Don't just provide them capital but actually help them grow their companies. So that struck me, like a, it struck me.

Maren Kate
Another Mike Tyson blow?

Michael Mangini
Another Mike Tyson punch right to the nose. At this point, I was like, “alright, let's do it”. So I moved out to California with Chris and, in 2010, started a company called Ignition Talent Group. That's how I got into recruiting. So the path of getting to recruiting, like most people, is a very chaotic and nonlinear one. But once you find it, and you find yourself being pretty good at it, it can be a really fun one.

Maren Kate
Wait, but so 12 years ago, talking about the idea behind Signalfire, you moved out, you started a search firm, is that right?

Michael Mangini
Correct.

Maren Kate
You guys started it together?

Michael Mangini
Well, we started a search firm. Chris Farmer, Mark Jacobson, and myself were basically building out a search firm that was an extension of other venture capital firms. And so this was pre the explosion of every firm having a talent partner. We were sort of that talent partner extension to a couple of strategic firms. And the model worked out super well. So yeah, I could keep going or I can…

Maren Kate
No, this is fascinating. So when did you work with Facebook? Was that before or after?

Michael Mangini
This was after. When Chris had sort of proved the model and it works, he was at General Catalyst at the time, when he proved the model and it worked super well he decoupled and went to go build Signalfire. At that point, we had merged Ignition with True and became sort of the west coast division of True which is now a much more substantial recruitment organization.

Maren Kate
Yeah, I have a meeting with them next week. So yeah, looks like they're doing cool things.

Michael Mangini
Great, great group of folks. And, you know, this was back when there were eight partners at that firm, and it was wonderful. My path, though, was always one of really wanting to continually evolve my skill set and my value add to the founders that I was working with. And I wanted to get in house experience and the reason I came to that conclusion was, the third jab to the head was when a good friend of mine, Jen Holmstrom gave me a phone call and Jen pitched me on this idea to go and work directly for the senior leadership team at Facebook. And through this effort, we would have an opportunity to partner on lab development, on senior leadership recruitment strategy, on post-acquisition talent transition strategy, and that, to me, struck a chord. It was at the time Facebook was the place to work for in the valley. And so I had an opportunity to go and to learn from some of the greatest leadership teams around and I got to learn about how Facebook was this organization that was doubling in size at the scale of tens of thousands of people year on year and their quality bar didn't seem to go down and I was very fascinated by that. What did their process look like? What are their analytics look like? How is the leadership involved in that recruitment process? And to what extent can I learn from these people so I can take those learnings and ultimately, when I decided to go back to my roots, I could be more valuable?

Maren Kate
What was the biggest takeaway? What was one or two of the biggest takeaways from working in a huge organization that's growing that fast and keeping the talent bar high?

Michael Mangini
The best leaders in the world spend an enormous amount of their time recruiting.

Maren Kate
Now, is that recruiting as in, I'm having a coffee with you? Or is that thinking about recruiting systems and ops?

Michael Mangini
I don't think it's so much about systems and ops. I think it's about the realization that a leader’s job is, I should say a large component about a leader’s job is to build the team. And in order to build the best team, you have to be super good at recruiting. Part of that is meeting lots and lots of people. Part of that is understanding what are the components throughout a recruitment process that one can leverage in order to optimize for getting and landing the candidates that you really want. And part of it is understanding your role and the other nodes of influence throughout that process, and how to partner with them in order to get the outcomes that you're looking for. And so, I think that Facebook had done, does, an exceptional job at that. And I think that's reflected in the folks that that organization has been able to bring in and retain and then from there, as a multiplier magnifier effect, thus continue that bar rising higher and higher.

Maren Kate
Fascinating. I've heard that. It's like, what’s the leader’s, especially a founder’s role is vision, hiring, and then pretty much making sure you don't run out of money. Right?

