Why Most CPOs are Bad

Biggest product lesson learned from Instacart was as much as AB testing and, like, high velocity optimizations feel like progress, and to some extent, they will be. When you’re at a business of that scale, where we’re talking, like, 30 to 40,000,000,000 in gross transaction volume, the only thing that really moves the needle is, like, new capabilities. So we would try and test a lot throughout the customer experience to optimize conversion, make things easier, make search better, the results more relevant. And it would deliver wins, but the sleeper, huge win, was when we launched Snap EBT, which is like food stamps, to be able to pay with those on Instacart.

It became a billion dollar business line in less than a year, and then grew up to be 4,000,000,000. So it changed how we plan and how we think about placing bets from what are the quick win optimizations on the current experience to what do we need to do to unlock the next billion to 5,000,000,000.

So how I translated that into Tezi, where we are seed stage, is if we can launch a new capability and do it at, like, an a quality level, we can actually set it down for a while and not have to come back and keep working on it for, call it, a year, which then enables us to be able to go and add an additional capability.

But when we launch things that are like MVPs, that are just kind of like scrappy, like beta stuff, we get mired in fixing it and trying to make it work, and it slows down our ability to launch sort of the next big thing that’s going to move the needle on our ability to have a differentiated positioning and to, like, market ourselves.

Sort of. So I guess, how do I feel about, like, MVPs and test and learn? It’s when we’re building, we’ll have varying degrees of clarity as to what the customer needs and wants based on everything else that we’ve learned from customers over the last, you know, year, year and a half at at Tezi. And when we have clarity as to what they want, let’s just build the thing. Now where there’s ambiguity and we’re unsure as to does this really meet their needs, there’s so many steps along the product development journey that we can bring in a customer.

And, like, whether that’s at the design stage, whether that’s with a prototype alpha that was vibe coded to right before launch, we released to just a few customers. And so I think of it as kinda like one swing, and I wanna finish the swing. But in between, we will need to involve customers if we lack certainty.

really changed it dramatically. Even just in, like, the last year for how we work, our designers now are trying to figure out what vibe designing means, then to some extent, even if they can vibe code. There’s some ways in which it works, and so magic patterns has been, like, useful for us to designer can just articulate what they want, what they’re trying to do, and then all of us can see a prototype and interact with it and get what the designer’s trying to put forward very quickly, very simply.

We haven’t quite gotten to the place where the designer can use Cursor to, like, vibe code it themselves. We’ve tried just running an environment was too hard. And so maybe someday we can optimize it so that, you know, a designer or myself could stand up an environment and do it pretty quickly. But it’s enough that, okay, this vibe designed thing in magic patterns works for the engineer to vibe code it up themselves. And sometimes it’ll be high quality code, and sometimes it’s gonna require, you know, a bunch of work after that.

Our standard for what we release is still the same. Like, we still want to get to, like, a quality on anything new, but we can get there faster.

see roles evolving is really towards what I think has been, like, more natural and organic all along. When I think about early days of tech, it’s like engineers. And then they were building, and all of a sudden, like, UX actually mattered because we had, like, graphical user interfaces. And some of them could design, and some of them, like, couldn’t design. You know, they couldn’t imagine it and, like, make it usable. And so a design as a field, UX design as a field emerged. Then what happens is product emerges because someone needs to understand the business requirements, why we’re doing what we’re doing, and articulate and prioritize that.

But the thing is some engineers could have always done it, and some designers could have always done it. And so that’s how I transition from design into product management is it’s not really different. Like, design is a set of decisions about a product, and so those decisions can be made by an engineer. They can be made by a designer. They can be made by a product manager. So I don’t see the roles as all that distinct. It’s just sometimes you’re lacking skills within the team, so then you need somebody to bring those skills.

With emerging technologies, perhaps you can have more skills, basically. So an engineer can get to something, like, solid design wise when it might have been challenging for them in the past. That’s great. And same with a designer could perhaps be able to code up something through prompting, and that’s amazing. Like, for us, my theory was we didn’t need PMs until, call it, 50 people or so. We actually do have some gaps. And so we have PM that’s, like, former senior director at Slack that contributes about fifteen hours a week, And it really helps fill the gaps on his enterprise experience, clarifying the requirements, prioritizing.

Because as good as our engineers are and as good as our designers are, it’s just helpful support to them.

