 Excellent. So glad to be here for the next 25 minutes or so, because it's a topic that I've been personally tackling with for the past year or so. So, like, how do you build a really, really self-organizing team and maximize your efficiency? So, maybe just start with the entire discussion. I like to ask Christa. You're building one of the fastest growing companies from over here that has scaled amazingly in the past four years or so. So, like, why in general, why do you think that this way of working, like very bottom-up way of working, is the way to go? That's an excellent question. And we work in an industry that is developing extremely rapidly. We serve some of the largest online advertisers and the most demanding online advertisers globally, and at the same time, we work with Facebook who is innovating faster than I think anyone else in the industry. So, because of that industry, we need to maximize our product development speed. And I believe that only thing to make it happen is to have decision-making on the lowest possible level within the people that actually knows exactly what the problems are doing, and it can implement and solve those problems, especially in software. And that's why I think it's essential to not to build any bureaucracy or any hinders to decision-making and keep the decision-making and the autonomy within the teams. And when was it when you had the first time to start thinking about this actually, like, how do we work? So, it's interesting. This is for startup, and we failed miserably with all the others. And then when we found product market fit with Smartlin 2013, already at that point, we were working with the clients in a very similar way than we do now. And I think that was the sole reason why we were able to find product market fit and make our customers extremely successful even in the early days. Full-stack teams working together, cross-functionally from sales and development and building things straight with the customers and making decisions every day about what to build and what to ship. How about Niklas? You have Blancrocy working at the moment, but when was it for you that you needed to start thinking about how you actually work together? That's a good question. I think so the first two years we grew from four founders to 20 people. And I think this time you don't need to think that much about culture or organization because everyone is just doing everything, but as soon as you start growing the team and you have like three to four new people joining every month or every quarter, you realize that you have to do a better job really communicating the way you work and the way you want to make decisions to the new people. And I think for us, very interestingly, it's like one thing we learned is that culture develops if you want it or not. So there's some kind of like routines, habits and decision-making processes that are in place that just develop through the way you interact with each other. And if you don't really codify them, document them, it's pretty hard for new people to understand how you actually want to operate. So once we started growing and realized that there was a lot of un-clarity for new people, how we actually want to run the company, we started really looking, going step back saying what are actually our values, what are our principles and really write them down and make them part of the onboarding process for every new employee. And is there something you would do differently now if you would go back those three years or so? I think yes, I would think about writing down values and principles much earlier and spend much more time during the onboarding of a new employee to really explain the values, explain why they developed in a specific way and probably even give more examples how they can be applied in the day-to-day life instead of just assuming that everyone just will get onboarded by themselves by just observing how the company works. Michel, before Obvious Ventures, you were at Patagonia, which is probably, if you look at 10, 15 years ago, already back then the leading company in working this like a very mission-driven way. So how on earth was it possible that a big company with thousands of employees was able to work with such a like, well, focused on the mission? Yeah, so Patagonia is a great example of a company with a very authentic purpose and an aligned culture. If you look at Patagonia's purpose, it's about building the best product with least harm and using business to inspire solutions to the environmental crisis. So the purpose has been designed in a way that first portion of the purpose is going to keep you in business, which is building the best product. And then second portion of the purpose is why are you doing, why are you in business? So there is means to the end and end is solutions to the environmental crisis. And what is very important when companies are starting purpose or authentic purpose is all about what people are thinking about in an organization. Why are they doing what they're doing? And so it should reflect that. And also when you are hiring people, you should be hiring people who believe in the culture, the purpose which is getting cemented. Most important is at Patagonia was that you are always walking the talk. A lot of companies will put posters all across the company, but that doesn't really do anything because it's not authentic. So Patagonia was a great example of alignment of authentic purpose and aligned culture. Could you give an example of what that in practice is if it's not like posters on the wall, but how does it come to life when decision making, being at the office? So if I take the first portion, which is making the best product, Patagonia has had a history of innovating around that whole idea with the least harm. So they were in 1980s, they decided that cotton was not, had a very negative environmental footprint. And so they moved the whole business towards organic cotton. They came up with this, they innovated using soda pop bottles to make fleece. When they're opening up a store, they try to rehab old buildings so that it's a gift given back to the community they're serving. If you think about their catalogs, they are designed in a way that people are not only buying from it, it's like a magazine they want to read. So a lot of these things happen at the company which are aligned with this idea of build the best product with least harm. Similarly, on the other side, which is kind of using business to environmental crisis, the company gives 1% of revenue and 10% of profit, whichever is higher back to environmental causes. They have launched a whole non-profit called 1% for the planet. They've inspired by this whole vision or purpose. They came up with a very successful advertisement campaign in Thanksgiving. Do not buy our jackets, which for a commerce company is an interesting idea. So the key message here is that all your actions should be reflected in alignment with what your purpose is. Next up, I'd like