Zach Perret

“If I need to go hire for a role that I haven't hired for, I'll create a list of the top five people that anyone will recommend that are currently doing the job. Just cold email all five of those people and then try to get a coffee with as many as I can just to…”

“The path seems to be joining a mid to late stage company and learning a great deal, then kind of having your pick of what you want to do after that. There's a particular phase of a company somewhere between kind of a hundred and maybe 500 people, maybe a thous…”

“We look for the areas where someone is truly world class, and we prefer to hire people that have a few elements in which they're totally amazing, where they can really lean into their strengths, than hiring for the absence of weaknesses.”

“And so almost the history of the company, I've probably spent about a third of my time recruiting people.”

“We're fortunate to be in a business where our revenue doesn't scale directly with the number of people that we have, meaning we don't have to go out and hire thousands or tens of thousands of people in order to scale a great deal as a company.”

“For every company that's scaled quickly that I've talked to. And you ask their leadership team, you know, what do you wish you'd done differently? The answer is always, I wish I'd built my executive leadership team faster, and I wish I'd been more willing to l…”

“Like, we're in financial services. We want a seventy-thirty split. 70% of people on our team should not have come from financial services. 30% should have.”

“I don't think that most people, like, immediately orient on value, the dollar value of the acquisition. Like, sure, yeah, it reaches a threshold and the dollar value, like, starts to make sense. But I think when people really go through that Agony around selli…”

“Doing that, going from one to two would have been the right answer, and then maybe we could have done the next two at once, but going from one to four it was super hard.”

“So I think, like, the average returns have to come down. Because like the amount of capital is going up and the amount of amazing companies is not necessarily going up at the same pace.”

“Philosophically, like, I have a very hypothesis-driven decision-making model, which is you ask me a question, I have an answer. I, like, I'm, it's not a deeply held answer always but I always start with a starting point. Within the company we push this really …”

“Early on in the company, I had a five sentence rule which is if you write an email with more than five sentences no one's ever going to read it, so write them with less than five sentences.”

“We look for people that are incredible at some things, even if they have, like, glaring weaknesses in other areas. So as long as we have a team that can balance that out, we would rather have the spikey person, because it turns out, you know, a well-rounded pe…”

“I do feel strongly that you should never celebrate something that just factually isn't good. So something, if we're delivering something at a four out of 10, that is factually bad. And we should not be celebrating that we're delivering a four out of 10, but we…”

“And ended up making what I think was a 51 49 call to say, like, it's the right answer to sell the business. For a variety of reasons at the time. A year later, we had that same meeting, same group of people sitting in my living room, having the same, same styl…”

“For me, the question that no one ever asked me is, how confident are you, and how much do you care? So if you ask me, hey, what's, is, is the answer red or blue? Red. I don't know. How confident are you? Zero percent confident. How much do you care? Not at all…”

“So the question, is the VC product kind of played out? I think it's kind of played out.”

“He was saying, why were they lifted from the manufacturing industry and plopped down into the software world? And I would very much agree with that.”

“It probably was one of the first rounds of Plaid, which I subsequently corrected myself for by doing the Series C of Plaid. So I think we invested at 2.4 billion for the Series C, and I was debating a five million dollar difference with Zach for the Series B. …”