I see PM as think of it as, like, a hire of last resort. And so I don’t think a company should be allergic to hiring them, but it shouldn’t be the default. And why is that? Creating room for engineers and designers to be leaned in on the business is good for the business. And that having more ownership versus, hey. Stay in your lane. Design the thing. Hey. Stay in your lane. Code the thing. Leads to deeper employee engagement, helping them think like a founder about all aspects of the business.

But if not having PMs is affecting execution, the team is asking for PMs, then that’s, I think, the time to introduce one.

I think where PMs spend their time will evolve. And by that, I mean, instead of long PRDs and, like, set of requirements or, like, even just the idea of, like, CEO of the product, I think is really obnoxious and not helpful. So a good PM will be filling gaps that a team has. And I think that there will be continual gaps. It is hard when you’re in it, in the thick of building things to be able to zoom out and say, okay. Of the 50 things we might do, what are the, like, three that we should do, like, next cycle?

And how do we prioritize against the customers we have versus the customers we want versus fixing what’s we have already built versus new capabilities? That requires building a lot of context, and I think that that continues to be where PMs spend a lot of time. But articulating it in some doc, like, it becomes a one pager instead of a 20 pager.

For me, the biggest product lesson from Thumbtack is you should just do the common sense things, and whether you have the data to support them or not. And chasing the data to support why we should do something can actually just be a distraction and a delay. And so to unpack that, what I mean is I recall so much time we spent hemming and hawing in 2016 through 2018 about whether we’d be native first. Like, how important app usage was versus web usage. And we knew it was correlated to retention, but we didn’t know if it was causal to retention.

And to do sort of analysis and study to determine the causality of something takes quite a long time. When at the end of the day, we could have just said, listen. The long term secular trend is everything’s moving towards mobile. More usage, whether they desktop and mobile, is better. So, yeah, let’s just go all in, and we’ll see what happens. So I guess it helped me see the value of even in, like, late stage companies of conviction based bets that are based on, like, sensible, secular, long term trends or, you know, otherwise.

yeah. I hate consensus building. I think it leads to slow execution and often, like, worse outcomes that it lacks anyone’s conviction because it ends up being watered down that, like, this is the right thing. So I’d rather have someone feel empowered to make the call, test, learn, and, like, either be right or wrong, but, like, get to an answer quickly so that they can move on to the next thing.

think the biggest nonconsensus product decision that I made that didn’t work is how we built Daisy, like the v one. We took a breadth first approach. The consensus view is, you know, start narrow, point solution, land and expand. It’s the wedge, that sort of thing. What we set out to build is the equivalent of a full life cycle recruiter. And so that necessitated a ton of surface area across the entire recruiting journey from opening an offer all the way up and or opening a role all the way up to the point where you’re ready to extend an offer.

That was the, like, product scope. So very broad. What was right about that is it’s a very differentiated positioning and has helped us get a ton of meetings, and customer interest because companies are tired of point solutions, and they don’t wanna integrate another one. What we’ve struggled with is it’s a lot of surface area, and it’s hard to get, you know, 12 things to a sufficient quality level. The thing that I learned from it is you can’t do an MVP for a breadth first approach. And I think Ben, the CEO at equals, has a post on this where it’s basically MVP versus full build.

And so they have a spreadsheet product, and you had to take, like, a full build approach. We took an MVP approach to a full build breath product when really we should have delayed going to market by another six months to get it all to, like, a higher quality level.

For us, it’s about the thesis that we’re trying to test. And in order to be able to validate or invalidate, you know, the hypothesis that we have, it requires certain things to be true. If we’d only built, like, an AI sourcing tool, let’s say, where you can create a list and email candidates and stuff like that, like much of the market is today. That would lead us to be selling to recruiters, and it would then be about efficiency of the human recruiting team with an AI enabled tool.

That wasn’t the thesis that we’re trying to test. What we’re trying to test is, can AI be a labor capacity addition or augmentation for a company. And so that needs to be, like, the breath of a human sort of role. And so for us, that necessitated, like, building more.

I think the most common way that I see hiring managers screw up hiring is, like, over delegation, which then is compounded by the fact that they have, like, muddy thinking. They don’t know what they want, and they haven’t taken the time to, like, really suss that out. So then you think you’re hiring a recruiter, and it’s the recruiter’s job to, like, hire for you. But the recruiter doesn’t really get what you want because you don’t know what you want. And so I think the best hires will come from, like, super active involvement by the hiring manager that they are in it and very hands on.

But most hiring managers think that they’ve outsourced it, they are hands off, and it doesn’t go well.