Michael Mangini
Yeah, yeah, the adage of, you know, vision, recruiting, and fundraising. I think you'll get that on any website. I think that, also, it's one of the key components that we try to help founders really clue into, as they're evolving as leaders, is truly understanding the elements that they bring to the organization, that they are truly, truly exceptional at, and surrounding themselves with other folks that are exceptional in areas where they may not be. And so it's, rather than trying to be everything, it's recognizing what you are truly exceptional at and be that thing, in addition to the other components of vision, recruiting, and fundraising. And so I think that's also something that is of critical importance and it's something that I spend a lot of time on with our founders at the firm.

Maren Kate
Yeah, I mean, even another way to think about it, I like thinking about it inversely. What are you not good at? What are you anywhere from subpar to absolutely suck at because sometimes it makes it even clearer. The various very few things that both you can be good at but also you enjoy and can get into that flow with. I've always found that the more I nation on those things, the better everything else goes. And I don't know why for so long, if it's just maybe the culture, is the idea that you almost have to kind of try to be good at everything, especially in early stages. So that's great. So tell me a little bit. I was looking at the portfolio pager for Signalfire and it boasts 1000 candidate intros in the last year. So you mentioned how you differentiate yourself in the venture capital game, but what does that really look like? What is the talent platform? Functionally, how are you helping the founders that you invest in?

Michael Mangini
Yeah, great question. So we take a holistic view of the people and talent acquisition function. We have programming that expands also, by the way, just to plug into product pricing, go-to-market strategy, pricing, product marketing, PR, and there’s just a whole bunch of different programs that the firm offers outside of people in talent acquisition. But to this specific answer to your question, we look at it from a zero to one and a one to end kind of a journey. And for the zero to one, what we focus on is talent infrastructure. And so that's everything from helping you to identify and implement the right kinds of software systems, get the right kind of recruitment and interview training from within the organization, helping you think through your funnel and the development of that recruitment funnel, the role description, and specifications, and strategic component of identifying is this the right person at the right time for your team kind of thing, and what's the ultimate effect in helping you to get to that next major milestone and so that's the strategic piece. We also have a lot of software that we bring to bear. So we're a product and a software company as much as we are a venture capital firm. And so we develop product in-house to help our founders do a couple of things on the talent side, one of which is sourcing top-of-funnel candidates. So if you find somebody that you think is a great match for what you're looking for, we have technology that can help you to amplify the top of funnel resource and finding a whole host of those people, the look-alike candidates, really quickly, how to identify them and triangulate the connection points both from within our firm and from within your organization to connect with them quickly and efficiently. We also have things whereby we're able to call out certain things that may not be obvious to a non-recruiter. So these would be like, we call them badges. And so people get badged if they have clear startup experience if they're a job hopper if they're a tenX or engineer kind of thing. There's all sorts of different algorithms that are developed to help our founders more efficiently and effectively identify these things quickly in their screening process. And so that on the software side is another key piece where we add value. And then on the direct recruitment side, you've got dedicated resources on our team who will do engineering recruiting and data science recruiting, filling bespoke roles on your behalf. We have key account executive and SDR recruiting on a bespoke basis and we also have leadership recruiting. So it's a lot of hands-on work with the portfolios so that we're actually able to help teams grow through our direct recruitment efforts. And then on the people side, we have world-class expertise. Heather Doshay on our team is a former chief people officer from Webflow. She brings an enormous depth of experience in helping our founders think through, not just the strategy on the talent acquisition side, but also the development of your people strategy, and the people leadership component, and what that means, and how it fits together. So there's just a wide breadth of resourcing there. And then as you start to evolve up the stack, and you start to build your own teams, and you need less of our hands-on work, and then zero to one phase we have other folks that we've brought into the organization, the former chief people and talent officer from Netflix, Tawni Cranz, is on our team as an operational partner focusing around leadership development, culture scaling, and helping our founders understand how to go through major moments of inflection both personally as a founder, and then professionally as the organization begins to scale and go through those chaotic growth moments.

Maren Kate
What would you say the percentage of all the companies that you've funded, what are the percentage that really take advantage of those offerings?

