The Exchanges

Q Talk to me about that. How do you foster that relationship with the leadership team and the board? What does one actively do to create that where it's not actually normal? I'm on many boards and I have to seek that out.

A Well, so one thing in as the CEO, Make sure you give lots of airtime in board meetings to your leadership team and have them there for the open session. I would bring the whole of my leadership team in, most board meetings, and certainly everyone would present in their functional areas, right? When we're discussing sales, it's the salesperson talking. When we're discussing engineering, it's the CTO and the VP of engineering talking. You know, I'm there to provide overall high-level goals. Like, I would start every board meeting with, here's the good news, and here's the stuff we got to work on. You know, that just simple one slide, what we're happy with, what You know, we're most sweating right now, but then let each of the functional areas drive that. I think you want to go further and actually specifically identify board members to mentor the key functions, right? So, you know, especially for sales and marketing, it's really good to have a board member that can provide insight and even bring people with that expertise on the board. You know, as you're ramping toward public being public, you bring in an audit chair, somebody can coach up your CFO. Even help hire the best CFO. So it's almost like you can build board first and then use the board to help build your leadership team if you have the right sales, marketing, and financial expertise on your board.

AI assessment note: “Make sure you give lots of airtime in board meetings to your leadership team”

Q I do want to ask, also, you mentioned there about the taking the chance on you as CEO. Were you nervous? This was not a role that you'd had before, and there are very different roles between CTO and CEO. Were you nervous, and what elements were you more affronted by?

A I wasn't nervous in the beginning because I knew right where Pure was. I mean, Pure was my fourth Startup. I mean, I joined when it was about 12 people, and so I'd been down this road multiple times before, and, you know, I had a vision for how we should attack the market. You know, there were people that felt that the company should pick a particular niche and try to go dominate that, and I was much more excited about David poking Goliath right in the eye and just, like, making this fight a big fight from the outset, that the technology has wholly got to change. You know, the solutions that were being used in the market were 25, 30 years old, based on mechanical disk. I would say, hey, these are competitors richly deserving of competition. Let's change the architecture and bring it to them and take that big fight right out of the gate. So I had a plan and the board liked it. And I mean, that was ultimately the reason they took the chance. I had incredible, you know, support and advice. And Neil Bouchery told me, you know, the hardest bit about the CEO job is you've got to build both below you and above you, right? You've got to build a leadership team, but you've also got to build a board, you know, to help ensure your success. And so having people like Anil Bousry and Frank Slootman and Mike Volpe and, of course, Mike Speiser and Satish Dharmaraj, a whole collection of your f…

AI assessment note: “I wasn't nervous in the beginning because I knew right where Pure was.”

Q Aligned to the morale maintenance. It's the element of trust with teams for me. I'm fascinated. It's something actually that Mike told me about you. He said that you're incredible at building internal trust with your teams. How do you think about that internal trust building exercise and creating that environment of safety, but also not a soft playground, like, that we're here to work as well?

A I do think trust is absolutely critical currency to foster and build a team. One of the simple things, first of all, is to never talk about yourself You know, you don't use I, me when you're talking about something that the company is going to do. I see CEOs and other functional leaders in business make this mistake all the time, where they say I, me when they're talking about their team's execution, and it's always got to be we, us, right? Because you're building, you know, team success. As soon as one person starts talking about their individual accomplishments, it causes other people to go political too. The time for I, me is when there's a screw up. And as CEO, it's always your fault. You know, taking responsibility for a problem, but then passing credit when anything goes well is a really simple recipe for building trust. Here's a more aggressive one that I've had great success with. When recruiting people, you know, when they're, they'll start to try to negotiate, I will shut them off and say, look, this isn't necessarily a fair ask of you to negotiate. I mean, we've got all the Compensia data about what everyone is making. We know what all your peers are making. And I can tell you, Offering is very fair for your experience and, you know, the talent. We believe you're deeply talented among the best, you know, in the world at what you do. We want you on the team. This is a…

AI assessment note: “taking responsibility for a problem, but then passing credit when anything goes well”

Q Do you believe that? Sorry. I didn't mean to go off to it. I'm just interested. I always think that actually, I'm not sure about that. We just never analyze our wins. We celebrate them and move on. And we set like analyze our losses. Do you think that you do learn more from losses than wins?