For me, at least, how I figure it out is I start from the outcomes that I’m trying to achieve. So what would actual, like, success be for this person if they did the job for thirty, sixty, ninety days? Like, how would I actually be happy with them? What’s true about our culture that they just need to have, like, a level of grit, drive, ownership, that sort of thing. And so I try to articulate that and make chat GPT or, you know, our Max Daisy agent. I’ll put it as a JD, post it.

And I just really need to start talking to people. For me, I I learned through talking to the first twenty, thirty candidates to get a feel for at least some pattern matching across them of what is an excellent answer sound like versus, you know, not so good. But initially, I can’t tell the difference. So I have to just talk to a ton of people. And I also look for help from other people that have hired for the role. And so, hey. Who do you know who’s good at this?

And at least I can talk to that person even if they’re not on the market about what I should be looking for.

Yeah. And I’ve gotten this wrong, so I get sort of why it happens. But a lot of people hire for a resume, and I found some of the worst hires that I’ve made, some of the worst hires I’ve witnessed are based on incredible resumes. And I think why people get that wrong is you mistake that this person was in a seat at a certain time. And in many ways, it was an elevator going up, and they were on the elevator. But what we failed to understand was, like, what did they do?

Like, what did they actually do to, like, change the trajectory? Did they contribute, or just were they at the right place at the right time? And I find that right place, right time can get you really far in terms of getting, you know, big roles and stuff like that. But you get found out after, like, a year, year and a half. And so, those are, you know, often execs that turn over quickly, and it’s unfortunate.

I’ve learned a lot about interviewing from Apoorva, founder CEO of Instacart. He spent, like, seven hours with me over, like, the course of maybe four weeks when recruiting for the VP of design role he was trying to fill. And much of it was just my questions for him. Like, I probably had a 100 questions for him. He’s, like, one question for me was, like he he maybe had three questions, but, like, the the one that stuck with me was just, like, what did you do? And, like, I’d say some things, and he’s like, no.

But, like, what did you really do? The more that you kind of, like, keep pushing at that question, what you’ll hear is either, like, platitudes or, like, depth and specificity. And then you can take that and triangulate it, like, back channel with, like, other folks and, like, their orbit. Hey. So how instrumental was this person to this outcome? And you’ll hopefully get some real talk based on that. If they did big things, that’s incredible. Then they have great resume and they contributed, but sometimes you can’t find it.

If I think about the founders and experience sort of veteran, like myself and my cofounder, where we’re, like, we’re 40 plus. We’ve been in the industry for one or two decades. Yeah. Like, we can pull those folks. But when I think about, okay, new grad or, like, dropout, I don’t think they actually need it. I think you just need people that are going to be, like, very competent and very driven and very ambitious, like and, like, hardworking and stuff like that. And that’ll get you plenty far to where you’ve earned the right, I guess, to be able to get some remarkable people to come work for you.

But I don’t think it’s essential to get off the ground.

As a founder, I find that everyone wants to give me advice and get paid for it. And for the most part, I don’t need it. There’s a few key areas where advice has been useful as it pertains to fundraising or go to market because that’s like it hasn’t been a strength or part of my background or my cofounder’s background. But by and large, I find advice to be, like, cheap. I I I can get it for free if I want. So, like, I don’t know why I would pay for.

What is useful is people that’ll put in the work. And so this guy, Colin, has been advising companies since leaving Slack. I got connected to him through my wife who was an engineer at Slack and worked with him. And my pitch to him was, hey, wouldn’t you like to get in the game a little bit? And instead of just, you know, give advice, like, can we do some work together? And it’s a nice change of pace. It’s hard to find, like, a way to contribute when you don’t wanna sign on full time to, you know, do a fifteen, twenty hour a week, like, PM job.

And it’s been remarkable, actually. So I I’ve worked with, a 100 PMs probably over the course of my career. I like his fifteen to twenty hours more than most of their, like, fifty to sixty hours. What?

I put a real premium on getting to the right answer quickly, and it’s hard to find those people. But when you find them that they can take in the context, they understand the problem, and they’re going to solve it in a way that is simple, clear, and quick, I will hang on to those folks for, like, the rest of my career, and I have. So I don’t know how to always get there. Like, I don’t know it on the front end. I only know it through, like, doing.

But I do like working with part timers or fractional people because I get to try it before I buy it. And then sometimes it’s like, oh, this really, really works. And so we found that, like, three or four times already in the last year with some part timers. So I would advise founders, try it a lot. If you can get the people to do some work like embedded team members, but you just don’t have to have them full time, which also then creates more flexibility about, you know, how we manage cost and burn and stuff like that.

