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Lendio is a marketplace that simplifies the process for small businesses to get loans. By Q1 of 2020, they were growing 100% Y-o-Y and had hit their monthly goals 24 consecutive times. When COVID hit, every lender on their platform stopped lending and they went from nearly $100 million in monthly loan volume to 0 overnight.    Rather than pullback, Brock Blake (CEO and co-founder of Lendio) used the opportunity to double down in a big way, hire 250 new people, and re-orient the entire company around PPP loans.    As a result, they helped 100,000+ businesses secure close to $10 billion of loans and saved 1.5 million jobs in 6 weeks. Brock joined Scott Britton and I on Built By Humans to chat about taking big bets, how to keep a team afloat under extreme pressure, and Lendio’s push to add a SaaS business onto their marketplace. Here are some key takeaways:   Never underestimate a group of individuals that rally around a big mission. It is so critical to have clarity of message and vision. If people feel a lack of clarity or transparency, like when there starts to be doubt about where the company is headed and the message…… that is really the most damaging thing that can happen to the company.  The most successful companies have this combination of marketplace + SaaS + data. Moving from a single to a multi-product strategy is tricky. It’s tough to have all this energy and growth in your core business but then also look at a longer-term opportunity and invest in it properly.   Leaders should re-assess their org’s design as revenue scales up from 0 to 1, 1 to 10, and then 10 to 100 million.   

By purchasing a home at 24, Dan Snyder experienced the value of homeownership at an early age. As a result of that experience, Dan decided to found Lower, a bootstrapped fintech focused on helping people build wealth through home ownership.    Lower raised a $100 million Series A in June of 2021 and proceeded to grow the team exponentially to about 800 people over the last year. Dan joins Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Built By Humans podcast to discuss the importance of having strong core values, investing in training front-line managers, and constantly recruiting for new talent.    A key part of being a mission-driven company is making sure the people you hire are aligned to that mission. If you don’t believe in the value of home ownership, you probably shouldn’t work at Lower.   An underrated benefit of raising institutional capital is raising the level of awareness the market has about your product or service.    Building and maintaining a high-performing team is always going to be harder and take longer than you think. Companies should always look to keep their bench full by recruiting across all areas of business regardless of need.   Managing people is very difficult and it is only something you do well when you’ve had the right amount of reps. Make sure to invest early in training your managers (especially newly promoted ones) as they are critical to your ability to rapidly scale out a team.   Hire people who do more than they think. The easiest way to lose motivation is by making your team feel like they cannot chase opportunities because they need approval before taking action.   

Superhuman aims to make responding to emails less time-consuming by building a blazingly fast, yet gorgeous email experience. CEO and Founder Rahul Vohra joins Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Built by Humans Podcast to offer some untraditional takes on user onboarding journeys, how you can build software products that feel like games, and why productivity and mental health are intertwined. Here are some key takeaways:   - When trying to build a quality product, be wary of early customers experiencing bug fatigue -- if too many users run into the same set of bugs, it can overwhelm both them and your development team. Instead of risking this with a traditional all-at-once launch, consider a measured pace of onboarding that allows your team to fix bugs at the same rate they’re found.   - Keeping a manageable onboarding pace coincides with a good strategy for developing the onboarding process. Start by ensuring the founder can tackle onboarding calls, and as long as you’re retaining healthy customer metrics, transition to shorter onboarding times and specialized teams to make the process efficient. Nail it before you scale it.    - While ‘gamifying’ your product with explicit rewards can decrease end-user motivation, some underlying trends of game design can be implemented to create an extremely engaging product. Consider all your individual features as toys forming a larger game for the user. If each feature is created as its own engaging toy, the overall product acts as a game that motivates users to learn all its features over time.   - Communication is a major stress point for remote workers: 89% said that responding to emails and messages was the worst part of their day, while over half said they think their presenteeism and quick responses are valued just as much (if not more) than substantive work output. Superhuman’s software largely eases this process, but reworking workplace norms to reinforce clear communication in remote work can also help improve your employees’ productivity and mental health.   - When building a quality product, it’s best to limit your building to a single platform. Choose a target market, and build on whatever platform is used most. Going multi-platform can be a monumental step -- good strategy usually means waiting until your customer requests demand that you expand into new markets.