to spend time on the founding blocks for this self-organization to work. The culture, the people, communicating the clear purpose. Maybe actually starting with Christo, you've written one of my favorite pieces of servant leadership, each and every one of you should go and check that out on the smart place website. One of the things you wrote there was about how your leaders, team leaders need to be very, very aligned with the purpose of where you're going. How do you in practice make sure that all the leaders within your team are aligned? What do you do on a weekly or a monthly basis to align everyone? It's a huge question and you can put it to different pieces, but first of all, everyone needs to understand the mission, the vision we have to make online, growing customers online easy, efficient and enjoyable. Everyone needs to understand that that's the core and what it means in practice. Then the second is that everyone we hire needs to believe in that. It needs to believe in that mission, but needs to also be able to work and understand and enjoy our culture and our ways of working. So it doesn't matter whatever you do after, if you fail on these two things, I think whatever you do, how well you document what processes you build, it doesn't make any difference, you'll fail. So those hire and then people believing in the mission and that being widely understood. But then after that I think for us as a leadership team and all the team leads, the core is to help everyone else to be successful. We always should have a better person to do sales, coding, marketing or something else within the team. We always think about hiring to elevate the team, not to delegate things. So then the role of team leads and us is building the infrastructure, building communication structures, building documentation, building data, where people can see how they're doing. And that in practice happens by many ways. One is that every Monday morning we gather the whole company in our eight offices in different time zones in US, Asia and in EMEA. We gather together and we talk about the context and the topics and share our learnings. On Friday we do the same. We demo what has changed in our product and then our salespeople gives feedback. And after that session the salespeople and developers gets together to solve those problems because developers build something that salespeople are not able to sell or understand or vice versa. And then it goes on and it goes on on higher half annual levels. We go for an offsite for a week, the whole company somewhere hopefully warm, where we share all the learnings and build the processes, how we do sales, how we code, how we do marketing, how we hire all of this. So it's very far from self-organizing in a sense that you have a huge infrastructure supporting that. But then the teams can actually focus on what they do best. And our leadership role is to equip the teams. Yeah. There's a question here that I would have taken anyways next. Niklas maybe you can start, but feel free to comment afterwards. So a lot of talk about hiring the right people. But so what do you exactly do in the process of hiring the people to know that they will fit? Or do you fail many times? Yeah, I think it's pretty hard to really say 100%, to be 100% sure when you hire a person if the person will fit. Because I think there's like just so much information you can acquire during an interview process. But I think there's some techniques you can use or processes you can use to get to a level of confidence that you say, okay, I'm able to make this decision. So we spend a lot of time really making sure that the person fits the culture and has the same beliefs as we have and is really buying it into our purpose as a company. So I think the first step is always kind of like making sure that the person has the experience and the skills that are needed. And we spend a lot of time really nailing down the qualifications and the criteria that we're looking for before we actually start hiring so that we can really say, okay, this is what we need. Does this person bring this? And once we get a good feeling about the experience and the skills, then we spend most, like two-thirds of the hiring process then it's really cultural fit. So we kind of like really use our values in mind and ask questions around to understand, is this person believing in self-organization? Is this person believing in transparency? Do this person as examples from previous jobs where they really champion transparency or self-organization? All these things and really make sure that we have a feeling, okay, this person is not only believing but as well as has shown in the past that they keep up these values. And then the last step, we have a day at Blinkus. So we fly in every person that we want to hire. So the last round is always in our office in Berlin. So we never hire over Skype. And then the person comes in for like a round of interviews meeting different people from different teams so that we get a lot of perspectives. And then we have a decision round where everyone who was involved in the interview process comes together and shares their kind of like feedback on this person. What's important though is there's always one decision maker. So it's not a consensus decision in the end where we say, okay, 50% yes, 50% no. But like one person is making the decision in the end is taking all the feedback from all the other people into account and then come up with a like decision if we want to hire the person or not. And then the second part which I think is important is so you have a probation period of three to six months for example and you should really use this as a trial phase and really understand this as a trial phase. So making sure that the person gets up to speed as soon as fast as possible but as well be very honest and have like a lot of feedback loops within the first three months and see is this really working out? Is this person fulfilling our expectations or not? And if not then, oh wait, you should part ways very soon and just like go back to the hiring process. Other tips for Vishal? Yeah, I think especially for entrepreneurs I think when you are starting a new company if you are three or four founders basically you are from day one whether you write it or not you're building a culture. Right? And then good entrepreneurs they make sure that first 50 people they are interviewing themselves and they are hiring the best people who fit with that culture and that purpose, the journey they are on. At certain point the culture becomes so solid that in case of Patagonia that if somebody was not excited about outdoors was not into environmentalism would not fit or would not even send their resumes or for some reason if they got in the company within two weeks they'll realize like they don't fit here because it had a uniqueness to it, right? So that's what successful organizations do really well and so I think I'll encourage all the entrepreneurs sitting here is to think