Yeah. I’ve seen this movie, you know, many companies over the last fifteen years. The three roles that I see that get fired over and over are CPO, CMO, and head of talent. They typically have, like, one and a half to two year stints, and then they, like, move on to their next thing, you know, sort of, like, quietly, and discreetly. So most folks don’t understand that they were fired, But when you’re in the senior leadership team, you do. Why does that happen? I think it’s very similar to the same deal of, like, any mishire.

It’s muddy thinking. And it’s like founders vaguely know what they want. They want the product to work. They want the business to grow. They want to make good hires. But the level of clarity and vision of like, okay, here’s the product. I have a crisp product vision for where we’re headed. I have a crisp, like, workplace vision for, like, who we are and what our culture is. I have a crisp vision for growth. That I believe belongs with the founder. And until they arrive at a place of, like, clarity for themselves, they’re not gonna get it through somebody else.

I’m gonna assume, like, most founders are product people. I think that that tends to be true. I honestly think you don’t need a CPO until maybe, like, as a founder, you’re starting to think about transitioning into the chairman role.

Yes. Yeah. Absolutely.

The only thing that matters with a CPO is whether they have the trust of the CEO. And so if they have the trust of the CEO, then they can stick around and they’ll likely sort of be successful. And if they don’t, they’re going to continually butt heads, and it’s just not gonna work out, and the role will turn over every year and a half, two years. In those situations, the CEO should just do the job because they need to learn through doing. And in doing the job, in thinking harder about the problem, they are the only ones that really have a shot, I think, at cracking it.

And I guess how does the CPO establish trust? I think it comes from results. So they say a thing. They were right. It delivered the results. And so being consistently right a lot builds trust and clarity. It’s not hand wavy. It’s not platitudes. It is, like, a clear or crisp articulation of what we should do, why we should do it. And at the end of that process, we will have either validated or invalidated. But what I find is when a CPO can make a whole career out of being hand wavy, it’s like kind of like a magician where there’s like a misdirection and slight of hand to say, like, hey.

We’re gonna do this, and we’re gonna do that. And, like, when you don’t put numbers to it, when you don’t put dates to it, there’s just like a complete lack of accountability or the accountability moves down, and it’s always a director’s fault or, you know, some VP’s fault. And so those types of things, like, obscure what, like, really is the CPOs to own.

I think that that could be a CPO’s job in a certain company. Like, what do I imagine the CPO of, like, ADP does? I would imagine it’s, you know, along those lines. Because it’s a big org. It’s hard to wrangle a lot of people. And so most of the job is wrangling and aligning. It’s not a very fun job, but, like, I’m not here to, like, necessarily disrespect it. I think it’s probably a necessary job, you know, at that scale of company. But it’s the thing why I get into product at least and what I value is the creative, like, aspect of it.

It’s building something new. Process management is a means to that end, and I wanna spend as little time on it as is, like, necessary to achieve the end, which is, you know, shipping great product.

I think the timing for value extraction ideally is always based on what would maximize lifetime value. So if you have a reasonable hypothesis that by delaying value extraction, you can achieve a greater sort of lifetime value extraction over the long term, then delay it, as long as you can survive, you know, as a business in the interim. Yeah. If you don’t have that hypothesis and you’re just hoping it becomes valuable sometime, like, it’s not a business to sell, you know, a dollar for for a dime,

Yeah. At Thumbtack, you know, conventional wisdom is like remove friction from onboarding, make it easier, faster, whatever. What we found was that doesn’t actually work for our product, where the friction was answering questions about your project that you’re trying to accomplish. The when we take away certain questions at a certain point, like the results that we deliver as far as pros that are a match for your project deteriorates. And so, like, friction of capturing those questions and the drop off that sometimes occurs is useful because it’ll get people to a point of success.

And that success is worth more than the drop off that we incurred.

I’ve learned a lot about product reviews through trial and error and how they sort of have worked across many different companies. One of the most important things I found is it needs to be, like, self serve than, like, opt in. When myself or, you know, my bosses try to make it pull, not push, what it does is it changes the, like, life cycle of the project to where now it’s anchored around, like, getting things ready by a certain date for an internal milestone, for an internal review with leadership versus if we let it be self serve and more push than pull, then if constructed right, if coach right, they will bring it at the right times, and it will be a help, not a hindrance.