A I do. The wins are great. You need wins to encourage and provide enthusiasm, and people want to be part of the winner, so you should celebrate those victories, and I'm not saying there aren't lessons to learn in wins too, but in losses, there's almost always a lesson to learn, unless your competitor buys the business, right? Competitors that are larger or have ancillary product lines that they can, you know, move money between, you're going to lose in those situations, and maybe that's a case where there isn't actually something to learn, but in general, there's almost In every loss, there's something you can identify or multiple things you can identify about your product, about your engagement, your partnering strategy, and you should mine those insights, and you should openly share them too. I think one of the problems entrepreneurs have is they're great at sharing the good news, the attaboy, attagal, we won, but they're less inclined to want to open up and dig in on the losses, and it makes everybody feel fragile and dishonest. If you're not really mining the insight from those losses, you're going to lose. Sometimes. And if you talk about the losses, then you can bring this entire smarts of the company to bear on making things better so you don't lose again for the same reason. That's the key. Don't repeat your mistakes.

AI assessment note: “I do. The wins are great. You need wins to encourage”

Q terms of that overpromise. I do have to ask, you know, in terms of, you know, the boards that we mentioned, You've also sat on boards on the other side of the table. How did sitting both as a board member and then also managing a board as a CEO, how did that impact how you approach board management as a CEO, having the other hand as a board member?

A You know, I had the privilege of being on boards before I became CEO. I think it's really helpful to see how the mechanics work, to see what's, you know, you like about how boards are being managed and what you want to change. It really caused me to be very, very careful about Who's on the board? What are the dynamics of the board meeting like? I really like a very collegial, open board meeting, but then you've got to also be careful where you don't have, like, one person drowning out other board members, and so I think in managing the board, I would try to be careful to make sure that we were getting the input from the board members with the greatest expertise on a specific issue, and so I wouldn't leave a topic until I got particular board members, if they were being quiet, to speak up and share what I was looking for from their perspective. And so CEO's job is really to manage those board dynamics, you know, to build the board, to preserve that kind of great collegial collaborative trust, but open environment where you can say anything.

AI assessment note: “It really caused me to be very, very careful about Who's on the board?”

Q competition. I had Frank Slootman on the show very recently, who obviously was on your board, and he said, you know, business is warfare, and competition are your enemy. And that kind of flies in the face of a lot of the Softly, softly be friends with your competitors. How do you advise founders and CEOs today on the right way to approach competition, and how did you do it?

A First of all, encourage everyone to welcome competition. I mean, you actually need competition to build markets. If you're the only company in a space, it's, it can be a lot harder. Competition certainly makes you better, right? It forces you to innovate faster and improve your product and see what they're up to. So I relish competition, but, you know, I would say I try to stay away from warfare analogies. Because at the end of the day, this is more like sports, right? We're playing to win. We're not going to win everything, but the downside is dramatically less than if you're actually in a sort of military engagement. And so, yeah, I want people to play hard to win, but not be afraid to lose too. And the critical thing is when you do lose, you look at the tape, the Monday morning tape and say, what is it that we could have done better? You know, what about our sales process? What about our product? You know, where was it that we lost the This engagement because you're going to lose some. And so the critical thing is, can you learn as quickly? I mean, you can learn a lot more from losses than you can from victories. And so the critical thing is digging in on losses and sharing them openly.

AI assessment note: “encourage everyone to welcome competition. I mean, you actually need competition to build markets.”

Q of your world-class superpowers was your ability to the most incredible salesman to both customers and to employees, and to combine that with this incredible technical acumen. I wanted to ask, when thinking about that kind of salesmanship aspect to customers and team members, respectfully and with I'm asking you so it's not egotistical. What makes you so good at sales and inspiring both customers and employees, do you think?

A I think it's a pretty simple recipe. Every sales meeting we had with customers, I would always insist on the customer talking first, and every presenter from the company needed to be there to hear the customer's side and then ask questions and dig in and understand the customer's pain points and aspirations. If you truly understand where the customer is and what the customer is dealing with, then you have the ability to connect the dots with what your product and solution are and why they're a fit. One of the most empowering things you can do is say no to a customer. Especially early on, unhappy customers are supremely painful. 10 X more downside for an unhappy customer than upside for a happy customer. Salespeople don't like this, but I would say, no, we're not ready for you yet. You know, the sweet spot for what you need is probably still two years off. For us, so let's stay in touch. We'll let you know when we're ready. You would not believe how credible that is with customers. You've just won over somebody's, you know, long-term interest, and they'll often turn around and try to convince you that they are a right fit for you, but you need to put yourself in the customer's shoes and say, can we make this customer successful? Are we convinced that we're ready to make them successful? And if the answer is yes, by all means go for it, but if the answer is no, Say no.

