Team

“We've got about 10,000 teams that use Cadence”

“So the team had 80% of the company still. They took very little dilution.”

“I told the team last year execution was maybe four out of 10.”

“Teams will sadly, but because we are all human, teams will always optimize for local comfort over company outcomes.”

“I think Teams is a severely inferior product to Slack. I still think Slack is a world-class product, but you could argue that we did not win in the large enterprise and Microsoft won because of their distribution power.”

“These entities, these agents are going to start showing up in all places where you do work, whether that's your Slack or your Teams, for example.”

“If it's not a, like a obviously terrible answer, and sometimes even if it is an obviously terrible answer, you're still more likely to succeed if you just sort of like sort of reorient yourself around a world where it's not a terrible answer and then just try …”

“Life's work entrepreneur and a fantastic company that's building something that can just go forever because there's no one that's gonna, resistant to disruption, And no large incumbent. You're not going to be like Slack getting clipped by teams.”

“It's not about you standing alone. It's you always collaborating and pairing with someone else, but you are the only one who's pairing with everyone else, and therefore you have that unique insight which no one else in the team will have.”

“If you have a founder, you have a leader that has relentless pressure, that's from an internal source that they're applying to themselves, chances are they are also going to apply relentlessly to their team,”

“When you're so extraordinary at your craft, when your talent is so natural and your skill is so elevated, it's hard to understand that not everyone like you, that not everyone is like you and can do what you do. It's not a matter of they're trying more or work…”

“One of the ways you get speed and quality is by time capping things and then deciding as a team, again, what has to be polished, what doesn't have to be.”

“If you have an exceptional team where the ID still needs work and the product still needs work, you can still back them. If you have an exceptional ID, but we figure out the team is not AAA, top notch, you tend not to back them because so early on, IDs still r…”

“If you have that mentality with the team, it's very demotivating, right? It's like, what are we trying to go to? Like, when are we going to get somewhere? And so it's really important to celebrate small wins.”

“You don't need the entire team to be extremely high agency, but the ability of at least a few individuals on the team to have and embody this high agency approach such that, oh, actually, yes, we do have this obstacle, but here's how we're going to creatively …”

“We used to think teams are important. Of course, they're important. But I think I'm back to over indexing on one alpha female, alpha male equivalent, because I don't think you can distribute that vision and mission.”

“Ensure that each of these teams can successfully last for at least 12 months. Because again, you want to design for durability. You want to know that the team doesn't have such a short runway of work that it is taking on something that is urgent, but short liv…”

“I think that over the next 18 months to three years, I actually don't think we'll see substantially different changes, but over the next five years, I could see teams actually getting smaller again.”

“One of the easiest hacks for creating strong identity as a team is to put the team in a combative situation.”

“What's very important is for teams to set their own goals because that's how they're going to be engaged and that's how they will stretch themselves. But if you feel these goals are not stretching enough, then you should challenge them.”

“When people in teams get aligned to be impeccable with agreements, they start keeping about 90% of their agreements. Now, when you go in and you look at a relationship or a team that's working together and you say, What percentage of agreements do you guys kee…”

“I think what Microsoft did was anti-competitive, but I don't think it was monopolistic.”

“In my view, market comes first. And I think if you have the right model and the right product in that market, I think that's more important than ultimately the team.”

“Do calls individually. It's really difficult to do a group Zoom or Teams call in terms of due diligence because you might have people talking over each other. You can't pick up on individual Brady Bunch boxes that when the senior PM talks, the number two rolls…”

“Process also enables team. We were able to bring team members on to help us with that process. And it also enables monetization because then you're able to communicate to the industry, you know, what do I do? What can you buy? What's the product that I offer?”

“And I think part of as you decide that you want to try to help a company grow and be in a leadership position, part of what you're signing up to is absorbing the pressure. That is part of your function. If you just take the pressure and pass down the anxiety, …”

“I think for teams, it's good to be in a range. I'm actually okay with a range of up to seven or eight hours, so like Europe and US is okay, because you can still overlap for an hour to a day, and that's usually plenty. If you need a lot more, you're probably h…”

“Microsoft had the relationships with the CIOs, and people were, companies were wall-to-wall Microsoft, that their product didn't even have to be as good as Slack. They could still go win so many customers, and they didn't say, oh, wow, there's this new PLG thi…”

“Over a third of the team left.”

“I do very deeply believe that that speed is everything. Like, what is the shape of slope in terms of what you're doing always is like how you should judge teams. And their output.”

“And the number one reason why a VC will pass on your business is that they don't like your team. This is especially true for seed and series A deals.”

“And I think it's important as a company owner to remove yourself from as much of the decision making as possible so that you can build a team that doesn't need you.”

“When I first started studying leaders, what I was surprised by is how many of the best results leaders I could find that were willing to talk to me. And I was, again, I was asking and interviewing teams, how many of the teams really despised those leaders that…”

“So if you don't feel confident that you can evolve through your team, then definitely consider selling.”

“I think very few founders want the radical transparency of why somebody passed, and at the end of the day, a lot of the early passes are around teams.”

“21.”

“You can see that you could switch out a whole bunch of people in the team and the disposition wouldn't change. It's not actually any one person that brings that in. It's the collective of us and the way we engage.”

“If I ever went back to investing again, I would most definitely bet first on the team. I would absolutely focus all of my energy on who am I investing in, and do I believe that they can figure this out?”

“And team is under a hundred people.”

“There is an optimal size for a team, and it's not 10, right? There's not 15. So people will complain, we have too many people, and that's dilutive to what we're trying to do.”