Will Bunker on disrupting bigger, more established companies and sustaining innovation
Key Takeaways:
Stay focused
Use data to stay focused
Give everyone one number
Always work backward from the desired result
Keep a rhythm of meetings
Daily for direct reports
Weekly for your team
Scale well
Stay humble and keep learning - you have to stay mentally flexible to keep up with the growth
Every stage of the company requires a different CEO mindset, you have to be able to reinvent yourself continually
Links
Book recommendation: Difficult Conversations
Past installments
Will Bunker, Co-founder OneAndOnly (now Match.com), VChatter, President; investor in 160+ tech companies, 5 exits
TK Kader, Founder and CEO of Unstoppable
Jason McCann, CEO of Vari
Andy Petranek, Co-Founder & Chief Evangalist at Whole Life Challenge
Arjun Dev Aurora, Founder and CEO Retargeter; Founder, Valence; Nike, Investment Committee
Lori Williams-Peters, VP Business Excellence, InvisionApp Inc.
Transcript
INTRODUCTION
Hey everyone, Scott Levy here - CEO and Founder of ResultMaps, where we're on a mission to help the world be its inspired best. We're the makers of the ResultMaps platform, and we produce these sessions to help leaders navigate the resilience economy. We bring in those who've navigated uncertainty, all kinds of challenges and scaled successfully.
In this session, I talk with Will Bunker. He's an industrial engineer who's run an array of challenging businesses from farming to mining operations and more. He also co-founded a platform called OneAndOnly.com, which outpaced an impressive array of competitors before being bought and rebranded in the Match.com deal. He's gone on to invest in or lead more than 160 companies and still helps some of the very biggest in the world transition to new technology fast. I'm excited to get his perspectives on helping teams navigate uncertainty and highly competitive environments. As always, check the show notes at ResultMaps.com/latest, and be sure to follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook.
There has been some light editing for readability.
INTERVIEW
Scott:
All right, so your team…I think your team started out with you and one other person when you have OneAndOnly - how big was your headcount when you sold? What type of revenue did you guys have when you sold?
Will:
So when we started, it was the two founders and we weren't even full-time. We worked nights and weekends for the first 18 months. When we sold four years later, we had 75 people and we were rapidly ramping up to meet demand. So it probably doubled within another six months of that.
Scott:
As you added to your team, what did you do to keep everybody focused? Did you have meeting rhythms? Were you doing a regular weekly?
Will:
What we found worked best was a meeting at the beginning of every week in which the emphasis was what's going to be accomplished by Friday that's going to make more money or move the company in the right direction?
So we had a very tight cadence around producing results, real-time. We tried several really large projects along the way. And inevitably, if you waited three or four months to get results then there was a high probability that it was going to be a disaster and/or the results were not going to be what you wanted. So we found a weekly meeting where we would list everything on the board that we could work on that week and then we would stack rank it based on how long it would take, you know, what kind of resources it would take, what was the expected payoff, and then how long did it take us to see any results because the longer you went without seeing the results, the higher probability that you're going in the wrong direction.
Scott:
In terms of daily cadence, I know that you used after OneAndOnly - is that something that evolved because you were working in fast-paced software environments or did you evolve that with your prior experience? Can you talk a little bit about where that came from?
Will:
If you're talking about your direct reports, touching base every day - I mean, my job as the founder was to remove obstacles and barriers and set the overall strategy and goals. And so, there's a quick check-in that you do every day around is there anything blocking you? Do you need any help for me to get your job done? Because by Friday I want to see these results. So, it's very much geared toward removing any, I won't say excuses because that's a negative word, but removing any reasons that someone couldn't accomplish what they were doing.