AI assessment note: “I think it's a pretty simple recipe. Every sales meeting we had with customers”

Q to do what you just said there, but they're going, you know, the talent market is so tough right now. If we have any negativity in the company, people go to the recruiting 10 messages they have and join someone else. We have to keep pumping, which is obviously not very healthy, but how do you do that critical analysis on losses and understanding what went wrong without reducing morale?

A Well, so I think the morale, if you're not being realistic, the morale is fake, right? And so you're inflating things in a way that's not sustainable. The critical thing is to keep your eye on the long-term goals and make sure you're sharing what success looks like for the company in five plus years. Right. You paint that picture of what the future can look like, but then at the same time, you have to be grounded in the reality of exactly where you are right now today and what needs to happen and why, you know, your product isn't ready in a particular market. And I think it's completely comfortable to share that as long as the company stays focused on that long-term upside, then you've got the wherewithal to, you know, to go through the valleys and fix the issues in front of you that are slowing you down right now.

AI assessment note: “as long as the company stays focused on that long-term upside”

Q Where do you think many founders go wrong in terms of managing their board?

A I've seen lots of mistakes. One of the classics is just posing a problem to the board and then, you know, saying, what do I do? That's not the board's job. If you're a founder CEO, your job is to propose a path and then Rely on the board to help you course correct. So one side of the error is not coming in with a plan. Got a problem. If you're going to propose it to the board, you know, you're going to get a plan out of it. You're better off going in with a plan and letting the board course correct. I would say the other thing though, that I see founders do is not share bad news with their boards. And then they really limit the amount of help they can get from their board. So they're so interested in trying to sell, sell their board on only the good news that they don't actually present Challenges and what they're worried about. And then, you know, the board's got to try to dig in and ferret that stuff out. You know, the latter problem is almost always tied to insecurity. I would say, you know, going back to why I wasn't nervous at pure in the early days, everything was about the orange flag of pure, right? My job as a servant leader is to try to raise that flag as high as possible. And so I'm going to do the best I can, but I'm, I'm not going to be worried about my own success. I'm worried about pure success. And that frees you up to really take ego out of the equations.

AI assessment note: “One of the classics is just posing a problem to the board”

Q Aligned to the morale maintenance. It's the element of trust with teams for me. I'm fascinated. It's something actually that Mike told me about you. He said that you're incredible at building internal trust with your teams. How do you think about that internal trust building exercise and creating that environment of safety, but also not a soft playground, like, that we're here to work as well?

A I do think trust is absolutely critical currency to foster and build a team. One of the simple things, first of all, is to never talk about yourself You know, you don't use I, me when you're talking about something that the company is going to do. I see CEOs and other functional leaders in business make this mistake all the time, where they say I, me when they're talking about their team's execution, and it's always got to be we, us, right? Because you're building, you know, team success. As soon as one person starts talking about their individual accomplishments, it causes other people to go political too. The time for I, me is when there's a screw up. And as CEO, it's always your fault. You know, taking responsibility for a problem, but then passing credit when anything goes well is a really simple recipe for building trust. Here's a more aggressive one that I've had great success with. When recruiting people, you know, when they're, they'll start to try to negotiate, I will shut them off and say, look, this isn't necessarily a fair ask of you to negotiate. I mean, we've got all the Compensia data about what everyone is making. We know what all your peers are making. And I can tell you, Offering is very fair for your experience and, you know, the talent. We believe you're deeply talented among the best, you know, in the world at what you do. We want you on the team. This is a…

AI assessment note: “taking responsibility for a problem, but then passing credit when anything goes well”

Q Do you believe that? Sorry. I didn't mean to go off to it. I'm just interested. I always think that actually, I'm not sure about that. We just never analyze our wins. We celebrate them and move on. And we set like analyze our losses. Do you think that you do learn more from losses than wins?