Michael Mangini
99%.

Maren Kate
Really?

Michael Mangini
Yeah, we only have one portfolio in 130, it's actually greater than 99%, who has not leaned into the service offering, and for fair reason. They don't feel they need it and they don't, frankly. And it's important that this is called out as this is a pull kind of offering, not a push. It's not, you know, people work with Signalfire so you have to do these things. If you want them they're here for you.

Maren Kate
It’s not prescriptive. Like a choose your own join me. And then my second question is, you'll never talk to a VC or go on a VC site that's like, ‘listen, we just give you cash and that's it’. Everybody's like, ‘we're a value add’ and they're like, ‘we invest in people’ and you're like, ‘yeah, no duh’. I've seen word clouds of different venture capital sites and everything and pitches and it's kind of funny, and I’ve raised venture capital, I've talked to hundreds of VCs in my career, and there's definitely an 80/20 of the ones that actually do provide that value versus more lip service. And I'm curious, from your experience, what percentage of firms do you think are actually built out and run a truly exceptional talent and people offering for their portfolio?

Michael Mangini
You know, I think everybody approaches the solution a little bit differently. I think that I'm personally biased and I think that we are far and away the most value-added and effective, absolutely at the zero to one phase, without a doubt. But it's hard for me to say. I think that people are trying to solve this problem in a lot of unique ways and I wouldn't want to speak ill about any of my fellow bandmates. What I will say is that where we try to differentiate is in thinking through the areas where it's gonna make a material difference. Outside of just talent acquisition, as an example point, we just recruited the chief marketing officer from Stripe to join us as an operating partner and so that person who, Jim is a remarkable person when it comes to understanding developer ecosystems and go-to-market strategy and all these really important things that a wide swath of our portfolio needs to tap into and figure those things out. So we're gonna go off and recruit the best in the industry to help our founders think through these components. And so I would say just take a look at the venture capital’s website and see who's on the team. Or is it, we give you advice and we kind of tell you what we think you should do? Or do we have people that are the best in the world at doing those things who you can tap directly into, and they're going to meet with you on a regular basis to help me get this right? I think that's one of the ways that people can maybe answer your question in their own ways.

Maren Kate
I like that. And then in terms of, you know, thinking of the next 10 years and people, like, the best in the world, is Signalfire investing in web3 and the different variations of companies in crypto that are powered by blockchain and NFTs? Is that something you guys are actively starting to take notice and invest in?

Michael Mangini
Yeah, I think where we have begun the journey of this next evolution of the web is we really started with the picks and shovels and the infrastructure. So we've made a series of bets at that layer. We haven't invested in any tokens directly, as previously it wasn't allowed through our limited partner agreement to do so. As we evolve the firm and we start to migrate more into this new world, we're sort of expanding in all of these areas. And so, yes, we will be doing a lot of that. I think it speaks to the core of the firm where we're extremely good at helping to grow developer communities and infrastructure and technical types of developer tools, companies. And so that made total sense for us to get involved at that layer at this time. I think what we're doing as a firm is really starting to hone in on our philosophy of what the future holds. For a lot of this stuff, that includes NFT's, that includes tokens, it includes how crypto, broadly defined, impacts everything. And I'm a personal believer in the fact that it will influence and impact everything and it's a pretty cool future if a lot of this stuff starts to play out in ways where the consumer starts to take a little bit of ownership and power back.

Maren Kate
And I think it's more than just the consumer. I mean, one of the things, almost going back to what you talked about with the sports, your startup years ago, and that idea of ownership or taking a bet on someone's career. I mean, one of the things we're seeing is how tokenization will impact comp, and how recruiting and the compensation package. I think companies that have a layer of that more distributed ownership or more decentralized organizations with different voting structures, potentially, in an ideal world, or the ideal use case, can make more fair and equitable workplaces with a much better diversity of ideas and input. And then, high level is everybody gets to benefit in the upside. And so I’m curious as you think about the web3 future, how are you thinking it will impact recruiting? And how will it impact talent acquisition and also comp and everything else that goes into that?