Scott:
In terms of finding the most effective way and the most efficient way to work together - that's something I know you do a lot of reading on, you've done a lot of experimenting and iteration on. Why are you so driven to find the most effective way. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Will:
Well, as any company gets bigger, it's really hard to maintain momentum in the same direction. And you know, I just went through several phases of that. I can only imagine as you get to even larger numbers of people, how hard it is to maintain everyone going in the right direction. And so, a lot of what we did was we had real-time feedback. We were lucky as an internet company and so you could, make a change and literally see within 30 minutes to an hour, was that change going to make you more money or less money at the scale we were at. And so a lot of the management techniques revolved around taking advantage of that and giving people the direct feedback - so we even got to where we would made a screen for each employee - not all of them, but a lot of them. And we're in the process of doing all of them - that told them how much money they made the company that day.
Scott:
Everybody actually had their own dashboard that showed them exactly how they were tied into your results?
Will:
Yes, you could see exactly the kind of revenue that you generated and that would allow us to do things. Like I had an engineer that was in charge of profile pages and I told her, look, if you want to get a raise, if you're not happy with your salary, if you'll improve the percentage of profiles you get into the system, I'll give you 30 more thousand dollars a year. And it was a enough of a number that, I mean it was millions of dollars for the company. But no sooner had that gotten out of my mouth and she turned and ran out of the room to go start working on it. And it took her about, I'd say two to two and a half months, and it turned out that what she found was it wasn't the page design. It was someone in another department deleting all the profiles at the end of the day so that they look like they had approved them all. So she actually found a misalignment in incentives and brought it to me. Of course we had to get rid of that person because who would do that? But it allowed us to motivate people to unlock large amounts of value in the company and then reward them for it because if they were gonna make us that much money than we could afford to pay them a lot.
Scott:
Did you find that you had to challenge people to think that way and get that aggressive? Talk a little bit about some of the challenges, getting people to dial in with that much with that high of a degree of engagement.
Will:
A lot of it was letting them see the results. I mean, humans - most humans - want to do a good job. They want to be productive and no one starts out going, well, gosh, I wonder what I could screw up at the company today? They actually are aligned internally. If they're not getting the results, it's because they're not getting the feedback probably. And so by putting that direct line of vision for them to be able to see “here was the impact I had today on the company.” They would get really engaged because they could see victories happen.
And then you have to have a culture of - guess what? - not everything you do is going to produce good results. Some things you do produce negative results, but if you learn quickly and you're able to change it back, that's okay. That's a victory too. And so we had a culture of accepting the fact that no one knew if an idea was going to work or not. The question was could we find out fast enough that we could get through enough things that, overall, the company would grow at a rapid rate? And if you go read like Amazon Bezos, they have a very similar culture - probably on steroids - around learning as fast as possible because one out of 20 things it was going to have a big pay off or one out of 50 things has a big payoff. You just have to efficiently get through the other 49 to find the one.
Scott:
And you guys were competing against much bigger, much better funded players. Is that something you were aware of?
Will:
You’d never miss it. Someone raises a lot of money and then they're in all the magazines and all the feedback and we're sitting in Dallas going, you know, no one loves us. We couldn't get any attention if we wanted it. Our main competitor, the original Match - before they went broke - had raised $10 million. And so they had a one year head start and a large war chest of money. And then Yahoo, which was the biggest internet company at the time, just started to do personals for free. And I would get emails of “Will Bunker, you're the worst human being on the planet because you're trying to charge for something and Yahoo does it for free. And why don't you do it for free?” And you know, I would always hit reply and it would be “Well obviously the person that you want to go out with isn't at Yahoo or we wouldn't be having this conversation.” And eventually - but usually within a day or two - they would subscribe and give us money.
Scott:
As you brought people in, how did you make sure they kept that kind of scrappy, focus-on-results feel? Was it all about the dashboard pages, the money page type of idea, or did you have other things you did to keep it?