A I do. The wins are great. You need wins to encourage and provide enthusiasm, and people want to be part of the winner, so you should celebrate those victories, and I'm not saying there aren't lessons to learn in wins too, but in losses, there's almost always a lesson to learn, unless your competitor buys the business, right? Competitors that are larger or have ancillary product lines that they can, you know, move money between, you're going to lose in those situations, and maybe that's a case where there isn't actually something to learn, but in general, there's almost In every loss, there's something you can identify or multiple things you can identify about your product, about your engagement, your partnering strategy, and you should mine those insights, and you should openly share them too. I think one of the problems entrepreneurs have is they're great at sharing the good news, the attaboy, attagal, we won, but they're less inclined to want to open up and dig in on the losses, and it makes everybody feel fragile and dishonest. If you're not really mining the insight from those losses, you're going to lose. Sometimes. And if you talk about the losses, then you can bring this entire smarts of the company to bear on making things better so you don't lose again for the same reason. That's the key. Don't repeat your mistakes.

AI assessment note: “I do. The wins are great. You need wins to encourage and provide enthusiasm”

Q Can I ask, when you lose that element of trust, you know, someone doesn't do what they said they were gonna do, someone lets you down, and this is quite deep, but once lost in some way, can trust be regained, do you think? And also, when you have someone, you start with full trust, and it's theirs to be lost, or no trust, and you build it over time.

A So through the interview process, I think is when you have to be building trust. Trust that this employee is among the best in the world at what they do, and of course what they do is really important to the company, and so there's part of the interview process is all about forming those trust bonds by direction. An employee to the leadership team and leadership team back to the employee. I want trust to be there as, as you start, and obviously you want it to grow over time. And trust does get lost. I mean, you're inevitably going to make hiring mistakes. Any business that's scaling fast is going to make hiring mistakes. And, you know, the number one advice from every CEO I've ever talked to is I was too late in, you know, fixing that. Not everyone makes an elite team. And, you know, I think too many people fall into the innocent until proven guilty model of employees. And I'm sorry, that's not the way it works. It's when you're a leader, if your bit flips on somebody, if you lose confidence, then you need to make the change. And I don't like pips. You know, I think I'm much more in the Frank Slutman school on this one. You make changes quickly in order to keep the team on track. If somebody can make a mistake, you don't want to lose trust just because of a mistake, but you need to go to them and talk about what happened and why and coach them up. So the same mistake isn't goin…

AI assessment note: “As soon as you've lost trust, I encourage managers to make the change.”

Q When making a change, Scott, I suck. At firing people. I mean, honestly, it's, it's comical. As a Brit, we're not good at all at this, but I'm especially bad. What's the right way to do it?

A It is a very hard thing to do, and unfortunately, it's something you get practiced at over time. I strive to give some concrete, constructive input why this isn't working out, but I also try to leave, you know, the employee plenty of room to save face and turn their own story, you know, into what happened and why. You've got to be really careful you don't damage someone's career. And I've had the good fortune to be really, really elite startups with amazing teams. You know, it's like, okay, if you didn't make the top one percent or one half of one percent for a particular reason, maybe other things are going on in your life. That's okay. I mean, you've got so many opportunities in front of you, and I'm even willing in many cases to go to bat for somebody and say, you know, I think in this other job, they can be really successful at your firm. And so try to give them a soft landing, but, you know, give them concrete feedback too on What they could have done better with the opportunity.

AI assessment note: “I strive to give some concrete, constructive input why this isn't working out”

Q Talk to me about that. How do you foster that relationship with the leadership team and the board? What does one actively do to create that where it's not actually normal? I'm on many boards and I have to seek that out.

A Well, so one thing in as the CEO, Make sure you give lots of airtime in board meetings to your leadership team and have them there for the open session. I would bring the whole of my leadership team in, most board meetings, and certainly everyone would present in their functional areas, right? When we're discussing sales, it's the salesperson talking. When we're discussing engineering, it's the CTO and the VP of engineering talking. You know, I'm there to provide overall high-level goals. Like, I would start every board meeting with, here's the good news, and here's the stuff we got to work on. You know, that just simple one slide, what we're happy with, what You know, we're most sweating right now, but then let each of the functional areas drive that. I think you want to go further and actually specifically identify board members to mentor the key functions, right? So, you know, especially for sales and marketing, it's really good to have a board member that can provide insight and even bring people with that expertise on the board. You know, as you're ramping toward public being public, you bring in an audit chair, somebody can coach up your CFO. Even help hire the best CFO. So it's almost like you can build board first and then use the board to help build your leadership team if you have the right sales, marketing, and financial expertise on your board.