What do you mean push not pull when it comes to product reviews? Just

Yeah. So for Tezi and then eventually, at Instacart when I, like, worked through this, we just have recurring time slots that are, like, always available to book every single week. So we have tick six time slots for reviews. Anybody can grab one at any time, and it’s to get more eyes and feedback on a particular thing that they need feedback on. It could be really early in the life cycle. It could be, like, right before they ship it. It could be design. It could be ENG.

It could be just a requirement. But anybody can grab the time when they need it. With that, since they’re selecting into it, it’s at the right time for them, and they have a particular question. When it goes the other way around, they show up and it’s more about optics and managing upward when I’m saying, hey. Bring this project on this date. I want an update, and I want to, like, make sure, you know, it’s on track.

We’ve solved it both at Instacart and Tezi with basically required versus optional attendees. So project team, opts in. They invite themselves. Required for us right now is me and my cofounder. And then the rest of our r and d team is optional. They will opt in if they have availability or interest in the topic. And so we usually end up with, you know, eight or nine people. The way I worked at Instacart was product reviews for the consumer app was me, my counterpart, my design counterpart, my data science counterpart, and then my senior directors across the various pillars of the product, and then the project team.

And so they always have a good quorum to provide feedback, but doesn’t necessitate everyone all the time, you know, being in every meeting.

I haven’t found that work cultures have changed in my observation based on AI in terms of their intensity. I think of Instacart as effectively pre AI and super intense. A good week was sixty, seventy hours. A bad week is a 100 to a 110. And maybe this is just at, like, VP level or something like that. But, no, at 11PM, 12PM, I could ping anyone on Slack, and they were already online, like and they’re immediately responsive. And so it was like an around the clock culture.

And I think we’re still pretty intense, at Daisy. We’re not that extreme, but maybe what’s changed is I feel like the glorification of, like, nine nine six by certain companies has been, like, coincidentally timed with also the AI wave, and maybe that’s what makes it feel more intense.

Oh, like, why do why would a company glorify nine nine six? I think it’s incredible marketing. It’s a way of differentiating against sort of the market. Everybody’s gonna be intense, but we’re super intense. And so, like, we’re gonna be like Olympians and, you know, in terms of work ethic. It’s like a coded way of saying, hey, we’re self selecting to, like, twenty to twenty six year olds. So you’ll end up with a lot of, like, junior and mid level people that are working very hard, but also socializing very hard, tends to be true in these types of cultures.

And at the end of the day, like, seventy two hours a week actually isn’t that much, like, for me, at least, where, like, I’ve metabolized that over time to be, like, a normal week. But it does help with their sort of recruiter brand, their employer brands to be like, we’re for the really intense people that really wanna win. And so, like, a d one athlete feels like, oh, this might be for me.

are. There’s a lot of things that I think are bullshit, but it’s I’m drawing a blank. Do you have any?

So the thing that, like, I’ve learned is culture really starts mattering and you start talking about it a lot when growth slows. And what I found is, like, the only thing that matters for culture is growth, like business growth. Because for a business that’s growing at, like, an amazing clip, it’s always gonna have cultural sort of issues that, you know, make it kinda suck to, like, work there. But everybody’s okay with that and leaned in because they see a path for themselves. Because what they’re solving for will be more comp, more career progression, bigger scope, manage a team, and they can have they have a line of sight towards that.

But then if you don’t have enough growth, then everybody starts worrying about their seat, their path, and it gets political. It gets slower. The culture amp surveys get worse in terms of their score. So I’ve, at times, and I’ve seen other CEOs at times, like, fall down the trap of, you know, caring and trying to optimize, like, the culture scores and stuff like that. But it ends up it never satisfies. So what I saw from, like, Apoorva, like, with Instacart, just a relentless focus on growth, and it works out, until, you know, growth slows.

Which company had a better culture? Instacart or Thumbtack? Thumbtack. Amazing culture. Incredible workplace. I would love to have worked there forever. And Instacart, incredible business, but neglected culture. Not a pleasant place to work.

I think a little bit goes a long way. We spend the first five or ten minutes praising people for, like, awesome shit that they did. And I think some investment like that along the way is useful because you don’t know when ripping growth becomes slow growth becomes no growth. And having some goodwill in the bank from people that like each other and that retains them is useful.

Yes. Yeah. Founder transitions, really hard. I think Fiji did it really effectively. She got a lot of, like, charisma and charm, and so she endeared herself to the company pretty quickly. That made the transition smoother. The fact that she was on the board also, like, there was some continuity of context and stuff like that. And Apoorva’s participation in, you know, finding and recruiting her led her to be someone of a similar pace. There’s some continuity, but still, like, you lose a lot when the founder CEO moves on.