Will:
I mean you convey culture in everything you do and so, you know, we couldn't guarantee that someone would be a good fit. Like I don't even know that we tried to guarantee it, but what we did see very quickly was if you plug someone into that kind of feedback system, they will either have a positive reaction to it or a negative reaction to it. And it happened very rapidly because if you felt crushed at the end of every day, if you tried something and it didn't work and that crushed your spirit, it became rapidly a terrible place to work because you were finding out constantly that you were wrong about everything. But we needed people that were okay with that. Like when we finally rigged up our first A/B testing framework, you know, cause this is pre-Google. So there's no Google Analytics. We found out that 80% of the features that we had decreased revenue. And so I just got very comfortable with the fact that we were wrong most of the time. It didn't matter. We just had to try things fast enough to figure out what was right. But when people got into that feedback system, some of them would fall apart. You just have to, you know, with as much dignity as possible, allow them to go find a job somewhere else.
Scott:
So when we met, I was managing a team overseas and shortly after that you challenged me to start outsourcing work. What do you think, or what mindset allowed you to jump on this idea of outsourcing work so early where so many people even are just now becoming open to that idea?
Will:
Well, I read an article - you know, I'm constantly reading stuff - and I read an article about someone who had shipped work over to…I mean it was Eastern Europe at the time - through one of these online platforms. And the names have changed as they’ve merged, but I just went, “I wonder if I could really drive costs down or getting a unit of work done and what would it take to make that work?” And it took a lot of experimentation to get to the point to where and it comes down to being able to spec something correctly. And even now that I know even more, it would probably be getting started with unit tests first so that you know if something works or quality is what you want, and then you reassemble the pieces when you get it back from the overseas team.
But it is a skill. You have to learn the skill. It's not free. It's not like you can just throw out ideas and they'll come back fully baked. I think a lot of people try to do that and they end up in a lot of misery because they don't know how to run a project. But I would say for any founder, if you've never developed a complex software product, you are in for quite a learning curve because it seems easy, but there's so much complexity too. I mean, I know you've gone through it many, many times, but it's one of those things that you're almost going to fail right off the bat and you better plan to fail because otherwise you'll have spent all your money and then run out of runway.
Scott:
What about in terms of having your teams actually be dispersed and bringing people in? Was that something you iterated on as well? Can you talk a little bit about that? What are your influences? Did you read some books on it? Did you just dive in and figure out how to make it work?
Will:
Well for the dating site, remote work just wasn't a thing back in the nineties. The infrastructure wasn't there, the tools weren't there…We found that for there, pulling everyone in and building excitement around it could work. I think now you've got enough tools in place that you can do that, but I think it's a fine line. I mean, how do you create the comradery around getting joint work done? You've worked with several of these contractors now that I know that you've gotten in touch with for like five years, seven years. And now you have a relationship with them, and there's something about human beings - they need that relationship. It can't just be impersonal where you're just like worked on, pull a lever sort of thing. And so I feel like it's a skill that has to be learned and you need to approach it that way and go, “how do I get good at doing this remote thing?” Because if it's going to be important to pull the team together – and take right now with the COVID-19 situation - it's almost, “you have to.”
Scott:
Right. Do you think that there are particular methodologies where one methodology or another is going to give you that edge you need? Or how do you approach that in terms of - Iknow with software you're very diligent. What about with teamwork and how you bring people together?
Will:
I'm still…I feel like this is an area where I'm still learning. Yes, I can do the remote work. I've never built a remote team. Well, you and I worked a little bit remotely together. And there, I think it's that daily check-in process because there needs to be a level set of if I'm going to get work done today, what is going to be accomplished? Like at the end of today, what do I expect to see? Because it's so easy to let that go for a week or two weeks or three weeks. And then whatever gets produced has, you know, it's probably going to be disappointing or not what you wanted or the feedback. And so, what I do think is there's no autopilot. You can't just expect someone to read your mind and know they're doing exactly what you want them to do.