Sean Scott spent close to 15 years at Amazon where he ran their shopping experience and autonomous delivery product, Scout. In January 2021, Sean decided to join Pager Duty as their Chief Product Officer. Pager Duty is a software company founded by 3 former amazon developers that helps customers move at ‘machine-speed’ in critical moments. Pager Duty’s business has dramatically accelerated over the past 2 years as the rise of remote work made real-time incident response and work orchestration incredibly important to the enterprise.   While Pager Duty is mainly known for being an industry leader in notifications and work orchestration, they have recently launched new products for AI ops and automation. Scott joins Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Built By Humans podcast to discuss the importance of being data-driven, how the modern product leader’s skillset is shifting, and what aspect of Amazon he made sure to bring with him to Pager Duty. Here are some quick takeaways:     Having the right data is paramount. The question is do you have everything instrumented to get those insights and learnings. And, more importantly, are those insights actionable.    To understand your customer, you need to break down the user experience and instrument it for all the metrics that matter so that you can truly understand what is happening within your product.    When analyzing your product’s performance in aggregate, it is easy to trick yourself into believing everything looks good. When customer anecdotes disagree with the data, the anecdotes are usually right.    Companies experiencing hypergrowth need to make a habit of revisiting and questioning the effectiveness of the processes they have in place. They usually grow stale every time the size of your team doubles.    Companies need to move away from having separate motions for sales, marketing, and product. You must analyze the entire flow holistically and combine how every team interacts with the end-user to create a truly great customer experience. 

When faced with a global pandemic and social isolation, you wouldn’t expect Envoy, a startup based on improving physical workspaces, to come out alright. But, through a user-oriented mindset, and a willingness to adapt to new situations, they came out not just surviving but with an exponential growth from where they had been.    CEO and Founder Larry Gadea joins Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Built by Humans Podcast to offer advice on how to move through situations like the pandemic, what kind of mindset you need in a startup, and some unique takes on the future of workspaces. Here are some quick takeaways:   When forced to transition through uncontrollable events like the global pandemic, ask yourself how you can build through it instead of focusing on the losses you might face. These events can be tragic, but they also create new customer needs that you can treat as unique opportunities to solve. With advancements like the pandemic and meta, it seems like modern work will only become more and more isolated and flexible. However, there is evidence to the contrary – our current situations may make an in-person workspace even more important to keeping human connections with each other. In a company, people are more important to the overall culture than the physical space they meet in. Because of this, the future might see more coworking/lending of physical workspaces, sacrificing personalization for efficiency and availability. In the startup world, taking constant changes and risks are necessary for long-term success. Make sure you find some thrill in facing the tough problems you’ll have to work through and be wary of burnout. If you and your team get too focused on in-the-now projects, make sure to remind yourselves of the bigger vision you’re working toward – a paycheck won’t always be enough for motivation. The people you hire define what your company will become. Don’t be afraid to hire opinionated people, and make clear paths for your team to voice complaints. The more feedback and open communication, the better for everyone.

Few businesses have grown as unconventionally as CircleCI. CircleCI, a CI/CD platform, experienced numerous product pivots at its beginning, saw key merges with other dev teams, and grew as a small engineering team adopting management and operational roles. On top of that, CircleCI was already a remote environment by the time COVID forced other companies to do the same, and so it went through its own separate set of challenges as the rest of the world shifted.    CEO Jim Rose joins Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Built by Humans Podcast to offer his unique ideas on facing the problems of in-person vs. remote work, building out good software, and seeing the startup world as a journey. Here are some quick takeaways:   Transitioning both into and out of a remote working environment can present cultural challenges that weren’t addressed before. Accept that you’ll make mistakes along the way and learn from them as you go - you can’t always please everybody, so it’s important that people trust you to have good intentions for them. Often, the idea you start a business on won’t be the one you end up going with. Especially in the early stages, be open to pivoting focus until you find an idea with good product-market fit. When building out software, keep in mind that many of your problems have already been efficiently solved by other teams. Don’t feel like you have to do everything from scratch - instead, use your needs as opportunities to work with, integrate, and possibly acquire others’ solutions before you resort to building internally. Don’t assume that an employee’s performance issues are their own fault. Instead, view the problem systematically, and keep open communication with them to figure out what role they would work better in. Many times subpar work is simply the result of someone working on the wrong problem. The startup world can be seen as a collection of journeys. While finding early product-market fit and making profit are priorities, having the mindset that it’s all ultimately about the people can be rewarding: without a good team and good friends, even a profitable journey might not feel worth it.  

