Assertion certainty 4/5 debate potential 1/5

Siroker personally interviewed Optimizely's first 100 hires

Dan Siroker · How to Break Out and Really Scale · Jul 7, 2017 · at 14:38

Dan Siroker, co-founder of Optimizely, describes his early hands-on involvement in company recruitment to Ajay Agarwal.

0:00 / 0:07exact quote · 7.5s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“I interviewed the first hundred people at Optimizely, and that means I also interviewed probably the other, you know 209 hundred, whatever people that we didn't hire.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Dan Siroker

Opinion
Siroker calls Adobe's marketing cloud a poorly integrated 'Franken-suite'
“Adobe you know, has a product that, you know, has been evolved through acquisitions, which turns what they're offering into what our customers tend to describe as a Franken-sweet. It's a bunch of products that don't really integrate well with one another.”
Dan Siroker Jul 7, 2017 ▶ 5:22 How to Break Out and Really Scale
What-if
Siroker: Optimizely would have benefited early on from vertical focus
“If I had to give myself advice to a past version of myself, I think a lot about that, and I think about optimization. I think that it would have actually served us better to be more narrowly focused on a set of customers and deeply empathize with their biggest…”
Dan Siroker Jul 7, 2017 ▶ 11:37 How to Break Out and Really Scale
Insight
Siroker: Job candidates heavily focused on titles are a massive red flag
“We try to seek missionaries, not mercenaries. So people who are really focused on title as part of that process, ah, to me is a red flag. It means that they're about trying to make their LinkedIn profile look good, not how to make our customers wildly successf…”
Dan Siroker Jul 7, 2017 ▶ 19:51 How to Break Out and Really Scale
Insight
Secure six paying reference customers before scaling a second product's go-to-market
“Looking back, what I would, wish I had done differently is, is have a small team of folks working on getting six reference customers who are using the product, paying for the product, and are willing to be public spokespeople for the product as a way, ah, to r…”
Dan Siroker Jul 7, 2017 ▶ 31:04 How to Break Out and Really Scale
Assertion Supported
Optimizely became the top website optimization platform globally by 2012
“So in 2012, ah, we became the number one most adopted website optimization platform in the world. We actually had Obama And Romney using us extensively, which is great.”
Dan Siroker Jul 7, 2017 ▶ 2:29 How to Break Out and Really Scale
Assertion Supported
Siroker: Optimizely operated without multivariate testing for a year and a half
“We didn't have features that people assumed were, ah, must haves, things like multivariate testing. We didn't have that for a year and a half.”
Dan Siroker Jul 7, 2017 ▶ 3:49 How to Break Out and Really Scale
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 400 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.