Apr 1, 2021 · 39m · 20vc
20VC: How To Deliver Feedback with Compassion and Clarity, WTF Are Values Really and How To Instill Them & Raising $50M+ From Index and Greylock but Remaining in Stealth for 12 Months with Linda Lian, Co-Founder & CEO @ CommonRoom
0:00 / 0:00
gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of 20VC, host Harry Stebbings interviews Linda Lian, co-founder and CEO of Common Room, about her journey from AWS to raising over $50 million in stealth mode. Linda shares actionable insights on compassionate leadership, establishing startup values, strategic senior hiring, customer discovery, and founder resilience.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Harry holds 27.4% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Harry as informed peer 2.9 Guest teaching 2.3 Guest disagreement 1.4 Harry pushing back 1.7
speaking balance: gold is Harry, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 31:27 Dismissing traditional views on competition
Linda completely rejects the host's premise regarding competitors, asserting that no company is her competition and framing her real opponent as organizational inertia and human nature.
Hardest push from Harry ▶ 11:32 Challenging generic corporate valuesHarry refuses to accept generic descriptions of values like 'strive for excellence' and challenges Linda to explain how such broad phrases are actually made concrete.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 8:15 Values as an employee disagreement toolLinda educates Harry on a counterintuitive insight from AWS: company values exist to give junior employees a formal framework to disagree with executive leadership.
Harry holds his own ▶ 18:47 Bringing insider intel on 'the long poach'Harry demonstrates deep episode prep and domain context by citing private conversations with investor Chris at Index to probe Linda's specific recruiting technique.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Harry as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Harry pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Founding Common Room and the Rise of Developer-Led Growth | 1 | 3 | 1 | 0 | Harry opens with a broad question about the founding 'aha moment' for Common Room. Linda gently reframes the premise, explaining that 'aha moments' are rarely a single instant but rather a combination of multiple experiences over time across venture and AWS. | |
| Amazon Leadership Principles and Frameworks for Disagreement | 2 | 4 | 1 | 0 | Harry references specific tech figures like David Richardson and Jeff Wiener. Linda educates the host on how Amazon leadership principles function practically, introducing the idea that corporate values serve as a mechanism for employee disagreement against executives. | |
| Practical Strategies for Instilling and Refining Corporate Values | 3 | 2 | 1 | 2 | Harry pushes on generic corporate values, questioning how slogans like 'strive for excellence' actually translate into meaningful operational principles. Linda walks through her exact evaluation and iteration process for company values. | |
| Compassionate Leadership, Transparency, and Delivering Direct Feedback | 2 | 2 | 2 | 3 | Harry challenges the balance between direct candor and compassion, sharing his own struggle with giving overly soft feedback. Linda explicitly rejects conventional feedback methods like the 'shit sandwich' in favor of direct transparency. | |
| Hiring Senior Talent and Executing the 'Long Poach' | 4 | 1 | 1 | 2 | Harry demonstrates active prep by bringing up back-channel context from investor Chris at Index regarding Linda's recruiting tactics. He presses her on her unusual early strategy of exclusively hiring senior staff. | |
| Personal Resilience, Persistence, and Learning to Delegate | 4 | 1 | 1 | 3 | Harry asks a sharp probing question about how to distinguish between necessary persistence and knowing when one is simply bad at a task and should delegate. Linda responds openly with personal anecdotes about her administrative weaknesses. | |
| Decision-Making Frameworks: Data Processing and Intuition | 4 | 2 | 1 | 2 | Harry leverages information from co-founder Viraj to ask about Linda's rapid mind-changing ability and how she avoids flippancy. He further probes the tension between head and heart in decision-making. | |
| Stealth Strategy, Fundraising, and Effective Customer Discovery | 3 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Harry asks for practical advice on structuring customer discovery conversations without getting superficial answers. Linda explains that founders should focus on customer problems rather than asking for specific feature requests. | |
| Quick Fire Round: Books, Competition, Angels, and Future Vision | 3 | 3 | 4 | 2 | In the quick fire round, Linda rejects standard assumptions around competition and reading business books. She contrariantly frames competition as organizational inertia rather than rival companies. |
Statements from this episode (17)
Common Room raises over $50M from Index, Greylock, and 20VC
“To date, Linda has raised over fifty million dollars with Common Room, from the likes of Danny Reimer at Index, Sarah Grew at Greylock, Dylan Field at Figma, Dick Costolo, and of course, TwentyVC Fund.”
Linda Lian: Startup aha moments unfold over years, not single instances
“Aha moments aren't really a moment, and for me, I think there were really three ingredients to my aha moment in building common room that happened over the course of probably years.”
Linda Lian: AWS launched its developer community programs around 2017
“This was around 2017 when we really started building all of the developer community engagement programs that AWS still has today, including our developer Slack, our Reddit engagement, our Stack Overflow engagement, open sourcing product roadmaps on GitHub.”
Linda Lian: Company values serve as a framework for constructive disagreement
“I always saw Amazon's values as a way, a framework for disagreement. It enables employees to lean on the values to advocate for what they think is right, even when it is counter to what their leadership may think.”
Common Room sends candidates company values ahead of dedicated values interviews
“So we do a core values-based interview where we send the candidate our values, and we say, we're going to ask you questions as part of this interview process that map directly to figuring out whether or not you have these values, whether or not you share these…”
Common Room considers changing two company values rarely used in daily operations
“So right now we're actually thinking about changing two of them because we don't use them very much in our day to day life.”
Lian: Transparently speaking truth is an act of workplace compassion
“One of the most compassionate things you can do in life or in work is to speak the truth and to speak it transparently.”
Lian: Common Room bans the 'shit sandwich' method of giving feedback
“One of the things that I'm not a huge fan of is the shit sandwich. Which is this notion that you want to say something nice, and then, you know, give a direct piece of feedback, and then say something nice again. That's not really how I want to communicate, an…”
Lian: Common Room will hire exclusively senior talent through year end
“Yeah, so it's definitely not a perpetual plan. It is our near-term plan and our plan so far, so probably until the end of this year we'll be looking to bring on board folks who are experienced”
Lian: Common Room co-founders initially ignored her cold LinkedIn outreach
“I reached out to Francis and Baraj on LinkedIn, and they ignored me. I didn't hear back from them at all.”
Lian: Intuition is the summation of logical reason and subconscious signals
“And so, to me, intuition is the summation of that hard, logical reason, plus a lot of subconscious things that you may not really fully understand in the moment.”
Lian: Intuition should override resume credentials when evaluating job candidates
“The example with the candidate that I'll give is someone who looks amazing and perfect on paper, but then when you talk to them, there's a whiff of ego, or there's just something that's not quite right about how they're Speaking about their experience, and the…”
Common Room operated without a website or marketing until Series B
“We didn't have a website. We hadn't updated our LinkedIns. We had done zero marketing up until we announced Our Series B.”
Lian: Never ask customers for features, only for their problems
“We never ask our customers for features. We ask them to tell us their problems, and that's how we always start.”
Lian: Common Room's true competition is inertia, not rivals
“I genuinely don't think for what we're trying to do, any company at all is the competition. I really see our competition as inertia, as the way that companies are already doing things, as human nature.”