By taking a unique user-oriented approach to workflow organization, ClickUp has managed to see extraordinary success in an already crowded market. Because of this, ClickUp has had to navigate and find solutions to the problems common among all fast-growing startups. Head of Global Revenue Tommy Wang has been with ClickUp since its earliest stages and joins Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Built by Humans Podcast to discuss the complexity problem of user-oriented products, how to find the best hires, and how to adapt your company and yourself during hypergrowth.   Here are some quick takeaways:   Different people and different teams work best in different ways. If you can, make your software configurable and flexible to meet each client’s needs. At the cost of complexity in your go-to-market, this can lead to faster growth and better net retention. Knowing what customer behavior(s) indicate healthy usage of your software is a difficult but important question. Try to find which measures for customer usage lead to the best outcome so you can train on those behaviors. Relying on other peoples’ judgements is crucial for finding and hiring the best-in-class. When working with a limited network, you can ask coworkers at other companies who their strongest peers are. With a more involved network, talk to well-known leaders and enlist the help of professionals to get a better idea of what talent looks like. During hypergrowth, your company quickly becomes less nimble - you need to make sure you make the right decisions at the start because changing direction later is almost impossible. Context is more important than experience here: look at the history of companies and institutions in similar situations. Almost every team in hypergrowth will hit an inflection point for communication: people start to lose connection with the larger team as they’re subdivided into more and more groups. Having a single place to connect workflows helps with this, but you may also have to hire roles focused on intercommunication. Having a good market is more important than having a good team. Focus first on making sure there’s a good market for your product, then focus on making sure you have a solid team - don’t waste time on trying to start a business with a perfect idea.

Cyber-attacks are quickly becoming a worldwide problem, and in many cases, cybersecurity systems are too slow to keep up. By taking this issue head-on by catching insecure code while it’s being written, Snyk has become a hyper-growth SaaS business in an impressively short timeframe. Snyk aims to expand its services to as many developers as possible, making our world’s digital infrastructure safer in the process. CEO Peter McKay joins Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Built by Humans Podcast to discuss how he coaches teams, how to prioritize, and why you should hire diversely.   Here are some quick takeaways: In today’s world, applications need to be built at a faster rate than ever before. With cyber-attacks becoming an ever-increasing threat, viable security for your applications is necessary to staying competitive in any type of company. A good workplace doesn’t need to work completely like a sports team or completely like a family: Hire the best people you can and expect quality work, but also trust them until proven otherwise, and offer as much flexibility as you can. The more flexibility you offer, the more talented people will apply. Especially at a time where we’re mostly online, try to get rid of the taboo of talking about mental health in the workplace setting. Being able to constantly communicate about mental health is vital - good communication can help point out who’s struggling, plus we all need to talk about it sometimes to get over occasional hurdles. Taking time to choose which projects to prioritize is important: choose 3 and run with them to completion. At the same time, don’t get blindsided: many executives fail by completely ignoring the things they’re not prioritizing. In tech, only hiring in-network means critically low diversity, you won’t have enough range of thought to approach many issues well. Instead, value diversity and try to hire from as many different backgrounds and perspectives as possible. Resiliency is an overlooked skill in the modern world. Be able to take harsh criticism and failure, and always be willing to use these experiences to keep growing and advancing.  