AI assessment note: “Make sure you give lots of airtime in board meetings to your leadership team”

Q terms of that overpromise. I do have to ask, you know, in terms of, you know, the boards that we mentioned, You've also sat on boards on the other side of the table. How did sitting both as a board member and then also managing a board as a CEO, how did that impact how you approach board management as a CEO, having the other hand as a board member?

A You know, I had the privilege of being on boards before I became CEO. I think it's really helpful to see how the mechanics work, to see what's, you know, you like about how boards are being managed and what you want to change. It really caused me to be very, very careful about Who's on the board? What are the dynamics of the board meeting like? I really like a very collegial, open board meeting, but then you've got to also be careful where you don't have, like, one person drowning out other board members, and so I think in managing the board, I would try to be careful to make sure that we were getting the input from the board members with the greatest expertise on a specific issue, and so I wouldn't leave a topic until I got particular board members, if they were being quiet, to speak up and share what I was looking for from their perspective. And so CEO's job is really to manage those board dynamics, you know, to build the board, to preserve that kind of great collegial collaborative trust, but open environment where you can say anything.

AI assessment note: “It really caused me to be very, very careful about Who's on the board?”

Q And what a chance that it was, and an incredible journey that you have since. I'm too interested. I didn't know that, actually, about your father being an entrepreneur. I always think our parents shape us in ways that we don't really expect. What were some big takeaways from seeing your father's entrepreneurial spirit?

A I think early on, it was not a draw. My dad worked extremely hard. You know, it's where I got my own work ethic, because it kind of just wears off on you, I think, when you're growing up. But I used to not see him for days because he would be gone to work before I would get up in the morning, and I had a job after school, so he might be asleep before I got home. He worked really hard, but he wasn't in technology, so the, you know, the upsides of that hard work was he built a successful business, but I would say the return on his time invested was not ultimately what I was hoping for, and so I just got really lucky getting pulled into technology at where I went to school, Carnegie Mellon. Computer science faculty were just insanely gifted and talented, and it was so incredibly exciting, and I just got sucked in.

AI assessment note: “it's where I got my own work ethic, because it kind of just wears off”

Q competition. I had Frank Slootman on the show very recently, who obviously was on your board, and he said, you know, business is warfare, and competition are your enemy. And that kind of flies in the face of a lot of the Softly, softly be friends with your competitors. How do you advise founders and CEOs today on the right way to approach competition, and how did you do it?

A First of all, encourage everyone to welcome competition. I mean, you actually need competition to build markets. If you're the only company in a space, it's, it can be a lot harder. Competition certainly makes you better, right? It forces you to innovate faster and improve your product and see what they're up to. So I relish competition, but, you know, I would say I try to stay away from warfare analogies. Because at the end of the day, this is more like sports, right? We're playing to win. We're not going to win everything, but the downside is dramatically less than if you're actually in a sort of military engagement. And so, yeah, I want people to play hard to win, but not be afraid to lose too. And the critical thing is when you do lose, you look at the tape, the Monday morning tape and say, what is it that we could have done better? You know, what about our sales process? What about our product? You know, where was it that we lost the This engagement because you're going to lose some. And so the critical thing is, can you learn as quickly? I mean, you can learn a lot more from losses than you can from victories. And so the critical thing is digging in on losses and sharing them openly.

AI assessment note: “First of all, encourage everyone to welcome competition. I mean, you actually need competition”

Q Where do you think many founders go wrong in terms of managing their board?

A I've seen lots of mistakes. One of the classics is just posing a problem to the board and then, you know, saying, what do I do? That's not the board's job. If you're a founder CEO, your job is to propose a path and then Rely on the board to help you course correct. So one side of the error is not coming in with a plan. Got a problem. If you're going to propose it to the board, you know, you're going to get a plan out of it. You're better off going in with a plan and letting the board course correct. I would say the other thing though, that I see founders do is not share bad news with their boards. And then they really limit the amount of help they can get from their board. So they're so interested in trying to sell, sell their board on only the good news that they don't actually present Challenges and what they're worried about. And then, you know, the board's got to try to dig in and ferret that stuff out. You know, the latter problem is almost always tied to insecurity. I would say, you know, going back to why I wasn't nervous at pure in the early days, everything was about the orange flag of pure, right? My job as a servant leader is to try to raise that flag as high as possible. And so I'm going to do the best I can, but I'm, I'm not going to be worried about my own success. I'm worried about pure success. And that frees you up to really take ego out of the equations.

