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This week we have a returning guest, Anish Dhar (CEO of Cortex), backed by nearly $100m from Sequoia, YC, IVP, and even Scale (no, not us, the multi-billion dollar AUM VC) on how to judge employee-market fit. 

PS: feel free to reach out and say hi to us on Linkedin (Rahul, Aryaman) and follow the Scale LinkedIn page to keep up with us more generally.

⚡️ TLDR

In established industries judging employee-market fit would be easy, I am building a [jewelry] company, so let’s hire people who’ve worked in [jewelry]. But Anish and Cortex were off creating a whole new market, so what how do you hire a team?

Hire from the closest competitor? Hire ex-founders? Only hire from Stanford? (yes this is a legit strategy being employed by some). Let’s find out what Anish did.

The Story

Before we get into it, a quick introduction to Anish Dhar and Cortex in case you missed our last feature of them, where we dove into how to effectively drive sales when you’re operating in a market your customers don’t know exists yet. 

Anish himself is a two-time ex-founder, and also worked as an Engineer at Uber. Since then, he’s been named to Forbes 30 under 30, on the list of “next billion dollar start-ups” and also has been featured on Scale Newsletter (lol). 

Cortex builds tools that help engineering teams manage their microservices. Think of it as the control center for modern software development - they help teams track and improve thousands of internal services.

“Who do we hire?” 

When Anish and his team got started, they didn’t just want the best performance, they also wanted to build a great culture.

Having worked at Uber, he had an issue with just hiring top performers and squeezing out the last bit of performance out of them. 

So Cortex was now solving for both culture and performance. Anish also realised that the stakes were through the roof for Cortex. 

The first few hires are not only responsible for creating the first iteration of your product, leaving the first impression with customers and investors, but are also responsible for the next wave of hiring, so you literally don’t have a second chance. 

To narrow down the sea of applicants, he started with the obvious strategy: hire from your nearest comparable. 

For them, it was Datadog (the $50bn software behemoth).

They learnt that if a candidate had worked closely with or understood Datadog well, they’d probably understand what Cortex was building in some way.

That formed their base-line, but building a team in a whole new market takes a lot more than understanding software. 

What to look for

Through months of trial and error, hiring the right candidate for the wrong role and vice versa, Anish and his team noticed a pattern in their best and worst hires. 

The one golden thread that connected these candidates at the interview stage was the depth at which they could articulate their previous role. 

If you’re wondering how they test for this, we had the same question for Anish. Here’s a few things to try in an interview with a candidate: 

• Begin with an open ended question, and become increasingly detailed. Keep pushing them with “But why”’s and “But how”’s until they don’t have an answer. Anish found that people who know their stuff can keep going almost endlessly. 

• Ask them to do a retrospective on their work. What went right? What went wrong? Why? 

  • Here you’re not looking so much for the content of their answer, but their tone. Do they sound proud of their work, or does it sound mundane? 

  • Anish and his team have found that having a high level of pride in one’s work, and viewing it as an extension of themselves is one of the sole determinants of how hard they’re going to push as part of your company. 

The risk with doing the above is you might end up with a high performance but toxic team. One filled with people who want the best outcomes but often at the expense of their team’s wellbeing. Anish’s take on how to test for “culture” is: 

• Ask them questions about their relationship with their colleagues, not just people senior to them, but on par and junior as well

• These questions often answer how well they’d respect their colleagues time, how efficiently they’d get work done as a team and how easy they would be to work with 

What this means for you

If you're building in a new market, here's how Cortex has built one of the best performing SaaS teams in the world. 

#1 Form your baseline. Hire from people from an adjacent industry 

#2 You’re looking for people who can push. This needs to be tested in a variety of ways. Find out how much they care about their work, and how deeply they understand their work. 

#3 Understand their relationship with their colleagues. This has a direct relationship with how much they’ll respect their time and work. 

Remember Anish's golden rule:

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See you next week!

Rahul & Aryaman