Lucid, a visual collaboration platform most known for its original product Lucidchart, has grown from a zero revenue company to a wildly successful startup, now passing 30 million users and 100 million in revenue. Lucid only continues to grow, transitioning more recently to a multi-product platform and always advancing its mission of ease-of-use for knowledge workers.   David Grow has been with the company almost from the start, giving him unique insights into the changes you have to go through at a company moving from small to giant. President and COO Dave Grow joins Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Built by Humans Podcast to discuss his approach to strategy, hyper-growth, self-awareness, and patience. Here are some quick takeaways: With growth comes a greater need for disciplined strategy. Expect a formal timescale for a meeting on strategy every 2-3 years, and make sure your plan for the future still connects your mission to your customers. The ability to be everything for everyone is just becoming a possibility and relies upon your end-user needs. If your product meets an inconsistent end-user need, you may need to work vertically. If your product solves a problem across companies of all sizes, you can work horizontally and market to a large number of people. High growth situations mean you’ll have to “give away your legos” and partition off what was your responsibility to new hires. Leaving ego aside while others do what you used to is necessary for this. Self-awareness is key to making the right future career decisions. The goal is to know when there’s still more for you to do at a company but to also accept and know when you’re not needed anymore, and when it’s best to move to a different project. In the SaaS world, tons of stress is put on speed. On the contrary, be comfortable with waiting. Have patience with the process and with your employees: most great companies take around 10 years to get where they are, and many employees need patience and second chances to step into their role.  

Starting third to market and rising to be the market leader in just a few years is rarely heard of, but that’s exactly what Gong has done. Gong is a revenue intelligence platform that gives sales and customer success teams insights on what is happening with their customers without anyone having to lift a finger. Their vision is to build the best autonomous applications in the world. By prioritizing quality, Gong has managed not only to become the best at what it does, but to stay on top, always running fast to keep making its product better than the alternatives. CEO and Founder Amit Bendov  joins Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Built by Humans Podcast to discuss the future of autonomous applications, how to pull away from the competition, and the importance of being able to ‘zoom out’.    Here are some quick takeaways:   As time goes on, businesses will only continue to favor autonomous software solutions over human-curated ones. The goal is to make what was hard work effortless and more consistent. There’s no moat between you and your competitors in the SaaS world. While in competition the strong tend to get stronger,  you shouldn’t assume the advantages you have will last any longer than 12 months: you have to run like crazy to stay ahead. A strong collaboration between sales and product is vital for either team to work effectively. The goal is to have a product so good even a mediocre sales team would work, and a sales team so good even a mediocre product would work. When it comes to marketing, be bold and be comfortable with polarizing decisions. Being safe with marketing is a risky choice; taking risks is your safest option. In many markets, you’ll have to make the product decision of whether to be the budget option or the expensive solution to your problem. In either case, make sure to stick to your decision: if you decide to be the best solution, don’t also feel the need to lower your prices as a competition strategy, and instead market on being worth the high cost. Job interviews are a tremendous source of information for learning about organizational design.  The ability to “zoom-out” can be a great addition to your skill set as you move forward in business. Constantly challenge yourself to think bigger to find new solutions and ideas.  

The recent uptick in online learning has drastically changed what has long been a stagnant industry: education. Course Hero capitalizes on these changes, providing a massive affordable library of online supplemental resources for both students and teachers. Through their model, Course Hero wants to fix the nearly universal problems each student experiences. Founder and CEO Andrew Grauer joins Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Built by Humans Podcast to discuss how to build on a good opportunity, what the future of the education industry looks like, and why it’s so important to put company culture first.   Here are some quick takeaways: When creating any product, make sure to prioritize understanding and empathizing with the problems of your end-user. Finding a widely shared pain point can be key here. When building a business in a typically low-speed industry like education, it can be better to start with discipline: keep your fixed costs low and wait for expansion stages. The future of education will likely solve for learning speed and cost. Technology that makes education widely available and easy to learn will rise in the coming years. A large portion of today’s students are parents or workers - many are working to pay off debt and many don’t graduate after 6 years. Companies that try to act as an alternative to college and supplementary resources like Course Hero aim to fix this problem. Building your company’s culture always comes before building a product. Treating others well and building a community of trust is necessary for overcoming inevitable future challenges for your business - make sure to be intentional in your day-to-day interactions with coworkers. The “pod model”, when done effectively, is a great way to maintain the shared culture at a large scale. Split into teams, and try to balance team autonomy with cohesive leadership.