AI assessment note: “One of the classics is just posing a problem to the board and then”

Q Final one before a quick fire, but on the leadership style that you have, how did having children change your leadership style? Did it change how you operate, how you engage, how you communicate?

A That's very interesting. You have this vision of children that, you know, they're gonna want your leadership, and My own experience, at least, is the opposite. That, you know, my children were fiercely independent from birth, right? Like, you know, they're gonna own what's going on around them, and they wanna take charge. You know, and I would say that's certainly the leadership style that I try to approach with. If you're micromanaging somebody, there's a mistake, right? Either you've hired the wrong person, or you're in the wrong job if you're trying to manage somebody else. And so, when things go wrong, and they're inevitably gonna go wrong, then you wanna try to give people the help they need to be successful. But you shouldn't have to micromanage anyone, and I try not to micromanage my kids. Piece of parenting advice I got from a friend, he said, you know, I got my best parenting advice from watching nature programs. A lioness will engage aggressively if she fears for the safety of her cubs, but otherwise, she models the behavior that she wants, and that is a really powerful tool as a parent, and I think as a leader. You ultimately need to model the behavior that you want. I would work, right, I made sure that I was doing, I was an individual contributor, Even as CEO, because I wanted every manager to be contributing and doing things particular in the early days. And so I …

AI assessment note: “she models the behavior that she wants, and that is a really powerful tool”

Q I do want to ask, also, you mentioned there about the taking the chance on you as CEO. Were you nervous? This was not a role that you'd had before, and there are very different roles between CTO and CEO. Were you nervous, and what elements were you more affronted by?

A I wasn't nervous in the beginning because I knew right where Pure was. I mean, Pure was my fourth Startup. I mean, I joined when it was about 12 people, and so I'd been down this road multiple times before, and, you know, I had a vision for how we should attack the market. You know, there were people that felt that the company should pick a particular niche and try to go dominate that, and I was much more excited about David poking Goliath right in the eye and just, like, making this fight a big fight from the outset, that the technology has wholly got to change. You know, the solutions that were being used in the market were 25, 30 years old, based on mechanical disk. I would say, hey, these are competitors richly deserving of competition. Let's change the architecture and bring it to them and take that big fight right out of the gate. So I had a plan and the board liked it. And I mean, that was ultimately the reason they took the chance. I had incredible, you know, support and advice. And Neil Bouchery told me, you know, the hardest bit about the CEO job is you've got to build both below you and above you, right? You've got to build a leadership team, but you've also got to build a board, you know, to help ensure your success. And so having people like Anil Bousry and Frank Slootman and Mike Volpe and, of course, Mike Speiser and Satish Dharmaraj, a whole collection of your f…

AI assessment note: “I wasn't nervous in the beginning because I knew right where Pure was.”

Q Ah, sod it. We've got time for one more. So now I love this one with Scott Dietzen, former CEO at Pure Storage. How did having children change your leadership style?

A That's very interesting. You have this vision of children that, you know, they're going to want your leadership. And my own experience, at least, is the opposite. That, you know, my children were fiercely independent from birth, right? Like, you know, they're going to own what's going on around them, and they want to take charge. You know, and I would say that's certainly the leadership style that I tried to approach with. If you're micromanaging somebody, there's a mistake, right? Either you've hired the wrong person or you're in the wrong job. You're trying to manage somebody else. And so when things go wrong and they're inevitably going to go wrong, then you want to try to give people the help they need to be successful. But you shouldn't have to micromanage anyone. And I try not to micromanage my kids. Piece of parenting advice I got from a friend. He said, you know, I got my best parenting advice from watching nature programs. A lioness will engage aggressively if she fears for the safety of her cubs, but otherwise she models the behavior that she wants. And that is a really powerful tool as a parent. And I think as a leader, you ultimately need to model the behavior that you want. I would work, right? I made sure that I was doing, I was an individual contributor, even as CEO, because I wanted every manager to be contributing and doing things particular in the early days. …

AI assessment note: “as a leader, you ultimately need to model the behavior that you want”

Q And what a chance that it was, and an incredible journey that you have since. I'm too interested. I didn't know that, actually, about your father being an entrepreneur. I always think our parents shape us in ways that we don't really expect. What were some big takeaways from seeing your father's entrepreneurial spirit?