Michael Mangini
Such a good question. I wish I had a crystal ball. So in terms of the recruiting world, and I should say recruitment world, I think that there's going to be a lot easier of a way to identify information and background and credibilities of people based off of their profile. I think that there will be automatically baked in, this person has done this thing and it's fully verified and it's immutable, kind of thing. And so, if you, in fact, did beat your sales record or your sales number by 115%, that's going to be an actual verifiable thing that will come with your personalized token. And so I think that what a lot of that means is, you know, I go back to this concept of friction and you look at, why was Uber super successful; why is any company super successful? Well, it's because you create these ways, these pathways, for things to become realized by reducing those friction points. And in terms of the recruitment process, if I were to go and apply for a job, I could submit my resume and instantaneously get a response and, yes, this person qualifies for this job. The only thing we really need to do is figure out whether or not you culturally fit within this organization, which by the way, may also be a quantifiable thing that comes with your token, based off of various different psychological reference points or recommendations or what have you. And so I think that it's going to be phenomenal. I think it's going to reduce cycle times. I think it's going to make it so that people get exposed to opportunities where their backgrounds are fitting that they may have never seen otherwise. And you're going to see this confluence of the rise of artificial intelligence and the rise of the ownership of one's historical working data. And all of these things are going to conflate to create this environment where it's going to enable people to discover lots more things. It's going to enable the people to hire them more quickly and efficiently. And hopefully, what it creates is this environment where, back to your point around DOAs and decision making, it creates things in such a way where people have real genuine ownership over what it is that they're doing and ownership over their value add to an organization.

Maren Kate
And I mean, then it also leads into the ultimate goal, the thing I think about a lot is, and Ray Dalio talks about this at length in several of his books and posts is the idea of meaningful work. I truly believe that most people, like the vast majority, want to do meaningful work. And even if you don't have to work, even if you were, you know, never have to work another day in your life and could have a roof over your head and food in your mouth, part of the human condition, at least to me, is the idea to contribute. And I think that by, like, I love what you're saying about that proof of work and that could be on the blockchain. A variety of different things that could be like, ‘Oh, she has done this before and boom, boom, boom’, versus you can write anything you want on LinkedIn, you can be nominated for whatever, there's a lot of ways to both game it now for people that are good at that and are shady. And there's a lot of people who are excellent at their job and just so few of us are good at selling ourselves. We're not thinking about in terms of what a recruiter would look for or how we should present ourselves. But people do amazing work and they have these skills and I think, so many of the times, they don't even realize the skills they have or how those skills could be applied to new opportunities. So it's the idea of people, companies, being able to hire better individuals, being able to discover better work that better suits them, like that. So that is the ultimate hack and that will actually bring about a lot of benefit. And that goes all the way up to senior positions and it also goes all the way down to someone who's not even out of high school, who naturally is going to have proclivities, certain sorts of things, is going to be interested, is going to have skills, and they'll be able to better find opportunities, hopefully, without things like they went to a good school or they majored in economics at Harvard but you don't know the backstory is that they grew up with a silver spoon and were lucky because their dad had a friend. It's almost more of a meritocracy. You know, in a certain world, it could be more of a meritocracy, where it's like, this person can do this. They have the skill versus the pedigree, so to speak.

Michael Mangini
Yeah, I mean, I agree. I think I will be long retired before we see the vividness of that vision come to fruition. I think that where this probably starts is in some sort of, you know, when you talk about friction points, maybe there's no more need for background checks because everything is baked into a token anyway. There's a whole host of initial wedges that are going to be valuable enough where this will get started. And so when you think about the evolution of where all this goes, and to your point, it will become much more about what you know versus who you know, in how you were describing things. I think that there's a very real future for that. If you look at the evolution of artificial intelligence, and robotics, and distributed workforce, and remote work, broadly defined, all of that, what it means is that it is absolutely more about what you know and what you're capable of versus how good are you at navigating a political food chain within an organization. And so, I do think that there's a really interesting future there.