Scaling is often a major problem for rapidly growing startups; rarely does a company adapt to and fill out its product as well as Dialpad has over the past 10 years. Today, Dialpad can claim to be a standalone solution to communication in the modern workplace. Dialpad Founder and CEO Craig Walker joins Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Built by Humans Podcast to discuss how to start building an “all-in-one” company, why to prioritize workspace culture, and how to adapt to the modern SaaS world. Here are some quick takeaways: The modern workplace has radically changed in how it views employee productivity. Don’t force employees to sit in an office while they work; instead, prioritize giving good software and cloud access so they can be mobile and more active throughout the day. Building an “all-in-one” company that has filled out the scope of its market takes an extremely solid foundation -- make sure you’re confident in your product market, then take the time to build something scalable. Aligned culture and tightly-knit teams are vital for a startup. Agreement on values and the ability to make decisions quickly are the only advantages a small team can leverage over massive corporations. In today’s market, you don’t need to artificially limit yourself to one strata of the SaaS market, small teams have become just as interested in and capable of buying software as large enterprises.  Learn what differently-sized markets want out of your software, and market accordingly. The SaaS market is shifting to meet the needs of end-users - if you create a product end-users don’t need, it will not be used. Always approach new ideas from the consumer side. Mobility and availability will only become more important in the future of video calls. Expect future innovations such as AR calls or advanced ai popups during calls.

The stock market has historically been highly exclusive and highly discriminatory. By instead advocating for accessibility and inclusivity, Public creates a business model for personal investing that has grown wildly over the past couple of years. The company offers a unique avenue for enterprise: combining social media with a goal-oriented product. COO Stephen Sikes joins Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Built by Humans Podcast to discuss the future of investing, a community model for business, and what a good revenue model should look like.   Here are some quick takeaways: The best way to invest is by balancing passive and active trading. Get excited by stocks but don’t get too emotionally invested in the process. Modern improvements to the availability, accessibility, and inclusivity of stock market trading have brought a massive cohort of small investors. Building a  valuable community means putting community first: start by defining a consistent brand and reinforce that brand upon your community members. There is a huge gap of business opportunities in community-driven content aimed at positive results. The consumer startup world has a two-phase sequence, first focusing on growth over economics and then flipping to economics once large enough. You should align your revenue model with customer satisfaction, not revenue itself. Don’t start a business that predicates on its’ customers’ losses.

It’s not often you see a company well established in its product niche completely rebrand, but that’s exactly what Tom Hale and his team at Momentive, formerly SurveyMonkey, have done. Tom joins Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Built by Humans Podcast to discuss what an effective rebrand looks like, why modern businesses need AI-generated feedback, and how the workplace can help the world. Here are some quick takeaways: Automated surveys give the quick data needed to remain agile and move at “ventilator speed” in the modern workplace. All growing multi-product businesses hit a wall where they need to rebrand. Matching different products to buyer profiles is key to getting past this. Brand health can be measured both through traditional metrics like awareness and competitive share but also through monitoring statistics like customer calls and the amount of people directed to your product without a referral. AI, if made well enough, can provide a volume of personal feedback humans are unwilling to expend the time and energy on. Try to look past just money and see the workplace as a way through which to positively affect the world. If you can use business to help people, you should.

Whether you realize it or not, part of your job is being a marketer. Broadly, every company is becoming a content machine. Effective content marketing is a crucial part of growing a company.  According to Semrush Chief Strategy Officer Eugene Levin, marketing is something that you can’t excel at through just studying- you have to practice. Eugene joined Scott and Andrei on the show to elaborate on how trends such as Tik Tok are creating a generation of skilled marketers and why this is a good thing.   Here are some quick takeaways: Technology goes through cycles where it begins with a high barrier to entry before becoming accessible to the masses. Marketing is experiencing a similar trend. Discovering and capitalizing on trends is a fundamental marketing skill and one that apps like Tik Tok are honing. Education has historically been highly structured, with an emphasis on hard skills- the future of education will focus on developing soft skills that are necessary for building relationships with others. With an ever-increasing number of channels and a finite amount of time spent online, content discoverability is a pressing challenge. Competing with many competitors over popular keywords becomes a zero-sum game- you need to find a niche and then grow out of it.