A I think early on, it was not a draw. My dad worked extremely hard. You know, it's where I got my own work ethic, because it kind of just wears off on you, I think, when you're growing up. But I used to not see him for days because he would be gone to work before I would get up in the morning, and I had a job after school, so he might be asleep before I got home. He worked really hard, but he wasn't in technology, so the, you know, the upsides of that hard work was he built a successful business, but I would say the return on his time invested was not ultimately what I was hoping for, and so I just got really lucky getting pulled into technology at where I went to school, Carnegie Mellon. Computer science faculty were just insanely gifted and talented, and it was so incredibly exciting, and I just got sucked in.

AI assessment note: “it's where I got my own work ethic”

Q When making a change, Scott, I suck. At firing people. I mean, honestly, it's, it's comical. As a Brit, we're not good at all at this, but I'm especially bad. What's the right way to do it?

A It is a very hard thing to do, and unfortunately, it's something you get practiced at over time. I strive to give some concrete, constructive input why this isn't working out, but I also try to leave, you know, the employee plenty of room to save face and turn their own story, you know, into what happened and why. You've got to be really careful you don't damage someone's career. And I've had the good fortune to be really, really elite startups with amazing teams. You know, it's like, okay, if you didn't make the top one percent or one half of one percent for a particular reason, maybe other things are going on in your life. That's okay. I mean, you've got so many opportunities in front of you, and I'm even willing in many cases to go to bat for somebody and say, you know, I think in this other job, they can be really successful at your firm. And so try to give them a soft landing, but, you know, give them concrete feedback too on What they could have done better with the opportunity.

AI assessment note: “give some concrete, constructive input why this isn't working out”

Q of your world-class superpowers was your ability to the most incredible salesman to both customers and to employees, and to combine that with this incredible technical acumen. I wanted to ask, when thinking about that kind of salesmanship aspect to customers and team members, respectfully and with I'm asking you so it's not egotistical. What makes you so good at sales and inspiring both customers and employees, do you think?

A I think it's a pretty simple recipe. Every sales meeting we had with customers, I would always insist on the customer talking first, and every presenter from the company needed to be there to hear the customer's side and then ask questions and dig in and understand the customer's pain points and aspirations. If you truly understand where the customer is and what the customer is dealing with, then you have the ability to connect the dots with what your product and solution are and why they're a fit. One of the most empowering things you can do is say no to a customer. Especially early on, unhappy customers are supremely painful. 10 X more downside for an unhappy customer than upside for a happy customer. Salespeople don't like this, but I would say, no, we're not ready for you yet. You know, the sweet spot for what you need is probably still two years off. For us, so let's stay in touch. We'll let you know when we're ready. You would not believe how credible that is with customers. You've just won over somebody's, you know, long-term interest, and they'll often turn around and try to convince you that they are a right fit for you, but you need to put yourself in the customer's shoes and say, can we make this customer successful? Are we convinced that we're ready to make them successful? And if the answer is yes, by all means go for it, but if the answer is no, Say no.

AI assessment note: “Every sales meeting we had with customers, I would always insist on the customer talking first”

Q the other day, and you know, I said, you can't settle for good. Great has to be it. And they said, hey, respectfully, that's a luxury. You know, we need to fill seats. That is cool. We can't wait months. Do you agree that a good hire today is better than the perfect hire tomorrow? And how do you think about that, accepting good now because you need it now?

A Yeah, I mean, it's definitely hard. I think it varies considerably at stage and functions. Right. There are certain functions that you need to be the best in the world at, and there are other functions that you need to be good at. Engineering hires, in particular, especially early on, are something I would sweat really, really deeply because, you know, the difference between a top one percent and a top 10% engineer is pretty dramatic. You know, it's like tenfold productivity, and so it's really, really crucial, you know, to get that. But then there are other functions inside the business that, you know, you don't necessarily need to be the best In the world at finance and accounting, right? You want to be good, and you better be squeaky clean, but you don't have to hire the top one-tenth of one percent like you need to do inside of engineering, and so I think you need to focus on the role. I think you want to be really aggressive in the interview process. We put people through the ringer. I mean, we've had multiple engineers that interviewed at places like Google and Facebook and say, wow, I never felt like I got interviewed until I got interviewed at Pure, because we would really challenge them, and periodically we'd have, you know, folks that would say, oh, I'm too senior, you know, I don't want to go through that process, and be like, okay, then you're not a fit for our cult…

AI assessment note: “it varies considerably at stage and functions. Right. There are certain functions”

Q I would listen to podcasts before I would hear leaders like you and I'll go like, oh, that's Scott. And it would never be me. And I guess I kind of would love to understand, you know, every leader has insecurities. When you look back to your leadership as a CEO, were there some core insecurities that you faced as a leader? And I'm intrigued. How did you overcome them?