about their culture from day one as they are thinking about their product market fit because that's what's going to help them scale their company. Right. Christa, what have you learned from hiring? Fully agree on all the points and either help to scale or fail the company and in a lot of the words that whether you put effort or not building the culture the culture builds itself but you can adjust and you can build a culture systematically and I think the culture as many famous people have said but culture is strategy for breakfast and it's the most important thing because that defines really how you work with your customers, how you build the product how you work together with your people and every culture is unique and you need to be able to build it to make your company successful in the environment with the people in the company and hiring is the most important thing and I think there is no such person in the world that would not do mistakes with hiring, it's impossible the amount of variables that you need to take into account in your personality versus the company is so huge that you cannot know in beforehand whether it works or not with full certainty I think we are getting better I think we are at 85-90% hit rate in the sense that they are culture fits and that's exactly the reason why we for example wrote our culture handbook we documented for the people that are thinking to work at smartly whether this is the right place or not and the best outcome is that someone comes and tell that smartly is not the right place I shouldn't waste your time, I shouldn't waste my time applying but people very often don't know they don't understand what makes them to drive what makes them efficient, in what environment and what kind of people they enjoy the work so I think that's the hardest part in an interview process to try to understand that both ways I think one more point I want to make is a lot of times again entrepreneurs focus on hey this person is a rock star and has an amazing credential but they forget I think is this person passionate about what you are doing so it's important that you give more credit to whether the person is going to drink each sleep with your mission in mind and even if they are like 20% less than that rock star I think you will do much better as an organization if you hire those kind of folks one pattern we found is what we try to look for is people with a gross mindset so it doesn't mean that the person has to grow as a person really ambitiously but I think they need to believe that they can develop themselves and not come and say this is who I am and I can't improve in any area so we try to really kind of like you can call them rock stars or whatever just people who think of themselves that they can acquire new skills that they can learn new things as well and of course taking the challenge and grow and on the more concrete level we also talk about humble hungry hunters and that's really the profile and you need to be very humble to get feedback to learn from our customers from the colleagues from the industry because otherwise you will stop developing and then you need to be extremely smart or selecting the right fights and be able to manage yourself and it's really hard combination it's really really hard combination that can survive and thrive because you need to be we bring the data available and we are going how we do on product adaption or sales or something else but then the people within the teams need to pick that data, that context and set their priorities and drive those priorities forward and not even within their own team but cross functionally so they need to sell actually the idea to other functions other people gather that group together let them to drop whatever they were working and prove that this is more important so that's those kind of people it's really hard to find and they are they are cold, gold they are humble, hungry hunters if we are able to find but it's really really hard I am going to take those three H with me it's excellent I like it too and hunt there's quite a lot of questions from the audience on Holoocracy and to end this discussion with I'd really like you to share the experience that you shared with us when we met last summer on like how you tried it out try to explain it briefly we wrote a couple of blog articles about that so if you want to go deeper you can do this later so we got very inspired by the idea of self-organization through discovering Holoocracy actually and I think 2014 we experimented with Holoocracy implemented it and kind of like something we called Blinkercie which was a Holoocracy library say we take the best parts we don't take everything but we take the best parts and make it kind of like you apply knowing as a team and realize actually Holoocracy is creating more problems for us as a team then it actually solves and one of the main issues we found around Holoocracy although the basic concepts are pretty good I think one of the problems is that Holoocracy is a concept and a brand name at the same time which means that everyone can Google Holoocracy and there are like 20 blog articles and every blog article just grabs Holoocracy in a different way so what suddenly happened is that we had an onboarding people on the system so that people were I think the main point where we realized that we have to get rid of Holoocracy in a way we have to do something different I was sitting in a meeting and we were discussing so we were discussing about a problem and people were asking how do we solve the problem with Holo, like in Holoocracy instead of saying how should we solve the problem and this was like okay so I think the system became way too dominant the system must go okay what are the principles of Holoocracy we liked for example self-organization transparency having roles instead of job descriptions all these things and we said we keep that but we put it into a new framework which we call the blinkest operating system which is basically a set of values a set of guiding principles and just like a really handful of core processes how you create a role how you create a team for example and that's what we set as a framework as a foundation they can do governance they can do tacticals what Holoocracy recommends but they don't have to it's like really up to them so I think for us the big learning was here is that it can be very tempting to take like a out of the box solution because it seems to be really easy to apply but actually you should think like and it's like we said it's like you have to create your own culture you should think what's important for me and then put it in your own words control the narrative and then do a good job explain there I think it's not working now we're out of time for the audience each and every one on the stage these guys have written awesome pieces on how they're building their companies or what they're seeing as investors so please go and check them out you're going to learn a lot more thank you thank you