ServiceNow: the best-kept secret in Silicon Valley. The company, led by the tenets of humility and hunger, has grown in orders of magnitude in the past 3 years. The longtime consultant turned Chief Customer and Partner Officer Lara Caimi joined Scott and Andrei on the show. In a world where every SaaS company claims to be customer-centric, Lara provides specific examples of how to truly embed this into the culture of a company.   Here are some quick takeaways: You need to be aware of the distinct phases of growth in a software company- at a certain point investing in customer success becomes more important than winning new clients. Be better than yesterday but realize that you are not as good as you will be tomorrow. Enterprises can and should learn from consumer-facing companies to understand how to put the customer first. Remote work is an important step toward the real democratization of talent.  

Data is nothing more than a collection of facts spliced by rows and columns. Yet, this simple concept is the single most important driver of innovation. SafeGraph provides Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) about physical places. The company is in a constant search for truth and lives to provide others with data to build innovative solutions. According to CEO Auren Hoffman, working in such a company requires humility and veracity. As he puts it, data is like high-quality butter that a baker uses to make a croissant- it often goes unnoticed, but it is essential. Auren joined hosts Scott and Andrei on the podcast to elaborate on the democratization of data and how it can be used to do good in the world.   Here are some quick takeaways: Data needs to meet different thresholds of accuracy depending on its use (eg marketing vs modeling), ranging from directionally correct to nearly 100%.  Data science as a field is growing as more and more students are pursuing this discipline. As accessibility to reliable data increases, so does the capacity to address issues across areas such as healthcare, economic mobility, and more. The trend of perfectly optimizing your most valuable resource (time) is misguided- it is ok to allocate time to interests outside of work. Treat your past self as a separate person and as someone that you don’t mind disagreeing with.  

The “Good Guys” of the credit card industry, Ramp’s goal is to actively help customers spend less. We often are excited by reward points and bonuses when using a credit card; however, these incentives often delude us into spending more.    Co-Founder and CEO Eric Glyman embarked on his mission with Ramp after discovering how customers were being deceived. The avid StarCraft player joined hosts Scott and Andrei to describe the misalignment between what customers want and what their credit card gives them- and how you can avoid it. Listen in to become a smarter spender and learn about a company disrupting a space dominated by incumbents.   Here are some quick takeaways: When services such as expense management are generally provided at a cost, offering it for free is an effective way to secure a foothold in a market Banks and consumers have inherently different goals- understanding this is the first step in becoming a budget savvy person In marketing efforts, directly show how your product or service addresses a customer’s needs rather than how other companies are lacking Be strategic with hiring- talented individuals often run in the same circles Don’t crush the butterfly- acquiring a company should be a delicate process to integrate the two entities

In the mid 1990s, a group of MIT students stunned casinos by winning extraordinary amounts of money playing Blackjack. These students, utilizing a data-driven card counting strategy, gained notoriety and became the subject of acclaimed books and films such as Bringing Down the House and 21. One of the team members, Jeff Ma, went on to become a 4x founder and an executive at Twitter before joining Microsoft as VP of Startups. Jeff joined hosts Scott and Andrei to describe his key learnings from building and exiting several successful companies. The conversation covers misconceptions around funding as an end goal, aligning perspectives between enterprises and startups, and the most exciting areas in tech.   Here are some quick takeaways:   Aligning perspectives to avoid friction should be the first consideration when entering a partnership When partnering with an enterprise, startup founders often underestimate the sheer scale that they are dealing with- fully utilizing their resources is not a trivial task The size of large enterprises can hinder rapid implementation of initiatives; however, it also makes accomplishments more rewarding Starting a company with the hope of being acquired is the wrong mindset