A I certainly had insecurities in grad school. There was something called imposter syndrome. I was really successful as an undergrad in a strong program, and I thought, oh my gosh, I'm great. And I got into grad school, and I'm like, wow, these people are crazy smart, and the professors are even smarter. Do I even belong here? What am I doing? And, you know, I think I had some of that in my first job, too, where I wasn't I thought I was bright. I've never been the best technologist or the best business person at any of the companies I've been at, but I can straddle them effectively, right? I have a combination of business acumen and technical expertise that allows me to, to be a bridge. And I think that's part of what's allowed me to be successful. And I would say the other thing is over time, your instincts, you watch your instincts play out. Some of my early work, I second guess myself about things because there are people here that know more than me, but when I turned out to be right, You get ever more conviction to follow your gut. But then the most important thing I said earlier, which is it's all about the company. It's not about you, right? You're a tool just like everyone else on the team for the company's success. And so if you check your ego at the door and focus on what can I do to help make this team capable of achieving its goals, you're liberated from worrying about…

AI assessment note: “if you check your ego at the door and focus on what can I do”

Q Final one before a quick fire, but on the leadership style that you have, how did having children change your leadership style? Did it change how you operate, how you engage, how you communicate?

A That's very interesting. You have this vision of children that, you know, they're gonna want your leadership, and My own experience, at least, is the opposite. That, you know, my children were fiercely independent from birth, right? Like, you know, they're gonna own what's going on around them, and they wanna take charge. You know, and I would say that's certainly the leadership style that I try to approach with. If you're micromanaging somebody, there's a mistake, right? Either you've hired the wrong person, or you're in the wrong job if you're trying to manage somebody else. And so, when things go wrong, and they're inevitably gonna go wrong, then you wanna try to give people the help they need to be successful. But you shouldn't have to micromanage anyone, and I try not to micromanage my kids. Piece of parenting advice I got from a friend, he said, you know, I got my best parenting advice from watching nature programs. A lioness will engage aggressively if she fears for the safety of her cubs, but otherwise, she models the behavior that she wants, and that is a really powerful tool as a parent, and I think as a leader. You ultimately need to model the behavior that you want. I would work, right, I made sure that I was doing, I was an individual contributor, Even as CEO, because I wanted every manager to be contributing and doing things particular in the early days. And so I …

AI assessment note: “a really powerful tool as a parent, and I think as a leader.”

Q Can I ask, when you lose that element of trust, you know, someone doesn't do what they said they were gonna do, someone lets you down, and this is quite deep, but once lost in some way, can trust be regained, do you think? And also, when you have someone, you start with full trust, and it's theirs to be lost, or no trust, and you build it over time.

A So through the interview process, I think is when you have to be building trust. Trust that this employee is among the best in the world at what they do, and of course what they do is really important to the company, and so there's part of the interview process is all about forming those trust bonds by direction. An employee to the leadership team and leadership team back to the employee. I want trust to be there as, as you start, and obviously you want it to grow over time. And trust does get lost. I mean, you're inevitably going to make hiring mistakes. Any business that's scaling fast is going to make hiring mistakes. And, you know, the number one advice from every CEO I've ever talked to is I was too late in, you know, fixing that. Not everyone makes an elite team. And, you know, I think too many people fall into the innocent until proven guilty model of employees. And I'm sorry, that's not the way it works. It's when you're a leader, if your bit flips on somebody, if you lose confidence, then you need to make the change. And I don't like pips. You know, I think I'm much more in the Frank Slutman school on this one. You make changes quickly in order to keep the team on track. If somebody can make a mistake, you don't want to lose trust just because of a mistake, but you need to go to them and talk about what happened and why and coach them up. So the same mistake isn't goin…

AI assessment note: “as soon as you've lost trust, I encourage managers to make the change.”