Maren Kate
There's definitely a lot of roadblocks and there's also, as with everything in life, there's edge cases that are potentially concerning and there's going to be a lot that has to change. I think, for better or worse, it could potentially create more inequality in the first x period of time, whether that's the next five years, 10 years, or 20 years. And then over the long tail, hopefully, it will actually become more of that meritocracy, meri, meri….

Michael Mangini
Meritocracy.

Maren Kate
What's the other version?

Michael Mangini
Meritocratic

Maren Kate
Yeah, that's it. Meritocratic. Yeah, so I love that. I love talking about this stuff. I do think really, you know, you talk about the future of work and I really think that what we're seeing the very beginnings of now really will be the future of work. And like you said, we may be long retired or long dead but, at some point, we'll look back on the way we hired and the way we looked for jobs in the last 20 years, not even to say the last 100 years, and it will just be ridiculous to think that we used to do things that way.

Michael Mangini
It's gonna be a lot harder to fool people.

Maren Kate
That's a good thing. Okay, so this has been so great, Mike. Thank you for taking the time. And then my last question, actually, two. So first of all, at Signalfire, and even just yourself professionally, what tools do you really rely on to get your best work done?

Michael Mangini
What tools do I rely on? You know, we use all sorts of tools internally. We find a ton of value out of using Kota as a means of collaboration among the team. You know, without plugging certain ATS, we use various ATS systems. I think the most valuable tool that we have is our own internal tool, Beacon. For us, that's a tool that we use, both internally and as a product for the portfolio. For me, I have an unfair advantage in saying that it's the one that we built in-house. But outside of tools, I think tools are amazing, for me, it's the people. For me, it's the people that we're surrounding ourselves with. It's the team that we've got and the ways in which we all align on the vision and the efforts to, at the end of the day, help founders that we're trying to help build these companies. We're the support crew. We're not the second-class citizens because we're all class one. We're the folks that are just there to get things out of the way. We’re the pit crew and pick up a shovel and a broomstick or whatever it takes to help our founders get to where they need to go.

Maren Kate
Awesome. And the other question is, what is your favorite book and podcast from the last year? And it doesn't have to be work-related. It can just be whatever tickles your fancy.

Michael Mangini
Favorite book or podcast from last year. Good question. You know, this is an old book but it is one that I read in the past year. It is a book by Bill Walsh and it's The Score Takes Care of Itself. It’s a leadership book. Highly recommend it. I read it because it was recommended to me and it's so simple in its philosophy and yet so unbelievably brilliant in practice.

Maren Kate
Oh my gosh, I'm so excited. I have never read that book and I love it. I like the title in and of itself. Oh, it's a sports guy.

Michael Mangini
Bill Walsh was a head coach to the 49ers.

Maren Kate
You can tell I know a lot about football.

Michael Mangini
It's a great book. Another one I also read a book called The Sovereign Individual recently. Everybody was talking about it. Recommend that one too. It has a lot to do with your concept of distributed work and the evolution of the sovereign individual. Another really interesting one that was written 20-25 years ago that is so incredibly relevant even today in the predictions that they were making. So there were those two. In terms of podcasts, you know, I'm gonna have to say this podcast.

Maren Kate
You just melted my heart. You made my week. That's awesome. Oh, Mike, I appreciate it so much. I appreciate your time. And where can people find more about you, find more about Signalfire online?

Michael Mangini
Yeah, www dot signal fire dot com. I am on LinkedIn and almost nowhere else by design. And, you can find me at the office or in a video rectangle anytime you need to get me.

Maren Kate
Oh wow. Back at the office. I love that. I love that we're back in person sometimes. So exciting.

Michael Mangini
I think effective Tuesday is when San Francisco opens up again. I'm very excited.

Maren Kate
That's awesome. Well, thank you so much.

Michael Mangini
Thank you. Take care.