So again, it's that touching base - either physically or electronically - around setting expectations on a cadence and a pace. “What are you going to check in today? What features are going to get done, what unit tests are going to get done?” There has to be something visible at the end of each work period to show that the team's in alignment and moving in the right direction. And that's not a micromanaging thing. I don't need to know how you're doing it. I don't need to sit there and watch you do it, but we have to agree on what's the rational amount of things to get done today. And I think that produces a sharpness of focus. Otherwise it's tempting to go, well, maybe I'll work on this or maybe I'll do that. Or maybe I'll run this railroad trail. But if at the end of the day, the person you report to is expecting something, you're going to at least get that done or have a really good reason as to why it didn't happen. It needed help in getting the barriers out of the way.
Scott:
So I know you wear a diverse set of hats from boards of financial institutions to venture investing to actually executing on some very technical projects. You get to see this broad swath of how people manage things and stay on track toward their goals. Are there any patterns that emerge there or any things you notice when you're the observer versus the person having to run the team? What things work? What things don't in the best situations - and maybe the worst situations?
Will:
I think it's interesting. I remember we went through this as a company trying to do performance reviews and it's a backwards-looking thing that happens once a year that's just this dreadful task of where you're supposed to say good things and tell people what to work on. But my problem with that is that I'm not gonna wait a year to tell someone that they're not doing what you want. I feel like that's almost a crime against the employee. Oh wow. You waited a whole year. I've been screwing up this whole time, and you never said anything until this day or we're not going to talk about whether I get more money next year. And so, you know, I honestly think it's the - without being overbearing, it's how do you take a small amount of time to set expectations on a regular cadence so that you don't get this misalignment?
If someone's not performing the way you want them to, unless you just don't like them and you want to get rid of them, you should be…that's an ongoing conversation around it. There's a great book…it's the one by those Harvard people…Difficult Conversations! And I think a lot of people will avoid talking about issues in order to not have an uncomfortable conversation. The problem is that you let it go so long that it did become something much bigger than it has to be versus having uncharged conversations around goals and how to get to those goals and what the problems are. And where I found the most friction is, it's where people are afraid to tell you that they're struggling. I mean, we almost lost the company over this.
We had had AOL drop our computer and crash our database. Now we had everything, we typed it back in by hand, but later we were doing our own backups and I hired someone whose only job - like, I didn't care what they did all day long, as long as the backups got made. And they knew they were going to get made. And we get to the point to where the database locks up and we can't get it to come back up. And I mean, this is…we're at 12 employees and this is a “if we don't get the database back up, there's a high likelihood that we'll go broke.” Like we just won't, you know, the company won't make it. And I said, “well, hey, no problem. Hey, go grab the backups.”
And she didn't come back for like an hour and it was like…20 feet over to where the backups were in another room. And I finally got up and I went in there and she was in the dark crying. And that's when I found out that she was struggling with making backups and didn't know how to do it. And we could have had that conversation months before then and it would have been like, let's figure this out together and train and you know…it doesn't matter to me if you don't know how to do something. That's okay - we can learn it. So I think the fear of looking bad or being perceived as a poor performer keeps a lot of communications from happening and it's making it to where people realize the only reason you're going to get fired is if you're in that room crying when it's too late to fix it. Plenty of times I have that conversation, but it's hard because people don't know that you have to build a lot of trust with someone to know that they can reveal to you that they don't know how to do something.
Scott:
One of the ventures that you had where we did some work together, there was a six week push to get to…I think it was getting a product out before the big conference that was coming. And I remember on that project we had to figure out how to go two and three times as fast. What do you think drives your willingness to dive into problems like that and look for a better way to do it, even though people may be trying to fall back on the comfortable methodology?
Will:
Well I think a lot of it is working backwards. I'm a big believer in knowing where we want to go and then working backwards. So, we had a release date that wasn't flexible and you've always got that magical triangle everyone talks about - which is real - which is with any software product, you can dictate two of the three things, and then the third one is fixing it. What features, time, and then money or effort, right?