You totally do. Do you think Apoorva was a good CEO? I do. I think he was remarkable at building that business. I mean, 0 to 38,000,000,000 in valuation, that’s a good CEO.

So, yes, DoorDash did beat Instacart. I mean, why did that happen? I think the main thing is they expanded faster, went, you know, beyond restaurant sooner. I think also their key insight was when the suburbs, they got their first beat, you know, Uber Eats to do that. And so they, like, won in a really, really big way, which then gave them room to be able to expand into other verticals. Whereas Instacart should have gotten into restaurant year five, year six, and should have also gone international way sooner.

Kari at Linear. I’m gonna just assume CEOs are product leaders. Kari, he’s built that company, on his own terms, and the quality of Linear is incredible.

My favorite interview question with PMs is along the lines of kind of, like, repeated over and over. So what did you do? What exactly, like, did you do, and how did that, like, change the outcome? If I get something hand wavy, find another way to ask the same question over and over.

Best recent purchase under $500 was a subscription to Whisper Flow. I spent so much time writing and communicating. It’s amazing. Now, I have largely, like, stopped typing, and it’s really good. Like, it actually, like, works, and I can I also don’t have to add it? I can just ship it, and it’s

Yeah. 100%. I’d given up on, like, dictation for a long time. I just didn’t think it was worth it because, like, editing was slow and clunky, but whatever they’re doing, they nailed it.

I think we’re for the future of hiring, where we’re at is, at least within investors, there’s consensus as to AI agents will do much of the hiring work. That hasn’t proven to be true yet, but is now sort of coming to be like a consensus point of view that it’s an inevitability. I think the next big wave that we haven’t internalized or works through is just how much inefficiency there is to the process of a candidate finding a company.

The future is going to when it comes to recruiting, it looks a lot more like dating where it’s like there’s two swipe rights equal a match, then it’s like a double opt in, like, warm intro versus most of today, how a candidate finds a company is wildly random from job boards to they happen to get a ping from a recruiter. And so, okay, they’ll take the call. Maybe they know someone and it’s network based. But they can’t find out of a thousand potential rules, what’s the, like, exact two or three that are, like, going to be what they want?

That is incredibly hard. I think that we move from casting a wide net on the employer side and casting a wide net on the candidate side to more of that, like, dating matchmaking model.

I think that the threshold of, call it, series b, it’s probably not a great return on the time for a CEO or, like, a founder to be in every recruiting loop. They are still the pacesetter, the, like, bar setter for the company in terms of talent density and talent philosophy, but they should set some threshold for themselves of, like, senior manager and up or something like that. Because what you don’t want is c players hiring other c players. And so I would, you know, at a certain point, transition from interviewing ICs to, like, interviewing only management or something like that.

What I didn’t understand about fundraising when we first set out is the game that we’re playing is as a company, we’re looking for a yes. As an investor, it’s in their interest to preserve optionality for as long as possible. Super easy to get meetings. Meetings mean nothing. And I thought, holy shit. We have all of this interest. This means that, like, it’ll turn into funding any day now. No. It doesn’t actually get real till you get, like, that first term sheet in, and then all of it clicks.

Everything turns a corner. And it’s very important to time box it. It’s very important to sort of drive towards that first, like, term sheet in, and then run a quick process after that first term sheet is in. But everything else is, I guess, kind of theatrical, until that point.

Yeah. It’s a it’s a good distinction. We try to build relationships between rounds and with people that have potential to be high quality partners. That’s effectively what you’re bringing on is capital and a partner on your journey. And so it’s worth building the relationship and getting to know folks outside of the fund funding cycle. But then once you’re in it, you’re in it. By getting to a tight process, it’s really like getting to a moment where someone’s at least, like, verbally expressed and committed that they’re interested, they’re gonna go deep on diligence and stuff like that, then, okay, we’ll be flexible.

We’ll figure out, like, how to close out the next, you know, couple weeks and not be a pain in the ass because, like, we wanna be good partners and collaborative about it. But otherwise, you can just get strung along and not really know where you stand because it’s in their interest to, like, just kind of keep you in the mix.

The thing that I know now that I wish I knew then, the hardest part won’t be building the technology that can be like an end to end autonomous AI recruiter. The hardest part is gonna be change management, working with the humans to adapt and get comfortable with a total paradigm shift. In hindsight, it’s obvious, but we were more fixated on figuring out can it do it than what it would take to get people comfortable with the emerging technology change and how dramatically it’ll affect their working lives.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for having me. This has been fun for me too.