And so we knew what we had to do. I mean or when we had to do it. Okay, so it's gotta be done by this date cause that's the conference. And then if you work backwards and you go, “well, there's no way we're going to get this done if we try to do it the standard way,” then you have to start getting creative. So like Dave and I, when we would have these weekly meetings, if we couldn't get something done by Friday and then the question became “what is a different version of this that we can build that can get done by Friday?” And so we would practice like backing up and going, “there has to be another way to do this.” Or if we were really struggling, like the whole reason we came up with an A/B testing framework was we got sick of the amount of wasted time we were doing on features.
And so we were like, we have to create another process for doing this. Because you know, I think a lot of times in business the answer that people want is to row harder and the row harder assumes everybody's been screwing off up to that point and they just need to row harder. And there are very limited circumstances where running faster is the right…I mean if the bear's almost on you, yes, run faster, but you cannot run fast for five years of a startup. You will reach exhaustion and start making really bad decisions. And so I worked harder and harder and harder up to the point I realized I couldn't work. I mean, I was working a hundred hours a week - and that's not a pretend work a hundred hours a week. That's a like…really worked a hundred hours a week.
You can't do it five years in a row. Like it's just not physically, mentally possible. Your motivation. So, you know, and as an industrial engineer - which was my background - you're always trying to figure out how to do things better, cheaper, faster. And so that's natural for me to think about. But you know, a lot of it is, I mean, if you'll take any particular startup - if you looked at a grid of all the potential features that you could build and this is multidimensional like “I could add this feature, that feature, this feature. I can make it look this way. I could do this,” there's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of possibilities. If you take two to three months to iterate through each one of those possibilities, you will run out of money before you find the answer because the answer’s in there somewhere. It's just you're never going to get to it because you've only got 18 months.
And so my brain goes to “what is the version of this reality that allows us to iterate fast enough?” And it was with that particular product, I think the answer was we mocked the data up, right? And we just made it look like it worked. Which you know, is a common technique now, but for that particular industry in that particular time it was like, what? What do you mean we don't have to hook it up to him? He's like, no, we'll just put data in there and it'll just pretend to get it from somewhere. And that allowed us to iterate fast enough to get it built.
Scott:
You're in more than 160 deals. Plus you act as an advisor and have business ranging from agriculture to tech. Have you noticed any particular traits that have enabled people to bridge, beyond Series A and B, and going on and scaling their business? Are there any things you've noticed in how those companies are led?
Will:
Well, I mean a lot of it comes down to managing more and more people. And so Dave and I - it's funny, you'll read about certain business school techniques like an org chart and when you're a zero person startup, an org chart seems kind of dumb. But then, as we started hiring all these people and people would get confused about who they were reporting to or what, we realized, “Oh man, every six months we have to sit down and do an org chart.” And so I think the best people that continue to grow are willing to understand that how you run something with five human beings is not going to work when you get to 30 human beings. It's not going to work when you get to 200 or 2000 or 20,000 and are willing and open to learn about. You're not the first human being who's ever tried to get, let's say 500 human beings to do something or a thousand human beings.
There are many, many other human beings that have accomplished that. And what have they said about it? What have they talked about? And so we would just go back and, and kind of get out management books and start going, all right, so what other companies do you know where they're doing XYZ? And honestly, I've always felt…there's a story where our database locked up and we could hire a consulting company to come tune it -and I didn't know jack about this at the time - for $20,000, or there was this book in the store called Tune Your Databases. And it was written by a brilliant database tuner who had 20 years of experience and wrote it all down for you in 200 and something pages. And I went “and it's $40! This is the bargain of the century!” Like this book is worth $20,000 if I'll just read it. And that's kind of how I feel about all these things. I mean, you've got great leaders that have written down and maybe everything they say is usable or not usable, but they've been there and there's some of what they talk about that's usable. I mean, I think both of us have these giant bookshelves behind us because I find it a lot cheaper to learn from other people than I do to experience it myself and try to work out how to do everything personally.